Product Highlight: Yucca Meal & Extract

As summer is heating up, you may be looking for ways to reduce the amount of water needed in your garden. Luckily, yucca products exist just for that! Yucca plants are extremely drought tolerant, and contain compounds called saponins. Yucca can be ground into a meal or turned into an extract, allowing you to add these saponins to your garden. You may have heard of saponins before, as they are found in products across various fields, but these compounds can also benefit your garden by increasing water retention in your soil! This blog post discusses how this works, and how to use yucca products in your garden.

Explanation:

Yucca saponins are surfactants. This means that they reduce water surface tension. Surface tension is what stops water from spreading out as far as it can, so when surface tension is reduced, water can penetrate deeper and farther into the soil. This reduces any hydrophobic qualities of your soil, and ensures that water and nutrients are reaching the roots of all your plants. 

These properties can also improve the overall quality of your soil. Since yucca extract is a wetting agent, it can prevent soil compaction caused by constant drying and wetting of the soil, which is especially common in the summertime. It can also improve the permeability of your soil. Good permeability is what allows water and nutrients to travel deeper into the soil, and it contributes to good soil structure. 

Because yucca extract improves the structure and water retention of soil, it allows plant roots to travel deeper and get established easier. It also improves nutrient availability and uptake because of its chelating abilities.

Application:

Because yucca meal is less broken down than yucca extract, it should be used in cases where you need a slow releasing product; whereas yucca extract should be used when you need a quick releasing product. 

Yucca meal can be mixed throughout soil when creating a potting soil mix, or a fine layer can be sprinkled on top of garden beds to being improving aeration and water retention in your soil.

Yucca extract can be used similarly. Simply mix 1-2 tablespoons of the extract with a gallon of water, and spray across your garden's topsoil. 

This product can be used year-round to support the health of your plants and soil, but it is best used in the spring or fall before planting to get its full range of support.

Other Benefits:

• Yucca meal supports soil microbes and nutrient cycling, as it is a form of organic matter
• Yucca products have antifungal and antibacterial properties, and have been known to reduce root diseases and mitigate powdery mildew
• Yucca extract can improve seedling vigor and increase root length
• Yucca products can decrease salinity of the soil by improving soil structure

Check out our yucca products: Therm X-70 Yucca Extract & DFWOG Yucca Meal