How to improve soil structure

Usually, you can improve soil structure by incorporating organic matter in your soils.

If you are dealing with a ‘shallow pan’, planting root crops like potatoes may help.

For deeper compaction issues, you could consider not doing anything or tilling once to loosen up the soil and subsequently adopting soil conservation practices and again, adding organic matter.

Add organic matter. This can be in the form of compost of well-rotted manure. By adding organic matter the micro-organisms in the soil will thrive and breakdown the matter to form humus. On clay soils, humus will force tightly packed soil aggregates apart, this improves soil drainage and makes it easier for plant roots to penetrate. On sandy soils humus will loosely bind particles together. It will also act like a sponge and will slow drainage. In summary: increased nutrients increased micro-organisms increased humus and better soil structure.

Dealing with a pan. If you have a pan (a hard, compacted layer running horizontally through your soil) it will prevent roots, nutrients and moisture reaching the deeper parts of your soil. If the pan is shallow (less than 25 cm) a crop of deeply planted potatoes will probably break it up. If you look after your soil properly, pans will not recur once dealt with.

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