Soil: the engine that makes a garden run.
If the soil wears down, or is in poor condition, the plants that rely on it for their survival will suffer greatly.
“Soil is very important,” said Port Kells Nurseries’ Stephanie Taylor, whose parents Rene and Joanne Duineveld opened the nursery in 1992. “If soil has no nutrients, your plants aren’t going to survive.”
The same applies to your lawn, she added.
“Definitely the nutrients in the soil: you have to revamp those every year,” Taylor said.
Port Kells Nurseries sells garden soil, which consists of a mix of composted bark mulch, peat, sand, and mushroom manure, which is ideal for any kind of growing, as well as top dressing soil mix that has a higher sand content and is for over-seeding a lawn.
“The garden soil is good for any kind of growing you’re going to do,” Taylor said. “Hedging cedars for privacy, under turf for a new lawn, your vegetables, flowers… everything loves it.”
To keep soil healthy, Taylor said a lot of people add mushroom manure or a different type of manure every year “just to revamp your soil, because the plants have fed off those nutrients all last year. So they add mushroom manure and mix it into their soil to just add some new nutrients.”
Taylor said if you don’t maintain and add nutrients, you are going to be left with “dead soil if you don’t take care of it.”
“Your hard work is kind of going to be put to waste, if you don’t have good soil,” she said.
Making sure of proper drainage is an ongoing challenge for people living on the oft-rainy West Coast of B.C., Taylor said.
“They don’t have proper drainage so the plants they have are just drowning,” she said.