While calcium and phosphorus are often considered the most important minerals among organic and biological gardeners and farmers, we know it’s not that simple. A granite quarry in Madrid province, Spain. All nutrients need to be there in sufficient quantities…
Calcium and phosphorus are two of the most important nutrients for plants. One of the most common “disease” symptoms in tomatoes – blossom end rot – is really a sign of calcium deficiency. Conventional gardening and farming largely ignore these,…
Microbes and plants need nutrients. We can supply most of these nutrients through good mulches and well-made compost, but not only do we need the nutrients, we need them in specific amounts in relation to each other. The old paradigm….
Dr. Teruo Higa started studying microorganisms in the 1960s and 1970s, mostly at Ryukyus University in Okinawa, Japan. By the early 1980s, he was perfecting his liquid culture of specific “facultative anaerobic microbes” that provide amazing benefits when combined together…
Do you have too much compost? I know I don’t. It’s always in short supply. Most of us don’t have too much organic matter in our soil either. In fact, most of us don’t have nearly enough. Microbes are the…
Perhaps you don’t have the room or inclination to make a full-sized outdoor compost pile. Fortunately, even a small amount of compost can be highly beneficial. This article outlines two methods of composting your food scraps that can be done…
Cover crops are traditionally thought of as plants used when the garden or field is empty, such as over winter and sometimes over summer. But I like to broaden this definition to also include plants used during the growing season,…
There’s been a lot of excitement in the last 15 years about the benefits of compost tea and nearly as much confusion about what it is. The benefits are all the same as those things microbes do in the garden…
The last post was an intro to compost and now it’s time to make it. There are many composting methods, but the most common is probably the outdoor, above-ground compost pile, and it’s a good method. The size of the…
Compost is our way of mimicking nature, yet speeding it up substantially. Whereas nature slowly decomposes animal manure, leaves and other organic matter, we put a large amount of these things into a pile in specific combinations and ratios to…
Despite some claims, plants and microbes really do care about the source of their nutrients. They often do better with organic forms of the elements rather than synthetic chemical forms. Compost is valuable for far more than its organic matter,…
We can’t look at soil management without also looking at water management. This lesson isn’t a complete summary of strategies, but it does cover some of the most important points we need to know. Seedlings in the rain While perhaps…