Real Earth Gardening

Everything in healthy gardening comes from good earth.

There is no substitute to soil that has been built from aged manure, natural top soil and worm castings. These are the foundation tools to your garden of which nothing else matters if the foundation isn't right.

The great thing about real earth gardening is it takes no gimmicks, cost very little and is simple to do yourself. The first thing to remember is that there are living organisms in good soil called mycorrhiza  which are essential to every living plant. Purchasing aged manure from a box store that has been sitting in heat and lack of oxygen for weeks will not have those living nutrients. The same goes for top soil that has sat in a nursery cement bin or worm castings that are not fresh. Remember, grandmother didn't have plastic. And plastic is becoming more and more suspicious as one of our chemical influences on our health.

So where do we get our basic tools. That terrible word called work and another one called effort. Now we need to check craigslist for someone with horses, cattle or chickens that desperately wants to get rid of that manure. If it's not aged we will need to put a small area outback for it to sit a year in but if you put in enough effort you will find aged manure that is directly from a farm environment.

We may have top soil right in our yard that we can use. If not, we need to check with that farmer again.

Now we have to find some worm castings. Worms were just naturally in Grandmothers garden and she knew this was a good sign. We now know that worms create the most biological miracle creating nutrient rich soil. If we don't have worms in every shovel of soil then we are going to have to reintroduce what was naturally there in the first place.

A worm farm needs to be made, link here or here, and you need to purchase some red wiggler worms for about $15 like this. This is going to help take care of your leaves and kitchen waste and build you fantastic soil with the nutrients you need to be healthy.

This effort will reward you in so many ways in the long run, but it will take effort.