Permaculture and Garden Tips

Building Your Soil

Building soil is a fundamental aspect of growing most plants, especially edible varieties. This fundamental step has also been mostly lost in modern farming and landscaping practices. We have made it a priority to make our customers soils fertile again.

Immediate Soil Building
Think microbes, PH, carbon, nitrogen, potassium and you can mostly forget about phosphorus. Most of the soils in Gainesville and the surrounding areas have plenty of phosphorus. And if you can do anything to save your soil it would be clay. Clay will make your garden thrive. If you’ve ever been up north to see your friends and their gardens look abnormally lush and beautiful, that’s mostly clay and other stuff.

Nitrogen – Mostly for vegetative growth.
Potassium – Mostly for root and stem growth.
Phosphorus – Mostly for flowering.

Micronutrients –
Calcium, Chloride, Magnesium, Sodium, Boron, Cobalt, Chloride, Chromium, Copper, Fluoride, Iodine, Iron, Manganese, Molybdenum, Selenium, Zinc

PH – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_pH
It’s extremely important to take into account your soil ph. If your soil is too alkaline or too acidic it can prevent certain microbes from working the soil and making nutrients available to plants.

There are many ways to immediately build soil, but as they say, “patience is a virtue”. Building healthy soil takes time and energy. Taking time to examine soil and plants reaction to that particular soil will help you have a broader understanding of how different and similar every soil situation is. It can be just as exciting and time consuming as plants.

Recycled Cardboard
A simple and affordable weed barrier and soil builder: Cardboard waste is an abundant resource that will probably be around for a long time. By laying cardboard and heavy mulch over areas to be planted, most weeds and grasses are easily choked out. In many cases, turf is just ripped up and disposed of, but grasses are generally heavy feeders, which means the grasses themselves contain high levels of nutrients. By eliminating turf in place you end up storing a huge amount of fertilizer in the soil and saving a huge amount of labor. Then having the added bonus of being biodegradable and ultimately increasing earthworm activity, cardboard has become an integral part of AEL’s landscape practices.

Heavy Mulch
The most practical and long term solution to building organic matter in your soil: Here in Gainesville, we are very lucky to have a resource for free mulch. Though we will use other mulches at the request of customers, recycling waste products is key to a sustainable Alachua County and it's also cheap. Mimicking forest systems, by adding a thick layer of wood and leaf waste and allowing microbes to decompose that organic matter over years to come, is once again the most practical way to build your soils and choke out unwanted growth. Keep in mind the mulch you are using and what you’re using it for. For example, pine mulch is great for the acid loving blueberry.

Amendments
Though adding Carbon to your soils is very important, balancing Nitrogen to Carbon ratios, is as, if not more important. While Organic matter benefits drainage, microbial activity, and the ability for soils to retain appropriate amounts of water, enough of the right nutrients need to be added to your soil to really reap the benefits of an edible landscape. While also attempting to use local sources of raw and composted manures for nutrient additions, only where these additions are appropriate.

Permaculture Activist