There is a plethora of home gardeners and/or permaculture resources on the internet that generally like as much organic matter as possible.
I some of that strategy as it's convenient at home to supply nutrients to plants without much work.
But, I can't help but feel it's all sort of wish washy science.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHZHy3_7PPE
^ I found this guys videos much more satisfactory to "need the facts" mindset. He uses knowledge from the agricultural industry instead of the "organic" approach.
In short, plant roots actually love sand, silt and clay, and actually don't like organic matter around their roots as it causes rot. He suggests that you should always just top feed your plants. (throw compost around the top of the plants only) When people say don't over water your plants, it's not because of the water, but because of the organic matter in your pots mixing with water and making sewerage. (e.g. this is why hydroponics works)
Anyway, I'd suggest watching some of his videos on perfect soil for an opinion you don't find much of in home gardening videos.
(This was touchy for me because when I started gardened everyone described my soil as sandy, shit and told me to amend it with X, Y and Z. I was too lazy to listen at the time and noticed that my plants were perfectly fine growing in sand as long as I top fed regularly.)
Each of those - sand, clay, organic matter have a pore size distribution and different pressure that it releases water at. The amount of water and the pressure that it's released at form what's called a soil matric potential graph. The important thing is balancing those so that the soil moisture is mostly held at a pressure that the roots can access . There is a soil texture pyramid that illustrates the different soil textures and mixtures.
[0] https://www.dpi.nsw.gov.au/content/archive/agriculture-today...
[1] https://topsoilpros.com/what-is-a-soil-texture-chart/
The guy in the video is calling mulch compost. Compost is supposed to be made of green material which contains nitrogen and other nutrients not bark and wood chips. There are different sources of organic matter that contain different nutrients, pore distributions, etc.
I believe he knows what compost is, he is just being lazy about using it interchangeably with what you find at most garden shops. Most commercial bags of garden soil and compost both contain a lot of broken down wood. He is just suggesting you shouldn't really have any organic matter around your roots, except for at the top level. It's good to promote mycorrhizal fungi but only at the top layer etc
I think he mostly ranting about how commercial gardening places just sell "soil" that is mostly always comes with added "compost" e.g. https://shorturl.at/mvwzG
Where as they should sell more clay/silt/sand mixes and encourage top dressing instead.
Most people just fill their pots to the top with those bags and it leads to adverse effects.
These days I do all my gardening in a 50/50% volumetric mixture of perlite and coco coir (buffered with calcium and magnesium). With a small amount of pH adjusted hydroponic nutrient and a watering can, the results you can achieve are just incredible, absolutely no comparison. Plus it's completely pest free so you aren't dragging in mite eggs, and fungus gnats.
Never using potting soil again, and anybody still using it should really reconsider. It's insanely counter-intuitive just how well plants can grow in something as inorganic as perlite. It just doesn't look like it should work.
I can't help but wonder if his knowledge applies specifically to cases where chemicals like fungicide are used. There are quite a few species of soil fungus that are beneficial to plants, including root protection, but these can be wiped out by fungicides, leaving a blank slate for harmful fungus and other pests to take hold. So it would make sense that if there were no beneficial fungus present, then organic matter would be a rot threat.
With the exception of orchardists (whom some of us think doing everything wrong that you possibly can), modern agriculture concerns itself with prairie plants. Where natural woodland fauna can and do mix decaying logs into the soil column, in a prairie it will mostly be decaying roots (and especially decaying root hairs). The kind of rot going on is a bit different.
That said, saprophytic fungi are generally held to leave living tissues alone. There are exceptions of course, but having decaying woody matter in the soil is not a death sentence.
IMO it really depends on what you're trying to grow. I live in the tropics and there are a lot of tropical plants that do indeed thrive when the soil is heavy on the organic matter. I suspect it depends on how far/long these tropical plants have been bred away from their rainforest origins.
Gardening is actually quite hard in this regard. Everyone is always sharing tips and tricks, for different crops, different species of said crops, different climates, different soils, different hemispheres, different sides of a mountain etc
I think there will be a cool database where you can filter by those factors one day but not sure we are quite there just yet.
It's really conventional farmers concentrating on annuals that want something different. They're growing prairie plants.
gardeners' advice that is along the lines of "what you do is wrong, what i do is right" is generally not very good, and you can feel fine telling them thanks on moving on with your life.
Worms!
The root washers say that by removing all media that the sapling was grown in will give the roots more "incentive" to move into the native soil and thus it will establish quicker.
Whereas the anti-washers say you are slowing the establishment by washing away the helpful microbes as described in the article.
Then there are the people who say, DO wash the roots, but save the water. Plant the tree bare-root, but fill the hole with 50% of the saved water, and use the rest to top-water over the next few weeks. The idea is to get the benefits of bare-root planting along with saving the beneficial organisms.
The reason I ask is that my yearly tree just arrived in the post and I've yet to put it in the ground. I'd love to know what the current thinking is.
Bare root plants never have this problem.
There is definitely a tendency of trees to behave as if they are in a pot when they encounter a huge change in soil medium. The dead tree I dug up this spring had virtually no roots outside of the original cone section of the pot it came in.
The other problem, especially with bushes, is they often put those little plastic time release fertilizer beads into their soil mix and so I'm putting microplastic into my yard. Often the roots are too fibrous to get all of the beads. I sometimes get the smaller plants because of this.
I don't actually 'wash' though, I use a chopstick to tease the dirt away from the roots. They're still coated.
Bare root plants do sometimes have issues getting started but I will only be ordering seed or bare root from now on.
Get like 9 of the same plants at the same point in the life cycle, wash 3, leave 3 and do the 50\50 for 3. Compare results.
If it's as big a deal as people make it out to be, it should be obvious, no?
But I do like a good experiment! And my neighbours garden is quite bare. Now you got me thinking...
A little rule I follow is;
If the plant already looks quite unhealthy, I prefer to just put it as is straight into the ground, feed it and water it. It will take longer to recover but I believe it minimises the risk of outright killing it.
If I get a very healthy plant, I will play around with it more, slice its roots, rinse it out, make a soil mix for the new roots etc
This is completely speculative but the best results I've had so far.
I think that you don't want the rootball to be limited to the old pot outline, so opening it up a bit gently (so a few shakes and a little digging around) and encouraging a bit of a spread of the roots is the best way to go.
You might incentivize the tree, you might kill the tree... I don't think that this is a good plan :)
First we might look at dirt, but that doesn't quite pan out; where does the mass come from, and how would it be replenished? We don't see gaps slowly start forming around roots, and dirt doesn't just build up in other places, so that's probably not it.
Next we might look at water, but water is only made of hydrogen and oxygen, and the oxygen is released. The water also brings in nutrients, but there's no way it brings in enough to generate the majority of a trees mass.
So there's only one place left, which is never anyone's first guess and almost never crosses anyone's mind at first glance: air. It's around this point that most people realize that a majority of a tree is carbon, which all comes in from the air as carbon dioxide.
The correct answer is water though, not air. Air only accounts for the Carbon content of the tree, which is a big part, but still a minority.
First, a live tree contains a lot of water (30-50%), that's why you need to let wood dry a lot before burning it.
And there's something else:
> Next we might look at water, but water is only made of hydrogen and oxygen, and the oxygen is released.
Not all oxygen is released. All oxygen contained in a plants molecule (mostly cellulose and hemicellulose, which are polymers of glucose, and lignin) comes from water. And there's a lot of it: there's as much Oxygen as Carbon in a glucose molecule.
Plant carbohydrates are made directly from CO2 in the Calvin Cycle.
The Calvin Cycle is the source of all of the carbohydrate building blocks in the plant, and I’m pretty sure that oxygen from H2O does not enter the equation, just CO2 and some enzymes and cofactors.
If so, the vast majority of the mass is from the air.
(H might originate from water but its mass is pretty trivial compared to C and O)
The mathematics of weight loss https://youtu.be/vuIlsN32WaE
I would have been wrong, mind blown lol thanks.
To head down the rabbit hole of soil health even further, learning about increasing the cation exchange capacity(CEC) affect on plant health has been fascinating.
In fact, if you try to plant venus fly trap in rich soil, it'll probably die.
