The Little-Known Amazing (And Affordable) Combo That Will Change Your Veggie Gardening Game

The one thing that can make or break any vegetable garden is the soil. Above all else, the soil is the most important element of any sucessful garden. Clay soils that don't drain well, sandy soils that don't retain enough moisture, or soil that doesn't have enough nutrients or organic matter can be equally detrimental to any successful vegetable garden. 

Enter: Compost. One of the single-best things you can do to improve your veggie garden success and increase yeilds is to start composting, and periodically add your compost to your garden. Even the most expensive store bought bags of soil, and bulk gardening soils you can obtain at landscape suppliers won't have the best of everything, and even if it's great, soil nutrients and organic matter will break down over time, so it's best to have a long term plan for continuing soil amendment and conditioning with compost. 

While composting is in iteslf an entire rabbit-hole of information, don't worry, as always we've got the easy mode way to go about it, and it has to do with our two top-secret ingredients. Ok, no more beating around the bush. Let's get into it. 

Yes, you read correctly, good old fashioned straw. No straw isn't some super high tech ingredient, but it is one of the single best things you can use for your garden.

It can be used as a sort of mulch or soil topper, to keep sunlight off the surface of the soil and help moisture retention, and it also has the added benefit of preventing any driving rains from compacting the soil. It also breaks down slowly over time and acting as an organic-matter soil amendment.

Speaking of soil amendments, I've also used it mixed-into garden soil that was a little too clay-like or too good at moisture retention. Even in sandy soils it will break down into an organic matter that can improve soil retention. It really is a fantastic do-it all product that should be considered by any gardener, not only are straw bales inexpensive at a local tack and feed store, they last a long time!

Straw Pro Tip: If you stand a straw bale up on end before you cut the bale strings, it will easily come apart one section at a time, almost like wafers. This makes it really easy to use a little bit at a time while not making a mess of it. These wafers are also great to use at the bottom of newly-built garden boxes to help supress weeds!

While alfalfa pellets are most often used as feed for horses and other animals, it's one of the best things to use in your veggie garden as well. Just like straw, it can be used as a dressing, a soil amendment, and a compost ingredient. 

It also has the added benefit of being a fertilizer, being high in nitrogen and having a balanced NPK ratio, being nitrogen potassium and phosphorus balanced at a 3-1-2 ratio. The pellets also have tons of trace minerals; A, B, E, magnesium, Iron, and 16 different amino acids. There is also a naturally occurring growth hormone, triacontanol, prompting strong root development which in turn boosts the size and strength of your crop, without GMOs.

It's one of my top-secret tips for massive tomatoes that I've been using for several years now. I dig my planting hole a bit deeper than necessary for my tomato starts and throw a handful of alfalfa pellets in the hole, then cover them slightly with soil before planting. It's not uncommon to have my cherry tomato plants exceed ten-feet in height and produce seemingly non-stop. 

Another thing you can do with alfalfa pellets is make an alfalfa tea, essentially a liquid fertilizer. While there are several different recipes people often use for alfalfa tea, all I've ever done is fill a bucket about a quarter-full with pellets, then fill the bucket about two-thirds with water and leave them be overnight, giving them a stir or two every couple hours. What you're left with is a great organic nitrogen fertilizer that isn't strong enough to burn or hurt any of your plants. My cabbage, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, and many other veggies really love it. 

I've also mixed the pellets straight into soils on several occasions, it's a good source of minerals, including potassium, calcium, magnesium, and zinc. It's also a great way to fix nitrogen in nutrient-poor soils and build organic matter where it's lacking. Did I mention it's great for compost as well?

Now let's circle back to the beginning of the article where we went over soil conditioning and the importance of compost. To keep it simple (since that's our thing) as far as composting is concerned, the most basic keys to composting are simple. Two parts "browns" to one part "greens," create heat, give it some time, and a compost win is inevitable. That's basically it. 

That's where our two secret ingredients come into play, we've got our composting greens and browns right here! While I do spend a little bit of time to break down the straw bits a little more in order to speed up the process, you can make a lot of really great compost very easily using just these two ingredients, although I do also sprinkle in some native soils from the garden to add some microorganism activity to the mix, that's really all you need besides giving the pile a good stir every month or so.

These two ingredients create a phenomenal amount of heat when mixed together and watered a  bit initially to "activate" the alfalfa pellets so to speak, and what's left over (after some time) is really incredible loamy compost that has all the benefits of the traditional compost, along with a known-good supply of nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium thanks to the alfalfa pellets.