Many people who are new to gardening often disregard how important the soil is. Whether this is through negligence or plain ignorance is debateable but what is clear is that soil is a vital part of the circle of life and in order to successfully grow anything, gardeners should ensure that their soil is the best quality 
and most nutrient rich it can be.
The soil that I am primarily talking about is topsoil. Topsoil is the earth’s top layer of soil and it is this that contains all the nutrients that plants and other life need. According to the North Carolina State University’s website there are 13 mineral nutrients found in topsoil. These are split into two types; macronutrients and micronutrients. While both of these are vitally important in order to sustain plant and animal life, it is the macronutrients that are the most important. The topsoil also contains water and air, which just like us, plants need in order to survive.
In fact, soil is vital to the survival of all life on this planet. Without it, nothing can grow, therefore leaving us with nothing to eat. Meat is also off the menu since there will be no food to feed our livestock.
Yet the most worrying thing is that the dystopian vision of a world without soil could in fact, turn into a reality. The world’s topsoil is depleting. Topsoil needs to regenerate and regrow, but modern farming and agricultural practices are resulting in topsoil that is disappearing at a considerably faster rate than it can be regenerated. The eventual impact of this would be a world food crisis.
However, high quality topsoil can still be purchased from certain retailers, allowing gardeners to easily grow food. This is very beneficial, firstly to the gardener because they are able to enjoy cheaper, fresher and more nutritious food, yet also to the earth itself. If more food was grown organically, and on a lesser scale, the impact on our world’s topsoil could possibly be reversed.
If you do wish to grow your own food you can and should do more to nourish your soil than simply purchasing a bag or two of organic topsoil. You should ensure that before you begin to grow anything, you clear the topsoil of weeds and dead plant matter, since these can significantly harm the growth of new plants.
You should also avoid the use of any chemicals. Not only is organic farming much healthier for our bodies, it is also dramatically better for the earth also. In fact, gardeners shouldn’t only be concerned about the chemicals that coat our foods when we eat them; they should also consider the impact of breathing in the chemicals when they are used on the crops.
While chemical fertilisers and pesticides may be the easiest and quickest route to a fully grown fruit or vegetable, it will over time, make this growth much more difficult. As the soil becomes unhealthy, eventually ‘dying’, everything within it slows in growth also, and the resulting produce will be much less nutritionally dense.
In fact the nutrients in our foods have depleted by staggering amounts over the last 50 or so years. A recent study carried out by USDA researchers discovered that you would need to eat six of today’s peaches in order to intake the same amount of nutrients found in a peach harvested 50 years ago.
One of the large contributing factors to this is the depletion in the quality of the earth’s topsoil. However, by growing fruits and vegetables at home, organically, and by using high quality topsoil, you should be able to grow foods with a nutritional content that is more akin to foods of the 1950’s than it is of today.
This post was written by James Harper on behalf of Boughton Loam And Turf Management. James writes on many issues including horiculture.