Grow Your Soil!: Harness the Power of the Soil Food Web to Create Your Best Garden Ever

Description

It’s possible to create a productive garden with very few inputs, no fertilizer, and no tilling. Grow Your Soil! guides home gardeners through the process of creating and maintaining rich, dark, crumbly soil that’s teeming with life while cultivating a beautiful, bountiful garden. With a combination of cover crops, constant mulching, and a simple-but-supercharged recipe for compost tea, author Diane Miessler shares with readers the techniques she used to transformed her own land over the course of a decade from a roadside dump for broken asphalt into a garden that literally stops traffic. Halftitle page Title page Copyright Page Dedication Acknowledgments Contents Foreword by Elaine R. Ingham Beauty, Magic & Tomatoes 10 Commandm Suggestions for Creating Healthy, Living Soil Making Soil: Building a “House” Chapter 1: The Skinny on Soil What Is Soil? What Makes Good Soil Good? What Good Is Good Soil? Chapter 2: Building a House Mulch Cover Crops Chapter 3: Build the Walls Soil Organic Matter The Soil Food Web: A Gardener’s Best Friend Biodiversity 101: Microbes Biodiversity 102: Algae, Bugs, Worms, and More Chapter 4: Install Ventilation, Plumbing & a Nice Pantry Step Away from the Rototiller! Make Paths What Is CEC? How to Increase CEC Chapter 5: Feed the Inhabitants Photosynthesis: Empty but Necessary Calories Macronutrients & Micronutrients To Test or Not to Test Chapter 6: Compost & Compost Tea Benefits and Tools Is It Compost or Is It Mulch? How to Build a Compost Pile Maintaining a Compost Pile: It Needs Your Love When Is It Done? Growing Pains Fungally or Bacterially Dominated? Worm Bins Frequently Asked Questions, Answered Compost Tea for a Non–Rocket Scientist with a Bucket Chapter 7: Where Do I Start? Step 1: Pick a Spot Step 2: Get Water to It Step 3: Decide Where You’ll Walk Step 4: Soften the Soil Step 5: Pull Stuff Up, Throw Stuff Down Step 6: Mulch Step 7: Plant Stuff Chapter 8: Housework and Home Repairs Maintenance = Mulch Putter, Don’t Work Glossary Bibliography Metric Conversions Index Cultivate Gardening Success with More Books from Storey Share Your Experience!