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Home Garden Soil Health Assessment

Home-Garden-Soil-Heath-Assesement

Download the complete Home Garden Soil Health Assessment document here

Growing food in a home garden is sensational.

The most obvious sensation is the taste. If you don’t know how much better home grown fruit and veggies can taste, then ask an old person what tomatoes used to taste like.

But the sight of a productive garden can be inspiring as well. It takes a shift from the modern urban view of gardens as neat and constructed, but the constant change and promise of fruitfulness can be very exciting.

Many of the plants and blossoms in a veggie garden or orchard have smells to match the well-known scented flowers. And as for healthy soil….. it has a fabulous aroma.

There are lots of things to touch in a veggie garden because there is plenty to do: digging, planting, pruning and harvesting.

Your garden might sound like silence…. broken sometimes by the snap of green beans that are not going to make it to the kitchen.

This is what the Chinese proverb means:

You have to be in the garden to know from your sensory experience how things are going and what is needed. You get a feel for it.

How to use this Assessment

The purpose of this workbook is not to be a textbook of soil science. It is to assist you to make observations about things in your garden which can help you to understand what is happening in your soil, how this might affect plant growth, and what you can do to improve things.

Using the Home Garden Soil health Assessment is like a doctor using a thermometer to measure your temperature during a check-up. It doesn’t tell exactly what is wrong with you, but it is an indicator of how various parts of your body are working.

The indicators in the Home Garden Soil Health Assessment are not measurements in a scientific sense. Although there are numbers in the assessment, these numbers are qualitative assessments rather than objective measurements. They can be used over time within the garden to compare different beds or areas and to track changes (hopefully improvements) over time.

Each assessment provides a score out of 10. A total score of 7-80 or more in the Recording Sheet is a pretty good indicator that you have healthy soil.

The thinking behind the Home Garden Soil Health Assessment is:

To get taste you need nutrients

To get nutrients you need microbes

To get microbes you need good structure

structure → biota → nutrients = taste

Download the complete Home Garden Soil Health Assessment document here

The How to Use The Home Garden Soil Health Assessment has been compiled by Col Freeman, the Project Manager for the Lower Georges River Sustainability Initiative, via his website www.dirtygreen.com.au

7 Comments

  1. But microbes create and maintain the structure… and it’s kind of hard to magic structure into the soil. People try with tillage and gypsum and lime but at the cost of the soil life and therefore structure.

    1. Hi Tim
      Thanks for the comments – you make some good points. The HGSH Assessment is primarily a decision support tool to identify the issues rather than specify the solutions or responses – maybe a topic for another resource.

      The issue is kind of ‘chicken and egg’, which I think is common in natural systems where things are inter-related and iterative. I think structure is a good place to start when thinking about gardens because it can be a limiting factor for many other processes.

      As a thought experiment: Given that even soils with very poor structure will still have some microbes (and other critters), and that microbes multiply very rapidly when the conditions are right, what is limiting their numbers in a particular soil? I suspect the limiting factor is soil structure since structure provides the conditions (habitat) they need. If we were to buy or brew some microbes and add them to the soil, would this solve the problem? I don’t think so – the microbes would still be limited by the lack of structure (i.e. lack of pore spaces, low levels of air and water, lack of organic matter as food).

      You are right that microbes create and maintain the structure. But to do this they need to interact with the plants which penetrate the soil to make channels, and provide the organic matter (exudates of sugars and carbon; dead cells) to fuel the growth of the microbes.

      This is what happens in grazing situations where graziers are “building soil” through regenerative approaches – essentially they are introducing rest periods which allow the grasses to grow to maturity which at the same time allows (needs) the roots to grow more. This root growth underpins the improvements in structure, organic matter and microbial activity.

      In a garden situation, the equivalent approach would be to use plant roots as the pioneers. For example, a green manure crop would begin the process of improvement by creating some channels, and providing the sugars and organic matter (food) that the microbes (and other critters) need to begin their process of creating soil crumbs. If there is magic, I suspect it lies in the ‘trading economy’ whereby plants feed microbes, which feed plants, which feed microbes, which fed plants, which …. etc.

      Re tillage and/or gypsum/lime: I think you are right. Tillage might provide some initial benefit for a compacted, tight soil; but in the absence of other things the soil will likely return to its previous state. Similarly, gypsum/lime may have some benefit in improving the chemistry of the soil, but will primarily only have a benefit for structure to the extent that it enables better plant growth and the associated microbial life.

      Sorry for such a long response. Hope it is helpful

      1. Hi Col,

        Thanks for the detailed reply. I think the plants are in the same boat as the microbes. They generally need good structure to extend their root systems, as the anaerobic hard pans slow progress, but also favour microbes whose metabolites will dissolve cell membranes and infect the roots. It’s something of a process of chipping away at it in order to improve conditions for what follows (chicken and egg, as you say), but also making sure a large diversity of microbes is present to create structure in all conditions. Elaine Ingham teaches that you can accelerate this process by applying compost tea or extract with foods – or just compost which contains long term foods already. This helps get over the immediate need for plant root exudates, but ultimately you want the microbes to live off them and so maintain the structure indefinitely. EM brews can also be used to help improve poorly structured soil so that the aerobic microbes can take over. Anyway thanks for this resource and your thoughts.

  2. What a fantastic document – thank you.
    I have circulated it to the members of the Mekong Sustainable Farmers Forum

  3. Fantastic aid to understanding your soil. I have had lab tests done, but struggle to understand what the figures mean, i.e. what are the consequences on my vegetables and fruit of the various mineral and nutrient levels reported. Using this approach is far more useful as it is practical and facilitates a deeper understanding of everything that makes up ‘soil’. Well done and THANK YOU.

  4. Hi David and Gill. I’m very glad you find this resource useful.

    Gill, re the lab tests: The HGSH Assessment booklet looks at symptoms of “acute” nutrient deficiencies (roughly meaning that there is none or very little available) rather than “chronic” deficiencies (roughly meaning that there is some but not enough nutrient available). The chronic deficiencies, which might be picked up in a soil test, may be related to poor growth and/or susceptibility to pests and disease. So its still very useful to look at your soil test results.

    cheers
    Col

  5. Thanks for the resource, I will have a look.

    Snarky aside: If your garden sounds like “silence”, you have a serious problem. Mine currently sounds like various territorial birds who are providing pest management as they feed their young, the constant buzzing of bees and bumblebees if the sun is shining at least a little, the first frogs doing evening concerts in the pond 2 houses over, the chickens and (much louder) ducks someone started keeping 2 houses over in the other direction, and the occasional tussling noises from a nest of weasels that I can’t get to move out of our attic crawlspace.

    Though I could realy do without the construction / tree-felling noise from across the street that’s been ongoing for several weeks now, and especially without my four direct neighbors who all seem to have a compulsion towards weekly lawn-mowing. Those really ruin my day, and sometimes give me a migraine.

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