Better Blooms and Plants: Soil
Enhancers for Your Garden

The red clay soil of Northern Virginia is a mixed blessing for a gardener like me. It's full of nutrients, but also dense and easily baked to hardness in the sun -- a big reason why founding fathers Thomas Jefferson and James Madison used it for the bricks of their mansions.

Delicate vegetable and flower roots have to fight for air and water in heavy clay soil, which is why conscientious gardeners add sand, peat or other amendments to break it up -- a back-breaking and somewhat expensive chore. I usually lighten my soil with compost that I make from autumn leaves and summer grass clippings in a black plastic bin I keep next to the garbage can.

But early this summer, a nest of yellow jackets took up residence in my compost bin, and no amount of flooding with a garden hose could dislodge them. So I decided to leave the compost alone and tried some of the latest ways to condition garden soil without picking up a shovel. I tested the products on a row of 46 red impatiens in a garden bed along a wall of my house.

While my experiment was unscientific, after a month I found that all products produced plants that were more than double the size of the 14 plants growing in unadulterated soil in my control group. They also had more blooms. Unfortunately, I had to halt the project last week when deer came by one night and devoured all the beds that I had sprinkled with various liquid soil conditioners. Apparently, they consider them quite tasty condiments.

Below are the products I tried:

Lazy Man Liquid Soil Aerator ($25 for one quart) and Lazy Man Liquid Soil Conditioner and Plant Biostimulant ($15 for one quart), both available from Outsidepride.com. Mixed with water, these concentrated liquids are easy to use, since they're either sprayed or sprinkled on with a watering can. The company suggests using the first product earlier in the season, and the second later. The aerator is a mixture of polymers and humic acids that loosen soil and makes it more friable, or crumbly; the conditioner contains a blend of humic acids, organic matter, kelp concentrate and other nutrients that stimulate plant growth and improve soil structure.

Fenic F-68 Plus ($30 for one quart), available from Biconet.com. A brew of microorganisms, algae and beneficial bacteria in an organic slurry that's poured on with a watering can; later it needs to be flushed into the soil with water. The company says the soil conditioner helps alleviate the effects of toxic salts, promotes earthworm activity and hastens decomposition of dead plants. It also helps kill the eggs of harmful root nematodes (plant-harmful worms or parasites) and fungi.

Aerify Plus ($20 a quart), available at Natureslawn.com. The product is an ionized conditioner that attaches to soil particles and breaks their bonds so air and water can get through. In the mixture is a "bioactivator" that contains humic acid, seaweed extract and blackstrap molasses. The company warns that it could take up to a year of treatments, spaced four or five weeks apart, to break up dense clay soils. (My flowers started shooting up after only two treatments.)

Enki Watering System ($80) Available at Myenki.com. This product couldn't be simpler to use -- it's a plastic watering can that you fill and plug into an regular electric outlet. A grate on the bottom creates tiny bubbles that oxygenate the water. Five minutes later, a green light shows that the water is ready. Although the bubbles disappear quickly, the dissolved oxygen remains in the water for several hours, the company says. Unlike the liquid soil conditioners, this device doesn't deliver any soil bioactivators; it's just fizzy water. But that turned out to be a blessing in disguise. The flowers I had watered with the oxygenated water were ignored when the neighborhood deer came to dine.

-- June Fletcher is a staff reporter at The Wall Street Journal and the author of "House Poor" (Harper Collins, 2005). Her "House Talk" column appears most Mondays on RealEstateJournal.com. Email your questions about the residential real-estate market. Please include your name, city and state. If you don't want your name used in our column, please indicate that. Due to volume of mail received, we regret that we cannot answer every question.

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