Book Review
Soil Food, 1372 ways to add fertility to your soil.
Jackie French, 1995. Aird Books Pty Ltd
Why feed your soil? This questions is only asked by novice gardeners – or by people who have learnt to get their garden to feed itself.
No matter how good your soil, if you take stuff out, you need to put stuff back in – or one day you’ll run out of enough elements for your plants to grow well. It’s a bit like dipping into your bank balance without ever making a deposit. In fact, you can eventually end up with ‘dead’ soil.
Most gardeners and farmers regard fertility as something you buy in bags. Even organic growers often think in terms of equivalents of artificial fertiliser: so many tonnes or bags of hen manure, compost or blood and bone.
No one feeds the bush. Yet, wild flowers and fruit grow and nutrients are recycled very nicely. There are endless alternative ways to feed your plants – and many of them require no work from you once the system has been set up.
Plants can be fed by the animals, fish or birds that live among them, spreading their dung as they feed. They can be fed by ‘companion plants’ whose deep roots forage for nutrients and transfer it to the surface of the soil as their leaves break down.
For decades now we have been taught that fertility is bought by the packet or smelly truck load. It doesn’t have to be like that. The earth takes care of its own. Treat it well: learn to live with it instead of exploiting it, and your soil will create its own fertility.
Healthy soil is stuff that grown things, and keeps on growing those things. Long may we cherish it.
All information taken from Soil Food, 1372 ways to add fertility to your soil
This book is available for loan from the Fleurieu Environment Centre