BUILDING SOIL
Have you ever gone to the canyon to pick wild fruit or berries? Have you ever noticed there are no weeds and no one is watering these plants yet they grow and produce very well? No one goes in the woods to rake, hoe, or rototill. No one goes into the forest to fertilize the plants.
Every spring you will find a family outside who is laboring, digging, raking until the spot they have chosen is a beautiful spot of fresh-turned soil. Most are excited about the season and filled with optimism for their garden. They then plant, with endless watering all the while hoping their garden will grow! However, somewhere in June, the weeds come at a storm rate choking out the plants. The soil is dry and clay and families give up.
This was our experience. For the 15 years we had a “garden” nothing ever looked like it should in the magazines. Nothing grew except for the weeds. Now looking back the ground was clay, dry looking, and dead. For some reason, I never ever thought about repairing the soil.
To avoid this type of gardening, and to try and get it right we began “schooling” ourselves. Our inspiration for our gardening has come from the documentary film called Back to Eden.
FORGET THE PLANTS!
The idea with the Back to Eden Gardening is you want to focus on repairing and building your soil up. This process can take about 3 years and then from there your soil could be healed with little work after that, but maintenance.
The reason we must do this is that our plants are lacking what God intended them to have and as a result, the world is in a famine as we are literally starving. We must as Zion people heal our gardens and the only way to do this correctly is to mirror what God has been doing all along in his own garden. If we look at the flooring of the forest the soil is protected with this thick layer of decomposing matter, it is less likely to erode. It does not bake in the sun, and it retains significantly more moisture.
By building the soil it becomes heavily productive. The thick natural mulch forms new soil over time and protects the older soil and watering is almost completely unnecessary. The mulch stores the rainwater, preventing it from evaporating away.
HEALING OUR LAND
Soil is living and a lot like us. The top layer of soil is like skin that offers the first layer of defense that can be easily damaged. It must have a covering on it at all times. Without a covering, we damage our gardens, and nutrients are lost. But we can help undo some of that damage by feeding life back into it. With the Back to Eden gardening method, tilling isn’t required- you build your soil on top of the existing soil mimicking nature.
We learned that to begin the healing we needed to lay down about 18 inches of material on top of the existing dirt. This was tiring just thinking about how much work this was going to be. I had never done that kind of work before, nor my girls, and with a deadline of winter around the corner.
LAYING CARDBOARD DOWN
To begin we first laid cardboard down in the area we wanted which was like EVERWHERE! Our goal is to have the entire yard someday put into gardens.
There are two reasons to do this-
a) to smother unwanted weeds. By doing this you will block the needed sunlight that weeds need to grow with.
b) to create organic matter in the soil. This will improve the nutrients and earthworms will come as they love the dark and moist area. In return, they will leave worm castings which is free fertilizer.
LAYERS
Next, we laid down leaves and we even used straw. Then grass clippings, food scraps, and manure (it does not matter the order in which you put things down) We have spent hours and hundreds of truckloads at the local waste area collecting leaves, grass clippings, and manure to lay down in all of our beds. We worked for 3 months straight almost daily collecting these organic materials. My girls and I learned to haul manure and load a truck real fast. We have had the entire family come join in on the weekends for our family service day once a month making the workload go faster. Not only has it been fun to learn how to build the soil together but to work together as an entire family.
A COVERING
Last we put woodchips on top to keep the moisture in. This way the earth can retain moisture to promote bacterial life. If your soil is exposed, it will dry and your bacteria will end up dying. Protect the bacteria by keeping your soil covered. If we dig under the layer there is now an active and thriving ecosystem underneath, helping to create rich, productive soil – worms, beetles, and all kinds of insects.
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