Establishing the Soil Food Web
Now we’ve got our soil set up and our plants, but we’re not done yet! Now we must begin to build up our soil by establishing a robust soil food web. Other guides will go into deeper detail of why this is important and how it helps your plant, but for now you must understand only the steps it takes to keep the life in your soil happy, and get it to work on your behalf to take care of your plants.
We won’t ever be using fertilizer in our living soil garden (and certainly not chemical/chelated fertilizers). Instead of feeding the plant, as you would with other forms of growing, this style of organic growing focuses only on feeding the soil. Feeding the soil means feeding the microbes. That’s why organic compost can be thought of more accurately as microbe food, not plant food.
Water
The water you use should be free of chlorine and chloramine, as these compounds are deadly to soil life and can lead to the disruption of the food web we are trying to establish. As the web breaks down, plants will become malnourished because the microbes that feed them will have died. If the healthy soil food web is not re-established, opportunistic microbes may move in and cause additional harm to plants.
Public water is treated with chlorine to kill pathogens. To remove chlorine, you need only let your water sit overnight. The chlorine will evaporate by itself. Many municipalities, however, have switched to chloramine. Chloramine can take weeks to evaporate fully, however it can be removed by passing water SLOWLY through carbon filtration—I.e. purchase an on-facet carbon filter and pass cool water through it at half speed or slower. Catalytic carbon requires 1/4th the contact time to remove chloramine than activated carbon.
pH
One large advantage to growing with a living soil is that the soil life has a particular pH it is happiest in, and so has evolved various mechanisms to buffer the soil pH (keep it from becoming too acidic or basic) for its own livelihood. Living soil growers benefit from this by not needing to pH the water they use to make teas/sprays with, or use to water their plants. So don’t worry about it!
Kelp
Kelp meal contains nearly every single macronutrient and micronutrient your plants need to grow, as well as hormones and compounds that may encourage plant and beneficial bacterial/fungal growth, resistance to disease, and the binding/inactivation of toxins in the soil. However, even with all these benefits, it is not listed in this guide as “required”, because a soil food web can be healthy and robust without it. It is “recommended”, however, because it can be a big help in feeding and protecting your plant and soil during the sensitive formative months when starting a new soil. It’s also a useful tool to turn to when an establish soil food web experiences a set-back.
To make sure your kelp meal has the largest possible impact on your plant, you want to deliver its nutrients and beneficial compounds directly to the root zone. To do this, first make a rehydrated kelp paste: Add about 2 parts of chlorine-free water to 1 part of dry kelp meal. Once the kelp has sucked up the water, you can store this rehydrated kelp in an air-tight baggie in a cool spot in your refrigerator (you can put it in a blender or food processor to make it even easier to dissolve in water later, if desired). Use this rehydrated kelp at about 1-2 tablespoons to 1 gallon of water, shake vigorously, and then water into your soil. If you didn’t blend it up, there will be many flakes floating around in the water, but this is normal and not an issue—those flakes will just be a bit of slow-release nutrients and food for fungi.
Try watering with this kelp solution every other week, or anytime your plants seem like they need a nutrient boost.
Earthworm Castings (EWC)
Aerated compost tea made from earthworm castings serves as an inoculant of soil biology, including; bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and nematodes. Not only does this establish the soil food web, but it also adds the full spectrum of macro and micro nutrients plants need to the soil, as the nutrients in the organic compost portion of EWC have already been digested by bacteria in the gut of the worms, and are now present in a form that plants can absorb.
Please see here for instructions on making aerated compost tea from earthworm castings. If you don’t have the resources to make a proper tea, you can receive some of the benefits by making a slurry, instead. Simply add 10-20% EWC to chlorine-free water, shake vigorously to detach as many bacteria from the particles as possible, and water this mixture into the soil (including the solids). To give you an idea how much force is required to detach bacteria, think of how hard you/your dentist must brush/scrape to remove plaque from teeth.
Maintaining the Soil Food Web
If something goes wrong with an established living soil, it is beneficial to return to the “establishing” practices above. However, a robust and healthy soil food web, once established, generally requires little maintenance. Keep the soil moist (neither constantly soaked nor bone dry) and replace the barley mulch after every harvest. Harvest is the only time you’re removing material from the ecosystem you’ve set up, and so an equal amount of material must be added back to the system to maintain balance. Using all non-harvested parts of your plant as mulch is another way to add nutrients back to the soil, as well as planting cover crops such as barley and clover, whenever your soil isn’t being used, which will keep the soil food web thriving, and can be chopped down and turned into mulch when you start your next grow. You can also lay down a thin layer of fresh, nutrient-rich compost before each new crop is planted, laying fresh mulch down on top of it. Every few years, you should also remineralize your soil with a sprinkling of rock dust.
Submitted December 10, 2014 at 07:00PM by xandarg http://ift.tt/1vE0OXg HerbGrow
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