Overfeeding is easily done. Surrounded as we are, by seductive marketing and miracle soil food, home gardeners fertilise wildly. Less really is more. All you need provide is just enough.
Today I hope to bring you clarity and ease, as I explain why you feed + what to use + how much your soil needs, you’ll be surprised at how little!
Why + how
Soil, is, by design, self sustaining: nourished via the cycling of organic matter and ‘waste’ from all beings that live in soil and on it: plants, animals, fungi, bacteria et all.
Hmmm, if soil’s self sufficient, Why then am I feeding?
- To redress the small deficit created when you take the food part of your crop, home for dinner. A gap appears because the plant isn’t recycled in its entirety.
Ok. I see the gap. So how do I bridge it?
- Good news is you don’t bridge it. Biology in the soil does. Trillions of microscopic life forms in ‘healthy’ soil, team up with plants and together, sort everything from nourishment to immunity. Your role is to create a garden in which they enjoy to live.
How helpful are they! I want them on board! How do I create a garden such as this?
- With homemade compost + mulch + plants. That’s it! When these three form the backbone of your feeding regime pests reduce, disease abates and crops thrive. The key is the synergy of these three together, lets dive into the how to’s and amounts of each.
Homemade compost
Compost doesn’t directly feed the plants, it improves soil structure which houses nutrients and biology which in turn feeds plants.
Homemade compost, friends, is chalk and cheese from bought compost. Making your own is well worth it and it isn’t as arduous as you think because you don’t need near as much as you think you do, and because I can set you up for ease and speed.
Bump it up your priority list, higher than vacuuming if you please. Make some. If only to mix into your bought compost in order to improve it.
How much compost does my soil need?
But a humble amount. Compost is really concentrated, you don’t need much. Which is a relief, seeing as how much a pile shrinks!
- If your soil is in good heart, a fine layer applied once per rotation is enough.
Compost fits into my crop rotation like this:
GREENCROP ⮕ COMPOST ⮕ HEAVY FEEDER ⮕ LIGHT FEEDER
⮕ START AGAIN/ GREENCROP
- If your soil isn’t in good heart (check with this DIY mini soil test), spread a fine layer twice in your rotation, before both the heavy and the light feeder, as a temporary measure until your soil comes good. Which it will.
If you don’t have enough compost, vermicasting’s are an excellent addition to extend your supply.
Mulch
Mulch is essential to keep soil covered as protection from the elements (there’s an entire ecosystem down there remember!) Soil health goes backwards fast when left bare. Mulch is also a smorgasbord of future food: grow a diverse biology with diverse mulch. Mulch comes in 2 ways, inert or living. Use both!
- Inert mulch is simply raw organic matter. A mixture is best, of homegrown and/ or foraged plant matter. Spread it on top the compost. Mulch is dragged into the soil by worms and beetles, chewed up + pooped out to feed yet more soil life and eventually becoming humus. Humus is a spongy reservoir of nutrients + water, a stable baseline from which your soil and plants grow ever stronger.
- A living mulch is mulch made of plants. In the vegie patch this means covering the soil in crops, greencrops and companion flowers, and keeping it covered, which takes a little practice, but once you get in the groove you’ll love it, and so will your soil.
Plants: epic soil builders!
Plants are powerful soil builders. Which makes complete sense, right – there they are, cloaking the earth. All those roots! Imagine! Of course they have purpose…. many purposes. Nature is way too cunning to let an opportunity like that sneak by.
- Living plants build soil: Roots and the area around roots (the rhizosphere) are busy places. Biology feed on the sugars that are exuded there. In exchange for sugars, they provide the plants with minerals, immunity, information – whatever the plant requested. Cos yes, that’s exactly how it works.
- Dead plants build soil: Plants are easily broken down into humus when recycled as mulch or homemade compost. No other organic matter incorporates as seamlessly.
Use greencrops to build soil in your vegie patch:
- Include them in your crop rotation: a great way to reduce your need for compost
- Sow mixed greencrops with heavy feeder crops
- Plant crops amongst established greencrops
Use plants to strengthen your soil/ garden as a whole:
- Grow loads of perennials around the outside edges of your vegie patch
- Make compost using mostly plant matter
- Make mulch using homegrown/ spray free plant matter
- Grow a diverse garden! A big mix of shrubs/ trees/ flowers/ greencrops and crops
Give your soil a grace period as it adjusts. A lot must change below for above ground health to manifest.
Give yourself a grace period too – it’s a big mindshift, huge – one I am still on. Ease your way into it.
