How to Make Complete Organic Fertilizer

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"The Intelligent Gardener: Growing Nutrient Dense Food" by Steve Solomon is a practical, step-by-step guide to growing produce of the highest nutritional quality.
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Using a complete organic fertilizer is the key to a beautiful garden.
Using a complete organic fertilizer is the key to a beautiful garden.

Centuries of agriculture have depleted our soils causing the nutrient-density of fruits, grains and vegetables to decline dramatically, but the process of returning soil to true fertility is widely misunderstood. In this excerpt from The Intelligent Gardener (New Society Publishers, 2012), Steve Solomon gives us his all-purpose complete organic fertilizer recipe for re-mineralizing your garden soil.

You can purchase this book from the MOTHER EARTH NEWS store:The Intelligent Gardener: Growing Nutrient Dense Food.

Using Complete Organic Fertilizer Now

If your intention is to produce nutrient-dense food on a scale that means a great deal to the family economy, do a soil test, and amend the soil in the direction that maximizes nutritional outcomes. That’s the best way. Thinking just in terms of money, if you’re growing a large enough garden that its output makes a financial difference, and if its fertilization requires the purchase of anything at all, why not add another $20 to your annual cost and do a soil test first? Then you can buy only what the garden really needs. The test could save you more than its cost. And if you think of it in terms of your family’s health, there is no choice at all.

But if yours is a small garden that doesn’t seem to justify the cost or effort, if your food garden is not a discrete area but just a few vegetables interplanted amongst flowers and other ornamentals, or if it is in small, irregularly sized beds, each with highly different natures, soils, histories of being amended, and so forth, or for whatever reason being guided by a soil test seems undoable, then your problem can be solved by fertilizing with a fairly complete and balanced organic fertilizer recipe.

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