Balancing Soil Nutrients and Acidity: The Real Dirt on Cultivating Crops, Compost, and a Healthier Home: The Ultimate Guide to Soil, #3
By Anna Hess
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About this ebook
Grow twice the fruits and vegetables in half the space on the farm, in the backyard, or even in your window!
Have you noticed the extraordinary flavors and yields emanating from even a small garden when the soil is just right? If you've ever been envious of your neighbor's dirt or just curious about homesteading, then The Ultimate Guide to Soil is the perfect fit for you.
This third volume in the series walks new and experienced gardeners through bringing their soil into balance via remineralizion and pH correction. Learn chemical quick fixes for out-of-whack garden plots, then dive into slower-but-surer techniques utilizing cows, goats, chickens, mushrooms, cover crops, dynamic accumulators, and more.
If merely adding compost to your soil isn't improving yields the way you think it should, then the simple approaches in this book should have you up and running in no time. Maybe next year your neighbor will be envious of you!
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Balancing Soil Nutrients and Acidity - Anna Hess
Introduction
Remineralization adds nutrients back into your soil to ensure a bountiful, delicious harvest.
In The Intelligent Gardener, Steve Solomon makes a solid case for balancing soil nutrients in a process known as remineralization. He based his recommendations on others' research, but also on his own experiences with discovering that homegrown food doesn't always lead to good health.
Solomon's first-person account will likely resonate with other homesteaders. He and his wife lived for nine years in Oregon, where they grew most of their own food on worn-out soil that was deficient in several major nutrients. As a result, the couple began experiencing lowered energy levels, loose teeth, and soft fingernails.
A six-month vacation in Fiji created dramatic changes in the Solomons' vitality, due (the husband believed) to the local produce grown in soil fertilized by silt from volcanic rocks. This experience led him to the work of Weston Price, who argued that we really need four (or more) times the recommended daily allowance of calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, iron, and vitamins A, D, and E for optimal health. Next, Solomon turned to the work of remineralization guru William Albrecht, who explained that if we want to consume those high levels of vitamins and minerals, gardeners must plant into well-balanced soil chock-full of minerals.
Many proponents of remineralization use a Brix meter to assess the nutrient density of their crops. However, you should be aware that Brix is simply a measurement of sugar content and you can get the same information with your own taste buds.
While Solomon's tale is intriguing, many organic gardeners are rightfully leery of the similarities between remineralization and mainstream, non-organic farming since both utilize chemical fertilizers. In the latter scenario, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium are applied in their most basic form before each crop, creating a cycle of dependency in the soil. For example, if a farmer pours on chemical nitrogen fertilizers, the nitrogen-cycling microorganisms in his soil perish, and the farmer is forced to continue applying chemical nitrogen fertilizers if he wants subsequent crops to grow. The result is impoverished soil that decreases in quality every year.
For that reason, most readers of this book will choose compost over chemicals for annual fertilization. So why would you apply deficient minerals in chemical form if remineralization is likely to produce the same decline in soil microorganisms that you'd see from traditional chemical farming? Proponents of the former method will rebut that remineralization is meant to be a one-time corrective action to combat the natural effects of leaching, so you can consider the fertilizer applications in this scenario as a bit like tilling up the ground before building permanent raised beds—a necessary short-term evil to produce long-term gains.
In the end, remineralization is one of the most controversial topics covered in this book, and I'll admit that I'm not entirely sold on the concept myself. But it's worth understanding the whys and hows of this slightly fringe technique in order to decide which, if any, facets of remineralization you want to utilize in your own garden.
Chapter 1: Correcting Soil pH
When and why to shift pH
Blueberries require a much more acidic soil than other common edibles.
Even though this chapter is included under the remineralization umbrella, tweaking pH to suit your garden plants uses much more mainstream science than other parts of a remineralization campaign. In fact, most gardeners have a need to correct pH at some point in their growing careers and the task is generally accomplished in roughly the same manner. So why do I put pH under the remineralization umbrella? Because pH management utilizes the same science as topping up other garden paucities, which lends credence to the remineralization hypothesis and also helps you understand how to decide