Feeding, Simplified

Reader Contribution by Lee Reich
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Today, with a nod to my ancestors, I’m going to spread dark green flakes over some of my vegetable beds and beneath some fruit trees and bushes. That nod is not to my ancestors that came here from Poland, Austria, and Argentina, not even further back into the reaches of humanity from the savannahs of Africa. No, I’m referencing my – all of our – ancestors that first crept or waddled forth from the seas.

The dark, green flakes are kelp, a kind of seaweed; if the sea nourished our flippered progenitors, I figure it might also provide something nutritive to today’s iPod-appendaged humans. Kelp is rich in a grand array of trace minerals, many of which are known and some of which may become known as necessary to maintain health. So I’m spreading this stuff on my soil where its goodness can work itself up into my edible plants and, hence, my diet.

Spreading kelp here may be akin to “hauling coals to Newcastle.” After all, the ground in my vegetable beds has been beefed up over the years by annual dressings of compost an inch or two thick. Into that compost went not only all waste from my gardens and kitchen, but also manure, wood chips, and leaves that I’ve imported. Which is to say that my soil probably is already replete with a rich array of nutrients for my plants and me.

Years ago, I supplemented those compost applications with soybean meal. Soybean meal is high in nitrogen (7percent), which I figured would be the only nutrient my intensively planted vegetables might need. I also figured – literally – that a one inch depth of compost could supply all the nitrogen my vegetable plants might need, even if intensively planted, but couldn’t bring myself to really believe that calculation. Finally, a few years ago, I walked my talk, and ever since have been doing nothing more to the soil in my vegetable beds but slathering it an inch deep in compost every year. And the vegetable plants have been as happy and healthy as ever.

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