What’s Your Secret Recipe for Healthy Soil?

[TEG Project Manager]

Every great garden starts from the ground up—literally! Healthy, nutrient-rich soil is like a buffet for your plants, and composting is one of the most rewarding (and thrifty) ways to keep that buffet well-stocked. Whether you’re tossing kitchen scraps into a bin, layering leaves and grass in a pile, or experimenting with worm bins, there are so many creative ways to turn “waste” into garden gold.

Some gardeners swear by the classic mix of greens and browns. Others sneak in coffee grounds, eggshells, or even seaweed. And then there are the bold souls who let their chickens or goats pitch in with manure magic.

So, let’s talk dirt!
What’s your favorite way to compost?
Do you have a tried-and-true “ingredient” that works wonders in your soil?
Or maybe you’ve had a composting flop you can laugh about now?

Share your methods, your wins, and your soil-building secrets. Who knows—you might inspire someone to start their first compost pile today!

 

[flowerbug]

return as much as you can to the gardens where grown.

worm composting, in place composting, other composting and amending where needed.

crop rotations, cover crops and fallowing.

i consider my biggest failures to be when i can't get a garden weeded early enough that the majority of the weeds can't be composted in that garden. too many seed heads mean that the weeds have to go to the weed pile and that means i'm moving some garden soil there and all those nutrients and biomass to a place where it won't be reused by me directly. it may come back later via bird poo but that's a whole different kind of story.

as a general composting pile the weed pile also ends up feeding some other animals too - like i had put some old squash seeds out there last week and the chipmunks have been moving them around.

 

[digitS']

in place composting

That's it. It was very important for me to know and follow through with the process. I wanted  more production on less ground. I didn't just want to throw chemicals on the dirt and scratch some seed in. Yes, I know that commercial agriculture is more than that but I wasn't planning on working with hundreds of acres. I wanted worthwhile production from hundreds of square feet where most or everything could be done by hand.

Some of what was required was a result of gardening on distant pieces of property owned by others. They had to look at my garden 12 months out of the year. Here at home, I do composting beneath the decks of the chicken coop and the greenhouse. There are no bins as such and with semi-arid climate and rocky soil –– it works fine. In one distant location, I had a similar place to compost behind 2 large bushes and near board fences. Completely covered with soil during all seasons, It couldn't be seen from the house and looked okay anyway.

Mostly, I practiced composting-in-place by digging out 4 foot wide beds to a depth of at least 8 inches and moving spent plants and kitchen scraps into the trench and recovering with soil. Often, I have the precious homemade compost to add . Most of the plant material happens with the freezing temperatures at the end of the growing season. In the large gardens, I was able to follow a routine where the plants from 3 beds went into one bed but now use what I think of as "spot trenching" in selected parts of far fewer beds here at home. It can be done with different beds each year since some of the material will still present in the ground over the 3 years. Lots of shovel work? Sure, but the soil became much easier to move with the previous additions of organic material.

I found it a good way to deal even with corn stalks. First of all, some plant material is hardly useful for composting –– sunflower stalks will take a decade to decompose! Okay, I exaggerate . Corn roots & stalks are nearly too much but if they go together in moderate numbers in one dugout bed, maybe with some added organic fertilizer, that bed can be used for a crop in the following year by something like Winter Squash. That "sister" always grew just fine in those rougher beds their first year.

I didn't come up with these ideas alone but learning something about French Intensive gardening during my teen years from Alan Chadwick and later from the writings of John Jeavons and Peter Chan –– it all made sense to me. Sustainable, productive and a step away from noisy, smelly dang machinery .

Steve

 

[Shades-of-Oregon]

I use well aged horse manure , aged vegetation - compost and allowing the heat in summer to kill all the weed seeds in the manure. By next season it’s black gold.

 

[flowerbug]

@digitS' the by hand and without noise is very important to me too.



[the squeemish can skip this next part]

for those who are looking for all natural fertilizer i suggest setting some snap traps for mice, i think they could provide all any gardener would need... kinda like the native idea of burying a fish with a corn plant, but not quite so hard to catch. i also will go out and remove animals from the road out front if someone hits it and leaves it behind. buried in a garden it is as natural as you can ask for and it smells much better once buried deeply enough instead of having to smell it roast on the road for weeks...

 

[SPedigrees]

@digitS' the by hand and without noise is very important to me too.



[the squeemish can skip this next part]

for those who are looking for all natural fertilizer i suggest setting some snap traps for mice, i think they could provide all any gardener would need... kinda like the native idea of burying a fish with a corn plant, but not quite so hard to catch. i also will go out and remove animals from the road out front if someone hits it and leaves it behind. buried in a garden it is as natural as you can ask for and it smells much better once buried deeply enough instead of having to smell it roast on the road for weeks...

This reminds me of an exchange on a gardening forum that existed in the past, and still makes me laugh to remember. One gardener related how a neighbor had come over to her yard and asked how she was able to grow such healthy flowers and vegies while her own efforts had failed. She explained to the neighbor that the soil they both shared needed to be amended with added nutrients, but when she showed her her compost bin being worked by visible worms, the neighbor sort of recoiled and asked, "Isn't there a product I could buy to just spray or pour on the ground?" At which point another poster remarked, "The ick factor is strong in some people."

I imagine that would-be gardening neighbor would not have been thrilled with the idea of your road-kill fertilizer!