What is a fertile garden, and how do we get there?

Most of us gardeners, are always hoping for a bigger and better crop for our efforts. As Buddhists we can turn around, or at least justify, that selfish thought by a desire to free ourselves and others from the conventional industrial agricultural complex, and connect personally with the sources of our food. A big part of that equation is to understand that as growers, we are caretakers of life below the soil surface as well as above. To feed ourselves we feed the microorganisms that feed the plants that feed us. We work with, mimic and support natural systems. In doing so we find ourselves as part of rather than apart from nature.

Spring Wind Farm now has approximately 12,000 sf of vegetable gardens. If  we follow the old school organic gardening recommendation of adding 1” of compost or organic matter per year, that amounts to  37 cubic yards of compost each year. In my own experience (with midwestern soils much darker with organic matter), I have had mostly acceptable production with lower applications. I also know a local vegetable farmer here in the midwest who gets truckloads of compost delivered most years. My point is that while we can grow decent amounts of food under less than ideal soil conditions, by developing a soil improvement program the amount of food per dollar and hour spent will increase. Some heavy feeding crops like corn in fact won’t do well at all without enough fertilizer.

The conventional fertility model imagines adding nutrients to feed the crops themselves. But what if the process was less direct and more like a web, a soil food web? This is now referred to as soil biology.  In my own gardening I started to think about feeding the worms with compost and mulch years ago, but still felt like there were times to add nitrogen (N) or other organic, but basically chemical, amendment. Adding to the complexity of post-conventional agriculture, regenerative agriculture, named for practices that regenerate soils depleted by conventional farming, has exploded on the scene in recent years. For the past few years now I’ve been familiarizing myself with some of these soil biology enhancing systems to try to make sense of the claims of the various camps of new ag. 

When I study the various new farming systems out there now, it first sounds like each is a complete body of answers to every grower’s problems and entirely different from one another. This is of course not the case. Rather there are different approaches to a few very similar questions. Believing that the conventions of 20th century agriculture, i.e. repeated cultivation, a resulting dependence on synthetic fertilizers, chemical pesticides and herbicides, were no longer sustainable, and were in fact gravely damaging to soil, they instead increasingly saw the soil as a living thing or community of life that in a natural system supports plant life. The systems and practices I have looked at focus primarily on this life in the soil, or soil biology. 

Yet I still do not believe biology is the whole answer. Chemistry still has a part to play in our success as growers. Blueberries at SWF will never thrive with only biological improvements. An acidifier such as sulfur is needed. The more holistic view that I’m starting to see is that biology enhancing systems can replace the majority of the old N-P-K chemical inputs, but mineral (chemical) deficiencies, mostly discovered by soil testing, have to be addressed and may be one-time inputs. Some of the bigger names in biological farming include Dr. Elaine Ingham’s Soil Food Web School, Korean Natural Farming and the Johnson-Su Bioreactor. Each of these has its own techniques to produce a rich compost with specific kinds of bacteria and fungi. The Johnson-Su is the composter I had in the basement of the farmhouse last year. It tends to be fungally dominant because of the woodchips used and is best for tree crops. The Soil Food Web School, emphasises specific composting methods and microscopy to track the resulting micra-fauna in one’s compost. Korean Natural Farming’s methods are particularly like fermented foods, cultivating local bacteria into useful recipes that can be scaled up. No doubt there are other systems out there. 

Another thing these methods have in common is that they do not depend on producing enough compost to cover beds or fields an inch deep every year. Instead they use compost teas or extracts to spray on soil, leaves and seeds. So this brings me back to the farm and to my gardens here. While I made maybe two yards of compost at home this year, not nearly enough to cover my garden beds, I do have a wheelbarrow load left that will make 10’s of gallons of tea that will cover all my beds with a well-cultured, bacteria-rich inoculant. Going forward I want to cultivate and harvest soil microorganisms from around my property and neighborhood to add to my compost and increase the diversity of life in my garden soil. Plants have mutually beneficial interactions with soil bacteria. They provide things each other needs. These bacteria and higher soil life forms produce nitrogen in a form plants can use. Plants produce sugars bacteria want. With greater bacterial diversity in the soil, the more likely it is that there will be the microbes that our variety of crops can best work with.

So then, what strategies might we use at the farm to maximize food production and care for the soil life? 

1. Purchase compost - Positives: delivered ready (or almost ready) to use organic amendment. Will improve soil texture. Will add some nutrients and biologicals. Compost can be tested too! Our native soil at the farm is low in organic matter and drains very quickly. We would address these two issues by investing once or twice in a large amount of compost.  Negatives: cost, and not as finished ready as you’d like.  If the hoop house is  800sf and we wanted to work in 4” of compost, that would be 10 cubic yards. If we wanted to work in 1” into all 12,000sf of gardens then you’re at 74 cu yds. At $60/yd that’s like $4500. That’s a lot of groceries! Is that what you paid? In my region it’s less than half that.   https://mcgillcompost.com/compost-calculator/ 

2. Make compost - Positive: cultivates very local soil beneficials, inputs are farm waste, can adjust and control finished product to suit vegetables or trees.    Negative: it’s a lot more work, fowl eat much of our kitchen scraps reducing output but they trade us for eggs. As much as I’ve harped on turning the compost, I noticed that I turned my own only 2-3 times last year, and as Sanha explains about their method in Toronto, leaves and kitchen scraps are added throughout the year with only some aeration forking. In the fall we both end up with a finished product to spread. I screen mine through ½” hardware cloth to separate out the stuff that’s not ready. With more people and raw materials, it is of course possible to produce more faster.

Recommendation: Buy compost but also make a smaller amount and use it to make tea/extract to spray soil/leaves/seeds. Add local sources of soil life from across the farm, meaning soil samples from various locations, manure from farm animals, grass cuttings, chips/twigs from farm, food scraps.

3. Leaf mold & soiled straw - leaf mold is good as part of a seed starting and potting soil mixes, and as soil amendment to increase organic matter in soil which the soil at the farm can definitely use. Soiled straw from goats and chickens is relatively high in nitrogen but needs to break down before general use as do the leaves. I know you’ve combined these some which is fine but separate composting allows you to have true leaf mold available for its specific uses. 

I’ll say this again later, much of your choices come down to manageability. What practices are manageable considering time, cost and personnel? I tried to fertilize more regularly at home in 2025 but still probably did only a quarter of what I should. I found time to make compost tea only once and soil testing is still just a promise for the coming year!   

4. Johnson-Su Bioreactor - This is the composter I had in the farmhouse basement. Pos: no turning! We have the hardware for one bin already. This method produces a mycorrhizal fungal dominant compost that is especially beneficial for trees. One bin in the basement of the farmhouse every year could produce enough finished product to supply enough spray for all the trees we’ve planted out for some years to come. I have recently read but haven’t verified that there is ecto- and endo- mycorrhizae. Vegetables benefit from the endo- and woody plants from the ecto-. Which exactly the J-S bioreactor produces, I don’t know.  Negative: Need a source of wood chips which is the main ingredient. Also requires regular watering which we managed with a timer and soaker hose. Also requires the addition of worms after initial hot phase. Supposedly it needs to be kept above freezing to keep biology alive through the winter. I suspect that inside the hoop house or lower level of the barn would suffice, but then water isn’t as convenient at least in the barn currently. I have just purchased some (endo-) mychorrizhal fungi to inoculate seeds and roots in my own garden and will report back on the effects.

Recommendation: Even a small annual production would benefit our tree growing aspirations. Since delivered woodchips seem hard to come by, we should get our wood chipper working.

5. Biochar - Positive:  Its physical structure provides a home for bacteria or holding zone for nutrients and is recommended for the sandy/gravely loam at the farm. The source material is free, coming either from woodshop cutoffs or buckthorn removal. Neg: Is it too difficult for retreatants to make? If a batch was made once a year, all the vegetable gardens would get some kind of coverage in less than five years

6. Vermiculture - Glad to hear you’re moving ahead with this one again. Supposedly the richest natural fertilizer with many benefits.

These higher value amendments are worth producing because they yield organic matter, into mineral nutrients and biologicals. And can be turned in teas/extracts that get the goodness where it’s needed, i.e. onto leaves as a foliar feeding, at the root zone when watering by hand especially but can also be run through an irrigation system. Coating seeds before or when planting also is supposed to be really helpful especially with the fungi. I’m making a vow to use a lot more teas this year, but I think I’ll still be buying some bagged organic fertilizer and/or commercial compost this year too.

7. No or Low Till -  When the earth is plowed much of the soil biology is killed. The short term effect is an increase in fertility, mainly nitrogen from the bodies of decaying bacteria and fungi. Long term, after repeated, regular cultivation, fertility goes down as soil biology cannot regenerate fast enough. This is how we became dependent on synthetic fertilizers. This is how our topsoils were eroded by wind and rain. This might not seem like much of an issue for gardening. But if we start to believe that soil life is also precious, then we will want to minimize the harm (ahimsa) we cause to that life too. No or low till looks cultivate minimally and shallowly; doing just enough to plant. It includes not removing roots when we weed except for those that spread or come back from the roots. It means cutting crops off at the surface too.

   
   

8. Soil Tests - I admit I still haven’t followed through on this myself yet, but without testing we’re just guessing what our gardens need to some extent. Weed growth does tell us something about mineral deficiencies, but why not use a tool that might reveal a missing mineral that our composts were never going to produce? I guess my own hesitation has to do with the fact that our food production is pretty good; I’m covering the bases with compost and fertilizer already. What difference can it make? Would testing be easier to rationalize if we were growing to sell? How else do we know if we are actually regenerating (improving) our soils, or when we can apply less compost or other inputs? Especially when some crops at the farm seem to elude success, like corn and blueberries, understanding mineral and organic matter levels could provide a lot of insight.

Just as in our practice, as growers we need to go deeper, we need to investigate ways we can be present to the garden ecology we engage with. Dirt is something on our shoes and under our nails. Soil, on the other hand, is alive. Earth is one of the great elements, and has it's energy and complexities. We have to remember that the vegetables we grow are all cultivars after all. We've been selecting traits we like for generations. They are domesticated and mostly dependent on us. They are us in a way and we perform little dances or worship services when we join ourselves to the soil as growers, gardeners and farmers. We and our domestic plants (and animals) are not wild, and at the same time, not other. So let's keep trying to be skillful, and enjoy!