Healthy soil makes healthy plants makes healthy people. - Old organic maxim
Put most simply, organic is a method of growing food using only naturally occurring substances. Properly done, it recycles all wastes and improves the soil as it increases crop yields. Its goal is to work with nature’s laws and tendencies, rather than to counteract or defeat them. Practitioners of the method conceive of all life in the system as an interrelated whole to be strengthened, rather than as a group of creatures to be selectively supported, suppressed, or eliminated chemically.
Compost—the rotted remains of what was once living tissue—is both the source and destiny of life, and it is the heart and engine of the organic method. It. What was alive dies and decays to form a nourishing seedbed for new life. The concept is as old as life itself. Go into the woods and look closely at the forest floor. You’ll see the leaves and twigs of past years decaying to form a rich, spongy duff that nourishes the trees and plants currently growing there, which will in turn eventually die, decay, and nourish yet another generation of plants. William Shakespeare articulated it well when the Friar in Romeo and Juliet proclaimed: “The Earth that’s Nature’s mother is her tomb/ What is her burying grave, that is her womb.”
Compost is the perfect fertilizer, containing plant and animal remains, which naturally have the elements needed for the construction of new plants and animals. But compost is much more than just those elements. It is teeming with microscopic life of many kinds and functions. A teaspoon of fresh compost may contain billions and billions of living microorganisms. They tear apart and digest the remains of old plant, and multiply in a tumultuous explosion of life. A well-made compost pile can reach temperatures of 140 to 160 degrees Fahrenheit generated by the furious crescendo of microbial growth as these tiny bits of life colonize the feast of organic matter laid out for them.
Within each microorganism is a fluid that’s slightly acidic. When these tiny single-celled organisms die, the acid fluid spills into the water in the soil. This acid dissolves elements in the soil, forming soluble mineral salts, which further enrich the compost. Some of these soluble mineral salts, such as potassium nitrate, are plant nutrients and get absorbed by root hairs; without the acid from the compost, much of the soil’s mineral salt content would remain trapped in its insoluble state—of no benefit to plants.
Meanwhile, as the old plant matter (dead roots, leaves, and stems) is chewed up by the life in the soil, it eventually becomes a substance called humus. If you could be small enough for a particle of humus to seem as big as an automobile, you would see a dark, almost black lump with deep crevices, nooks, crannies, and channels creating an enormous surface area in a compact space. If you could stretch the particle out flat, the surface area would cover several acres. This humus particle is negatively charged, and it draws the positively charged ions to itself and holds them there.
Now nature, being the wonderful mother it is, has given the “soil solution” (as water in the soil is called) a remarkable property called the cation exchange capacity. As plant roots absorb and deplete positive ions from the soil solution, the cation exchange capacity replaces the ions to keep the cations at a fixed, balanced level. The replacement cations come from the humus particles, where they are stored on those negatively charged surfaces.
There’s something else about the soil cations that’s remarkable. ....read more
Share This Article
