Gimme Gimme Gimme More Permaculture!!

Here's what do to if you are trying to grow healthy vegetables and your soil is bad, as is the soil on the school property. The plants are growing very slowly and during this season of much wind, the topsoil is blowing away due to not having any roots or organic material living inside of it for a long time.

Firstly, how to decide if the soil is bad. I, personally, think you can tell before you ever even start planting, just by reaching down and grabbing a handful of topsoil or by looking a tiny bit deeper and seeing if any insects exist in there. In the case of the school: the topsoil is dust and there are next to no bugs, though one girl found a scrawny worm on the first day. I was quick to start the project and thought we could fix it with a little love, water, sunshine....in retrospect, I wish I had started composting and treating the soil with manure before planting...would leave me in a better situation right now, but its never too late to start and thats the game plan for today (and my entire life, actually)!

So, fertility and texture and all that jazz. Fertility is just access to nutrients that occur in healthy soil, nitrogen, phosophorus and potassium. Nitrogen is primarily known for its leaf and stem encouragement, sometimes (as with bell peppers and tomatoes) too much nitrogen will make your plants have too many leaves and not enough fruit! Some good, naturally occuring sources of nitrogen are used coffeegrinds, planting beans interspersed with certain things, and of course animal manure.

Phosphorous and Potassium are also easy to fix, naturally. Phosphorous is important for root growth and can be found in soil containing bone meal (the deep forest). Potassium, like nitrogen, leaves the soil quickly--especially in the rainy season and needs to be replenished. Potassium helps them to continuing growing at a stable pace as well as building up immunity.

But besides these nutrients, there are several other important things that have to exist for soil to grow healthy food. The process of decomposition and its resulting humus, for example, is a concoction of so many things dependent on the ecosystem that lives and dies on that location. The countless creatures that make up humus work to eventually produce those three nutrients mentioned above, as well as tons of other nutrients and helpful bacteria.

Be sure to steer clear of what writer Michael Pollan (and the ancient English agronomist, Sir Albert Howard, in “An Agricultural Testament”) calls in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, ‘the NPK mentality’ (that stands for Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium). When agricultural scientists found out the importance of these three nutrients they focused only on them, they began separating them, manipulating them and their relationship to the soil in order to come up with agri-chemicals that would make the land produce more and faster—they didn’t and still do not, however, take into consideration the other variables to growing plants and healthy soil…the other life forms it supports and their reason for being there and the interconnectedness of the whole system. They do not, as Howard suggests, take “the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal and man as one great subject.”

One can no longer say that agriculture can be divided up and that the land is just a sum of its parts…From what people know now (and other people have long suspected intuitively) of agriculture’s impact on climate change, its impact on people’s livelihoods, nations’ poverty and the health of the air, water, and food to the loss of biodiversity to the inability of the land to produce after the leaching of the soils fertility through chemicals…we have to acknowledge that agriculture and the land is the system we live in, not outside of-and address it holistically. We cannot think that we are able to manipulate variables within the system and only affect that which we have on our nice charted graphs…agriculture is nature and nature is not a constant. It can be chaotic, it can evolve, it cannot be looked at as separate pieces of a larger puzzle that makes up our lives. It simply IS our lives.

Politically, one can look at a single item of food and feel slightly wronged in the matter: it is nearly always packaged in uniformity and wearing a barcode or a number, just like a prison inmate. Many vegetarians claim that the reason for the dis-health of the American population is not simply that it eats too much meat, but that the meat that we eat was factory farmed and killed in such a way to cause terror and misery during its entire life…and that energy goes into your body when you eat it. I personally feel a lot happier eating chicken that can cross the street when it feels like it, but in line (or since we’re talking holism—perhaps I should say, “in circle…”) with my beliefs on everything—my happiness probably comes from a number of interrelated things.

So, in short, making your soil healthy makes your body healthy which makes your mind healthy which influences other minds and bodies to get healthy…and slowly but surely, we can repair and reclaim our most basic necessities in this world: food, air, and water. (I may be getting way ahead of myself, but in turn these things also affect our land-usage, our land-ownership and thus our political system and economy….just through soil maintenance! Yes, THIS I BELIEVE….)