How to amend your soil

If you choose to watch this you'll become a dirt-genius.

They're telling us how to make our garden soil alive. That way we can dispense with chemical fertilizers that tend to concentrate on NPK numbers, the main things that plants use, to the neglect of everything else.

We'll do fine with chemical fertilizers.

While organic vegetable gardeners swear by their natural ways. They insist the cell structure and cell functions of plants are improved, the roots work much better, the stems are stronger, the leaves darker, the flowers more abundant, the flower pedicels stronger, the fruits larger, more deeply colored and more delicious.

I learned this year something vitally important.

The seeds started in peat pods did very poorly altogether, nearly half were lost, and the seeds started in 3x3x4 nursery cups with amended soil are far more robust, much larger and thicker and darker, faster growing.

It makes sense, once their little roots touch the soil that is active with mycelium and bacteria, everything in the soil is immediately available, while the others started in peat pods have only peat.

It's kind of sad, actually.

That right there is plant abuse. Plant neglect. I didn't realize until I had the amended soil and made this comparison.

I think this is the backyard garden of the black haired man, John Kohler and he's invited the owner of Boogie Brew to his garden. The gray-haired man is showing how he amends his soil.

He's adding an expired package of his own Boogie Brew because it has the elements that make soils great. Later he explains why his company changed their approach to a two-part system. The active element was consuming the product causing its shelf-life to be limited. So they boosted both sides and separated them for unlimited shelf life.

I love the way that he gets his hands filthy showing us and he doesn't care because he likes playing around in the dirt.

Because we're dirt-savants now we notice he's leaving out several amendments we learned from previous videos.

In an earlier video John visited the company that makes the best worm castings that he's used. Here he is using the Worm Gold Plus brand, while later he discovered another brand that delivered better results so he went to that company and made another video.

Notice how John befriends all these people who allow him the run of the place and join him in his videos. They're not only being good salesmen, they're honestly stoked about what they are doing. We see this same thing in the microgreens videos, the people with organic gardens that he's visited, the nurseries he's gone to, and the companies whose products that he is interested in understanding.

In the worm casting video John carefully explains all the elements the company adds to compost to get the best result from their worms. They start out with compost then amend it to suit the worms best. They are the same elements that make the best soil for plants. So all that material comes with their product, the same way this Boogie Brew does. John sticks his hands in bins of each element and comes up filthy the same way this man does at John's home. He shows us what each element looks like, what it feels like and smells like. The worm casting amendment bins contained:

* compost, the base material, avoiding cow or chicken poop or raw sewage
* bio char (the carbon element)
* coffee grounds
* kelp, plant-based nutrients.
* rock dust (minerals that mycelium [fungus] delivers to plant roots)
* humates, humic acid, another carbon element rich in humified organic matter, it stains John's hands black.
* High chitlin, shrimp meal, crab meal and the like.

On Amazon these products receive mixed reviews.

And now that we're dirt-savants we know why some people are disappointed.

They're reviewing each product independently, as if each thing is a fertilizer in itself.

They're not comprehending the soil is alive. These are not intended as inert material that plants automatically take up. They need soil that worms can thrive in. The soil needs bacterial culture and mycelium from fungus to operate in the root zone.

If the soil is dead, and previous chemical fertilizing discouraged worms, then the plants cannot use the products independently either. The soil needs to be both decaying and living at the same time. Maintaining the balance is an ongoing thing.