This Weekend

Conditioners or amendments: what’s best for your soil

Some consider soil amendments to be products that are added to change a soil’s characteristics, such as gypsum and lime, and soil conditioners are added to improve the physical structure, such as compost and worm castings. Others believe amendments treat structure while conditioners change characteristics. Both amendments and conditioners are added to soils to improve the top layer of soil for the plants to grow. The problems gardeners face with any of these is that they are just additions, not solutions.

So is it really just a matter of semantics? Natural ecosystems are constantly being amended by leaf litter and animal droppings, with the soil microbes utilising these amendments to condition the soil deep into the soil profile. Soil biology is nature’s soil conditioner and given the right conditions, the microbes populate the soil and create an environment for themselves to live and thrive. Microbes need organic matter, and they need