Ever wonder why we need added vitamins and minerals beyond what we get through our food? Over the decades, the food we eat has gone down in nutritional value as the soil has gone down in fertility. Truly, we are what we eat. The nutritional value of what we grow is part the type of vegetable it is and a whole lot of what the plant is “fed” from the soil in which it grows.
It really all starts with the soil. Plants grow to the lowest constraint. Like people, plants need a balanced diet with beneficial microbes, minerals and nutrition.
Saying all a vibrant, robust vegetable plant needs is NPK (nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium) is like saying all a person needs is carbs, fat, and protein. Those things are needed to survive, but you need much more to thrive. Life is much more complex than three compounds!
When we think of the bouquet of the vitamins and minerals we need to be healthy, where do we think this comes from? We can’t get it from osmosis! We have to get these from what we consume.
I read a book recently by Steve Solomon and Erica Reinheimer called The Intelligent Gardener; Growing Nutrient-Dense Food that does a nice job of giving all the details about how minerals affect the tilth of the soil and the ability of the soil to support healthy, robust plants. Steve is the guy that founded Territorial Seed Company.
The minerals and nutrients we should be concerned about are calcium (Ca), magnesium (Mg), potassium (K), sodium (Na), phosphorous (P), sulfur (S), iron (Fe), copper (Cu), manganese (Mn), boron (B), Zinc (Zn), cobalt (Co), selenium (Se), silicon (Si) and molybdenum (Mo). There are also other trace minerals that plants and our body needs. It is a good idea to include Azomite or kelp to your garden each year to supply the additional trace minerals.
Steve recommends getting a detailed soil analysis at the get-go. For those just beginning to work with re-mineralization of the soil, he recommends Logan Labs for the testing. You can get all the information you need on collecting the sample and sending them off to Logan Labs. Steve recommends the standard sample test. At the moment the cost is $25.
When you get the results, Steve has posted a soil worksheet that you put your results from Logan Labs and it calculates for you what you need for amendments to get your soil super charged for growth and nutrition. It uses an acre as the basis. For those of us doing small space gardening, just divide the number of square feet in your garden by 43,560. This will give you the pounds you need to add to your garden for each mineral on the spreadsheet.
It gives a summary of how to put your soil in balance with a worksheet at the end to enter the results from Logan Labs to calculate exactly what you need to add to your garden to get minerals at optimum levels. He recommends going slow so as to not get any minerals in excess in your garden. It is a lot easier to add minerals than take them away!
I also liked this spreadsheet for general vegetable growing guidelines from Logan Labs that gives information about each vegetable type’s mineral needs. This can be handy if you are focused on one type of crop that you want to maximize your yield.
For most of us backyard/flower bed veggie gardeners that grow a variety, Steve’s spreadsheet is the way to go. You can also do side dressings of amendments specific to certain veggies to give them a boost. I do this for my fruiting plants like tomatoes, peppers and eggplants.
If the whole spreadsheet thing is just more complicated than you want to worry about, Logan Labs provides a service for giving you what you need to add to your garden. There is also a listing on the Soil Analyst web page. You can use an online calculator from Erica that costs $9.50/year, unlimited usage. All you have to do is input the numbers from Logan Labs and it spits out the amendments you need.
As you prepare your bed in the spring, you should add fertilizer. For a balanced organic fertilizer, here is what Steve recommends from his book for 100 square feet of garden space:
• 2 quarts oil seed meal (soybean, cottonseed, or canola seed meal)
• 1 pint feather meal
• 1 pint fish meal
• 1 quart soft/collodial rock phosphate or bonemeal
• 1 quart kelp meal or 1 pint Azomite
• 1 quart agricultural gypsum
Once you get your soil in balance, you can keep it that way by recycling back what you take out by composting and using a balanced fertilizer.
We get a NutrEval test done yearly that gives a report where your body’s nutritional deficits are. After getting our garden soil supercharged for peak production and optimum nutritional value, I’ll be tracking my NutraEval results to see the improvement in my body’s overall nutrition.
For more idea’s on small space and container gardening, check out Melodie’s blog, Victory Garden On the Golf Course.
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