How to Build Fertile Soil

Learn the basics for building fertile soil in your garden by joining Doreen G. Howard as she discusses no-till soil and permanent beds.

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Learn the basics for how to make soil fertile in your garden by joining Doreen G. Howard as she discusses no-till soil and permanent beds.

It’s a fundamental axiom of organic gardening and farming, and once you understand what “feeding the soil” means for building fertile soil, you’ll also understand why organic methods, and no-till techniques in particular, work so well.

Even though you can’t see most of it, a complex soil food web lives in your garden; it’s teeming with earthworms, mites, bacteria, fungi — all kinds of mostly microscopic, interdependent organisms that release mineral nutrients and create the loose soil structure crops need to thrive. Beneficial mycorrhizal fungi (see Mycorrhizal Fungi,) grow in and around plant roots, mining subsoil for nutrients and water to share with your crops. Other microorganisms prevent diseases and help plants withstand insect attacks.

Your crops actually help feed all this underground life. Ray Weil, a renowned soil scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park, says that while plants invest a “substantial amount of their photosynthesis in feeding soil microbes, the plants are obviously getting benefits back.”

Think of plants, with their green chlorophyll, as little solar-powered engines that pipe a steady flow of carbohydrates out through their root hairs. Between 20 percent and 40 percent of a plant’s total carbohydrate production is released into the soil through its roots. In the nutrient-rich area around the root hairs, microscopic bacteria and fungi feed and multiply. Nematodes (tiny worms) and other critters move in to feed on the bacteria; in turn, the root hairs absorb nutrients released by the concentration of microbes.

  • Updated on Jul 19, 2022
  • Originally Published on Jun 1, 2003
Tagged with: compost, cover crops, Doreen G. Howard, fertile soil, growing crops, mulch, no-till, soil
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