How to Grow More Vegetables : And Fruits, Nuts ... - Shroomery

60 FERTILIZATION
More-Sustainabile Fertilization
Each gardener should strive to use less and less fertilizer
brought in from outside his or her own garden area. This will
be especially true when such amendments become scarce due
to the increased number of people using them. There are at
least 4 ways to create a more “closed system” garden, to which
few resources are imported:
1. Use most of the food you grow at home, so all the residues
are returned to your soil. “Export” as little as possible of
your valuable soil resource.
2. Grow some trees. Their deep root systems will bring up
nutrients from far down in the subsoil into the topsoil and
even into the tree leaves. These nutrients would not otherwise
become available for use as plant food.
3. “Grow” your own fertilizers by raising plants that produce
good amounts of compost material, which concentrates the
nutrients required in a form that plants can use. For beginning
information on plants to use, see Ecology Action’s Self-
Teaching Mini-Series Booklet 12, Growing and Gathering
Your Own Fertilizers (see Ecology Action Publications, page
225), Bargyla and Gylver Rateaver’s Organic Method Primer,
and Ehrenfried Pfeiffer’s Weeds and What They Tell (see
pages 184 and 199 in the bibliography, respectively). If
everyone were to use organic fertilizers, there would be a
worldwide shortage; eventually the key will be growing our
own and recycling all wastes. Deep-rooting alfalfa (as deep
as 125 feet) and comfrey (up to 8 feet) also help bring up
leached-out and newly released nutrients from the soil strata
and rocks below.
4. Maintain at least a 4% to 6% organic matter level in at least
the upper 6 inches of soil in temperate zones and 3% organic
matter level in tropical ones. This will encourage microbial
life growth, which can keep nutrients from leaching out of
the soil.
The GROW BIOINTENSIVE method has roots 4,000 years into
the past in Chinese intensive agriculture, 2,000 years into the
past in the Greek use of raised beds and, more recently, in
European farming. Similar practices are still used today in the
native agriculture of many countries, such as Guatemala. GROW
BIOINTENSIVE will extend its roots into a future where environmentally
balanced resource usage is of the utmost importance.