Building Healthy Soil

Healthy soil is the foundation of successful organic gardening. Healthy soil is created from practicing soil building techniques that add organic matter to the soil and foster an environment for microorgranisms to flourish.  Many practices are used to build soil health, including applying or adding soil amendments to your garden.  Soil amendments come in many forms and often contain both macronutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium and micronutrients like calcium, magnesium, selenium, etc.   

Compost

Compost is a key practice to building the health of organic soil and is commonly used in organic gardening.  Composting is the art and science of mixing various organic materials, monitoring the resultant biological activity, and controlling conditions so that the original raw substances are transformed into a stable humus. It is an ideal way to replace nutrients back into the soil that have been removed throughout the season.

The idea behind composting is to gather all organic raw materials such as table scraps, lawn clippings, leaves, animal manure, etc., and place them in some form of a container or pile where the components can easily be mixed. After your pile has had a while to decompose or "cook" and you have turned it over a few times, you will be able to apply it to your garden as valuable organic matter.

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Raw Animal Manure

Applying raw animal manure is also a good way to get nutrients back into your garden. For best food safety practices, you should compost the manure, or add it at the end of your season and mix it in with the soil thoroughly. Organic standards require to following wait time for raw manure application:

• Where edible portion of crops touch the soil: Manure must be applied at least 120 days before harvesting the plants.
• Where edible portion of crops do not touch the soil: Manure must be applied at least 90 days before harvesting the plants.

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Minerals/Additives

Many things can be added to your soils to replace or enhance components, such as kelp, corn or soybean meal, alfalfa meal, and limestone. These should only be added after research into the technique.

Potting Soil

Many gardeners start their plants from seed indoors to give them an early start. Other urban gardeners grow exclusively in containers. Organic potting soil is becoming more commercially available, but it may be advantageous to make your own. 

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