Soil health

A collection of 50 posts

Featured

My 2 Ingredient Biological Liquid Feed

Liquid feed is awesome tonic support for the food garden, and this 2 ingredient biological brew in particular, because its alive! It's a brilliant one size fits all that has a gently transformative effect on citrus, vegies, roses, berries, fruit trees, the chook yard, pasture, even compost piles.

Featured

How to Grow A Living Soil

The health of all life above ground - you, me and our crops included, rests on the shoulders of trillions of tiny organisms - bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes et all. Though you cannot see them, you see their handiwork in the health of your soil, your crops + ultimately - your

Featured

The Bio-fungicide Advantage

The first signs of summer disease are making themselves known - potential is high after our mild, wet spring. Cool your heels before rushing out to buy a big hitting fungicide and have a read about the bio-fungicide advantage. Bio-fungicides are a gentle, natural solution to disease - they do

Soil health

How to Make Fermented Nettle Tea

Stinging nettle is the food gardeners, best mate. Loaded to the brim with minerals and vitamins, at service to the plant kingdom entire, and you and I also - a little wilted nettle with a fried egg is a fine spring breakfast. Amazing at anytime in its cycle for foliar

Featured

Don't Mow - Let It Grow!

Once the kids have gone and cricket games are no longer, you may wish to pause and ponder the usefulness of your lawn. If no compelling reason other than tidiness comes to mind, let me suggest you plant it up or let it go. Either way you're adding

Greenhouse

October in the Greenhouse

There's a gradual take over happening in the October greenhouse as new crops of tomatoes, peppers, aubergines, courgette, cucumber dwarf beans + basil are planted out amongst finishing winter salads, bok choy, spinach + celery. * Peppers and aubergines need to go in fairly soon - they take ages to produce

Soil health

How to Transform Heavy Clay

Winter is a telling time in your soil health journey - from now through early spring you get to see your drainage in action. Those of you at the basemap phase of gathering info and learning your land - perk your ears on up! How wet are your soils? Drainage

Flowers

Make a No Dig, Perennial Garden

Densley planted perennials make the easiest care, best looking gardens of all. Herbs, picking flowers, nectar/ pollen rich flowers for bees and beneficials, fruit, natives - you name it!, jam them all in together for a garden that beats out weeds, flowers year round and provides food and medicine. Beautiful

Featured

Introducing Guilds: The Easy Way to Garden!

A guild is a team of plants, that support, protect and nourish each other, working together for the benefit of all. A guild creates stability and best health because the variety of plants above ground brings a variety of roots and soil life below ground. It's the smartest

Featured

Can I Compost Diseased Plant Matter?

Yes! Yes, you can. Nature specialises in detoxifying and outcompeting pathogens. A compost heap is full of life, more than equipped for this job. Visualise a bunch of pac-men zooming about gobbling up the bad guys and you're not far off it. Further biology enters the fray to

Featured

3 Ways To A Living Mulch

Living mulch (covering the soil with plants), is the most nourishing mulch of all. A soil covered with plants is alive! Living on and in and around plant roots is a diversity of soil life forms - fungi, nematodes, protozoa, bacteria, arthropods and of course worms, these team up with

Soil health

An annual DIY Soil Test

Your soil is unique. It's history and geography make it so. And because it's unique, and because understanding your soil is at the heart of your garden's health - you do well to get to know it. The best way to know it, is

Featured

Managing Foodscraps: Easy Bokashi

This story begins on a sad note - Nellie, our beautiful kunekune pig, she in charge of foodscrap management, died. See you on the other side, my friend. As well as companionship (pigs are the best), she played an important part in the health of the garden - converting foodscraps

Featured

Cheat's Compost

I don't always keep up with compost making. There's many a moment when I have crops ready to plant but no compost to hand. In which case, I whip around the garden and creatively rustle up some soil food, or cheats compost as I affectionately call

Monthly gardening advice

The Ins and Outs of Choosing Bought Compost

Compost is the heart and soul of your garden. Does it matter which compost you buy? Damn straight it does! Well made compost is all our soil needs to grow abundant crops with minimal disease. But rubbish in, rubbish out -  compost made with sub-standard ingredients will wreck your soil

Featured

The Genius of Living Mulch

Soil that's undercover, hums with life, and mineral exchange and immunity are high. Woodchip (for fruit trees), or hay or homemade mulch (for vegies) is fab, but underneath a living mulch of plants, groundcovers and shrubs - now you're talking! Living mulch is trumps as far

Featured

A simple test for soil moisture

Testing your soil moisture before you water, is right up there with making your own compost + a daily garden walk = one of my top 3 best garden habits. I cant tell you the number of customers that have come to me downhearted at the state of their gardens and the

Monthly gardening advice

Easy Peasy Crop Rotation

Crop rotation is falling out of fashion - and I'm glad for it, it used to be a stuffy, over  complicated thing. However, don't lets throw the baby out with the bathwater! I love the moving about and mixing of crops, and so does your soil

Monthly gardening advice

Mulched Paths - Oh Yes!

The first permaculture book I read was "The Permaculture Home Garden" by Linda Woodrow. Back in mumblemumble 1997. I read it from cover to cover one cold weekend in bed with my first baby, those were the days. I gobbled it up. Linda made so much sense. One

Soil health

Eke Out The Water: Embrace The Shade

If plants are wilting under the hot sun, your best save is to provide a bit of shade. Shade is also a good idea, in hot climates, for newly planted seedlings - especially those that prefer the cooler side of life like saladings or brassicas, which you may be planting

Featured

A Useful, Yet Oh So Beautiful Herbal Border

A food garden is a cooperative happening. The gardener, the soil, the weather (lets not forget the weather!) and the companions. Those companions are the icing on the cake - they bring it altogether. Today is all about them, specifically herbs, and how irreplaceable they are in your food garden

Monthly gardening advice

Homemade Mulch

And by mulch I mean any old thing, don’t go mortgaging your house for fancy store bought stuff. In the absence of garden waste (which I find hard to believe – there are always things to prune or weed) there will be an old blanket lurking in the shed, a

Featured

Help my tomato has wilted #2

In an ironic twist of fate I lost three of my outside tomatoes this week. Having just written about Verticulum Wilt in my last newsletter (this about my mums tomato), it seems I now have it myself. Symptoms: sudden wilt when laden with fruit and yellowing on the lower leaves

Soil health

Spray Free Solutions for Tricky Weeds

This blog is all about the more tricky weeds, the ones that aren't easily mulched or planted out. I kick off with my 6 basic strategies then launch into my tried and true solutions in my Rogues Gallery below. 1. Change your mindset! Weeds are mineral rich powerhouses

Monthly gardening advice

Mineral Rich Comfrey: A Garden Essential!

Edible gardeners are mad keen about comfrey because she gathers and shares such mineral riches: silicon, calcium, potassium, phosphorus, iron, iodine... and more besides! This accumulation of minerals comes up from the deep, via a set of licorice like tap roots that open and aerate soil and create nutritious greens