Building the Soil
Sunday, August 1, 2010 at 11:31AM Growing good food is all about growing good soil. Worm castings and mulch are gold in the world of soil building, and this week while we had some time off we got busy spreading a tonne of worm castings around the base of our fruit trees...
We dug up our mulch paths....
And spread this mulch, which had been decomposing for a year, on top of the worm castings around the fruit trees. Then we ordered a big load of mulch (which in the winter here you can often get for free from local tree lopping companies – that’s what we did!)
And had a working bee with friends to spread the fresh mulch onto the paths – thanks again to our working bee buddies!
If you need some extra inspiration for getting out there and building your soils, check out the movie Dirt! like we did earlier this week! Happy soil building!
Reader Comments (4)
Wow, free mulch?! The one place I asked charge for it - I'll have to ring around! I bet the trees are going to love the attention.
Thanks for the tip on the mulch. We usually pay $15 m3 for the decomposed council stuff (via soilco). Having a Bokashi and chook poo burying bonanza over here and have just constructed a raised spiral as our main veggie growing area so we'll se if it works as well as it does for herbs. Do you guys have any recommendations for kiwi varieties? Just put in an arc fence on our northern side and it's crying out for something deciduous to grow on it.
Hi - maybe it's just my browser, but I'm getting all broken links for the photos :-(
Yeah it's definitely worth trying a few different tree lopping companies and seeing if you can get any mulch delivered for free. Often at this time of year, when there's lots of trees that have been blown down in the winds, and there is less demand for garden mulch than in the summer, you can have some luck :-)
Great to hear you're busy building the soil with a bokashi and chook poo bonanza Meryl! We LOVE bokashi - will have to do a post about that soon! We also love kiwi fruit too, but unfortunately Rich's mum is really allergic to them and shudders at the sight of them, so in respect to her we haven't planned any. You do need a male and female plant, we know that much! There is a lady who has a fruit stall in the Friday markets in the mall who grows kiwi fruit commercially down in Nowra - now that kiwi fruit are finished for the season, she is selling gorgeous mandarins and oranges which have not been chemically sprayed - she would be a good person to ask about kiwi varieties :-)
Daharji, sorry to hear you can't see our photos - we're not sure why that is. Perhaps you could try to view the website in another browser?
The council mulch can often have lots of weeds in it.