Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Soilsecrets@aol.com]

Hi everyone, 

 

I just wanted to send this wonder image of fertile, delicious, wonderful green success at a time of year that many of us enjoy seeing such things.  The site is in the arid high desert of Northern Arizona where the soils are so advanced in desertification that not a single blade of grass can be found anywhere.  The ecotone is dominated by declining junipers and ephedra shrubs reminiscent of the desert plateau region of the Sahara desert.  Yet on this site a dear friend of mine has developed a garden extraordinarius in the form of a CSA Organic Farm.  I've been watching this process happen and the soils turn from dry, crusty and barren to now having a rich black A horizon rich in humus about 2 - 3" deep followed with a really nice B horizon that is soft, fluffy and still rich in life about another 2 feet in depth.  It is truly amazing even for me and I do this kind of soil development  as my life's work.  I hope this list will allow these images to pass on to each of you and inspire all of us to keep working, and don't give up.  I'd also like to add that the water source is from a solar powered well, very low volume and all irrigation is done with sub irrigation T-tape.  This is a large area and growing every year.  The grower is using our Soil Secrets protocol which supplements and grows humus faster than it can go away via natural losses. 

 

Michael Martin Melendrez

Soil Secrets LLC

www.soilsecrets.com

 

"Great ideas go through three phases, first they are ignored, then they are ridiculed and than they are considered intuitively obvious to anyone who is knowledgeable"