All weekend they have been swooping in on the garden center, eager to collect white bags from the packages of brown gold outside the front doors. It’s Sea Soil, pricey but wonderful stuff that you can put around your garden vegetables.
Now, I buy Sea Soil sometimes. I must confess that I do. However, I also consider soil to be a great do it yourself project. One of the joys of this spring was to step out into our vegetable garden that contains soil that is a mere four years in the making and discover that it is looking wonderful for the summer, just perfect for our vegetables this year.
Why make soil? Well first, buying it can break the bank. However, making soil is a good investment too. Plants eat soil, and soil is truly the foundation of your garden. If you are going to eat what you grow, you’d better have a good foundation.
Commercial potting soil is light and airy, but it doesn’t have a lot of nutrition. It’s the packaged white bread of the soil world: it’s readily available, easy to transport, simple to source, and it does very little for you. This means that if you’re trying to grow vegetables, you end up adding commercial fertilizers to the soil as well. These commercial fertilizers use a lot of energy – in fact, half of the energy we use to grow food is spent on creating fertilizers and pesticides. Imagine what we could do with this energy instead, if we could just build our own garden soil.
How can you create your own soil? First, add aged manure and compost. Grow cover crops over the winter to add nitrogen to the soil and keep soil nutrients in. Use kelp as well if you live near the ocean. All of these things add soil micronutrients and microorganisms that will continue to the soil-building process in your garden. It’s free and healthy, and you’ll grow delicious vegetables using your homemade foundation.