3 Free Ways to Make Your Own Soil for Growing Organic Food - Regenerative Gardening & Permaculture
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2023-06-26に共有
Here at Forever Food Forest we explore ways of growing food without the use of pesticides, herbicides, or commercial fertilizers, and instead we rely on permaculture principles such as creating symbiotic relationships in the garden inspired by nature to grow food that’s good for the garden and good for the planet.
With these soil building methods that I’m about to show you, you will have beautiful, nutritious soil that you can use in your garden in as little as 3 months.
My main goal this year is to grow good soil. To do that I am taking inspiration from a forest. Nature - it’s the best teacher. Imagine a forest. There are a bunch of trees and one of those trees falls. It starts to decompose and all of these natural organisms move in and break down the tree, release the nutrients and then the nutrients are taken up by the plants around the tree and the cycle continues. I don’t recommend decomposing a whole tree in your yard (that will take forever), but what I do suggest is using wood chips. What you want is untreated wood chips or arborist mulch as it's sometimes called. You can get free wood chips from either your local tree removal service, or an arborist, or through a service called Chipdrop.com which I do not recommend.
All you do is dump your wood chips out in a layer that’s about 2-6 inches deep (or more if you want to get rid of stubborn weeds). As the wood chips break down, they’re going to release nutrients and they’re also going to help retain moisture and moderate the temperature of the soil . Once they’re fully broken down there’s also going to be a lot of humus that is going to get incorporated into the soil.
Humus is the black stuff left over after decomposition. It provides plants with nutrients, and improves soil texture and water retention.
You can also just leave your wood chips in a pile to break down over time. However, this process is slow and can take up to 10 years. It is hands off and the resulting soil is going to be absolutely gorgeous, but if you don’t want to wait, you can speed it up by incorporating nitrogen. Nitrogen speeds up decomposition by heating up the pile and that heat helps break it down in as little as 6 months depending on where you live.
If your native soil is sandy or dry, you can improve water retention by adding leaf mold. Leaf mold is easy to make and all you need is at least a cubic yard of leaves, water, oxygen, and time. Leaf mold is made when leaves are broken down through a fungal decomposition process. The result is a spongy, nutrient rich soil amendment that your plants are gonna love. It is similar in properties to peat moss, but much more environmentally sustainable.
Lastly, you can use herbivore manure to improve your native garden soil. Horse manure is great as it already has some wood shavings incorporated in it and once it’s decomposed makes excellent nitrogen rich soil.
These are just some gateway methods into soil regeneration and building up your own soil. And granted there are way more ways of building your soil. These are just some beginner friendly methods that you can start today. For me building good soil is like an investment that keeps paying out for years to come. It’s not just about nutrients -It’s also about the microbiology of the soil. A teaspoon of soil has more microorganisms in it than there are people on earth. Through these soil regeneration methods we are creating a symbiotic relationship between plants and soil. If you like to learn more about that, make sure to hit that subscribe button.
コメント (21)
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Good video! I love to see people using wood chips; I have used them for mulch, a bottom layer in a raised bed, and for compost. I would add a few tips, though. Mixing the wood chips with nitrogen-rich material is a great start for compost, but it will work faster if you turn the pile, and cover it to keep the moisture in. You can certainly just leave the pile alone, but it will take much longer to compost. Similarly, shredding leaves helps quite a bit. Without it, the leaves can tend to flatten into mats, and it slows the decomposition. Finally, if you are getting horse manure (or any other manure), it's essential to find out if the horses have been fed hay that was sprayed to kill broadleaf "weeds." Some of those herbicides persist in the hay, in the manure of animals fed that hay, and in the compost made from that manure. Compost containing those herbicides will kill the plants in your garden, and will persist in the soil, sometimes for years. If the people don't know how their hay was grown, don't use it.
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I contacted the city road department. They brought trucks of wood chips for free. I did buy them a big case of Gatoraid.
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Great ideas! However, I don't recommend using others leaves or lawn clippings unless you know they do not spray.
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Good news to home owners: your useless lawn isnt useless. grass builds soil over several decades just from cutting the lawn, if you dont bag the clippings. Lawns from old houses that have 40 year old grass have excellent soil under the grass. It builds up over time. Thats why old house lawns end up 6 inches higher then the sidewalk. It built 6 inches of new soil. The stuff is just black gold and people pay to remove it to re level their lawn. Its a gift if you save the soil.
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I've literally used chip drop 11 times. I've put close to 250 yards of mulch on earth 1/3 acre property in 2 1/2 years. It's been fantastic
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God bless you and thank you this is the kind of farming America needs desperately
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Love the idea of letting leaves decomposed in the bag. I had good experience with Chip Drop. I needed a lot of wood chips and it would have cost a lot, plus I shared with 2 others neighbors, I had about 8 deliveries (free gym membership). I made a sign to let driver know where to drop it. A note on animal manure is to be careful, if you are trying to be organic, about pesticides in their feed plus drugs given to them.
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This is good advice! I only have access to leaves (because my husband vetoed a mountain of wood chips!!) which are working really well. I like to shred them with a leaf mulcher because I've found that whole leaves create a mat that is harder to work with when planting my garden. I put my extra leaves in bags and poke air holes in the bag so the leaves decompose, not rot. It's so nice not to have to till my garden! (I'm an old lady!) I just pitchfork it a little to aerate. With healthier soil I have more songbirds and less pests. I have seen a 2 foot garter snake in my little garden. I just grit my teeth and leave it alone. I need the free bug-eating pest control!
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Hello from Windermere, Florida zone 9b. Excellent videos ❤👩🌾👍 I'm in a development near Disney. But I've been Gardening since I was 21 in 1971. I'm a Vermiculturalist since 2009. We all need to grow organic! Garden What You've Got is my life motto-Use What You Have 👍 Nice to meet you ❤Peggy❤😊
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I Had a great experience with chip drop. The problem is, they don't have many participants in my area (I'm on 50 acres at 5k elevation, 2 hours from the nearest city big enough for a box store) so I applied and got one drop by chance then nothing for over a year. The one drop was no where near what I needed, I had no problems using it. These are arborists etc, so it's going to be fresh mulch, meaning yes, it's going to be hot and will steam. If you live in a city in a tight space, a huge dump truck doesn't have many options for dumping them because they will sink in your yard, damage gas, water, power lines etc and may have to dump best the road at the front of your property. I encourage you to think it through logically before you ask for a chip drop, they are very up front about what to expect if you read the information they give. I highly recommend it. I've since just flagged down the guys I've seen locally doing tree work and have gotten 17 truck loads this summer so I also recommend that option!
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A little effort, every 2-3 days of turning your piles will turn your compost wait from 6 months down to a couple of weeks. Sure you have time, until you don't. If you take 1 year to prepare your soil, that is 1 year your not producing food, when you could have been producing food after a couple of weeks. When I moved onto my property, I had been previously hired to kill this property. So I had mowed the yard down very short, I had sprayed weed&feed and 40% glyphosphate the summer before I moved in under the owners orders. Then I got the opportunity to rent the property and I converted the area I had killed, which was nothing but a dead patch of dirt, into my garden and greenhouse area. That next summer we ate out of the garden, not the greatest harvests accross the board, but plenty tomatoes, zuccini, and lettuces. Only used compost I had made in spring to feed the garden. I coated the garden in 8" of leaves, ran my mower over them, and let winter settle in. End of winter I let my chickens turn over the garden for 2 weeks, weeding, fertilizing, tilling, and eating bugs. This year my garden is twice as dense and bountiful it was last year versus if I had waited a year to just build soil, I would have had my first food run this year and would have learned last years lessons this year, and not have been productice and bountiful for another year. So that is 2-3 years to acheive your goals instead of 1-3. Pro tip on soil building, buy chickens. They compost faster then any method, plus free eggs.
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I am making my soil better by combining it (my soil is literally 100% white beach sand) with homemade compost and coco coir for my raised beds, grow pots and containers. My field gets a generous layer of compost covered with my native pine straw (because I also live in the piney woods). I make my own liquid fertilizer from wild grasses and leaf mold from under our forest oak trees. All of these things are free to me except I do occasionally buy some Bokashi bran for my compost as I don’t make enough of that to produce it myself though I know how to do that also. The coco coir is also purchased. I’m occasionally amending with bone meal and blood meal until I can transition to also making those myself as well. I will be making my own fish emulsion and fish meal soon as well. It’s all very low cost and my plants are so much more productive and healthy than last year when I was first starting my garden!
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I appreciate your humor and you explaining where to find everything (as a lay person/gardener this is very helpful!)!
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Christina we need more videos!! You are awesome!
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I am here for this! Exactly what I need right now. I have been doing hydroponics for 10 years and now I am trying to regenerate my soil and start a mini food forest. Thank you.
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I live on the most nutrient deficient coastal plain soil IN THE WORLD. It has taken 4 years to build up the soil enough to grow non native plants/fruit veg etc so this is great info thanks as it’s a never ending expensive task. It is just part and parcel of living in some areas of Australia but I am constantly jealous when I see people digging into their amazing quality soil on YouTube 😂
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I've watched this video twice now, and it's inspired me greatly to take over soil production on our suburban land. We're in Brisbane, Australia, which is about the same distance from the equator as Orlando, Florida...so hopefully whatever works for you will work for us as well! We let our garden get away from us over the past few years and now we're taking great joy in getting it back into a proper working order, including a lot of tree/shrub trimming and then shredding everything we can that we've cut down. I'd already appointed myself the Compost King of our place (my wife handles the finer stuff, and I do the brute force stuff!), but now I'm gonna be the Soil Baron as well!
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Full Garden Tour! It's great seeing how others utilize their unique spaces.
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“Good soil at the root of your garden” love it!
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Another informative filled video thumbs up again 👍🏻 keep ‘em coming!! Enjoying how easy this is to do !!
