By Mary Lowther
Spring at last! Spring at last! You have done everything you can to get your garden off to a good start. You’ve bought coir (coconut fibre), fertilizer and compost to amend the soil, dug it into your plot, sown seed and transplanted carefully nurtured seedlings. You have sacrificed and prayed to the appropriate garden deities, and how do they reward your devotion? With spindly plants that produce nothing edible!
How can this be when you have been so faithful and observant?
The answer is a combination of torrential winter rains and logging practices that do not return extracted nutrients back into the ground, leaving us with depleted soil that doesn’t encourage microbes to thrive. Plants cannot produce well without microbial soil because these microorganisms transform nutrients into something plant roots can absorb; they penetrate plant roots and form a symbiotic relationship with plants, taking carbon from the plants and returning the favour by exuding nutrients that they have transformed into plant food from within their guts.
So how does this impact your lack of results? Since plants cannot absorb the fertilizers if soil microbes aren’t present, my first guess is that the compost you bought has been sterilized, which of course has killed every beneficial life form along with the bad. I suggest creating colonies of these vital microbes by making your own compost; think of it as inoculating the soil with probiotics. If you live in an apartment you could try a worm-composting affair or simply bury food scraps into the pots along with fertilizer. I used to blend vegetable and fruit scraps with water and dug this into pots but nowadays I’m more fortunate and have a yard to play in so I make compost in bins.
I add compost and fertilizer to the soil in spring when I prepare new beds and if there’s any leftover I add more of both about a month before the crop is ready, again before re-planting and before I sow a cover crop. In between times, compost tea adds booster shots of microbes every few weeks, coating the plants with easily absorbed essential enzymes, vitamins and whatever else may be brewing. Manure will get your compost heap really going well because it adds enzymes and nutrients the animal ate. It’s always useful to have a friend with a horse.
I read that microbes inhabit the human gut in much the same way, attaching themselves to our stomach lining, digesting whatever we eat and breaking down the food into particles our cells can absorb.
It made me wonder if we evolved into gardeners because our remotest ancestors were simply tired of waiting for food to drop by and decided to go look for a decent meal.
David, heathen Sassenach that he is, argues that this is a natural process that occurs throughout history.
“Look at the Scots,” he argues, “They conquered an empire for the English because they couldn’t face another day of haggis and blood pudding. India was conquered because you Hielanders went looking for a decent tandoori house. Why should prehistory be any different?”
That’s a pretty telling argument until you realize that his forebears invented gefilte fish. There’s enough culinary deprivation to go around so, whatever your ancestry, the next time you dig into some butter chicken or beef korma take a minute to think how much your garden appreciates an enhanced diet as well.
Please contact mary_lowther@yahoo.ca with questions and suggestions since I need all the help I can get.