Organic Gardening Blog

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…

In 2006, I started an organic gardening service, one of the few in my city at the time that was truly organic. This was my first chance to apply – to other people’s gardens instead of just my own –…

Inspecting your soil isn’t particularly complicated, but there are some things you need to know to do it right. Some of the simple tests we can do on our own, and the more difficult nutrient testing we should leave to…

“Such a strong symbiotic relationship exists between plans and soil that it could be argued that the plant exists to build soil rather than the soil being used to grow plants.” –Philip A. Wheeler and Ronald B. Ward. The Non-Toxic…

The “soil food web” refers to the inhabitants of the soil village. They are an army of tireless workers — 20,000 to 30,000 different species of organisms found in a teaspoon of healthy soil. The Soil Food Web inhabitants are…

Plants are brilliant. Their brilliance is so often underestimated or even ignored, but let’s take a closer look. All the energy in the earth’s living systems was collected from the sun by plants (plus algae and cyanobacteria). They photosynthesize: They…