What Can I Do To Manage Salt-Affected Soil?

Do you use synthetic fertilizers?

Does your soil has poor drainage?

Do you wish to decrease soil salinity using leaching?

Is your soil sodic (with a high concentration of exchangeable sodium)?

Did you choose salt-tolerant plants for your garden?

Synthetic fertilizers tend to have high concentrations of immediately available soluble nutrient salts. Plants cannot take all nutrients up right away. Without good rain or lots of irrigation water, the salts will stay near the surface of the soil and eventually lead to problems. Organic fertilizers, on the other hand, have much lower concentrations of available nutrient salts. Because these materials are composed primarily of compost and other materials that microbes must break down and transform before plants can use them, they don’t leave the kind of residues that synthetic formulations do.

In soils with poor drainage, deep tillage can be used to break up the soil surface as well as claypans and hardpans, which are layers of clay or other hard soils that restrict the downward flow of water. Tilling helps the water move downward through the soil. While deep tillage will help temporarily, the parts of the soil not permanently broken up may reseal.

Before leaching saline-sodic and sodic soils, you must first treat them with chemicals, to reduce the exchangeable sodium content. To remove or exchange with the sodium, add calcium in a soluble form such as gypsum. After the calcium treatment, the sodium can then be leached through the soil along with the other soluble salts. Add enough low-salt water to the soil surface to dissolve the salts and move them below the root zone.

Leaching can be used to reduce the salts in soils. You must add enough low-salt water to the soil surface to dissolve the salts and move them below the root zone. Leaching works well on saline soils that have good structure and internal drainage. To leach highly saline soil, you may need to apply as much as 48-acre inches of water. An acre-inch is the volume of water that would cover 1 square acre to a depth of 1 inch (27,152 gallons). Highly saline soils should be leached using several applications so that the water can drain well.

Some plants tolerate salty soils. Plants that grow by the seaside are often in this category, as are those that thrive in the desert. Some annuals and perennials that will tolerate salty conditions are Annuals and perennials thrift, asters, Carpathian bellflower, cleome, tickseed, pinks, California poppy, blanket flower, cranesbill, daylily, coralbells, Hosta, sea lavender, statice, sweet alyssum, Oriental poppy, stonecrop, goldenrod, nasturtium, verbena. Shrubs that can tolerate salty conditions are summersweet, creeping juniper, privet, weigela.

Many plants that can tolerate some salts in the soil cannot germinate in these conditions. For one thing, the seed must absorb an adequate amount of water to begin growing, and, even if it does that, the tiny first root has to be able to take in adequate water to continue growing quickly. The simple way around this problem is to work with transplants. Grow all of your plants in pots until they are at least six weeks old. Before you transplant them into the garden, improve the soil where they are to go by breaking up the subsoil with a spading fork and adding organic matter.