For people who want to grow more food with less work. 🌱 This is my weekly newsletter loved by 38,000+ subscribers—here's what one of them had to say: "These are not the regular run-of-the-mill garden-based emails. You actually touch on more unusual tidbits that encourage me to keep growing and learning."
how to make the best garden soil (for cheap)
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For the past year, my husband has been collecting bags of ugly or close-to-spoiling produce from our local grocery store. They offer these vegetables for people's compost piles (think: wilted chard, ripe bananas, and bruised apples—it's astounding what they get rid of!), but we also use them to give our chickens something to do in winter when there's not much to forage in the yard. We chop it all up and dump everything into a raised bed that we built specifically for composting, and the chickens do all the work of turning the scraps while getting some exercise and feeding on a variety of organic greens at the same time. (Our grocer sells only organic produce, which is a plus.) Some of this stuff also gets laid on top of the raised beds in our vegetable garden, which we then layer with fallen sticks and branches, pine cones, brown packaging paper that we put through the paper shredder, spent coffee grounds, old straw or chicken bedding, ashes from the woodstove, pretty much anything that biodegrades. I'm a big fan of composting in place, especially in winter when the weather takes care of breaking things down for you. So often we get paralyzed by all those composting "rules" and think we need to maintain three different bins so we can rotate through different piles, but honestly, this "lazy" way of composting has worked well for me, even in a climate that drops down into the single digits and gets snow as early as November. Once spring rolls around, I simply top off my raised beds with a fresh layer of aged, crumbly compost or a compost/soil mix, and anything that hasn't decomposed yet will naturally continue decomposing underground. This is just one of the many ways I make my own soil, and I've never had better soil in my life! (I started doing this more seriously four years ago.) Making your own soil is very easy and often more economical too. If you want a more methodical way to make soil, I also recommend trying my no-dig garden but starting it now, if you can. That way, your new soil will be ready to go in spring!
Where I live, several kinds of businesses offer customers free compostable materials just so they don't have to trash them: juice bars, coffeeshops, grocery stores, raw food and vegan restaurants. It doesn't hurt to ask the next time you're in the store if they can part with a bag or bucket of scraps for you to take home. We pick up a bag weekly or biweekly to supplement what comes out of our own kitchen, and it helps our local businesses reduce waste. (They would otherwise just throw them in the trash.) As they say... one man's trash is another one's treasure! P.S. Start making your own nutrient-rich garden soil now so it's ready by spring! P.P.S. It's never too early to start planning your spring garden. Get ahead of the season and start inventorying your seeds and plotting out what to grow and how much of it. My Ultimate Garden Diary can help you track all of this, and more!​ |
Garden Betty
For people who want to grow more food with less work. 🌱 This is my weekly newsletter loved by 38,000+ subscribers—here's what one of them had to say: "These are not the regular run-of-the-mill garden-based emails. You actually touch on more unusual tidbits that encourage me to keep growing and learning."