Good Living Soil

Planting 'digger' plants which grow roots and leave air cavities behind them when the roots die is part of how we achieve a stable and constant balance of soil water and air. This kind of idea gives us really rich and living soil in the end, because the longer you leave soil organisms undisturbed in a perfectly aerated soil with enough water and organic material, the richer and more fertile your soil becomes. Just keep feeding from the top and if you planned well enough for drainage, and your original soil make up of clay like and sandy particles is well balanced, the soil in your beds will become a living cornucopia of every kind of nutrient and useful molecule that a whole range of plants will need. A properly living soil, as opposed to the periodically reactivated soil on an industrialised monoculture farm, is the ultimate goal of a biodynamic farming system. All products of the growing and harvesting of plants and animals of all kinds can be used to feed the soil. Using Bokashi bins (anaerobic fermentation) and compost heaps and worm farms being fed bokashi processed solid waste we can turn any organic material back into soil. Easily. So it is easy to see that the creation of good soil is ultimately a cycle. We like to think ofit as a Positive Cycle. Feeding soil that has been allowed to develop naturally. Reaping the bumper harvests that result from growing crops in living soil. Returning what we don't use to the soil to be used again as a new harvest. That's how we survived all these millions of years.

Good quality soil

Soil is a mixture of clay like and sand like particles. These serve as a substrate in which the life processes of microbes take place. These tiny creatures 'eat' or 'process' organic material, changing its molecular state. The resultant material in the soil is what plant roots are able to absorb. So having the right amounts of air, organic material and water in your soil, with the best mixture of sand and clay like particles is ultimately what gives your soil the capacity to grow. It is what determines how much growth takes place, how vibrant and active the whole system of your garden is or can become. The life of planet earth is in the soil. Making and building soil is something every person on the planet should take some level of responsibility for. You can start with a compost heap and add the proceeds of a bokashi bin and a worm farm to your soil as well. This sounds gross to the uninitiated but is really not. What's gross is the level of food waste that humanity indulges in without ever considering the obvious consequences.

It is important that we look after this life. Too few people understand how bacteria 'fix' nitrogen in soil, how Oxygen, water, nitrogen and living creatures are all involved in an endless cycle and the more material we remove from this cycle by not reintroducing it to the soil the more tenuous life on planet earth is going to become.

To keep a variety of healthy microbes in soil it is necessary to feed them with as wide a variety of organic materials as possible, further than that, if your planting arrangement, the pattern in which you have companion planted your crops, herbs and barrier plants, is diverse and varied, your soil health and structure will stabilise into an optimal condition, resulting in growth and health that is unsurpassed. Adding manure to trigger nitrifying reactions in the soil is a common practice, it is however advisable to allow time to prevent contamination by manures.

Vertical Planters and Urban Greening

Much has been said about the necessity of feeding the world. In fact, it's even the favourite refrain of our mortal enemy, the GMO giant, Monsanto. We need to feed the world, they reason, so we will have to design a new type of corn that grows in the desert. Ja Great thanks. Then we have to fetch the corn and take it to a processing plant after which it goes through various sytems interspersed with transportation between the different palces in which the processijng and packaging of corn based products takes place. That kind of agriculture is going to drive our carbon emissions through the roof, and for no reason whatsoever.
The truth is that there is plenty of food being grown, it just isn't always profitable to take it to the people who need it.

The answer to this seemingly dreadful and insurmountable truth is so elegantly simple that the corporations tend to use that very simplicity to scoff at bio dynamics and urban agriculture. Telling themselves and those they are hoodwinking that anything suspect about their creepy products is a necessry evil and a triviality.

The Urban environment is full of vertical spaces. With a little shift in thinking and a small investment, it is perfectly possible to have a large quantity of fresh produce available literally at your front doorstep. The tests have all been done. Successful gardeners and farmers already know how to grow food up walls. Years ago we tried ideas like bags on walls and perfected them. Transforming ideas like hanging planters and bags of soil into the very advanced vertical pocket system, fully irrigated and set to last twenty five years. That's a significant achievement. Having a wall of soil pockets, all watered by an irrigation system means that almost anyone can grow large amounts of food. Just picture the surface area of the walls in a city. Of course, the wall needs light, but that is the only real limitation and there are plants that can be grown in the shade too, like chervil.

So much has been written to try and answer the question: what exactly is permaculture? We can say that permaculture is the use and reuse of all aspects of an organic garden. The way it all fits together, uh. Well maybe it's best if we describe something that permaculture aspires to. You take one of the oldest life forms on earth and examine how it operates. look at trees. If we could get our man made systems to work with a quarter of the efficiency demonstrated by a tree we would be doing very well indeed.

Trees manage to transport their water from below the surface of the soil high up into the air by capilliary action. Trees are able to resist attacks by predators by providing such a bountiful supply of food energy that feeding animals is rather a part of the tree's life cycle and not a loss suffered by the tree at all.

Permaculture, in essence, tries to operate a farm in the way that anatural system might operate. A tree is an unbelievealy efficient way of making material and energy out of sunlight and soil. So as you learn the ins and outs of permaculture. As you learn to work with compost and bokashi, with a diverse selection of plants that work together rather than against each other's purposes. Exchanging nutrients in natural balanced cycles of decomposition and regeneration. Look to the trees. You can't go wrong when you emulate the plants themselves in order to create, nurture and foster plant life.

Corporate Social Responsibility

The idea of growing food in poor periurban areas is not quite new, but making a commitment to a long termeffort is. Too many well intentioned gardens, efforts on the part of community members without sponsorship and proper strategy, management and supervision, fall apart before too long. That is why certain companies intent on making a charitable difference to people's lives choose to do so in a more orderly and businesslike fashion than you might have thought. Positive Cycle's philosophy is to respect the willingness to give that can be found in every human spirit by caring for and being responsible for the correct and therefore not wasteful management and application of donations of time, energy and money. We believe it is a tragedy to plants seeds than will never be harvested and that's why the follow through and the goal of sustainability are so important on all of the food growing schemes where we have had the privilege of teaching people what we know about growing plants for food and profit. By 'counting the beans' so to speak we make absolutely certain that every single cent donated to the schools and creches where we are helping people to grow crops makes the most difference it possibly can. We actually have spreadsheet already prepared that need only specifics of land area and available water and labour to be able to cost micro farm start ups and project their ultimate profitability.

So many plants... the value of diversity

 If you can imagine what might happen to a whole field of cabbages, growing as far as you can see all around you, should a pathogen to which that particular type of cabbage is particularly vulnerable happen to strike, then you will quickly be able to realise the value of a diverse field. When the cabbage has, say, origanum and spring onions as neighbours and the next large plant in the planting plan is a brinjal, rather than another cabbage, then there is a barrier between our first sick cabbage and all the others of its kind in the planting plan. This means that although a pathogen might find its way onto one of your cabbages, that is not to say that your entire cabbage crop will be affected. In fact it is quite possible that some of the companion plants around these hypothetical cabbages vulnerable to infection may destroy the pathogen. Certainly other aspects of the bio dynamic system will be destroying pathogens and reducing the likelihood of infections. Not only is bio dynamic soil full of the most diverse array of micro organisms possible but the earthworms and associated microbes at work throughout the soil will be progressively removing or destroying pathogens as healthy germs are added to the soil. This diverse approach, addressing both microbes and macrobes is what creates the rock solid stable agricultural system that is bio dynamics. Building soil rather than depleting soil.should be the goal and diversity is what makes it possible. A diverse garden orfield, to put it simply, is worth far far more than the sum of itsparts.

Using mulch

When used properly mulch is one of the best natural ways to foster the growth of soil organisms and limit damage to plants from extremes of temperature in the soil as well as control weeds and break down into additional organic 'food' for the soil organisms kept so healthy by the stable temperature and slow moisture loss provided by the mulch. Mulch is really practically any organic matter laid on top of soil as a top layer. Usually at least a couple of inches thick. One problem with mulching can be the difficulty some experience in obtaining sufficient mulch. Mulch is of course for sale at co ops and nurseries but if you need to avoid spending money (as many of the community projects where Positive Cycle provide material assistance and training do) then organic material available on the land will need to be used. It may seem impossible to find enough mulch to create a blanket several inches thick covering your entire growing area but take a closer look and where organic material is in short supply Positive Cycle will place a substantial wager that there is someone nearby who burns organic material. In a misguided attempt to 'clean up' a great deal of extremely valuable organic material is wasted. (It is worth noting that ash from fires is also a valued soil additive but that is for another blog post.)

Maintaining the disciplines of vermiculture, anaerobic fermentation and also simple aerobic composting will assist you to create rich soil with more than ample supplies of dried leaves and other plant matter to use as mulch. Particularly as a barrier against moisture loss in this one of the water poor countries, mulch is a valuable lesson worth applying, whether you are a market gardener in a hot and dusty township or a hobbyist in the well watered greenery of northern Johannesburg.