Growing Solutions for Healthy Soil
ABOUT EPISODE 7 Laboratory based testing helps you build quality soils for your farm and garden. This is because tests provide information about what your soils need, rather than simply highlighting what your fertilizer distributor has on sale. But the numbers on a lab report are only valuable if you know how to interpret … Read more
Farmers and gardeners can improve production with regular at home and laboratory based soil testing. Learn facts about soil color, texture, and aroma, and living creatures in and on your soil that can guide you to better production. Learn how to choose a soil testing lab, why pH is one of the most common variables … Read more
Podcast Transcript Are You Tending Your Soil Microbes as Winter Approaches? As the days are getting shorter and the weather’s getting colder, it’s tempting to put your farm or garden soil on the back burner, so to speak, and start thinking about: how to store all the produce you just harvested who to invite over … Read more
Herbicides Don’t Just Kill Weeds In the last post, we looked at biological cascades in ecosystems. We saw that seemingly unrelated activities are linked together through complex food webs. Living creatures that seem unrelated at first glance turn out to be so dependent on one another that what benefits one species can benefit many. Likewise, … Read more
Brackish Water is Toxic To Crop Plants About 97% of the fresh water on the earth is considered too brackish (too salty) for most agricultural use. Desalination, or purification, is of course possible. Mechanical desalination processes are widely known. But making desalination cost effective and environmentally friendly can be challenging. The National Acadamies tell us … Read more
Healthy Soils Require Amendments It is unrealistic to believe you can keep farming or gardening, and keep taking nutrients out of the soil without putting something back now and then. In the late 20th century, this was done with chemical fertilizers. No doubt, chemical fertilizers are still used today. When properly applied, qualified experts will … Read more