3 Free Ways to Make Your Own Soil for Growing Organic Food - Regenerative Gardening & Permaculture
Want to grow your own food, but the price of garden soil is holding you back? If you get your soil in bags from the big box stores you’ve probably noticed that dirt isn't dirt cheap. In this video I’m going to show you how to make your own garden soil from scratch for free. Rich, nutritious soil is easy to make and all you need to do it is time.
Here at Forever Food Forest we explore ways of growing food without the use of pesticides, herbicides, or commercial fertilizers, and instead we rely on permaculture principles such as creating symbiotic relationships in the garden inspired by nature to grow food that’s good for the garden and good for the planet.
With these soil building methods that I’m about to show you, you will have beautiful, nutritious soil that you can use in your garden in as little as 3 months.
My main goal this year is to grow good soil. To do that I am taking inspiration from a forest. Nature - it’s the best teacher. Imagine a forest. There are a bunch of trees and one of those trees falls. It starts to decompose and all of these natural organisms move in and break down the tree, release the nutrients and then the nutrients are taken up by the plants around the tree and the cycle continues. I don’t recommend decomposing a whole tree in your yard (that will take forever), but what I do suggest is using wood chips. What you want is untreated wood chips or arborist mulch as it's sometimes called. You can get free wood chips from either your local tree removal service, or an arborist, or through a service called Chipdrop.com which I do not recommend.
All you do is dump your wood chips out in a layer that’s about 2-6 inches deep (or more if you want to get rid of stubborn weeds). As the wood chips break down, they’re going to release nutrients and they’re also going to help retain moisture and moderate the temperature of the soil . Once they’re fully broken down there’s also going to be a lot of humus that is going to get incorporated into the soil.
Humus is the black stuff left over after decomposition. It provides plants with nutrients, and improves soil texture and water retention.
You can also just leave your wood chips in a pile to break down over time. However, this process is slow and can take up to 10 years. It is hands off and the resulting soil is going to be absolutely gorgeous, but if you don’t want to wait, you can speed it up by incorporating nitrogen. Nitrogen speeds up decomposition by heating up the pile and that heat helps break it down in as little as 6 months depending on where you live.
If your native soil is sandy or dry, you can improve water retention by adding leaf mold. Leaf mold is easy to make and all you need is at least a cubic yard of leaves, water, oxygen, and time. Leaf mold is made when leaves are broken down through a fungal decomposition process. The result is a spongy, nutrient rich soil amendment that your plants are gonna love. It is similar in properties to peat moss, but much more environmentally sustainable.
Lastly, you can use herbivore manure to improve your native garden soil. Horse manure is great as it already has some wood shavings incorporated in it and once it’s decomposed makes excellent nitrogen rich soil.
These are just some gateway methods into soil regeneration and building up your own soil. And granted there are way more ways of building your soil. These are just some beginner friendly methods that you can start today. For me building good soil is like an investment that keeps paying out for years to come. It’s not just about nutrients -It’s also about the microbiology of the soil. A teaspoon of soil has more microorganisms in it than there are people on earth. Through these soil regeneration methods we are creating a symbiotic relationship between plants and soil. If you like to learn more about that, make sure to hit that subscribe button.
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