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Healthy Soil's Key Components: Earthworms:
* Earthworms provide aeration so that oxygen reaches plant roots. * Earthworms till the soil bringing nutrients to plant roots. * Earthworms digest plant materials and then excrete waste containing readily available nutrients for plants to use. Carbon, Nitrogen, and in smaller amounts Phosphorus and Potassium are all made available through worm castings. Fungi: Fungi work together with plant roots to form a mutually beneficial relationship. Fungi excrete substances that help plants fight disease. Fungi also help plant roots take up nutrition. Humus: Degraded plant materials not only provide key nutrients for plants, they also provide better soil structure for plants to live in. Humus helps soil retain moisture in sandy soils and helps clay soils drain. More humus means more oxygen to the roots of plants in heavy soil as well. We had none of these when we started gardening on our land. What We Did To Build Soil In Our Garden
When our home was built the backyard was graded and the topsoil was
lost. All that was left was chirt, boulders and sticky-compacted clay.
What a mess! It has taken years of work to build the garden soil. What
I've learned over the last 12 years could fill a book but I'll stick to
some high points.
We did not till. We do use raised beds but we build these beds by either sheet composting (I describe later) or Hugelkultur,mounds made of small twigs and branches and layers of leaves and other organic matter.(click to find out more) Tilling compacts soils and decreases the numbers of fungi and worms in the soil. We mulch heavily. Mulch is very important for healthy soil. Mulch provides cover and food for worms and beneficial microbes as well as for plants when it degrades. Mulch moderates soil temperatures and helps soil retain moisture. Mulch suppresses weeds. We mulch nearly everything in our raised beds. Healthy soil needs organic material. We grow our own fertilizers and at the same time add biomass to the soil structure. We plant vetch, clover, oats, fava beans, garbanzo beans, mustard, turnips, and winter rye in the fall in some of our beds and in our paths. In some beds I need more nitrogen so I plant the nitrogen fixers, vetch, beans and clover. In others I need to improve soil structure so in go oats and turnips. You can plant the oats and clover together if you need both better structure and nitrogen. Here in Alabama, these plants grow slowly all winter and then really take off in the spring. Once the weather warms, we cut the cover crop and compost the greenery or use it as mulch. What is left in the soil is a huge amount of wonderful roots that decompose and add rich organic matter to the soil. To plant I simply cut out the cover crops in the spaces where I'll plant. The heat of summer prevents the cover crops from coming back. My soil wasn't ready for cover crops the first year. Actually I have NO soil the first year. I used and use a method called sheet composting to obtain the soil. In tired beds or new beds, I still use this method. In sheet composting leaves and other organic materials are laid on the ground to a depth of 4-12 inches. Then soil is heaped over it. We hand tote soil at the bottom of our acre where it mounds up due to erosion up to the top of our acre where our gardens are. Its long hard work but worth the effort! I made the mistake of buying topsoil only once. It contained Johnson Grass and field bermuda and I'm still fighting this stuff. Sheet composting is basically what is suggesting in "Lasagne Gardening" a book available at Rodale Press. We bought the book at the thrift store and I assigned the older boys to read the book. They in turn became enthusiastic about gardening and have built their own beds. Sheet composting smothers weeds and invites worms to the soil. The worms TILL the soil for you so that what you get after a season is beautiful loam. If you really need to suppress the weeds use newspaper as the bottom layer. Between the two methods, sheet composting and cover croping, my soil is healthy and vital. Since I know that chemical fertilizers leave various kinds of salts in the soil and over time ruin the soil, I never buy chemical fertilizers. I've seen soil that has been fertilized chemically for decades and its dead. The plants get all their nutrition from the fertilizers and much of it must be bought in order for the plants to produce. You really should READ and become familiar with what I'm writing. I've only scraped the surface. The books I suggest will help. Good luck to you and happy gardening! |
LINKS
Click on my BOOKS PAGE to find books you can read. I also put a few resources here that I have used and found very helpful. I am using Amazon.com links. You can find these at your local library. If you click on the link you'll be taken to Amazon.com. If you purchase the item I earn 5% of the cost of the item. ************** Back to Garden Page |
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