Healthy soil, Healthy plants, Healthy people
As crowded as the air is around here, our soil is a thousand times more densely populated. Truly healthy soil is home to the densest and most diverse ecosystem on earth. And probably the most important one.
This is not something you pour out of a plastic bag that has been sealed, palletized and wrapped in more plastic, and stored under the extreme conditions of a parking lot for months.
A healthy soil biology should also not be left to slowly starve all winter, without any food from sugary plant secretions.
Even a healthy soil, without plants growing in it, begins to die.
If you want to grow healthy and productive plants, soil is something that needs to be cared for and nurtured -- and it needs plants growing in it.
Get growing ASAP
This is the season of rebirth. Our soil is also starting to come to life again. As our peas and clover are growing, they are pumping sugars into the soil to feed and grow the populations of soil helpers. Our soil temperature,
and
biological activity are both warming up, getting ready for the big show of the summer crops. Because of what we are doing now, our summer crops get off to a faster start when they are planted in early June.
One of our customers came in a couple of weeks ago. In her garden last year, she planted early field peas, and later cut them down and then used them as mulch. She said her garden never did so well even though she wasn't sure why. It was because she started feeding her soil plant sugars weeks earlier than she had been doing.
When customers ask me what to do now, I advise them to prepare their soil for planting ASAP. If you till, you want to do this now and give the soil time to rebuild from the chaotic disruption of rototilling.
For our planters without fall planted clover, we are preparing our soil by planting peas, spinach, or onion sets. We are starting to fertilize all of our plants, to start the biological processes so important to a healthy and productive garden.
Topdressing with compost is a way to introduce these beneficial microbes to your garden. The better the compost, the less you need to use, and the better your results become. Compost is like probiotics for your garden -- but better than anything that could come out of a bottle because it is more diverse.
In your stomach, it takes hundreds or even thousands of microbial species working together to provide the greatest benefits. Quality compost introduces a greater diversity as well as greater density of microbial helpers to your soil. Again, microbially rich compost doesn't come out of a sealed and palletized bag -- despite what it says on the label.
We always mix some of our old compost into each new pile. This builds on the microbial diversity as each new pile might add more species, but consistently adding back some of the old pile means nothing was lost from previous piles.
You can also use our potting soil as an inoculant, similar to compost because we inoculate it with our compost. It is just not as concentrated.
You can get an extra harvest by planting cool season crops now. Our Sugar Snap peas are already up and growing, loving this cool weather. When they finish in June, they will leave their work behind for a faster start for our green beans, who love the heat.
Our double cropping Super Sugar Snap peas and pole beans is the most profitable planting we do per square ft.
Don't forget about planting onions sets. They are a great plant for building soil biology, they are inexpensive, and they can be eaten at any stage of growth. We will have better varieties of onion plants in a few weeks, but onions sets give you quick scallions, or decent cooking onions when planted early.
Note: We wait a little longer for cold hardy biennial crops like kale, parsley, and Swiss chard. A biennial plant is a flowering plant that takes two years to complete its biological life cycle. In the first year, the plant grows leaves, stems, and roots (vegetative structures), then it enters a period of dormancy over the colder months. If these crops are exposed to these cold temperatures early, they are also triggered to go to seed the first year, and this can severely reduce your harvests from them. We have seen this happen to all of these crops in the past.
Our kale that was planted last year is starting to bud up now, so we will have kale buds, and pea shoots from our field peas (my favorite green) in a couple of weeks.
We continue to get a lot of calls about seeds. Although some seed companies have now stopped sales to all but commercial accounts, we are now stocked with more seeds than we have ever had -- and all of the best varieties -- like pelleted carrot seeds. It will just take us a week or so to process them. Don't worry, we will have what you need -- before you need to plant them.
