When grocery stores aren’t reliable, you can rely on your land for food. At almost any scale, you can at least get some sustenance, which can make a big difference. At any scale, however, you will need your land to be fertile enough to produce, otherwise the work you put in won’t return enough food to make it an asset. Here I will cover improvements you can make to your land so that it will produce.
All of the following five improvements will work no matter where you live. The most important of the five will depend on your climate and soil conditions, however.
Note: The permaculture movement has a lot of solid advice that will work with almost no outside inputs and will last, even if they are slower than buying a bag of mined soil amendment. If you want to find some good methods, look there. This is probably the biggest dedicated forum: permies.com
Improvement 1: Compost
The pinnacle of the concept of taking what you need and giving back the rest. This is one of the easiest and most sure-fire ways to make better soil that will improve your garden’s health no matter what conditions you have.
Compost is the universal soil amendment. Indeed, enough organic matter, or “humus,” will cover almost all ills. It provides almost every nutrient, soil structure, the most balanced pH, and either increased drainage or increased moisture retention depending on which your soil has problems with.
Photo by Edward Howell on Unsplash
It’s one of the simplest things to make, too. It needs two things: air and the proper carbon to nitrogen ratio.
How to Make Compost
Designate a corner of the yard to make a pile. Add all of your food scraps to it (excluding
animal parts since they tend to putrify or attract wildlife), balancing it with yard waste, and stir consistently with a shovel.
The stirring will give it the air it needs to be broken down by aerobic bacteria (bacteria that need oxygen). Without stirring, the center of the pile will not have oxygen and anaerobic bacteria will get to it. Anaerobic bacteria is the kind that make rotting things smelly and create all sorts of bad compounds and diseases. It’s the same reason it is good to make sure wounds have enough air. With stirring, your compost pile will smell better and better with time.
Another factor in making good soil that doesn’t get smelly, take forever, or have few nutrients is the carbon to nitrogen ratio. While it sounds scientific, it is actually quite simple. As a rule of thumb, you make sure you have around two times more “browns” than “greens.”
“Browns” are organic material that is high in carbon, like leaves, straw, mulch, or cardboard. Usually it is long-dead plant material. “Greens” are organic material that is high in nitrogen, like food scraps, grass clippings, and manure. Recently-dead plant material hasn’t been stripped of all its nitrogen yet, contributing a significant amount to the compost pile. Too many “browns” and your compost will take a long time to finish, along with having a low amount of nitrogen for your plants. Too many “greens” and you will have an explosion of bacteria that thrive on the nitrogen and use up all of the other nutrients in you compost in order to grow.
When is it Done?
Compost takes about a year to finish, so the quicker you finish your pile then stop adding to it, the better. That way you can start a new pile and not have an old pile with fresh banana peels mixed in with finished compost.
If you put compost on your plants before it is done, it may burn them. Use your judgment to determine when that is. If it looks, feels, and smells like soil instead of what it was originally, then it’s done.
Improvement 2: Water Retention
You may think you only have to worry about water retention if you live in a dry area. This isn’t true. Groundwater the world over is suffering from depletion.
Inconsistent water is the real problem.
A brief lesson on hydrology:
Many different land management practices have changed the path of the water cycle in their areas.
In originally forested areas, the removal of trees and beavers both mean that water reaches the ground fast, hits it hard, and flows off quickly without the chance for infiltration, taking topsoil with it.
In arid places, the groundwater is drained by wells, irrigation, low rainfall, and non-native plants, making the water table lower and reducing the amount of plants that can grow. People have often removed animals—particularly ungulate herbivores—from areas like this thinking it will preserve the overall condition when, if grazing was properly managed, they actually help (see improvement 3). Together, these conditions also cause rapid runoff with reduced infiltration.
Without infiltration, groundwater can’t be recharged, causing drier conditions between storm events and standing water following. Quick runoff causes rivers to swell more during heavy rain events, causing increased flooding.
How to Improve your Water Retention
In both conditions, increasing infiltration is beneficial. One way to do this, as mentioned earlier, is more organic matter in the soil, but other improvements you can make for infiltration are those that will slow runoff.
There are a lot of methods for this, and depending on your resources and the topography and soil you have, you will have to choose different ones. Most often, they have to do with creating ridges on contour.
This can take the form of swales, hugulkultur beds, ponds, and any other iteration of these. Anything perpendicular to the flow of water will slow it and allow it to infiltrate. In clay-ey areas, the addition of organic matter will also help.
Placement
The placement of these earthworks will also depend on your land. In a drier area, you may want to plant your crops directly in the trough you create where the water will gather and infiltrate.
In a wetter area, you will probably want to plant on the ridge adjacent to the trough or place your swales uphill of your garden so all of the infiltration happens further uphill, providing your plants with a raised water table and reducing the amount of water that ends up sitting in the low spots downhill where you are planting.
Photo by Lucas Allmann on Pexels
Improvement 3: Animals
The easy way to accomplish composting on a larger scale, with the added bonus of another food source, is animals. The practicality of this improvement depends on your land, of course, but you may have more options than you think. Animals are scalable.
The uses of animals are variable, but one thing you can always count on is manure. This is compost in quantity. You can either compost in a pile and spread it on your gardens later or allow the animals to free range and build the soil they are standing directly on. With the proper rotational grazing, instead of depleting their pasture, animals can actually create new soil and make the plants they are eating grow thicker and healthier.
The king of rotational grazing is Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm. I would recommend looking into his methods if this interests you. He is also a great speaker and writer that gives good explanations of how all of this works. A quick internet search will yield a lot. Start with some Youtube videos or check out some of his books.
Improvement 4: Plant Natives in a Polyculture
Another improvement you can make is to plant native plants instead of non-native, or even remove and replace non-natives. The effect is one of the hardest to see, but it is nonetheless important. There are two basic reasons for this.
Source: NBGI.org
One, the native plants are accustomed to the environment and survive better in it. This is perhaps most evident in America’s grasslands. Our native grasses have roots many times longer than non-native grasses, allowing them to survive in droughts far better. An interesting example is May Ranch in Colorado.
Two, the other organisms in the environment are accustomed to native plants. Insect populations are the most notable. Most are literally unable to eat non-natives, and to a lesser extent this goes for mammals.
‘Don’t I want to get rid of insects?’ you ask. ‘They will eat my garden plants, won’t they?’
Benefits of Insects
By and large, insects feed on unhealthy plants. This is documented by studies on Brix numbers, a general indicator of the health of a plant. Part of keeping your plants healthy is making a strong ecosystem around them, and the basis of the ecosystem is plants (followed by insects). With a balanced, thriving ecosystem, there will be enough variety and quantity to go around and your crop plants won’t be the main target.
You will also attract beneficial insects to your property which pollinate wild plants and crop plants and eat crop pests. Native flowers will attract bees, beetles, flies, butterflies, and wasps, the latter of which are the main pest-eaters.
Finally, I’m going to bust a myth that comes mostly from our general 4-6’ height as humans. Caterpillars are everywhere on native trees. They don’t hurt the plant. Way down on the ground one caterpillar can eat all the leaves off one sapling, but hundreds of caterpillars will exist in an oak, way up where we can’t see them or their damage, and the oak is fine. It is made for that.
So no, insects are not a problem in and of themselves. It is their proportions, their food sources, and their environment that will create a situation where too many of your plants are eaten.
Polyculture
An important sub-point here is that a major factor in creating a variable and healthy ecosystem is to plant a polyculture. If you have a huge swath of land featuring only one species of plant, you are inviting the particular pest for that plant to multiply in droves. You also aren’t allowing the various ecosystem functions each different species provides to be filled, making it a harsh environment for all of the organisms that rely on those functions.
I will now step off of my ecological high horse. Yes, there are still going to be infestations even if you are doing it all right. Largely, this is because of the practices of everyone else in your area. But there would still be instances of infestations if you were filling up on pesticides. Aiming for a vibrant ecosystem means you are creating health and habitat and can avoid those nasty chemicals on your food plants. What you are doing helps!
Improvement 5: Mulch
This may be something of a given, but when I say mulch, I mean mulch. The deeper the better. If you remember the benefits of adding organic matter from earlier, know that mulch amplifies these. It has to do with what is going on in the microclimate of the surface of the soil.
Photo by Andrew Lancaster on Unsplash
What Mulch Does
First, let’s take a crop plant in bare soil. In the daytime, the sun hits the soil surface where it makes the top of the soil both dry and too hot for the plant to be functioning optimally. At night, when the air is cooler than the soil, humidity rises from the ground and escapes into the air. When it rains, the water hits the hard surface of the soil and is easily shed, taking topsoil with it.
Add mulch and the whole process changes. In the day, the sun may dry out the surface of the mulch, but the plant’s roots are left cool and moist. At night, the rising humidity actually condenses on the underside of the mulch layer and gets returned immediately to the soil. When it rains, the mulch acts like a sponge, infiltrating the water, softening its landing so it doesn’t remove topsoil, and slowing its movement downhill.
Mulch doubles as a slow-release compost, a place for beneficial insects and soil microbes to grow, and a weed suppressor. It mimics the natural environment where every part of the ground’s surface gets mulched by the leaves above it.
What to Use for Mulch
Literally any plant matter. Leaves, grass clippings, compost, wood chips—even cardboard. Plastic is the one thing that doesn’t fit the bill. While it suppresses weeds and collects condensation, it does not let rain in easily, provide compost, or cool the roots (in fact, it can make them hotter if it is a dark color).
Final Thoughts
In the event that SHTF, many people are going to have to rely on the resources around them for food. If you want to grow food on your land to help sustain you, you don’t want to break ground and discover that you can’t get crop plants to grow in your soil. These five improvements will give you a solid way to improve your growing conditions, but all of them take time. Starting them now will have your soil ready and give you the practice you need to know you can lean on your gardening to get you through tough times.
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