5 Garden Mistakes To AVOID For Healthy Soil And Healthy Plants

One of the biggest mistakes is bare soil, so we like to keep it covered. This is vetch growing between all of the squash plants. And if you add an extract after your broad forking, you're getting in the microorganisms down through that compaction layer and breaking everything up. Defeating your compaction means that your plant roots can go deeper to get more nutrients and water. Healthy soil equals healthy plants. Healthy plants, yep. Equals healthy people. Love it. So the first one is bare soil, so we like to keep it covered. Whether that be with straw mulches along the soil, that helps retain moisture, also feeds your biology. Or hardwood mulch, we like to use hardwood mulch at the farm, because that also feeds the biology. But that also means live cover crops, that can be vetch or rye or wheat. But that also extends to cover crops on the off-season as well. So once your crops come out of the ground and you're preparing for winter, really putting those cover crops down so it doesn't sit bare over the winter. Just allows for your microbiology to feed over the winter. And then when you use something like oats and peas, that's a winter kill that adds that organic matter for the spring decomp. And it just helps keep everything together. I'm really aware of this, Nicole, and this is something that I've been advocating myself for all these years. But not that many people know about the biointensive methods of production, where actually the crop is acting as the ground cover, the canopy. And this is a good example of this. The soil is covered, but we haven't put anything else in the plant. Just like the close spacing and the fact that the soil is so deep, at one point the plant just occupies all the growing space. You'll see to your right here, we're using ramule wood chips. This is for the flowers and the herbs. Again, the soil neatly covered here. But I want to show you something that I'm sure you'll like. Come on. We'll go to the greenhouse. So you see there's places where when we don't have crops that overlap, it's hard to create the canopy. So one of the strategies that we've been doing here is just planting cover crops. After the plants are into the ground. This is vetch growing between all of the squash plants. Vetch is a good nitrogen fixer too. Vetch is a good nitrogen fixer. The next mistake to avoid is heavy tillage or anything that will create kind of a pan. So when you till things, you create a compaction pan in your soil. So that's when you get compaction right on the tillage point. So what we use to break that up is a subsoiler. So a broadfork is a subsoiler, which gets down 12, 10 inches down into the soil. And that's breaking through compaction layers. And then if you add an extract after your broadforking, you're getting in the microorganisms down through that compaction layer and breaking everything up. So it's just aerating the soil in a much gentler way than tillage. I have to tell you, I'm happy to learn new things. I've never thought about putting compost. I just told you that I'm learning about compost extracts. It's really exciting. But to do it after the broadfork, it's really exciting. It works in a more conventional setting as well, where you can use the yeoman's plow to break up the soil. Would you have like a tank in the back of the plow? Yep. And then what we've done is we've added a pipe down the back. So you're getting it literally down. Yeah. So that would be on a larger scale. You can still do it. But in the market garden or in the garden, broadfork, then put your... Yep. And if you really want to double up, compost broadfork extract. All right. The next mistake to avoid in gardens, market gardens and home gardens is compaction. So compaction is really tough on your plants because plant roots can only grow down to about 150 to 200 pounds per square inch of pressure. So once they get that, they go out sideways. So defeating your compaction means that your plant roots can go deeper to get more nutrients and water. So compaction is basically... This is a nice one, eh? This is a nice bed because you can get your hand in pretty deep. So that's doing pretty good. But what leads to compaction is foot traffic is really bad for compaction. So anytime you step on a garden bed, you're compacting it. A good way to kind of defeat that in here would to be add mulches in between your rows. So people know that's where you step and this is not where you step. Bare soil is bad for compaction, especially outdoors, because rain can compact soils very easily as well. And then that creates a very small compaction layer. And then tillage creates the compaction layer on top. So just breaking through those. And that means your plant roots can get a lot deeper through the soil. What do you think about the concept of permanent raised beds, i.e. perma beds? We have those. We love them. So they're great to diminish. Yes, because you work a certain space every year. And that like over time, that's what creates healthier soil. Avoid synthetic fertilizers. Really to build your biology, you want to be using compost and compost extracts really to build up that population of microorganisms. Synthetic fertilizers are not adding any microorganisms. Most of them are salts because they are active in water. So then that creates kind of a salt layer on the top of your soil, too, which can almost go anaerobic at times as well. So we just want to avoid synthetic fertilizers. I've heard it once compared to steroids for your soil, whereas adding compost and natural ones like compost and extracts and wood chips and mulches, you're feeding your soil. So it's creating a healthier, more robust soil than just fertilizers. Let's say I'm doing the devil's advocate. Let's say I'm biking down the road here and I'm looking at the corn. And it's quite impressive. Like these are big stalks of corn, almost like six feet high, seven feet high, stacked. And, you know, I've been seeing this corn grow a year for like 15 years. The corn is tall, but how are the ears? Like that's the thing, too, like you can have good height, but what's your production like as well? Would you say also that perhaps like the side effects, not just on the soil, but on the runway, the water runway? Oh, 100 percent. Like there's that's why there's so much water protection. And in Ontario, we have the Water Act and all like the pesticides, because to create healthy, to work around the overspray in order to create healthy plants, but not like at the cost of human health sometimes, because it's going into our water and that's not the best thing ever. Like I grew up on Lake Erie, which is notorious for its gigantic algae bloom that happened from overspray of fertilizers. So that was like that's when people started to wake up and realize that excess runoff is not great because it's at the effect of our lakes. So we wheeled in some compost and you're in another video, we saw how to what makes good compost, what good compost is. And you brought an example of really amazing, beautiful compost. You had my 12 on 10 rating for sure. It's probably the nicest compost I've ever seen. Thank you very much. Actually, it is the nicest compost that I've ever seen. And so how does that substitute? Like, why is that better? Why aren't we just buying, you know, 20-20-20 and putting that in the tomatoes? It's healthier. So you're creating a healthier soil, which in the long run, like once you start adding compost and really building up your soil biology, you don't need to add compost every year anymore. So it's a lot of effort and a lot of money up front. But once you really start to build that up and once your soil starts working for itself, you don't need to be adding in additional fertilizers, any additional compost because it's starting to work itself. And if you feed it with straw or wood chips, that's what feeds the soil and creates it in that cycle. So we don't add compost onto our beds anymore every year because we don't need to. And would you say the difference between compost and good compost is important? Yes, so that's where you're making sure you have those microorganisms in there to make sure that you're creating the nutrient cycling, creating that building of structure and water infiltration. So that's what really gets your soil working. Love it. It's all the microorganisms. The last mistake is not caring for your soil or not making that full connection because we want to make sure that we get the well-rounded picture for soil health. Once you start to incorporate compost and the microorganisms into your soil, that's when you really start to build your soil, which leads to better water infiltration, which leads to less compaction. So your roots can get further down into the soil, they can reach more water, reach more nutrients. So issues like drought don't really become a problem because your plants are getting more water. Issues like flooding don't really become a problem because the water can infiltrate down easy enough. Nutrient management starts to become a lot easier because the soil starts to cycle the nutrients itself. So it starts to feed itself and then feed your plants. So once you get it to that nice sweet spot where it starts to work, that's when you just add in things year by year, like little things in order to keep it working and keep the system happy. The most work that gets done in farming happens under our feet. Yeah. And that's the microorganisms at work in the soil and that's something that's not tended to all the time. But why would we be putting in so much more extra work when the microorganisms can do the work for us? So healthy soil equals healthy plants. Healthy plants, yep. Equals healthy people. Love it.