Follow that with 180sqm of cover crop, green manure, and worms!
Fertilisers have a bigger environmental footprint than the shipping industry. And aviation. Combined. The toll from overuse of fertilisers on the environment is - catastrophic, for many ecosystems. Worse still, this isn't even for the food. Because most farmers also over-produce as well as over-fertilising. And aside from the waste of ploughing unsold produce back in, there's wastage all along the chain, from warehouses, supermarkets, and finally in the home.
"According to a report by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the average American family of four throws away between $1,350 and $2,275 worth of food each year. This amounts to between 25% and 40% of all food purchased. The report also states that up to 40% of all food produced in the United States goes uneaten, which equates to approximately $218 billion worth of food each year. This waste not only impacts the family's budget but also has significant environmental consequences, as discarded food contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and the depletion of natural resources." -- ChatGPT search.
Adding all the wastage together, it seems that around half of all food produced never finds a use in First World countries. Half the fertiliser being used could have been spared if we'd only used all of that food. (More down in the footnote.)
So it's good that they're talking about how adding a field's worth of healthy soil to the top of your soil will bring back the nutritional value, the richness, the water-holding capacity, of your garden / farm / homestead. It means farmers can use less fertilisers and cause less environmental disaster. And here's my story of having done this - on a tiny, home garden (and once, for a while, a homestead garden) scale and not realising how people might not have known how to do this. In fact, to me, with a father who was an Agricultural Engineer among his many qualifications, the idea that "you don't grow vegetables, you actually grow soil" was self-evident.
This article sets out stuff I've done to not have to use fertilisers, soil wetting and moisture holding factory products, and most pesticides.
Disclaimer: The techniques I detail here are things I've done to correct home garden plots and beds, a homestead garden, and covered a range of soils and hot to cool temperate climate zones. The materials I've used aren't available everywhere. So don't take this as concrete instructions, rather as a starting point for your particular environment.
Start Here For Home Garden Remediation
Read the article up there at the beginning of this post first, though. A small amount of soil with the right organic components, plants, bacteria, and insects in it, will spread out into other soil if you let it. I've been doing this at home for years. I did it back in WA when I wanted to grow stuff in what had basically been beach sand and needed a way to improve the soil's nutritional value and water-holding, and compost got turned into solar-sterilised dust by the heat.
Western Australia (around the capital, Perth, at any rate) is literally beach sand all the way back to the foothills and all the way down down down to some insane depth, pretty much to the aquifer it sits on. Buildings need L-O-O-O-O-N-N-G (and really specialised) pilings driven halfway to Timbuktu in order to stay upright. And water just seeps down through that sand right to the aquifer instead of staying up there and doing useful work like watering plants.
Where I was, I was still over that aquifer, same sandy soil, same heat, just a few miles south. If you watered in the early hours of pre-dawn, then by midday your plants were wilting from lack of water, if you then watered with the drip irrigation again, then by evening everything was wilting again, but it - barely - kept things alive.
Veges need a reliable source of water, and this wasn't it. Placing mulch on top of the bed kept the sand cooler, but the water still drained away within 2-3 hours, leaving the plants, bacteria, and fungi parched. People around there spend insane amounts on animal manure and soil from less crazy geological regions, and I think Perth probably also provides half of the annual profits of the whole soil wetter / moisture retainer industries. I always tried to be a bit more mindful of the environmental effects of all those chemicals and used things like straw, coconut coir and peat moss, but I'd just moved down the extra few miles south and was also on the bones of my backside due to having to go on disability pension so I needed to do things the cheaper but harder way.
By making a small area of the garden into my "soil farm" I was able to make something a bit richer and more organic than that Sahara-like sand, and actually had my vegetables - in those (previously) sandy beds - growing nicely by the end of that year. I found things like lawn clippings (not great, but beggars can't be choosers) and fallen dry leaves from around the native trees and scrub, I put the poo from my little herd of bunnies in the soil I was building, any vegetable scraps from my kitchen, and (I am not even kidding when I say this) if I travelled back to the foothills for any reason, I took a folding spade and a few empty feed bags with me and - with a wary eye open for official ranger types - would shovel a bag or two of real soil and take it home for that soil fixing patch.
Getting all that organic material in allowed the "soil farm" to thrive and create more live soil. I had a comfrey seedling I stuck in because I'd read that they're good for compost, so I let that and a handful of Poona peas grow on for two months and then just spaded them right back in along with the mulch, then shovelled it onto my garden, added more mulch. and planted my vegetables in. They thrived and I started to eat better. . .
What Sort Of Soil Needs Repair / Amending?
Well, the above case was one such - in that case though, I wasn't so much rebuilding it, as building a new type of soil, one that wasn't in the ecosystem of the region before. I felt that that was okay as long since I wasn't creating tens of thousands of acres of it. (That's how commercial farming has destroyed so many ecosystems.) But I figured that my 5sqm of garden would just sink into that sand after I left and there'd been a few decent downpours.
But another case - and the one I'll discuss in the remainder of the article - is my recent situation of having had to take down eight assorted established raised beds and move as many as would fit to a new part of the property (six, as it would turn out) - and so I was left with a pile of dirt that was disturbed, turned upside down, and getting baked by the sun while things slowly happened. First there had to be the new fence around the front yard, the slow moving of garden beds (old, mobility issues, prone to falling asleep and yelling at kids to get off my damn lawn, etc) and building them in so they weren't now an eyesore, etc.
You couldn't dig your fingers into that pile of soil after a few months as it was just put in a pile and left until I had time to deal with it, which turned out to be a bit too late. It had baked into a big adobe block by then, also it had had to be located out of the way of construction equipment which meant it was out of the prevailing rains but in the full sun, which pretty much killed it.
Fertile healthy soil has plants growing in it, plenty of organic material rotting and supplying nutritients, plenty of active insects, worms, microbes, and fungii. It generally has a topping of something to protect the top layer from the sun. It's crumbly / sticky and holds water well, and if you dig up a big clump and break it open you can see the bugs and worms, smell the earthy-mushroomy aroma of it.
The kind of soil that needs amending is what I finished up with after half a year's lying around in the hot sun after having been dug out of the raised beds and piled up without a covering crop to keep it shaded and holding water and alive.
(That can also happen when commercial farms run relentless schedules of crops, ploughing the ground right over in between, and depending on fertilisers to raise yields, and pesticides to remove competing plants and fungus/insect species. Under these conditions the natural biome in the soil dies off and is replaced by a very unbalanced, smaller, and degraded group of soil organisms that are unable to manufacture enough nutrients to make the soil crop nutrient-dense. There'll be a larger crop but overall it'll have less nutritional value.)
Before the relentless pressure to produce more and more crop for lower and lower prices, farmers had a brief glorious window where they knew that they weren't growing crops and raising animals - they were growing healthy soil, and it was that soil that grew their crops and fed their animals. But an increasing population and demand for more and more, changed all that. That older type of farmer didn't continue farming for long in that economic environment, and the soil and its ecosystem died as those farmers departed.
And it occurs to me that farmers today could possibly outsource their soil stewardship to a soil farmer. If such a soil farmer existed . . . (And I'll make a separate post about that soon and put the link to it here.)
Anyway - back to the nitty-gritty. As I mentioned, I still had a little bit of fertile healthy dirt from the one lone bed I'd kept going until the last possible moment, plus some coconut coir peat and a bag of "poona peas" (aka field beans) to throw in. I worked with enough of the 'dead' dirt to fill the bottom half of an old IBC (1000litre/240gal 'tote' tank) partway up (I went to about halfway up that lower 1/4 of the IBC that I was using, i.e. about 0.125 of a cubic metre,) topped it with some of the healthy soil, whatever amendments I had to hand, and the green manure crop of Poona peas.
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| I cut my damaged IBC similar to this. But without the cage. |
I had an IBC (100litre/240gal tote tank) like the above and the top half of it was damaged by the sun, cracked and crazed, while the very bottom - which had been shaded by plants and some stored building material - was still semi okay. As I'm a miserly bast*rd I'd already cut that bottom section down to much the same as the picture above and was using it to hold firewood. When we were due to move everything out of the newly-divided section of the yard, it was supposed to go to the tip, but then I had my miserly brainwave.
I set it up on the driveway - a less than ideal situation because it was in full sun for 3/4 of the day - but I also had some pallets and needed a place for those, so I arranged them so that they cast partial shade over the chunk of IBC - and started moving baked soil in, then some of the good soil from the last raised bed, and then started making amendments... I was wringing the last few years of life out of a piece of plastic I'd almost thrown away. And the fact that the outlet tap was in this half meant I could open it and so let the water out so that the soil wouldn't turn into a pocket swamp. Win-win-win.
By this stage I was also able to cart the rest of the impoverished soil back into the raised beds in their new location, and divide up the remainder of the better soil from the last operating raised bed among them. I planted them out and we started getting small quick crops - lettuces, rocket, silverbeet, a few herbs, not cropping fantastically but at least producing some food and some biological activity in the beds and (I hoped) starting some recovery in the soil.
The beds I wasn't growing stuff in either remained open for the cats to avail themselves of, or I grew cover / green manure crops in them . A few months later I used some of the soil I'd been "brewing" in the IBC to top them with and since then the beds haven't looked back. Whenever we've had to re-pot any of the ornamentals or the few food plants I have growing in pots, we're taken the spent soil back to the soil growing bed, first taking out enough to refill the pots with.
And I keep finding amendments to keep the soil growing bed active, which means the nutrients we lose when we eat the vegetables and then regretfully flush our manure away, and the bit of dirt that gets washed away from the roots of the consumed plants, get replaced.
Things To Amend Your Soil With:
A totally not crazy suggestion is - find some soils around your region that haven't been tainted or degraded and which seem to have a thriving biome and plenty of life. If you can legally take a few bags of this, use it as your starting soil, feed it up with amendments and once it's thriving use it to repair some less fortunate soil so that your chosen new biome can take over the lot. Take a good look around your area - what sorts of ecosystems are there? What feeds each ecosystem's soil? Your garden is usually a foreigner to the region, perhaps you can find some unique stuff in the vicinity to feed back into your soil and make your gardens chime with the local ecosystem.
Ideally you should have mostly those sorts of local amendments because it'll attract the local ecosystem to your garden and so you'll get natural pest controllers, natural fertilisers, and also be doing something to retain the local ecosystem. Which local critters 'fertilise' the soils here? Can you get an occasional few scoops of wombat poo or rabbit droppings or the leaf litters from around a dozen native tree species? These are important. They make the locale what it is. It's probably easier to fit in than to try to overwhelm with fertilisers and pesticides - after all, that's what large scale farms did to their locales, and look at how dependent they now are on the chemical industry. . .
What else you can use are plants like comfrey, borage, and yarrow because they all grow quickly, and can then just be dug in. (if you catch them before they start to flower. And if they do happen to go to seed, let them finish, collect the seeds, and you'll have seeds to start new green manures for your garden beds. And you'll still be able to shred the mature plants - without the seeds - and use them to improve soil.)
The reason I had for using these particular ones is that these are some nice soft plants that'll rot fairly cleanly without creating too many decomposition byproducts, and comfrey is allegedly a great compost 'activator' and therefore works just as well activating your soil as it would compost. If only I'd had some comfrey this time. . . Still, with the range of other stuff I had at my disposal the soil building up worked well enough for me to reactivate six beds and dozens and dozens of pot plants and meanwhile all the spent soil in the soil building IBC is already raring to be put to use. I may just spread some over the lawns
I didn't have those mostly due to our sudden space constraints, but I could, and did, plant Poona peas (which are also known as field beans) and which you can buy by the bagful in Indian groceries and nowadays in supermarkets too because it's an important ingredient in many cuisines and recipes.
You could also buy mung beans the same way, they're perfectly fine to grow because they're also just harvested at the dry pod stage, winnowed, and bagged. If they're adulterated by chemicals to sterilise them they they can't be sold as food, so they're perfectly viable as seed. And they're tiny so they sprout really quickly...
(Also worth noting is that pretty much all dry beans have to be in the same pure state, so kidney beans, fava beans, garbanzo beans - aka chickpeas - and so forth. Lentils I'm not so sure of as I've never gotten them to sprout for me, but it's worth taking a dozen each of the dried pulses you have in the pantry and viability testing them. I'll put a smaller sub-article up about this in a week or so. And yes, I've even grown my own chickpeas with some small success from a bag of supermarket garbanzos. I'll mention those in that future article, too, and why I considered them a failure.)
The main thing with green manures is to let them get some growth - but stop before they get too far along. And by "stop" I mean just chop them with a spade and dig them into the soil. If they accidentally get to the stage of setting seed, don't panic, let them go and collect all the seeds so you won't have to buy any more for future cover/manure crops, and then use the stalks and leaves by digging them into the soil once the seeds have been collected.
Other things to use are animal manures but even there, there are caveats: 'forever herbicides' that can be used on feed crops to turn them into dry hay sooner creates a feed tainted with a long-lasting herbicide. The feed (apparently) doesn't affect the animals but the chemical goes through them unchanged, the animals poop, the poop gets collected and sold as manure - and sometimes it's manure with concentrated forever herbicide in it. . . This tainted commercial manure has killed several allotment schemes, and affected hundreds around the world.
There have been several cases of herbicide contamination in fertilizers that have caused crop loss and soil contamination. Here are a few references to some of these incidents:
In 2020, a batch of fertilizers containing the herbicide aminopyralid caused crop damage and soil contamination in the UK. Farmers reported that the herbicide caused their crops to wilt and die, and that the contamination persisted in their soil for several years.
Reference: "Aminopyralid in compost: How to avoid herbicide damage," Garden Organic, https://www.gardenorganic.org.uk/sites/www.gardenorganic.org.uk/files/resources/factsheets/FactSheet50.pdf
In 2019, a batch of organic fertilizers containing the herbicide clopyralid caused crop loss and soil contamination in the US. Farmers reported that the herbicide caused their crops to become stunted and deformed, and that the contamination persisted in their soil for several years.
Reference: "Herbicide Contamination in Manure, Compost, and Soil," Washington State University Extension, https://extension.wsu.edu/herbicide-contamination-in-manure-compost-and-soil/
In 2018, a batch of fertilizers containing the herbicide glyphosate caused crop damage and soil contamination in Brazil. Farmers reported that the herbicide caused their crops to yellow and die, and that the contamination persisted in their soil for several years.
Reference: "Brazilian farmers say Bayer's Monsanto illegally pushed herbicide," Reuters, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-monsanto-lawsuit-idUSKCN1QH2GH
Forewarned. Word.
You could also add comfrey, borage, and a whole host of other cheap seeds. If you have the space you could grow patches of field beans, comfrey, and borage etc and collect seeds for the next batch of soil rejuvenating green crops. If you can get some seaweed, wash it, chop it, dig that in. Coconut coir and fine mulch can be bought cheaply at garden centres and will decompose nicely in the soil and add structure and water capacity, and places for bacteria and fungi to collect. Shredded paper can also be added and does the same thing.
So Now I Have Starter Soil
I planted the beans fairly thickly, added a layer of coir on top, and also piled on pulled-up weeds and some grass clippings, and let it go for a few months before digging it over completely and then leaving it for another few months. There was a LOT more soil because of all the organic matter, dug-in cover crops, and stuff I added from various sources.
The climate here is pretty humid, which speeds up decomposition, in fact things here rotted four times as fast as they would have in WA. (There, I got around this issue by making the soil building bed in the shade of a tree, and covering it with old cloth and rags that I kept damp by hosing it several times a day. That worked because I was able to stay home all day but a weeping hose or soaker hose could as easily be set on a timer to do this for you.)
So it was that about five months over a rainy winter saw me with an almost full IBC section. As I'd moved the lucky six raised beds to their new locations along with their loads of degraded soil around the same time I'd started the IBC, and planted our first crops in them, I arranged my timing so that as each crop came off, I added a layer of the "reconditioned" soil from the IBC on top and lightly turned it in, then planted new cover / manure crops or new food crops, and almost immediately you could see the difference by how much better those things grew. As I skimmed off some soil from each bed I topped up, all of that went into the reconditioning IBC, along with the spent pot soil, more coir and fine wood mulch or whatever else I'd obtained, and turned in.
I'd been thinking of turning some food scraps into the IBC as well - but I also have worm attractors in those new beds and realised that as they could now move more easily in the new softer amended soil, the worms began eating up most of our vegetable scraps in the worm feeders and leaving more healthy soil in their wake.
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| The white PVC pipe is a worm attractor - see the link above, description below. |
That bed pictured has a mix of those cover crop / green manure plants and was taken just a few weeks before I dug them back in. The wire cage around is foldable at each corner, and the main purpose of it is to prevent the cats from digging up tender seedlings - I now have several beds with permanent well-established plants that no longer need the panels as the cats just 'go' in the undergrowth and their doings are quickly watered in and eaten by the worms.
The wire itself is available in rolls, is 50mm x50mm squares of a 2mm thick wire and colloquially known as "puppy wire" and is the heftier cousin of "flower wire." It's strong enough to be self-supporting, and I just cut three panels to size, plus leaving wire points sticking out along one edge of the shorter side panels to let me bend loops around the centre panel to make a foldable edge, which lets me fold them flat to get them out of the way when not needed, or open them and rest them against the fence at the back as pictured to let the cats know there are other beds that are easier to poop in. They'd also keep rabbits out if you have a rabbit problem.
The worm feeders are 100mm PVC pipe 500-600mm long and the bottom 300mm has 4mm holes for the worms to enter and leave, and these holes should all be buried below the soil. You can see that these holes also tie the raised bed's soil down through the weed mat to the rest of the yard's soil because the pipe sticks down a fair way below the garden soil. The cap on top is also available in the hardware store and I added a cheap plastic drawer handle to be able to open it. It's needed to keep the feeding area moist and dark, as worms much prefer such an enviromnment.
You should only open the lid as infrequently as possible and then only to add kitchen scraps and water to keep them damp. Worms hate several things - disturbances, noises, light, and dryness. Our beds are maybe ten metres away from a highway so they're used to vibrations and disturbance (there's a fire truck passing as I write this, and a few minutes ago a passing B double rig made the house shake as it hauled construction materials from some point A to some other point B. Safe to say the worms here know no other environment.)
In my case, I tend to open the lids once every four weeks to drop in prunings, kitchen scraps, and what-have-you from around the garden dividing it evenly between the five beds that have the worm feeders. Also (not shown in the image above as that was an early picture) I drilled a 5mm hole into the lid, fed in a piece of drip tube and put a slow dripper on the inside, and carried the other end of the tubing to the reticulation system so that when the reticulation comes on, the worm feeders get a slow steady drip of water, helping the worm feed to decompose and attracting worms to the bonanza of food and nice wet ground.
In my opinion nothing improves your soil like worms. They aerate the soil and form tunnels to allow water to circulate, their castings are perfect plant food. This is also why I have a 'bare minimum' reticulation system so that there'll always be enough moisture for the worms to hang around and to keep the plants alive but I still get to hand water every few days to check on the gardens.
Anyway. Back to the soil. The thing is that the amended soil I added and lightly dug in was apparently also attractive to the worms and helped bring them up. There are worms in the ground almost everywhere and they just need to be attracted. And so that thin layer of soil with new microbes worked in several ways - the microbes got washed down with watering, got carried along with worms that came up at night to check out the new food sources, and also got carried along with the cover crop seedling roots as they grew down. Then digging that first cover crop in turned more of it in deeper. Game set match.
So yes
I'm very sure that a small quantity of degraded soil can be parlayed into large amounts of good healthy soil quite quickly. You can literally "grow your own soil in the comfort of your yard or balcony." That's the thing that hit me, a few years back. People don't often consider this - that growing the soil is a more productive quest than farming food.
I never could get composting per se. I've always been lousy at making compost, but making soil better is far easier and it's also a bit more spectacular when showing it to people.
And the reason that this is so, I think, is the same reason why a larger aquaponics system is easier to manage than a small one - dilution. When I had my tiny aquaponics system (I may whack up a post about that too, one day) I found one thing - it was hard to get the water balanced right. I had only about 400 litres (100 gallons I think?) of water in the system in total. If a fish floated away to fishy heaven, its contribution was sure to be missed and plants would not grow as well.
If I added a smidgen too much food, the ammonia levels got horrible really fast. If the plants got too far ahead of the fish, they'd starve themselves. If plants died off or were harvested, fish would start to die because of the toxin buildup. Small changes made a huge difference to the whole system. Same with compost. Adding a tiny bit too much of something either killed the exothermic reaction, or pushed it to the point of setting fire to the compost.
There's one other benefit to making soil rather than compost - rodents. Putting kitchen scraps and fruit prunings and so forth into a compost drum meant so many rats chewing right through the 4mm thick plastic and partying hard in there. Do the same thing in a bigger plot of soil and the rats aren't quite as interested in having to do all that digging for a few scattered bits of pumpkin or carrot.
However. With all that being said. If you have access to good compost then by all means dig some of it into your soil.
Commercial Possibility?
I think something like this needs to be done commercially. We need to cut fertiliser use but preferably without either destroying more of the biosphere of the planet nor at the expense of making food more expensive, nor at the cost of killing human populations with famine. Specialist soil amending companies could provide that alternative to fertilisers
We have to realise that one day soon, money will be a largely meaningless concept. The correct wealth we should be seeking is a regenerated ecosystem and a planet heading back from the brink of disaster. Anyone telling us that the disaster is "hyperbole" and "over-rated" needs to be firmly put down, because they are still of the money-first mindset which has caused all these over-consumptions.
Energy is becoming cheaper and cheaper and will be both economical and plentiful in only a very few more years, and at that time, recycling will become much more viable than digging up more raw materials, using machines to do work like recycling materials, reconditioning soils, tending agriculture (which will need to be in buildings inside cities to allow land to return to more natural ways of farming) and so forth. This is a post about your garden soil after all - but I also feel I need to ask you to start spreading this future vision. And I'll post my ideas about turning this into a commercial farm business in the next few weeks.
If anyone's interested in learning more about soil amendment, commercialising it, or climate/energy activism, chat with me on Mastodon.
Footnote:
Adding all the wastage together, it seems that around half of all food produced never finds a use in First World countries. Half the fertiliser being used could have been spared if we'd only used all of that food. Or a population equal to half the population of the First World could have been saved from famine.
Also, the things we deem beneath us, the deformed fruit or vegetable, the turnips and beets that are easier to grow but we prefer to avoid, the organ meats, what we sneeringly call "offal" and feed to our pets - they all cost fertiliser when you come down to it. We waste more growing crops that we consider 'finer', throw away a third - no, a half - of the nutritional value of the animals we grew acres of feed crop to grow.
Needless to say, that's all a great waste. All the food purchased is only a percentage of all the food grown, then only three-quarters of that is used. If we presume that 75% of farmed food goes to market, that means that half that fertiliser burden went for nothing, as half the food didn't benefit anyone. This is such bad ju-ju that any way to at least cut back on fertiliser use would save half as much damage and pollution as just shutting down shipping and aviation, both of which we kind of need.
Also, because this seems to indicate that the average American family (I presume we in Australia aren't far behind, and most First World countries, come to think of it) only spends about $5,000 - $6,000 on food per year, that means that much of the average family's remaining food bill must be restaurant and takeaway foods.
My wife and I spend over $6,000 on groceries per year and we're just two - but we buy very little takeaway or any other meals that aren't made at home. By my estimation that means that a family of four should be spending at least that much on foodstuffs And if they're eating take-away and restaurant food then that's even worse because those are also wasteful but on a bigger scale...
So - a LOT of things need to change. Our habits are formed. But the next generation's are not. And almost all of our "hard-held opinions and habits" about our food are formed by education, advertising, and contemporary culture anyway so with more public knowledge, I reckon attitudes will change.
A few years ago, our attitudes to waste were that it's too hard to recycle, yet now we're finding out that mostly that 'knowledge' was actually propaganda by the companies producing the things that became waste because they found it more profitable to make waste our problem. Now there are people campaigning against that attitude, determined to make those corporations make good one way or another.
Our food and farming will similarly experience this renaissance of education, and hopefully very soon. In the meantime, you can help. Really.
If you'd like to hurry the change along, get activated, get active! As I'm fond of saying, keep the bastards honest. Write to politicians, CEOs, newspapers. Comment on articles online. Talk to your friends, family, and colleagues. Talk about it on social media. Share articles like this one. Post the link, email it. Hell, make a QR code of it and stick it to walls, windows, and lamp posts.
Also, help people like myself to do the research, take subscriptions on publications to research things, pay for the servers I rent online, the domain names I pay so people can find this content. It takes me a lot of time to make these posts, some more than others. This one was over twenty years in the making, some parts of it. You can always help by visiting my Ko-Fi page and donating the price of a coffee.
And thank you for reading this. Now go and make noise!
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