Fertilizer Shortages? DON'T PANIC! She Grows a Garden Without Buying Fertilizer!

so we're in zone 8b right outside of mobile alabama and i'm excited to have you back to see what we've accomplished in four years time from the time that we covered this ground to today has been almost exactly four years and last time you came to see the garden it was kind of a spur of the moment thing some of my details were forgotten or inaccurate so i've kind of looked up some photos in my phone to look and remind myself of what exactly we did when we started and along the way so i'm hoping that this is going to help you either give you some information on things to do or not to do if you're on a similar journey and my goal has always been to produce the most nutrient dense food that i can the quantity didn't matter to me but the quality mattered and if it's nutrient dense then we shouldn't need as much in order to provide the nutrients that we need so i wanted to accomplish this without commercial inputs fertilizers insecticides and so this has been a project to see can we do it you read and hear that you can but until you see it happen it's all just uh speculation so hopefully if this is also your goal this might give you a little bit of encouragement or maybe some guidance as well back four years ago around june of 2018 this land was raw baking getting rained on it had been cleared we were building a house we didn't live out here it was just left to the elements and it baked into a brick it was horrible when it was time to start the garden a neighbor kindly came over and disked the area for us and we disked in quite a bit of gypsum to try to break up some of that clay then immediately we covered the entire area with 10 big round bales of hay and a neighbor came and helped us with his tractor to to spread all that hay so we had baked dead clay dirt that then we broke up added gypsum and covered a few months later we moved out to the property and i brought with me some comfrey and some thornless blackberries and some sweet potato and some turmeric and a few other things and most everything died in here it was just awful it was there was no life whatsoever luckily two tiny little clumps of comfrey survived and in the beginning it was pretty sad i brought with us a couple buckets of chicken run dirt from our previous property and i put it in one row and it was the only place that really grew anything that first year and it really grew we had cucumbers to share and where i had the chicken run dirt there was a difference as time passed we added more gypsum over the years we started throwing out cover crop seeds just all over the place anything if anything would grow we were excited to have it grow and put some roots in the ground every now and then we would get some wood chip deliveries and we would spread that in here as well and with each passing season it seemed like we had a little more life we also had rabbits at the time so i would spread some rabbit manure to try to get some i thought at the time nutrition from the manure but now i'm thinking more it was microbes that really made the difference in that manure and then what i think really changed things for me is one season i took chicken run dirt because we finally had our chickens here i took chicken run dirt and because i didn't have enough dirt to really spread everywhere i put a lot of it in a wheelbarrow and i just kept adding water and i would throw that water all over the place in the garden there was nothing to eat in the garden it was just a whole bunch of mulch and some cover crops but i just drenched the garden in chicken run dirt water and the next season when i would dig into the ground it was so much softer things started growing i feel like that was a turning point in the garden so what i did with the chicken run dirt was i took my wheelbarrow in there and i filled it about half full with anything that i could get off of the the ground in the chicken run and i brought it into the garden and i filled the wheelbarrow with water and then i took a five gallon bucket filled it up out of the wheelbarrow and just threw it and then i added more water into the wheelbarrow and i just kept doing this and when most of my manure dirt had also been thrown out then i would go get a little more dirt and so basically i think i was making a dilution or a compost tea something like that but the main thing was i was throwing microbes everywhere i don't think i was really spreading nutrition so much as i was putting microbes all over the place and they were going to help me digest this mulch that i had covered the garden with almost two years after disking and covering the dirt spring of 2020 came around and it was so exciting because i was growing food and i was growing food galore i had lettuce and okra and squash and beans tomatoes it was like a real garden and all without anything commercially purchased or produced we had luffa and snake gourd and pumpkins and sweet potatoes so something happened after all of that chicken water in fall of 2020 things were starting to die back and yet i was still getting some okra and things like that and that is when we made the video of the garden before so if you go back and look at that video you'll know kind of in time where we were in the process after that video i broad forked a lot of the area and i think that helped me in some ways because it helped break apart some of the re-compacted areas but it also hurt me in a sense because some of my mulch layer that wasn't decomposed enough got mixed in and i also bought some bagged compost or it was supposedly compost but i think it hadn't really broken down enough and so i was really putting a lot of carbon into the soil and that set me back so spring of 2021 was not wonderful but fall of 2021 this past fall was the most magnificent garden i had had to date i added frost protection for my fall and winter vegetables because we go from hot hot hot to freezing and things that should be frost and freeze hearty don't get a chance to build up those sugars and become hardy so this past fall i finally added some frost protection and we had kale and collards and broccoli and cabbage and rutabaga all fall and winter and spring and a lot of it's gone to seed some of it's making a bit of a comeback now so i've got a transition garden going at the moment of what's left over from the fall winter and then i'm interplanting my newer spring and and summer crops so again more and more life with every passing year so now we're getting ready for the spring season and i have tomatoes that are more amazing than anything i've ever grown we have strawberries i pulled up a huge wonderful garlic harvest i'm just seeing so much potential and so much promise and i think i've figured a few things out along the way that i could have done better that i would encourage other people to do but even with everything i did and could have done better i still have what i feel is a great result from not buying any insecticides or fertilizers so one thing i've noticed along the way is anywhere that i've had perennials planted the annuals are far more successful so this whole area has had turmeric in it since we moved out to the property so for almost four years there's been turmeric growing here and i let it over winter i dig it up when i want some or if someone wants to take some to their garden but in general i just leave it here and i decided this year that's too much turmeric and it's taking up valuable real estate so i dug up the front of the bed and noticed that the soil was amazing not only was it soft so i can easily stick my spade down there and this was hard brick so it's very soft there were lots of earthworms in here i think that the rhizomes had really fed the soil so anywhere let me cover that back up anywhere that i've had comfrey or asparagus or turmeric or galangal planted they produced exudates and then microbes live on that and bring in the earthworms and then my annuals benefit from all of that anywhere that i could leave some perennials in the ground i think it's to my benefit and it will really help me with my annuals so another big lesson that i've learned is the value of living walkways i have no desire to just cover my walkways in wood chips ever again that does mulch that does feed the fungi in the soil but i can do better than that i can keep living roots in my walkways they will break apart my dirt they will create sugars and exudates that feed the biology and all of that is going to help support what i'm growing in my growing beds so i have purchased alfalfa pellets so that would be something that i have purchased and used and my hope is that i could replace the alfalfa pellets with comfrey in the future but so far i have fed this garden alfalfa pellets chicken run dirt and i have a whole new situation in the chicken run now because we now own a trailer and we own a truck and we are able to go get bags and bags and bags of leaves so in the fall i can go around gather up leaves the chickens then turn that into a large quantity of chicken dirt for me they mulch it up they add their fertilizer and then when i plant my transplants i put some chicken dirt down or i just throw out some chicken water but i have more chicken dirt that i've ever had before so we used to have the chickens out all over the property and they would free-range and i found that i couldn't plant along my deer fence because the chickens would come and eat my cucumbers and my squash and things like that and also once we planted an orchard and mulched the orchard they were digging up all of my trees so we've decided instead to keep them locked up they have a large space and i bring the green to them and they work on my leaves for me and make my chicken run dirt they get a lot of fresh green when i bring it in and i'm able to keep my property from getting de-mulched as they like to scratch up all the mulch so we've got some nice soft rich dirt to add to our garden another thing that i feed the garden with is i have two buckets i have a big barrel that's blue and that's my c bucket and when my dad fishes he he reserves the fish guts for me and so i just let them rot and every time he brings me more fish guts i throw them in and that goes in the garden and then i have a big green barrel that is my weed and comfrey and banana leaves and anything green goes in that bucket and it rots down and i add that i just dilute all these things down when i have things growing in the garden that i'm going to actually eat the leaves or the fruit then i will pour it on the ground toward the roots of the plant but if it's between seasons or i have an area where i'm not going to eat that food it's it's not time to eat it anytime soon then i will fertigate and i will inject those things into my sprinkler system and just spray it all over the place so those are the ways that i have fed the garden and it seems to be working very well so far i feel like the mulching is great where you're growing the things you want to pick who wants to pick amongst a whole bunch of cover crop and and it's hidden in there who wants that so mulch where you're growing your produce but let your walkways be living pumping sugar into the ground breaking up your soil mulch just can't compete with that we could look back and analyze how i started this garden and i can think of so many ways that would have been better it would have been better to have added manure underneath the hay that i spread well i didn't have manure it would have been better to have planted a cover crop well i wasn't living here and that wasn't feasible at the time so i feel like you need to work with what you have do what you can do and as long as the soil is covered in some way preferably with living material and if that doesn't work for your situation then just cover it with whatever you can and if you have access to some manure that you feel comfortable with add that as well and it doesn't take much you can spread it by diluting it with water but i think we get so fixated on what the best solution is and if we can't achieve that because it's not within our reach we need to remember that there are still other things we can do that are better than other alternatives that that other people may choose so fertilizer is becoming much more expensive there's a school of thought that thinks that the salt fertilizers really are not helping you in the soil department as far as all the microbiology so i think that if we can learn to grow in a way that doesn't rely on fertilizer then it doesn't matter how expensive fertilizer gets or how difficult it is to come by we're free of that and have a different way of growing and we're not dependent on it [Music] you

Channel: The Survival Gardening Channel with David The Good

Views: 19,310

Keywords: composting, David The Good, fertilizer shortages, replacements for fertilizer, JADAM, korean natural farming, compost tea, ways to feed a garden, gardening without fertilizer, garden without buying fertilizer, need fertilizer for garden, organic gardening, gardening for free, diy fertilizer, organic fertilizer

Id: F3qjW8liBp4

Length: 17min 2sec (1022 seconds)

Published: Thu May 12 2022