5 Easy Ways To Build Soil Health For FREE 😱 🆓

What's up everyone. Kevin from Epic Gardening here. Today we're talking about building your soil. So I know I've got some hydroponic stuff here. This is the Aponix Vertical Barrel, but out in the front yard, I'm doing a lot of soil work and it all is predicated under the thesis of build the soil, feed the soil, feed the plants, right? I'm focused on the soil because the soil does all the work to feed the plants. Of course, there's some foliar feeding. There's some other techniques we can use for our plants. However, building our soil is going to be our number one tactic for making a healthy, happy garden that really does a lot of the work for us. In today's video, we're going over five ways that you can do it for nearly cheap or free and exactly how to do so. Method number one is going to be called a dynamic accumulator. Sounds fancy. It's very, very simple. People will use things like daikon radish. They will use things like comfrey, stinging nettle, all sorts of different plants can be used as a dynamic accumulator. But let's talk about what it actually does. So you have your soil surface right here. Now below, way down here, there's a ton of nutrition, micronutrients, minerals, et cetera, that really aren't accessible by anything that we're growing as edibles for the most part. And what we're doing is we're taking something like a daikon radish that gets really deep or comfrey, which roots can get over 10 inches deep into the soil. And we're saying, Hey, go down there, get all that good stuff that we really want and need up in our normal soil surface. That first six inches, bring it up for us, bring it into the plant matter. And then what we'll do is we'll either take that and throw it onto our compost heap, thus bringing it into our, our whole ecosystem, our whole cycle, or we bring it up, we chop it and drop it. We use it as mulch. And then the other benefit of that is that these roots are creating big holes in the soil that are going to be oxygenating our soil, breaking it up if you're heavy clay. So there's a lot of different advantages to using a dynamic accumulator. Option number two, composting. I've talked about it a million and one times, and I'm sure you've heard about it a million one times yourself. Hopefully you're doing it. Here I have the bio stack. I think it's an outdated model. You can't really get this anymore, but it's a standard bin composter that I'm doing really basic stuff on and just breaking down all my scraps, all my food scraps, all of my yard waste, et cetera, making sure I layer it properly. And it's a beautiful, beautiful way to add more organic matter into your soil. Compost is going to help with water retention. It's going to help lighten up heavy clay soil. So if you're not composting and at the very least worm composting, then you are really missing out on basically free soil fertility and soil improvement. Suggestion number three is mulching. Now it's not the absolute best suggestion out there, although I find that it's, it's absolutely necessary in the garden, but there are other ways that are a little bit better as far as building your soil. But I consider mulching a way to not lose your soil quality. So if you're mulching, if you're throwing some straw mulch on, then you're at the very least preserving your soil quality. And overall you're actually building it if you think about it, because the straw is going to break down, the bark's going to break down, whatever you are using is actually going to break down. And there are many different methods. Back to Eden Gardening would be one prime example of this where mulching is the key strategy for building soil. I will say it does take longer than other methods, but if that is something that you're willing to do, that's the price you're willing to pay in time, then it can be extremely, extremely valuable. So our fourth option is going to be cover cropping. Now this is something that people will do all the time if they're market gardeners, if they're a permaculturist trying to improve a certain area of land. But I think a lot of home gardeners don't consider this, especially because most of us are growing in raised beds. So we think, you know, what's the point of cover cropping a raised bed? Well, if you live in an area that you can't grow a whole lot in the winter, it might make sense to throw a cover crop or a green manure on because otherwise that soil is going to be bare. And the number one rule of keeping good soil is not letting it be bare no matter what. So at the very least you're mulching, but by using a cover crop, you're going to be doing two, three different amazing things for your soil. So the first one is if you're growing anything that's a legume, that's going to be a nitrogen fixer. You're stealing nitrogen from the air and putting it into the soil, right? So that's number one. Number two, you have those dynamic accumulators. Many of those are offered in cover crop mixes. The daikons, the comfrey, the stinging nettle, all those are often offered in a fall cover crop mix. It's fall right now. If you're watching this video, you can also cover crop in other times of the year. So not a big deal. Two, you're doing the dynamic accumulator thing. So you're kind of combining two methods there. And then three what you're doing is basically if we think about how plants grow, a lot of their energy is coming from the sun. So you're effectively stealing energy from the sun and also the air and putting it into your soil. And so you might think, aren't we, aren't we actually taking from the soil because the plants are taking nutrients from the soil. It seems like it's counterproductive. Not true, because you're actually getting resources from outside the system and putting it into your soil along with the fact that what you're doing is you're chopping and dropping usually. So you don't just rip all your cover crop out and take it off of your soil. What you do is you cut it down at the soil surface and let it just lay there and act almost as a green mulch. People will call it a green manure. So number four, cover cropping. I usually cover crop during the winter just because even though I can grow here in San Diego, oftentimes there's some beds that, you know, I just need a little break and I want to do some cover cropping, improve that soil and get ready for the next year. Number five, our final suggestion, and this is kind of a weird one and it does require you to have some poultry. You need to have some chickens. My friend Stephen Cornett over at nature's always right. It's about 15 miles that way. Really good guy. I've done a bunch of videos with him. He uses this technique and this would be using chickens. So chickens are going to do a few different things for you. First of all, they're going to make use of a lot of your, your waste. You can throw your scraps to them. You can throw maybe some slightly mushy moldy or not so saleable produce. You can throw that over to them and they're going to make use of that. They're going to scratch it into the first few inches of soil as well as their droppings are full of both beneficial bacteria that are going to kickstart your soil life and they're full of nutrients as well. And they're going to scratch those into the soil as well. So you can think of chickens kind of as like little mini tillers that are running around eating things that you need eaten and converting them into things that you need in the soil. And then on top of that, they're going around and actually doing the mixing part for you as well. And so that's why you see people like Joel Salatin moving around their chickens in these little electric sort of cages. I think they're electric. Anyways, what he'll do is he'll move them from patch to patch and have them do that work slowly over the course of an entire plot of land. Now that's not very accessible for most of us. We don't really even need to do that, but you can at least consider working in chickens into your fertility process for building that soil. So there we have it. Five different ways that you can build your soil practically for free. And now I know they range in complexity, but let's go over them one more time. Number one, dynamic accumulators, things that mine the subsoil for minerals and nutrients like comfrey, like a radish, a daikon, like a stinging nettle. All of those are wonderful, especially when you combine them with two, cover cropping, cover cropping is going to keep the soil protected. It's going to pull nutrients from the air and the sun into the soil. And you've got that dynamic accumulator thing going on as well. You chop and drop it. You leave it on the soil as a green mulch, green manure, and boom, you've built your soil for just a little bit of money and a little bit of time. Number three, composting. You can go Bokashi composting, which is fermenting and then breaking it down very quickly. You can go vermicomposting, which is worm composting. And one of my favorite, favorite methods because it makes such quick work of food waste, turn it into beautiful castings that you can use in your soil. And then finally you have your classic hot composting in a bin. You need about one cubic yard of space before you actually start to get that heat that you really need, that 150, 160 degrees. But once you break that down, boom, you've turned your, your waste, your scraps, your food scraps, your yard scraps, whatever into compost that you can just work right into your soil. And then number four, mulching. You've got so much opportunity to work bark, straw, grass clippings, et cetera, into the soil slowly. It's going to help protect the soil. It's going to keep moisture levels more stable, but also over time, boom, that's going to actually work its way into the soil. You can combine mix and match these methods. A lot of people will mulch with a mixture of like compost and grass clippings because that's going to work its way in. And it's also going to add a lot of slow release fertilizer to the soil over time. Our final method is the chicken method. That's basically where you're just using other organisms like poultry to supplement and do a lot of work for you. So what chickens are going to do is among many things that they do, you're going to feed them scraps. You're going to feed them whatever they want to eat. Oftentimes waste products that you would normally be throwing away or maybe working into your compost. And what they'll do is they'll turn that into chicken manure. They're going to work that in the soil by scratching it in and they're going to scratch other things in as well. So they're doing some labor for you and they're also converting waste into fertility. And that's a wonderful, wonderful way to get some free fertility in your soil. Thank you so much for watching guys. I'm really curious. I know that there's, this is only five methods. I know there's 15 more, at least I can think of off the top of my head right now. So if you have a favorite method, cheap, easy DIY style method for building your soil, drop a comment because I'm learning and I would love to know some of your favorites. I picked some of my favorites. There's like 15 more I can think of, like I said, but drop one and let me know what you do because maybe I'll do a little roundup of some of what the Epic gardening community has to say about it. Because building your soil is the number one thing that you can do to have a successful garden. And it is the number one thing that I've messed up in the past in my own garden. So I hope some of these suggestions are helpful to you. Maybe it kind of spurs the right mentality, the right action. You get out there and you start building that soil. Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.