Give Back to the Garden: Paul Taylor Teaches “Living Soils”
For far too long, mankind has viewed soil as a dead substance, something to be sucked dry of its remaining vitality before moving on to cultivate another patch of land. At the same time, we’ve also viewed anything other than what we’ve defined as the harvest to be waste—something to also be discarded and left behind.
Living Soils for Vital Food, a five-day (January 18th-January 22nd) workshop taught by organic soil management specialist Paul Taylor, is designed to change that. This course will transform the way that participants view soil and fertilizers while giving them the necessary knowledge to put these new perspectives into practice.
Taylor is an experienced educator, with Australian Federal Government FarmReady approval. He also holds a Certificate IV in Education, Training, and Assessment which qualifies him to teach under the federal Vocational Education and Training guidelines. For more than three decades, Paul has been studying and practicing organic farming methods and using them to restore degraded agricultural land, and he thrives on sharing those years of experience with his students.
Living Soils: Complex, Crucial
“Dirt” is spoken of derisively; it’s easy to trample all over it without a second thought. Yet, soil is one of the essential ingredients for supporting life on Earth. And speaking of our planet, we didn’t name it after water, or the light of our sun, or even ourselves: We named it after the humble soil beneath our feet: earth.
To understand sustainability, to put good food growing practices to work, and to usher in an era where we stop treating our planet like something disposable, we must—literally—start from the ground up, transforming our former understanding as we go.
Soil is not something dead; it not only supports life but is largely composed of living things, in addition to minerals and organic materials. It is soil that makes it possible for our planet to support plant (and by extension, animal and human) life. It is complex, but achieving a better understanding of its components and how to support them is by no means out of reach—that’s exactly what this workshop aims to help you do.
The course will center on demystifying soil microbiology, plant nutrition, and organic farming methods, educating students about the vibrant life it holds and how to nurture that life just as soil nurtures human life.
Sustainable Soil; Sustainable Sustenance
One of the biggest obstacles to achieving a truly sustainable civilization is how we, as human beings, have treated the soil. Degraded soil can endanger a region’s ability to maintain food sovereignty, at best, and at worst can lead to food insecurity or even starvation. As human beings, we need vital, vibrant, living soils.
Growing crops, however, does not need to result in arid, dead land where arable earth once supported life. Paul teaches sustainable soil management, which depends upon natural means intended to improve both crop production and soil fertility. His methods are as applicable to the backyard gardener as they are to farmers, and are part of the solution for a sustainable future.
Rebuilding degraded soil and maintaining the fertility of agricultural lands requires understanding the ecosystem beneath our feet, the microorganisms that compose it, and how to support and replenish this ecosystem using specialist compost and soil probiotics. We also need to learn how to do this in a cost-effective manner. The methods taught in Living Soils for Vital Food will guide participants through the creation of their own fertilizers, reducing costs even as they increase the productivity of their gardens.
A Bountiful Earth is Everyone’s Business
Living Soils for Vital Food is not a course designed purely for farmers, or for backyard gardeners. It’s a course for the organic farmer, for the suburbanite, for the inner city dweller. This workshop is meant for everyone—because we should all be taking responsibility for reaching sustainability goals. Participants will learn how to scale the methods taught to suit their own particular needs, whether they plan to plant acres or patio containers.
Living Soils for Vital Food is a practical course, one which helps students learn how to efficiently grow organic food at lower costs. It’s also a course that brings people together, to be enriched and energized by their own potential to contribute to a brighter, more sustainable future.
For more information about the course, click here.
Articles from Paul Taylor:
Christmas Island Gets its First Dam
Food Sovereignty
A Small Acreage Permaculture Makeover NSW Australia
Background On Our How To Make Your Own Natural Fertiliser Soil Science Course
