The first step toward nourishing your land, be it a balcony garden or a vast acreage, is to learn how nature herself creates healthy, vibrant, life-filled, landscapes.
Healthy soil is easy to recognize. Healthy soil is living soil. Healthy soil is full of living roots from a diversity of plants. This diversity engenders a symbiotic relationship between what lives and grows above ground and what lives and grows below ground. This diversity gives life to a healthy landscape.
A healthy landscape might look like a wild meadow or wooded area – green and growing year-round with a diverse range of grasses, forbs, shrubs, and trees. Most landscapes created by humans are not richly biodiverse, as evidenced by manicured lawns, individual bedding plants poking out of weed cloth, or row crops planted in bare, tilled soil. These are artificial monocultures, not healthy ecosystems. As such, they rely on chemical inputs such as fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides.
The good news is that we are now re-learning how to work with natural systems that renew the health of our soils. By doing this we can:
- grow nutrient-dense foods and feed our communities without chemical inputs;
- infiltrate rainwater to mitigate flooding and drought while recharging groundwater basins;
- sequester copious amounts of carbon from the atmosphere, and return it to the soil where it can be utilized by living plants and living roots;
- restore healthy ecosystems that work to repair the health of our communities.
Here are the six fundamental principles for working with nature to create a vibrant, beautiful, productive ecosystem that is truly self-sustaining. These principles strengthen and vitalize the Four Ecological Processes.
The Six Principles of Soil Health
I. Minimize Soil Disturbance
Tillage, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, overgrazing, and fire are all soil disturbances that can adversely affect living communities above and below the soil surface. Every time you dig, plow, rototill, or bulldoze your soil, you rip apart the intricate and vital networks of insects, worms and microbes that create healthy soil structure. These networks create porous soil that can easily absorb rainwater while sequestering carbon. Concentrated fertilizers, especially chemical ones, disturb the soil by feeding monocrops select nutrients at the expense of a whole-systems, nutrient-rich habitat. Pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides kill soil organisms, lessening biodiversity in the soil itself and decreasing its ability to maintain immunity from disease. These inputs may directly contaminate soil, water, and food while killing pollinators and beneficial microorganisms, thereby threatening entire ecosystems. Over-grazing leads to compacted soils that are unable to infiltrate rainwater. Learn more about growing healthy plants while minimizing soil disturbance here.
II. Keep Your Soil Covered
Keeping the soil covered with living plants and/or organic matter (such as leaf litter, compost or mulch) is essential to soil because: 1) bare soil becomes too hot in the summer sun and too cold in the winter for soil organisms to live, 2) bare soil will suffer wind and rain erosion, 3) bare soil becomes dry and caked in summer and mud in winter, 4) bare soil provides no food source (neither plant nor root) for soil biology, and 5) bare soil attracts what are generally known as “weeds” as a repair mechanism. Read more here.
III. Maximize Diversity
The greater the number of plant species and also plant types that you can grow in a given area, the better. Each type of plant – grasses, brassicas, legumes, and trees and shrubs – contribute a different array of beneficial soil components and feed different types of microbes. A truly vibrant natural ecosystem may contain thirty or more plant species per square foot! Emulate this as well as you can. This podcast does a deep dive on the benefits of crop diversity.
IV. Keep Living Roots in the Soil As Long as Possible
With help from sunlight and rain, plants draw carbon from the atmosphere and convert it into sugars that their living roots leach into the soil. These sugars nourish soil-dwelling insects, earthworms and microbial organisms, providing them the energy needed to break down minerals and organic matter into bio-available nutrients that the plants can then use for healthy growth. Perennial plants that live from season to season and year to year provide a continuous exchange with soil microbes, drawing carbon down from the atmosphere to convert into sugar that is used as fuel. Annual plants benefit greatly from this network, and a variety of both warm season and cool season annuals will keep your ecosystem vibrant and healthy year-round. The more living roots you have in your soil (including “weed” roots!) the better. Here is a great podcast about how living roots capture carbon.
Here is a video about how living roots interact with fungi to create a nutritional network within the soil.
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Link to watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v88gbtKBTv4
V. Integrate Animals
Ecosystems do not function without animal inputs. Nature evolved as a system, with animals impacting the world’s vegetation. They prune, mow, and trample to remove brush, which allows sunlight to reach small germinating plants. They stomp dead vegetation into close contact with the soil where it can feed the subterranean life. They contribute nitrogen from their urine, and microbe-rich organic matter from their dung. Our ecosystem evolved with grazing animals – great herds of bison, elk, deer, and antelope – that were driven across the open landscape by predators. They would graze an area thoroughly, then move on. This would give the grazed area many months to recover. This cycle of disturbance and rest, coupled with the microbes contributed by the animals themselves, gave rise to the glorious biodiversity found in remote natural settings.
Here is how to raise healthy animals using only water and sunshine.
(13 minutes)
Link to watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqsL4SsEge0
VI. Understand your Context
Your context can simply be ecological. Growing bananas in Canada or growing rice in Arizona is simply not feasible. Starting with plants that are naturally vigorous in your area is vital to creating a sustainable ecosystem. Your time and money constraints are also something to take into account. Hardy plants that are suited to your environment and animals that are suited to your climate will require less attention and special equipment than delicate exotics, for instance. Each of us has many details and considerations to consider when managing our land. Accessibility, fire awareness, the safety of residents and visitors, and the practical aspects of moving, feeding, and fencing animals all figure in to our decision making. This article describes how soil health principles can be adapted to a specific context.
These Six Principles are the principles Nature herself uses.
Jump Starting Your Healthy Ecosystem
Nature uses the Six Principles to create a healthy vibrant ecosystem. Most of us live on soil that has been stripped bare of life by decades of disturbance – mechanical and chemical. Here are some easy and enjoyable ways to put life back into your soil while encouraging your soil microbes to do their thing.
Embrace Your Weeds
People often think that the roots of plants compete with each other for nourishment. In fact the opposite is true. A healthy diversity of living roots in the ground fosters a symbiotic community of microbes that transport carbon and minerals to all plants in the system.
While it is true that fast growing plants can “shade out” slower growing plants, the solution to this problem is to cut back or trample the faster growing plants, preserving the carbon and nutrients that these plants borrowed from the soil by laying them down to cover the soil, so that the nourishment is returned and the soil is not strip-mined.
Another common misconception is that some plants are “weeds” and thus should be eradicated. On the contrary, some vigorous plants grow well when soil has been badly disturbed or depleted. Hardy opportunists like thistle and bindweed are nature’s band-aids. They appear first when the soil has been laid bare, and their roots work to soften the soil while the organic matter they are made up of provides the first nourishment for the soil microbes that will work to revitalize the depleted soil.
Rather than ripping out these vigorous pioneers, we can mimic nature’s own lawnmowers – grazing and foraging animals. Bison, elk, deer and antelope would historically move in great herds, eating and trampling down the vegetation in one area before moving on – driven by predators – and giving that area a long period of time to rest and recover.
By cutting and trampling less desired plants we cover the soil while making the nutrients absorbed by those plants available to the plants that are germinating beneath the ground.
The wonderful Learning from Nature website has a great page about the benefits of weeds and how to manage them.
This video shows this principle in practice:
Enjoy Nature’s Bounty
Is your kale struggling? Look around! In the springtime here in Northen California, nature will give you an absolute bounty of greens. The peppery young leaves of brassicas like mustard and wild radish are delicious raw, steamed or sauteed, as are the mellow leaves of mallow. Winter purslane or Miner’s Lettuce tastes like the most tender spinach you can imagine, and it’s abundant here in damp shady locations in early spring. Nettles need to be harvested with care, but once cooked they lose their sting and taste like the color green personified.
Many other wild plants are too pungent to be edible by humans, but are wonderfully medicinal. When you find an unknown weed, try identifying it using an app such as iNaturalist or Picture This, then doing an internet search for potential uses!
This video takes a deeper look at appreciating wild plants.
Close Your Loop
When a plant or tree grows on your soil, it pulls nutrients out of the soil and converts sunlight into sugar to feed itself. When that plant dies or is harvested or cut back, the organic matter they leave behind should be returned to your soil. Why put this wonderful material in a yard waste bin and send it off to via truck to be processed at some remote location, then buy it back, packaged in plastic, as mulch or compost?
With an inexpensive chipper/shredder, tree trimmings can be made into instant mulch, or added to your compost pile. Larger branches can be left as nurse logs, piled as habitat for birds and reptiles, buried in order to absorb water in underground swales, or covered with dirt and planted as a hügelkultur.
This video shows some ways to minimize outside inputs:
Let Your Vegetation Rest
Whether you have grazing animals, or you use a mower, string trimmer, or scythe, letting your vegetation fully recover is the key to keeping your soil full of healthy roots and microbes.
The amount of rest you need after you have grazed or mowed an area depends on several things. The general rule is to let the vegetation rest until it has made a full recovery. In late spring when things are drying out in California, that might mean letting your property rest until a few months into the rainy season! If that’s the case, and you have animals, it’s a good idea to have a “sacrifice paddock” where they stay until things are growing again. Keeping the animals in one place for many months is a huge reset for that area, and with bedding, food, and manure buildup it can be a great place to plant into once the rains are about to start.
If you are watering over the summer, then you don’t really have a “dry season”, so the vegetation regrowth rule of thumb will hold. Depending on how much the grazing or mowing affected your vegetation, it may take five to eight weeks for it to fully recover.
If you are growing food or other crops, your rest period might consist of letting your old crop dye completely out while seeding into its residue, without tilling the soil. Crimping, mowing, trampling, or grazing the old crop will cause its roots to send out exudates, feeding the soil microbes, just as your new crop is taking root. Here is a great article on the power of cover crops.
Imitate Animal Impact
If you are not yet in a position to own or borrow grazing animals, you can mimic their impact by mowing judiciously, applying compost or manure and trampling it into the ground, then giving your land ample time to rest and regrow. Mowing with hand tools such as a scythe is particularly beneficial because it leaves the vegetation intact and in place, where it can decay without blowing away. The trampling action of humans using scythes causes minimal soil compaction compared to tractors! As mentioned above, your land should not be mowed or trampled again until the vegetation has made a full recovery.
Plant Hedgerows and Silvopasture
Planting native trees and shrubs around the perimeters of your property and incorporating trees and shrubs into your pastures brings enormous benefits, including adding biodiversity both above and below ground, keeping living roots in the soil year-round, creating habitat for wildlife, including birds and beneficial insects, and creating oasis of shade, quiet, and privacy for humans and livestock.
This video shows some of the many benefits of planting hedgerows:
Got Rain? Slow it. Spread it. Sink it. Store it!
This wonderful guide from the Sonoma County Resource Conservation District describes how to hold rainfall on your land to give transitional soil and plant roots the opportunity to absorb it before it runs off.
Experiment and Have Fun!
Does the idea of letting the weeds grow send shivers down your spine? Try using the “chop and drop” technique in just one small corner of your garden or yard. Try leaving a pile of branches on the ground, or a log, or a stump. Mulch one area with fallen leaves and another with shredded twigs. Sprinkle last year’s left over garden seeds on any bare dirt and cover lightly, just before it rains.
Watch what happens when you let nature do its work.