How to Grow Soil.
Soil or Dirt? Is there a difference?
Dirt is not the same as soil. Simply put, dirt is soil without any life. It is sterile. Dirt is ‘dead’. It contains no biology or non in a living state. Dirt is a mixture of minerals, sand, silt and clay. Sand particles are the largest. Silt are smaller yet and clay is even smaller. Sand will allow water to easily pass through it. Silt will allow water to pass through, but slower than sand. Clay, depending on the layering and the quantity, will block water. It is why clay pots are used to store water.
In order to get great soil, you need to understand where and what you stand on, at the present. Most soils in the modern world of agriculture are degraded. This means the ‘living shell’ of biology rich soil near the surface, the top-soil as it is known, has been used and abused to such a terrible extent that it is either razor thin or non-existent. There are pictures from the dust-bowl of the 1930’s where a full six feet of top-soil was blown away by the winds. It is hard to imagine losing six feet of top-soil and continuing to grow food.
Soil is dirt plus life. There is a hidden universe of life living under our feet. The life in the soil consumes food, drinks water, breathes air, exhales, excretes, multiplies and dies. For bacteria, this ‘cycle’ is sometimes accomplished in only a matter of minutes. For some fungi, the ‘cycle’ never really ends, not even in frozen winters.
Another way of looking at this is soil is the ‘grocery store’ for plants. Another analogy is the soil is the ‘digestive system’ of plants. It is very similar to animals, except it is external of their bodies. It has many of the necessary ingredients for plant life to grow and thrive.
Soil health is the greatest predictor of plant life and consequently animal and human health. It is the proverbial iceberg under the water line. Properly balanced soil, will house an enormous variety of microbial, fungal and insect life that will in turn support the growth and protection of plants. Quite simply, the healthier the soil, the healthier the plants, all things being equal.
How does one turn dirt into soil?
The food chain in the soil begins with bacteria. Bacteria are the beginning of the food chain. Soil is created when bacteria come to life. As long as the soil is moist and has a food source, bacteria will thrive. In turn, this will activate an entire universe of microbiology that will consist of decomposers, shredders, and predators. None of these creatures live outside the soil. This all happens before insects/animals/birds/people consume anything.
The obvious question is how to bacteria feed? This is a summary of some of the latest understanding in soil biology. The short answer is they are fed by plant life. The more complete story follows. As a plant grows, it takes the photonic energy from the sun along with CO2 and water to make sugars. It releases O2 as a byproduct. Some of the excess sugar is fed into the root zone where it is used to feed bacteria (and some fungi).
The bacteria multiply in the zone around the roots and the roots in turn absorb some the bacteria into the plant. They are then stripped of their cell walls which contain mainly amino acids and some minerals. The plant directly consumes them and takes the components to other parts of the plant to build proteins. The bacteria, now without cell walls, are ejected from the roots along with more sugars. They immediately regrow their cell walls from nitrogen in the air, minerals in the soil and multiply. The cycle repeats as the roots continue this process.
Fungi also eat bacteria. Some species of fungi, called mycorrhizal have evolved to live symbiotically with plants (or perhaps it is the plants that evolved to live with these fungi). The mycorrhizal fungi interconnect with the roots of plants and using of the sugars, grow to incredible sizes. The filaments of fungi (called hyphae) are tiny when compared to the sizes of roots and they can grow in places that roots cannot. This effectively doubles, triples, quadruples or more the size of the root zone. The bacteria also ride along the outside of the fungal strands and use them to move throughout the soil, rather quickly in fact. In short, very healthy plants are ‘farmers’. They farm bacteria and fungi and use them to further the development of all three. It is a harmony of balance.
The short answer of how to create healthy soil is to grow healthy plants which in turn will feed the
microbiology of the soil. This is the way nature does it. This is the most sustainable way to do it. This is how it has always been done. So, with that in mind, what are some strategies that people can use to help this process.
The soil can also be thought of as a battery system. Natural plant systems will generally create a system of surplus as more plant matter is added to the soil than is used to grow the plant. That surplus of plant life builds up and creates what we call top-soil. Whether we are dealing with a grass-land or a forest, the process is very similar. The plants grow. They convert CO2, water, minerals and nitrogen into a complex mix of roots, leaves, stems, fruit and flowers. When the plant dies (or goes dormant in winter) some or all of that matter is returned to the soil and the decomposition process starts up. What is so impressive is that year after year, there is always more ‘waste material’ returned to the soil that is used. So that is how soil grows in nature. The cycles of the seasons serve to enhance soils by ‘crystallizing’ the air into carbon rich molecules that fall to the ground and are consumed by the soil life.
A word about humus. Humus (which is not the same as the dip made from chickpeas, called hummus) is a persistent material that is found in top-soils. As the microbiology consumes and cycles and recycles the organic matter in the soil, there is a point where they cannot get access to the nutrients anymore. A theory is that after a certain size, the bacteria themselves are too large to be able to access the micro-nutrients. This organic matter is what is referred to as humus. It is the end of the decomposition process. It is the real battery part of the soil. It contains minerals, water held by various ‘glue-like’ compounds, various organic compounds and more in a stable format (the theory is that it will last hundreds of years). Humus is created by adding organic material to soil and allow the biology to create it. Fungi are frequently found in humus as well.
Knowing the above, the main question is how can we recharge the battery of the soil, no matter where you live? This is a challenge, especially because we all live in differing regions with wildly different climates. The simple answer is to mimic nature. There are two steps to this but they both fall under the same simple idea, ‘always keep the ground covered, either with a living plant or decaying plant matter’. The expression is ‘nature is modest’ and when she detects ‘bare ground’, she will quickly try to cover it.
First is start growing something, anything, in the soil you wish to remediate. If all you can grow is weeds, that is ok for a season or two. The modern terminology for this cover cropping. This refers to growing a mixture of plants whose primary goal is to feed the soil life. A secondary goal could be consumable plants too (like radishes, peas, beans, grains, etc), but it does not have to be that way. The cover crop grows and feeds the soil. If it dies in winter, all the plant matter is added to the surface to keep the underground grocery store stocked in the winter months. In warmer climates, the cover crop is mowed down or crimped flat before it has a chance to go to seed or fully mature. The ‘clippings’ are added on top of the soil to mimic a ‘winter die off’.
If you live in an area with a long growing season. You can sometimes grow three crops in a year and one of those could be a living cover crop. If you live in a moderate growing season climate, you can usually grow two crops and one of them could be a cover crop. If you live in a really short growing season you can only get one crop and so cover cropping is not feasible unless they use a strategy of ‘crop rotation’ or ‘inter-cropping’ to allow a bed to ‘re-charge’ with a cover crop instead of growing a food or cash crop.
The second method to grow soil is mulching and composting. Nature prefers to keep the soil covered with plant matter. We can use the same process. A very effective method is called sheet mulching or lasagna mulching. You normally start this process when it is fall in your area. A layer of paper/cardboard/cotton/wool or any natural fiber is laid down as a bottom layer. This will suppress weeds and will also provide a much needed carbon source for the soil biology. Next a layer of greener material is placed on top. This can be grass clippings, mulched leaves and thin branches (these are known as Ramial branches and are less than 1 inch in diameter). Another good nitrogen rich material is spoiled hay that is pesticide and herbicide free (‘hay’ is made from green living plants and ‘straw’ is made from dead stalks of mostly grain crops). Other sources of nitrogen ‘waste’ are used coffee grounds, spent grains (from distillation), a thin layer of manure from animals like poultry, rabbits, sheep or other ruminants, organic ‘meals’ like alfalfa, soy, cotton, etc.
A word of caution is necessary. Anytime you use materials in your garden/farm that you personally did not grow or create (hay, spent grains, manure, etc), you risk adding persistent chemicals. The people you get this material from may not realize that a process ‘upstream’ contaminated everything. The best advice is to start a small test bed for a year or two with these outside materials and if they perform well, increase in the following years. There are many stories of farmers who had setbacks of three years or more due to persistent chemicals present in something they added to their gardens and farms.
No matter what top layer you choose, make sure it is thick enough. You need to remember, it is mostly air. So start with at least 6 inches (less if you use branches or leaves since they are slower to decompose). This will take some time. This is why it is best to do this over the winter. Come spring, the soil will have changed completely and the biology will start to wake up. Don’t add too much of the ‘denser’ material to the top, like spent grain or coffee grounds or manure. Everything needs to be balanced by weight, not volume. Water the sheet mulch liberally as you are building it.
If you are in an arid (hot and dry) climate, this process will be very challenging due to lack of moisture. The beds will need to be watered regularly and so you will need to decide if you can access the required moisture to keep the process running through the dormant months. For moderate climates, this is a very good option for the winter months.
There is usually enough moisture, warmth and time for the biology to decompose the mulch. For colder climates, this may take more than one or two seasons to fully decompose and so time is often the limiting factor. Again, crop rotating is an excellent strategy to allow the soil to recharge and build up organic matter.
No matter what climate you live in, keeping the ground covered is a very effective way of ‘growing’ soil.
What if you want to speed this up? If you are in a situation where you need to grow something now, not in 4 or 6 months, what can you do? The answer is composting. Composting compresses the time factor by concentrating the biology and plant waste into a very small area so it can essentially digest faster. The completed compost is then spread out on the soil or mixed with the seeds at planting to a) add a lot of beneficial bacteria and fungi to the soil and b) increase the organic component of the soil.
The many ways of making compost.
Compost is often thought of as just the organic matter of decomposed plant and animal waste. It is also so much more than that. Good quality aged compost is teaming with bacteria and fungi. Dr Elaine Ingram came up with the idea of comparing the amount of fungi to bacteria based on weight in soils. There is a direct correlation between the amount of fungi in the soil and with the maximum amount of plant matter you can grow. The short version of the story is you want there to be an equal amount of fungi and bacteria in the soil for our modern crops. If you want an orchard, you need even higher numbers of fungi. The most productive places on Earth are tropical rain forests and they are almost completely dependent on fungi for energy and carbon cycling. The good news is that this same level of production can be achieved almost anywhere by enriching the soil with organic matter (3% appears to be the catalyst point, below that and results will always be less than ideal), bacteria and fungi in the proper ratios. According
to the research by Dr. Johnson, plants are operating at 20% of their ‘current’ genetic potentials. In optimal soils we can grow FIVE times more plant matter than we can with conventional agriculture.
Every gardener will have their own favorite composting method and so the following is a list of the most common ways of converting ‘waste’ material into usable plant food.
In Ground Compost: Simply grind up food scraps (no meat, dairy, bones or citrus) in a blender with water and then bury this ‘shake’ into the garden. This is very fast as the material is in an easily digestible form for the soil life. It is only practical on a small scale though. On a larger scale, you could dig a deep trench at least a foot deep and fill it with a mixture of plant and animal waste or some less decomposed compost. Then you backfill the trench with your soil and allow it to decompose in place. After a winter or a few months in warmer climates, many plants will thrive in such a bed.
Hot Compost: You can quickly decompose material by stacking it in layers in a large enough mass that it will heat up, even in winter. Hot composting requires a large (1 cubic yard or 1 cubic meter) pile of material. It is layered between carbon rich material (paper, cardboard, dry leaves, thin branches, stems, etc) and nitrogen rich material (grass/hay/fresh leaves, coffee grounds, animal or human manure, plant/food waste, spent grains, urine, etc). This usually is a ‘cake’ of four or more layers. Each layer is sprayed with water to moisten the material as the layers are built. This mixture will begin to heat up.
The magic happens in as little as 3 to 5 days. The center of this pile will heat to 130 degrees For more (54 C). At this stage, you will need to monitor the temperature every 4 to 6 hours. If it gets over 140 degrees F (60 C), you will need to turn it. Over 150 degrees F (65 C) and the bacteria start to die off. Essentially this means opening up the pile with a fork and rebuilding it. You want the outside sections to now go into the center. You want the center section to go into the outside. Once this work is done, you once again monitor the heat and turn it again if the heat rises to 140. Depending on the ingredients in your ‘cake’ and your climate this may take 4 or more turns before it cools down. Once it no longer heats up, you can then use it as compost in your garden. The process can take as little as 3 weeks, give or take. The result is again a rich biologically active compost that will increase the soil life immediately after applied. It is not fully broken down, but it has sufficient biology and nutrients that it can be applied as a top dressing for most plants. If you don’t have a thermometer, you can simply test the heat using your hand. Most hot water systems heat the water to around 130 degrees to give you a comparison. So, if you pull out a section from the center and it is too hot to hold onto for more than a couple of seconds, turn the pile.
Cold Compost: Cold compost is a slower process. The most effective version or method is a called Johnson Su bioreactor (https://www.nmhealthysoil.org/2021/04/18/johnson-subioreactor-2/). It is ssentially a large container with access to lots of air that is filled with plant matter and composted in place for a year or two. The container is often made from cattle panels or metal fencing and is shaped into a cylinder. Inside the cylinder, vertical pipes are inserted such that there is never more than 12 inches of space between the pipes. The container has an open air floor that is normally suspended off the ground on top of an old pallet for example. The entire container is filled with plant matter that you want to compost (animal waste is ok too in low percentages).
The whole thing is watered as it is being filled and after a few days of letting it sit, the the pipes are removed. A cover is put on and the compost is left alone for a year or more. You check the moisture levels and you water it lightly if needed. In dry climates this will require frequent watering, as often as daily. You never want to let it dry out and you never want to get it so wet that air cannot flow through it.
The compost will begin to heat up for a few days, depending on the materials used. After a week or so, the temperatures should go down. Once the temperature has reduced to 80 degrees F or lower, you add composting worms (red wigglers). The key for a good batch is air and moisture. The design allows air to naturally convect up the shafts. The moisture content needed is 70%. That is the same as a damp sponge. If you have a damp sponge and you give it a good squeeze a few drops of water should come out. The same applies here. The second critical part is cold. In freezing temperatures, the worms may die or leave the pile and it will stagnate. Often people move the pallet into a controlled environment for the winter (barn or greenhouse or garage for example).
The end of the year will yield a large quantity (approximately 700 pounds using the recommended container size) of highly active biologically rich compost that has been proven to boost growth and yields when applied, even in small quantities. The compost will turn into a clay like material. It will be highly fungal. It will be loaded with bacteria and fungi and their spores. According to Dr. Johnson, he has identified over 2,500 different species in the final compost he makes, including the spores for mycorrhizal fungi.
The recommendation is to add 2 pounds (1 kg) of the compost into 20 gallons (75 liters) of water. This is then added into the furrow or hole at planting time. The best results are when it is used as a seed inoculant. As a seed inoculant, he mixes 1 pound of compost with a cup of organic milk and 1 tablespoon of organic molasses and some water to make a paste resembling pancake batter. This is enough to treat 50 pounds of seeds. The seeds are tumbled in the mixture and planted immediately.
A lot of commercially available seeds are ‘treated’ and this essentially sterilizes the outside of the seed coat. The poor seed has to then wait for the bacteria to colonize the soil near the root. Then it has to wait for the fungal community to get established. All of this takes time. In most conventional agriculture settings, the plant is using up to 90% of its energy for developing a vibrant soil community in the root zone. For seeds treated with a bacterial and fungal rich inoculant, they only seem to send 40% to 60% of their energy into the soil. That means a lot more energy is available for growing above ground.
You can also make a cold compost pile ‘in place’ by just piling up various amounts of plant waste into a pile and letting it cure for a season. Some people take an under-performing garden bed and make a pile on top of it. During the season, it will break down and by spring, there will be a nice rich layer of compost under the top layer.
Additionally, you can make compost in an old garbage bin or bucket with drainage holes. You place the bucket in a strategic location and over time, add carbon rich ‘brown’ material, a nitrogen rich ‘green’ material, and some garden soil in layers. Since it is a closed environment, you should not need to add any water. If you place this next to a tree, as an example, the leachate will fertilize the tree. If you place it in a garden bed, the same will apply, as the leachate will fertilize the soil. You can even do this on a balcony in a apartment or in a garage or basement (just make sure to think about collecting the leachate).
Fermented Compost: There is something called bokashi which is an anaerobic digester. Essentially any kind of food waste can be used. If it was people food, even meat, bones, dairy, pasta, bread, citrus, it can go into the bokashi composter. The waste is stored in a sealed container, and bokashi microbes are added. They ferment the waste into what is essentially the plant equivalent of a pre-biotic. In about two to four weeks the material is composted enough to be added to your soil. It will produce a leachate (liquid extract) that can be diluted and used as a fertilizer. The ‘digested’ solids contain a mixture of biology and pre-digested plant material making mature bokashi a wonderful soil amendment as well. It will have a vinegary smell and is best buried in the soil. The smell will not attract any of the typical garden scavengers.
There are lots of benefits to bokashi and it is scalable depending on your conditions. The one thing to mention is that since it is a closed environment, it does not off-gas. During an air-based composting process, a good percentage of the nitrogen and carbon does off-gas as ammonia and CO2. So, some of that is lost. With bokashi, nearly all of that is returned to the soil (some will eventually off-gas, but the goal is for this to happen IN the soil so the biology can use it). It is useful to note that you will need two bins for bokashi. You fill the first one and once it is full, you add the bokashi and seal it. Then you will let it ferment for the two to four weeks. While bin one is fermenting, you will fill bin two and repeat the process after emptying bin one.
Another form of fermented compost is using water in a large container. This is fondly called composted swamp water by many people. The idea is you gather lots of plant materials (grass, leaves, plants like nettles, thistles, weeds, borage, comfrey, beans, peas, yarrow, any fast growing or disease resistant weed in your area, even flowers, etc). You stuff this into a barrel or bucket, as full as you can. Then you add water to completely cover it and put a tight fitting lid on. Every day or two, take a long stick and give it a stir. After a week to 10 days, it will be swamp water that you can dilute and use as a liquid fertilizer. Then solids can be left in the container and more water and more greens added to continue the process. After a few months, the black solids at the bottom can be added as a ‘top dressing’ just like any compost. The only caution is the smell. You don’t want this on your skin or clothes. And if you are very ‘close’ to your neighbors, well, they might notice when you are using it.
Compost Tea/Extract: Another method of restoring the biology of the soil and to support plant growth is with compost tea. Once you have properly aged compost (either hot or cold) you can extend that compost by using a small amount to make a concentrated brew. You place an air bubbler in a container of your choice and connect it to an air pump. The container can be a five gallon bucket (20 liters) or 25 gallon (100 liters) garbage bin or more. The container is filled with chlorine free water (chlorine is anti-bacterial and is not what we want). Rain water and well water are best if available. Next you place about 1/2 gallon or two liters of compost into a paint straining bag or old sock or nylon stocking and tie the end off and hang it in the container. You add a sugar source like 1/2 cup of molasses (non-GMO please) and a few table spoons of fish emulsion (optional, just make sure it is processed at low temperatures and not chemically treated). Next you turn on the air bubbler and let it ‘brew’ for 24 hours. The ambient temperature needs to be above 70 degrees F or 19 degrees C for this to work in one day.
After 24 hours, you use this brew to water your plants. You can dilute it anywhere between 5 to 20 to one for example. The higher concentrations are ok for the soil. You can use the 20 to one dilution and spray it directly on the leaves of your plants too. It is safe even at full strength. It is more of a question of wasting material than anything dangerous. Once you stop the air bubbler, you should disperse the brew immediately. After a few hours, the bacteria colony will diminish drastically. Fresh is best with compost tea.
Another simpler version of this is to skip the aeration step and simply leave the compost in the water without anything else. The compost simply steeps in the water for a day or less. Then it is strained and used as liquid fertilizer.
Jadam and Korean Natural Farming methods: Korea is one of the leaders in natural farming methods. They have been successfully farming for thousands of years. It has only been the last 2 generations that saw the farmers being lured into modern chemical farming. The concept of Korean natural farming to to ‘grow’ beneficial bacteria and fungus on cooked grains. They are buried in a box in the garden, or forest near to where to you live. The ‘inoculated’ grain is then used in the compost tea method (see above).
Jadam is like a cross between compost tea and bokashi. You take plant material from nature and place it in a container until it is full. Then you fill this with water and submerge everything. You add soil from highly productive areas where you live. Forest floor soil from deciduous trees is excellent (avoid cedars, conifers, black walnut and any other trees that suppress plant life or are poisonous). Any place where are plants and trees are thriving is good.
You only need about 1 cup of soil. To increase the diversity, visit two, three or more different places to harvest the soil life. Add the soil into the water and mix it. Cover it and leave it sit for 10 to 20 days. After this time, you can then use this just as you would compost tea (soil and leaves) and dilute it in the same manner.
There are many more Jadam and Korean Natural farming methods than these two and if you wish to learn more, there are quite a number of books you can read explaining them in detail.
Terra Preta: If you have very poor soil and/or live in a sandy region, terra preta is a method you can use to charge your soil again. The problem with sandy soils is the water washes everything away, almost immediately. There are no sponge pockets in the soil to hang onto minerals or compost. These soils simply ‘burn out’ quickly, even with conventional agriculture. Terra preta means ‘black soil’ and it was discovered in the Amazon basin. Contrary to popular belief, the soil in the amazon is very poor. Many plants are living ‘hydroponically’. They live in the soil, but the nutrients and consumed from plant matter decaying in the every present water.
But the Amazonians discovered that by burying charcoal, clay and compost (manure and plants) that a rich dark chocolate soil would develop that was a sponge for minerals and nutrients. The result was a deep layer of soil that seemingly has lasted for hundreds if not thousands of years. Some even say it is self-renewing. The current day land owners switched to selling terra-preta instead of selling crops. One farmer is said to have taken only a certain amount from a section every year. The next year he would move on to a new section. After twenty years, he ended up back at the place where he started and to his surprise, there was now enough new terra preta that he could once again collect it and sell it.
Whether this is true or not, the fact remains is that added charcoal, clay and compost in a mixture to sandy or really poor soils will remediate them in as little as one year. Many people, including modern science groups have studied this and you can learn more about it by searching online. The short version of it is to make your own charcoal. Then you crush it. Then you mix it with your compost and let it charge. Chemically speaking, charcoal is a sponge. People ingest activated charcoal to flush toxins for example. If you add ‘raw’ charcoal into the soil, it will soak up minerals and nutrients faster than your plants can. In short, unless you age it, the charcoal will out compete your plants and hurt them rather than help them. Once the charcoal has been ‘charged’ with compost and minerals for months or longer, you can add it to your soil.
An easier and more ‘traditional’ method would be to make a trench in your garden. Fill it with branches. Burn them. As soon as white ash is visible on the top, add more branches to ‘drown out the fire’. Once these begin to turn white, you flood the trench to stop the burn. This will take a lot of water. Doing this before a rainstorm is a good way to work with nature. Once the fire is out and cold (a day at least), you mix in compost, food waste, crushed clay (if available), broken shells, egg shells, seaweed, etc. Then you cover it up and let it rest for a few months at least. Then you plant into this new bed and it should get better with time.
Hugelculture/Hügelkultur: This is a German method of making raised beds. The term literally means ‘hill culture’ in English. It first appeared in literature in 1962. The idea behind it is while you are young and full of strength, you work really hard to make a huge raised garden bed. Once the work is done, you plant into the garden bed for the rest of your life. You do the work once and get rewarded for 20 years or more.
The recipe is as follows. First you cut out a long rectangle in your grass. A good idea is a 4 foot wide (1.2 meters) strip and as long as you want it to be (10 feet, 20 feet, 100 feet??). You want to cut down under the grass roots and peel back the sod. So a two foot wide section of sod, one two foot section on the left side and one on the right side.
Next you dig a trench at least a foot or two deep (more or less). Keep this ‘top-soil’ near by. Into the depression in the soil you add wood, lots of wood. You want to place logs and thick branches on the bottom. You can make it a foot or two high with wood. Normally, the limiting factor is access to enough wood to fill the trench. You fill in all the spaces in the wood with your reserved top-soil and water everything aggressively. Next you flip the sod over so the grass side is down and the roots are up. You place this up-side-down sod on top of the mound. You will likely need more soil than you dug up and so, next you go hunting for more soil. Alternately, you can now add mature compost to the top.
However it happens, you want a 12 inch or more deep layer of soil on the top of the mound. If you used aged compost, you can plant directly into the mound immediately. If you used ‘any soil you could find’, you probably should cover the mound with another layer of plant material (leaves, grass, etc) and wait for 6 to 8 months. Either way, the work is done and you will have a garden bed that you can gift to your children. Each fall you cover the mound with a thick layer of mulch (grass, leaves, spent hay) and that is all the work aside from planting and harvesting.
Poor soils suffer from a lack of moisture and a lack of air. A Hügelkultur bed solves both problems. As the wood slowly decomposes, it retains a great deal of moisture. At the same time, since it can take decades for the wood to fully decompose, air flow into the mound is maintained. Lastly, only fungi can decompose wood and so that helps setup a nice balance of bacteria and fungi to help support your plants.
These beds work in both wet and dry climates. In wet climates, the shape of the bed will cause excess water to run off the bed (assuming it is shaped properly). In dry climates, water gets preserved by the sponge like decaying wood. As for the type of wood to use, hard wood is best as it will last longer. It is best to used aged wood, that has started to decompose (green wood, it is said, can sometimes actually re-grow from under the mound).
There are trees to avoid as they are detrimental to the process (either poisonous or they emit natural herbicide/fungicides). The list includes: black walnut, black locust, cedar, camphor, pepper trees, black cherry, coast redwood (it is endangered), pine, yew and the tree of heaven.
A Hugelculture also sets up nicely for micro-climates. There is a top side that is warmer and drier. There is a sun facing side that will be more moist and warmer than the top. There is a shady side that is cooler and even more moist. With this in mind, you can position the plants for the microclimate they thrive in.
The biggest problems with these mounds is that they are so life giving. The only downside is you might encounter a flush of mice or moles and voles along with an inordinate amount of weeds since the bed is so fertile.
Vermiculture: The farming of worms has many benefits for your garden. A large bin, like a halfbarrel or lastic tote or old bathtub are placed in a shady location out of the rain. At the bottom a good amount of paper material is placed (newspaper, cardboard, some leaves and twigs, etc). On top of that some native soil and compost is added (worms need the grit from the soil to feed properly). Then on one side, a pile of kitchen scraps are added.
The worms are added and then it is covered up (worms avoid the light). Many people like to add an old cotton sheet or burlap on top and then add a wood or metal ‘roof’ and a large rock to keep out the scavengers.
If using a large tote or barrel, make a hole at the bottom, so any liquid can escape the container. If using a bathtub, you already have a hole where the drain is. Place the worm-bin on some sort of platform so that you can place a bucket under it to catch the leachate. This ‘worm juice’ is a very bacteria rich liquid fertilizer. Next, always put the food on the same side of the bin. The worms will feed on that side and they will ‘go to the bathroom’ on the other side. Over time, the ‘bathroom side’ will fill up with a nice mix of worm manure, aka ‘castings’. Periodically, you will want to harvest these worm castings and use it in your garden as you would compost. Worm castings are very bacterial and so you want to balance that with a more fungal component like compost made from mostly wood chips or branches or thick stems, etc. You can also add smaller amounts of bio-char (charcoal powder), kelp or seaweed, rock dust and other minerally rich items in small quantities to the worm bin to enrich it even further.
Animal Integration: In nature, animals coexist harmoniously with the plant life. They are dependent on each other for the eco-system to thrive. The above has only lightly touched on using animal manures and urine in conjunction with composting. But there is amply evidence to suggest that integrating animals into your garden/farm soil is the fastest way to boost the soil life, and on a large scale if needed. A simple example would be the lowly chicken. Not only will chickens eat all sorts of insects, they will aerate the top of the soil with their scratching. They will eat all sorts of greens, including just about any weed. They will drop ammonia rich manure where-ever they go. They are excellent and reducing a compost pile into a compost ‘sheet’ in as little as a couple of days. They will pretty much turn anything into bare soil in a few days if left to their own devices.
The way people use them is inside something called a chicken tractor. They move the ‘henhouse’ into an rea they want the chickens to ‘work’ on. They setup a moveable fence around the hen house and let the chickens work that soil for a day or two. Then, when all the chickens are back in the hen-house, it is moved into a new area and the fence put up again for continuing the process
The same method will work for sheep, cows, ducks, etc. The only difference is the scale and what you want the animals to do and not do. For example, using cows in this manner grass land in dry and desert regions can be restored. Animals will also dramatically increase the organic content of the soil in as little as a year or two. And they can be used together. Some farmers do the following. First, they plant a cover crop. They let it grow to a certain height. Then they move the cows into a small section of the land and allowed to graze and of course, drop manure and urine everywhere. The cows are moved daily so they do not ‘over-graze’. Then chickens are moved into the areas that the cows had access to. The chickens will continue to level all remaining plants and will scratch and spread the cow manure looking for insects.
This land has now been fertilized for free. Correction, if you sell some of those cows or milk them and if you collect the chicken eggs, you now got paid for fertilizing the land. And year after year, the soils just get better and better with animal integration. The land can now be used for a cash crop and then cover cropped for the fall/winter months with animal integration. This mimics what the buffalo did while roaming the prairies and it how nature builds soil quickly.
Dr. Johnson, has said, the compost he makes in his reactor is meant to replace what happens naturally in the wild. The Great Plains and Prairies of North America and Africa have/had some of the deepest and richest top-soils of anywhere. They were created by a combination of many things. What we know are a) grasses have thin wiry roots that can deeply penetrate the soils, b) animals grazing on these grasses drop their waste and saliva which is teeming with bacteria with inoculates the soil, c) the predators hunting these animals keep them moving all the time so that they get a chance to over-graze an area. The movement of the animals trample plants, adds fertilizer, adds bacteria and feeds the ground life and d) the insects, birds and other smaller creatures feed on the animal waste which makes its way into the soil. Repeat this process year after year and in a few centuries the top-soil will grow to incredible depths.
The same can be done today with proper animal management. You observe how it is done in nature and then you create a system to allow it to happen in harmony with nature in a location where you want it to happen. This return to a natural stewardship of the land should be the ultimate goal of farmers, ranchers and gardeners world wide. And it just so happens that is it the fastest way to grow healthy soil that can be passed on from generation to generation
A lesson from the ‘giant growers’.
There are people all over the world in a variety of different climates who grow record breaking plants. I have researched a few of them and they do reveal some secrets. Two in particular come to mind. First is John Evans from Alaska. He had at one point at least 8 world records for vegetables (broccoli: 35 pounds, carrot: 18.9 pounds, beet: 42.7 pounds, cabbage: 45.25 pounds, etc). In 1995 he grew a Swiss Chard that was 9 feet tall and weighed 71.75 pounds. He also grew the equivalent of 5.4 pounds of potatoes per linear foot. Charles Wilber from Alabama held many world records for growing tomatoes. He is famous for growing 342 pounds of tomatoes on average across 3 plants. He also grew an okra plant that was over 17 feet tall (5 meters).
Both John and Charles studied nature. They used clues from nature then applied their ideas to their plants and eventually they grew the record breaking crops. We are used to seeing a tomato that is a certain size. We are used to how big a cabbage or beet or carrot is supposed to be. But what we are ‘used’ to seeing is what modern agriculture has conditioned us to think is normal. But is it really normal? Commercial crops and often chosen for one and only one criteria, how well does it survive being shipped long distances. The genetics of crops that are often ignored are size, taste, natural disease resistance, nutrition and more. So, after studying a few of the ‘giant growers’, here are some soil related tips that can help increase your food production.
Both John and Charles spent YEARS working on their compost recipes. They both emphasize knowing the soil conditions that your plants prefer. They both emphasize something many people have forgotten, plant positioning. Charles has specific rules for the distance between his tomato plants (1 plant every 8 feet or more), because he knows that underground, the roots are growing both down and laterally. John, in Alaska with the shorter growing season used very high raised beds. His beds looked like Hugelculture beds without the wood inside. His beds were extremely deep, likely to increase the root mass and to keep the roots warm as long as possible in Alaska. So, the secrets are to choose a variety that will grow big, give the soil plenty of compost and compost tea (including the leaves), give them plenty of space to grow and truly understand the conditions that the plants thrive in and you could be rewarded with giants of
your own.
How many 70 pound Swiss Chard plants do you need to grow to feed you for a year?
