Video Transcript
From The (YouTube) Gardening Channel with James Prigioni
Today we’re going to be talking about one of the most important aspects to growing healthy plants: getting good production and harvesting the highest quality food you could possibly eat.
So, I’m going to go through five tips to building and maintaining a healthy soil; the foundation to a healthy garden. Let’s go!
The first step to building and maintaining a healthy soil is to conserve water. Here in New Jersey we live really close to the shore and we’ve got very sandy soil. So, we have to do a few things in order to help conserve water so it doesn’t drain so quick.
So, right here we’re about five feet from the food forest. I’m going to bring you guys closer to show you what this all looks like. We started with showing you how sandy it is and showed you kind of what we did to amend it. Then, I’m gonna bring it inside, show you what the soil looks like now. We just had rain here a few days ago and you wouldn’t even be able to tell looking at the lawn.
It was already dried out so quickly because it’s all sand. Right here you can see that this is just all sand. It just can’t hold the water. It can’t conserve it. It really starts drying out quick and look at the structure of it. It’s just all sand and that’s just only a few feet from where we’re growing all this beautiful and great food.
Number two is organic matter. As you saw out there the soil was all sand. It couldn’t hold water and that’s because it didn’t have organic matter in it. Our soil is full with humus decayed organic matter. That’s what holds the water. That’s what conserves the water. If you want to help build your soil quick add organic matter. Just a five percent increase in organic matter will quadruple your soil’s ability to maintain water. Quadruple guys with just a five percent increase! You can’t go wrong with organic matter.
And number three tip for soil is mulch. Mulch can really make a difference for your soil and not just as a back saver. Mulch is constantly breaking down day by day year by year, building your fertility. There are a number of different kinds of mulch and I went into mulch further in a different video so check it out.
Number four is soil structure, which is so important to maintain healthy roots. In order for your plants to be healthy they have to have access to both air and water. In order for your roots to have access to air and water you have to have good soil structure because you need good pore spacing. So with good structure is big pore spacing which allows air and water to flow in so your roots have access to it.
So that has bad structure. It has very little pore spacing which doesn’t allow air and water to flow into it which makes it not available.
Number five, and probably the most important aspect of building and maintaining a healthy soil is to go organic. When you have an organic soil that’s filled with humus and covered with mulch you set up the ideal condition for bringing in these soil organisms that’ll do the work for you.
You can see we’ve got thick mulch; we’ve got plenty of organic matter in the soil and this is what’s gonna bring in things like worms. You see here that they’re going to do all the work for you; all these worms here constantly 24/7, you don’t have to pay them or anything, no health insurance benefits, building your soil
every day.
We believe in order to build the healthiest soil it’s best to go with the no-till method by not tilling, you’re not disturbing all these soil organisms. Instead we like to follow as nature does and just put everything in layers.
It’s no secret that to grow healthy plants you need healthy soil. So, with these five tips you can go from an area that looks like this lawn (sandy) to an area that looks like this a food forest.
Thanks for watching guys. Hope you enjoyed the video. See you on the next one…another food forest video!