The Dirt on Dirt!
Spring!!! It’s finally happening!!
This last winter just seemed to go on and on, but spring is finally here. And, like many of us, I am not at all ready to get planting. My flower beds and veggie garden are full of weeds and are nutritionally depleted from producing so much food and beauty.
The truth is, when you are harvesting your garden bounty, you are always taking a little more out of your garden than you are putting in. Even if you are composting, just eating the food from your garden and picking the flowers, you will deplete your garden’s soil over time.
The old wisdom was to turn the soil over and add chemical fertilizers, which would give pretty good results the next season. The follow-up problem would be insects and disease. So, the next year desperate gardeners would turn the soil, add chemical fertilizers, insecticides and fungicides. And so it would go until the soil eroded, died compacted. Afterward, it could only produce with a LOT of chemicals and a ton of work. And, the harvest would turn out strangely bland, all of which makes gardening seem, well, not worth the time. Let me tell you, the only people profiting from this system are the big chemical companies. They make a LOT of money selling you their garbage, so they put a lot of marketing money into tricking you into buying their garbage.
You don't need to turn over your soil. Plants evolved over millions of years to grow in soil that had tiny animals making tunnels for air and water to travel to the roots of the plants. More importantly, they evolved to have symbiotic relationships with the fungi (mushrooms) in your soil. It’s really interesting; the little fungi actually grow little cups around the tips of your plant roots. They pull nitrogen right out of the air, nutrients out of the soil and feed it to the plants. Then the plant says, “thanks neighbor for the ingredients for life, here is that cup of sugar you be wanting.” They take care of each other. With this safe community it’s much harder for the bad bugs to take hold.
Every time you turn over the soil and add chemicals, you bulldoze the Plants neighborhood. Your plants have no friends to rely on. The chemical food is actually less nutritious, has less flavor and the plants can’t defend themselves from pests. Just like the biome in your gut, the living things in the soil help your plants stay healthy.
So what do I do instead? Easy! I sprinkle a coat of “rockdust” consisting of ingredients like Azomite and Green Sand (I sprinkle both). They add micro-nutrients to the soil that the fungi can process for the plants. Bone and Blood Meal additives are not a bad idea, either. Same goes for a little Kelp Meal.
I also cover the weeded areas with a layer of heavy paper or cardboard. I get mine at my local feed store because there isn’t a lot of tape to remove compared to, for instance, old Amazon boxes. I only use plain brown boxes with a minimum of printing; I never use glossy printed boxes. I leave the plain brown boxes out in the rain to make them pliable, and to make the tape easy to remove. Paper grocery bags work, too, especially if you want to cover small curvy areas. Once I have placed them on the garden bed, I cover the cardboard with compost, coffee grounds or mulch. Since weeds can’t grow through the cardboard, they become out-of-sight and out-of-mind. It’s all biodegradable, non-poisonous, and super easy!
Finally, when I am planting, I will sometimes cut a hole in the cardboard, then weed anything that's under there, and add my super-organic fertilizer. If you can’t get mine, any organic fertilizer will do.
Soil is such a rich topic—I hope to bring you more ideas in the future about how to make your beds more healthy and productive.
