3 Free Ways to Make Your Own Soil for Growing Organic Food - Regenerative Gardening & Permaculture

there's a saying that goes something like a poor farmer grows weeds a mediocre farmer grows crops and the gray farmer gross soil good soil is at the root of every Garden and in this video I'm going to show you a low-cost way you can make soil at home without spending any money hi I'm Christina with forever Food Forest a channel where we explore ways of growing food without the use of pesticides herbicides or commercial fertilizers and instead we rely on permaculture principles such as creating symbiotic relationships in the garden inspired by nature to grow food that's good for the garden and good for the planet let's get into it with these soil building methods that I'm about to show you you will have beautiful nutritious soil that you can use in your garden in as little as three months I am here in the humble beginnings of my food Forest this is year one and my main goal for this year is to grow good soil and to do that I am taking inspiration from a forest nature it's the best teacher so the way to think about this is imagine a forest it has a bunch of trees and one of those trees Falls it starts to decompose and all these natural organisms move in and they break down the tree release the nutrients and then those nutrients are taken up by the plants around the tree and the cycle continues and so on and so forth I didn't want to cut down any of these beautiful trees just to make soil and plus a whole tree is going to take years to decompose so instead I'm using wood chips and you can get wood chips for free from either your local tree removal service or an arborist or through a service called chipjob.com which I do not recommend chip drop will deliver way more wood chips than you could ever use like a mountain of wood chips like an Everest amount worth of wood chips they will dump them without your knowledge either in your driveway or in the road in front of your house check this out we got our mulch delivery from chip drop and these chips are free you just put it in order and they bring them to your house and now we have mulch for uh like 10 years your neighbors will hate you it's evening City will find you and you will spend all your waking hours shoveling those wood chips into a wheelbarrow so do not use chip drop.com this is the easiest way of building your soil that requires minimum effort all you do is just dump your wood chips out in a layer that's about two to six inches deep make sure that it's all even and walk away that's it because if the wood chips break down they're going to release nutrients they're also going to help any plants or trees or shrubs that you have around them because they will help retain moisture and moderate the temperature of the soil and they provide a slow release fertilizer and once they're fully broken down there's also going to be a lot of humus that is going to get incorporated into the soil humus that's hummus this is humus it's the black stuff left over after decomposition it provides plants with nutrients and improves soil texture and water retention what if you need a lot of soil to fill a garden bed or some pots how do you make that you can make really good garden soil by just hot composting your wood chips and the way to do that is by putting them in a big pile and adding a load of nitrogen nitrogen is going to help break them down in as little as six months the bigger the pile the hotter and the wetter your climate the faster those wood chips are going to break down into humus rich soil that you can use in your garden beds so let's get started I'm going to show you how I grow my own soil right here in this garden bed over the summer so now that I have my wheelbarrow full of wood chips we need to soak them I prefer getting my water naturally from the sky so we're gonna hope and pray for rain and after these are nice and soaked I'm going to put them in a garden bed along with a source of nitrogen nitrogen sources that you can add to your pile you can use pretty much anything that's green weeds grass clippings seaweed Seafood weed fertilizer kitchen scraps horse manure any kind of other herbivore manure fish Emulsion if you have fish scraps meat scraps just toss it all in there mix it up add some water and mix it all around and that's it and look it's already heating up so we'll just leave it alone for the next three months and if you're interested in seeing what I'm going to grow here make sure to hit that subscribe button because this is going to be really exciting another free resource that we can use to make or improve our soil also comes from the idea of a forest and that's leaves once they're broken down they can help soil retain water and they also provide beneficial microbes in the form of fungi to help feed plant roots and vegetable Roots so how do you break down leaves into soil it's super easy you just collect your leaves or your neighbor's leaves or if you find leaves in bags on the side of the road you can also take those just put them in the piles Stomp Them Down and Pray For Rain wet leaves are going to break down a lot faster than dry leaves and another thing that you can do if you don't want to put them in the pile and you kind of want to keep them out of sight is um just collect them in bags if you have some Second Use bags plastic bags you can use those so right here I have my bags filled with leaves so I'm just going to leave these here open like this wait for rain hopefully tomorrow and then once these are nice and soaked we're going to seal them up if you find some leaves that are already starting to mold and grow some kind of fungus on them like this one you can use that to inoculate your pile some people recommend shredding these I don't believe in that they're going to break down just fine whether you shred them or not it's just going to take a little bit longer but we got time so now we're just going to wait for rain now that these are nice and wet I'm just gonna poke some holes tie them off and toss them behind the shed oh that's a snake sorry for disturbing you Mr Snake ah oh my goodness that was that was scary okay check for snakes and then we're gonna tie it off some holes for air so it can circulate we'll just toss them behind the shed to age for about six to nine months maybe a year I will check in on them later once they're fully broken down you get leaf mold and this stuff is amazing because the leaves are broken down through a fungal process as opposed to a bacteria process which is what happens in a hot compost pile you have a lot of bacteria the fungus prefer a cooler process it's a slower process but it creates fungus rich soil amendment that your wussy shrubs and trees are going to absolutely love and the way you can use that is by just using it as a mulch or by mixing it into your potting soil media maybe with a little bit of your native soil a little bit of compost the leaf mold is really going to help you retain that water it's similar in properties to like peat moss in the way that it holds water this last soil building method is inspired by a prairie or a meadow and if you can imagine a prairie there's a lot of grasses growing there there are animals grazing on those grasses such as Horses and as they graze they poop and the poop breaks down and releases nutrients back to the soil so those grasses can grow some more and the cycle continues so right here I have a big pile of horse manure that I'm going to churn into nitrogen rich soil in about three months and you can get that for free or for very cheap by either browsing on Craigslist or calling your local horse uh breeders or horse riding facilities and telling them hey I just want to muck some stalls and take some of that sweet sweet horse manure out of your way all you do is just put in a big pile make sure it stays hydrated and in about three months it's going to break down into beautiful humus Rich nitrogen rich soil you can plant a nitrogen loving crop such as corn and it'll be really really happy these are just some Gateway methods into soil regeneration and building up your own soil and granted there are way more ways of doing this these are just some beginner friendly methods that you can start today for me building good soil is like an investment that keeps paying out for years to come once you establish these methods it's not just about the nutrients it's also about the microbiology of the soil a teaspoon of soil has more microbes and microorganisms than there are people on Earth that's really what we're trying to build here we're trying to build a symbiotic relationship between plants and soil so if you'd like to learn more about that make sure to hit that subscribe button and until next time grow your soil and stay away from snakes bye-bye

Channel: Forever Food Forest

Views: 60,865

Keywords: peramculture, soil regeneration, soil food web, organic gardening, composting wood chips

Id: 8HbSuvOYYJE

Length: 10min 13sec (613 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 26 2023