'Plants were designed to be the intermediate between animals and the soil. The only reason we source our minerals from a bottle is because the minerals in the soil are depleted' - Phyllis Balch, nutritionist

We’ve been busily spreading locally produced ‘Remin’ rock dust of late, as a key way to improve the health of our soils – and hence our plants and ourselves! This rock dust is basically rock like basalt which has been finely ground to a powder. In this powdered form, microbes in the soil can easily break the rock down into a form that is then available to plants. Rock dust makes a whole range of vital elements and trace minerals available to plants, increasing their health, nutrient value and yield – check out http://remineralize.org/ for more insight into the amazing benefits of mineralising your soils.

We spread out about 120kg of ‘Remin’ rock dust all around our yard. Ideally you’d dig it into the soil, but because we had such a large area to cover and established ground covers, we just threw it around by hand and then watered it in.

To find out more about where we got our ‘Remin’ rock dust from, see: http://www.remin.com.au

Worm castings are phenomenal soil improvers. The last couple of days we’ve spread out 500 litres of worm castings we bought from a local worm farmer (see Local Green Directory). We spread the castings around our fruit trees from the base of the trunk to well past the drip line.

To keep the castings nice and cool we mulched over them with the free horse manure we picked up from the stables just down the road at Kembla Grange. To get our soils really humming, we’ll spread this amount of castings out twice a year.