How to Create Living Soil - Increase Garden Produce Yields!
Article by Stefan Burns - Updated November 2021. Join the Wild Free Organic email newsletter!
A rich soil that is home to a diverse amount of bugs and microorganisms is the foundation of a healthy garden. Over the years as gardener, I have developed a six step process to revitalize lifeless soil which utilizes the natural environment around you. The method utilizes biodynamic principles developed by Rudolf Steiner, founder of Waldorf Schools.
This common-sense methodology is easy and low-cost, meaning anyone can do this to establish a new garden, or to transform their existing garden. Healthy soil is one of the most important factors when it comes to having a healthy garden that produces an immense amount of fruits and vegetables. Flowers benefit from living soil too, growing better and producing more vibrant petals!
The Six Step Method
Depending on the scope of the project in mind, and the equipment available at your disposal, starting a soil revitalization project can take a couple hours to a couple weeks. The steps are as follows:
Remove trash, metal, waste
Aerate the soil
Add organics
Mix soil
Innoculate and seed
Water
One of the keys to this method is to perform all these steps simultaneously as they make sense. For example, if you find more plastic waste during step 4, remove it. If the project extends over multiple days, water each water in order to make the soil more pliable and to begin the revitalization process.
Before and After
I did this project by myself and it took approximately 12 hours of total work over 2 weeks. With some help steps 1-5 could have been done in a day.
Mycorrhizal Inoculate and Broccoli Seeds
My standard protocol to build the soil up after steps 1 - 4 is to inoculate the soil with mycorrhizal fungi and spread out broccoli seeds en masse. Mycorrhizal inoculant is a symbiotic organism that fortifies roots by acting as an intermediary for plants, helping to decompose organics and feed the resulting carbon building blocks to plants in exchange for energy created through photosynthesis. I like broccoli seeds for starting the productivity of the garden because they are exceptionally easy to sow, can be eaten along every step of the process, and when adding new plants to the garden, are easily mixed back into the soil to increase overall productivity.
These are the products I used in the video above:
Results Guaranteed
If you use this 6-step method to create living soil, your garden will improve right away. Rebuilding soil naturally by using the organics around you is an excellent alternative to spreading out expensive manure or fertilizer produced from diseased feed lot animals. You are what you eat! A great time to embark on this project is during the end of fall/early winter. As trees drop leaves and some plants end their lives, an abundance of plant matter is all around ready to be worked into the soil. It’s so important with gardening to work productivity back into the soil. If you constantly extract nutrients by picking produce but don’t add fresh materials like chopped up weeds, grasses, and leaves into the soil, eventually the soil will be depleted and the plants will die.
This method teaches you how to rework plant materials back into the soil and later gives you the experience that it works much better than the commonly recommended methods.