The basic premise of organic gardening is that healthy soil will grow healthy plants. Rather than feeding plants by adding chemical fertilizers to soil, which kills important soil microorganisms and makes the soil nothing more than something to hold the plants up, you need to make the soil itself healthy so the soil can feed the plants.
Plants that grow in a good healthy organic soil are better able to withstand insect pests, diseases and water shortages.
There are four things you can do to create healthy soil.
The first is to compost. You can build or buy an elaborate compost bin but that isn’t necessary. Just pile everything in a back corner of the garden or yard and use a pitchfork to turn the pile occasionally. Or dig holes in the garden, throw everything in, and fill it back up with soil. Compost all fruit and vegetable kitchen scraps as well as egg shells. Also compost yard waste, which means weeds, leaves, grass clippings and plants you pull up from the garden in fall. Never compost any diseased plant or grass clippings that have been treated with pesticide. Do not compost meat or bones or manure from any meat eating animal. Horse, cow, chicken and rabbit manure or okay, but cat and dog droppings are not.
The second way to create healthy soil is to mulch. Besides conserving moisture and suppressing weeds, mulch provides a food source for soil microorganisms and earthworms. The wastes from these soil organisms are better than any fertilizer you can buy.
Aerating the soil is important for its health. If you are able, turning the soil over with a spade is the best way to go. I do this in fall after everything is out of the garden. I leave the soil in big clumps so the shredded leaves I add later and the winter snows can get deep into the soil. Before planting in spring I turn the soil again.
Using a tiller is fine, but repeated tilling can damage the soil structure and kill a lot of earthworms. This is why I prefer the gentler method of doing it with a spade.
The final method used to create healthy soil is to grow cover crops, a.k.a. green manure. These are crops planted in any space where there is open soil.
When cover crops are turned into the soil they add crucial organic matter. Some good cover crops are alfalfa, various clovers, vetch, soybeans, ryegrass, buckwheat, oats and winter rye.
Some people plant a cover crop between every row in a vegetable garden to make a green pathway. I keep a large bag of vetch seeds on hand all year and whenever a crop is harvested I plant the vetch in the space. The cover crop should be tilled into the soil before it goes to seed.
By mid-July in my garden, every inch of soil is covered, either with growing plants, mulch or a cover crop. The objective is to have no bare soil. If an area is not being used to grow plants, you should be improving that area with mulch or a cover crop.
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