HOW TO HEAL OUR SOIL.
BEST TREATMENT OPTIONS INCLUDING HOMEOPATHIC REMEDIES.
The key element for healthy soil is soil organic matter. Soil organic matter is all plant and animal material in various stages of decomposition. Soil organic matter is where soil biology lives. It is its habitat. Without soil organic matter soil biology has nowhere to live. More precisely, the decay of soil organic matter turns into new soil biology. It is part of the never ending cycle of birth, growth, death and decay, turning into nutrients to foster new growth.
After every harvest, if it is plants or animals or animal products like dairy, we need to replenish what we remove. Soil organic matter is the far superior replacement for the nutrients because it is 100% bioavailable for the plants.
How we do this depends very much on the situation – if it is a market garden, a grazing operation, a veggie garden or a water catchment – the principles are the same – we replenish soil organic matter. If the nutrition offered is not 100% bioavailable, plants cannot absorb and process it properly leading to nutrient-rich runoffs that wreak havoc on the waterways and on aquatic life, like I explain in my article ‘If You Want To Make It Rain – Take Care Of Your Soil’. Artificial fertilisers are not 100% bioavailable and do not get properly utilised by plants.
When properties have been overused and abused for decades, a lot of soil organic matter is needed initially to return to the yield many expect from their land.
GOOD COMPOST IS SHEER SOIL ORGANIC MATTER AND PARTNERED WITH MULCH – IDEALLY WOOD CHIPS AS THEY ARE NATURALLY INOCULATED WITH FUNAGL SPORES – IS AN UNBEATABLE COMBINATION.
Anyone who grazes ruminants, like sheep and cattle, is already ahead. Ruminants and grasslands have co-evolved and if strip-grazed correctly the ruminants become amazing helpers to renovate depleted soil as they turn some of the available biomass straight into soil organic matter. I explain the details and timing of strip-grazing in my book ‘Radical Soil Care’. Timing is geared according to plant and soil recovery, not by the calendar or even the watch. If done with passion recovery can be visible within a year.
I do appreciate that many properties are in very difficult circumstances due to long lasting drought, but again, no soil biology, no rain, so we have to start to renovate the soil to attract humidity. See also my article ‘If You Want To Make It Rain – Take Care Of Your Soil’.
REPLENISHING SOIL ORGANIC MATTER IS THE FAR SUPERIOR WAY TO REGENERATE AND HEAL DEPLETED SOIL AND THUS WATER CYCLES. THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO SHORTCUT DESPITE WHAT MANY PROMISE – SEE MY ARTICLE ‘MARKETING AND POLITICAL DECEPTIONS IN AGRICULTURE’.
We can support soil organic matter with liquid soil improvers. There are many options – teas from compost or worm castings or plant ferments. We can make plant ferments from any plant by placing them in a bucket, covering them with water and letting them sit until they ferment and the developing stench subsides. I make my ferments in two stages – after the initial fermentation process I sieve out the plant material, which goes onto the compost. I add some molasses and water to the remaining liquid and aerate it for 24 hours. Then I immediately apply the fertiliser, highly diluted, onto the soil. The fertiliser has only a very short shelf-life and storing it will destroy the microbes that start to develop. I call it rocket fuel and the plants love it.
Aeration adds oxygen to the liquid which is needed in the chemical processes that create healthy soil biology. Anaerobic homemade fertilisers are not immediately bioavailable and make soil biology work harder to reap the benefits, whereas aerobic fertilisers hit the ground running.
You might even want to add some raw milk or sea water for additional nutrients. And please us organic molasses to avoid the excess sulphur in the preservatives used in the non-organic product. Make sure the fertilisers are highly diluted otherwise they will damage the plants. Start slowly, less is definitely more.
Try it out and play with it, ideally using resources from your property. Buying and shipping material, often over long distances, defeats the idea of sustainability, carbon footprint and ‘food miles’.
Please use rainwater for producing and diluting liquid fertilisers as the chemicals in town water have antibacterial properties killing off our precious biology we are trying to create. If you don’t have any other option, let the town water sit in an uncovered bucket for at least 24 hours in the open to let some of the chemicals evaporate.
And again, ALL liquid fertilisers only ever work if there is soil biology present to begin with and only make sense in conjunction with improving soil organic matter.
If we spray liquid fertilisers to improve soil biology but it has nowhere to live our efforts are futile. Or even worse, they create highly nutritious water runoffs causing enormous damage in fauna and flora and are especially harmful to any aquatic life.
For extreme toxicity or contamination for soil with e.g. lead and other heavy metals or even cyanide – or when soil has anti-bacterial properties or has to deal with acidic or salty water – we can employ more targeted means. Homeopathy is one of them. Let’s go down that rabbit hole for a while, starting with some extracts from my book ‘Radical Soil Care’.
The underlying principle of homeopathy is the law of similars, healing like with like. Samuel Hahnemann developed modern homeopathy in Germany in the late eighteenth century. He put the law of similar, which has its roots in ancient Egypt and Greece, into a comprehensive system of medicine. Symptoms are treated with plants, minerals or animal parts, which cause in larger doses similar symptoms to those of the illness we want to treat. Hahnemann discovered that the effect increases with ever smaller doses and potentisiation.
Potentisation is a series of systematic dilutions of a substance to achieve higher efficacy. The remedies are diluted so many times that only energetic memory of the original substance is left. This encourages the sick body – or soil – to heal.
HOMEOPATY HAS ALWAYS BEEN CONTROVERSIAL. THE PROOF OF ITS EFFICACY LIES IN TREATING ANIMALS, AS A POTENTIAL PLACEBO EFFECT AND SCEPTICISM ARE NON-EXISTENT. ONE OF MY DOGS HAS EPILEPSY. SHE DOES NOT RATIONALISE NOR CARE THAT THE DOSES ARE MINISCULE OR THAT SHE IS GIVEN A VIBRATIONAL MEDICINE; SHE STOPS CONVULSING.
Let me take you further down that rabbit hole and introduce you to a sub-discipline of homeopathy that I passionately practise which is called isopathy.
In isopathy the remedy is either prepared from diseased or pathological specimen such as blood, tissue or discharges – or soil, plant and water samples – from the very tissue or area we want to heal. These remedies are called nosodes from the Greek ‘noses’ meaning disease. Alternatively we can prepare idiopathic remedies from healthy specimen which are called sarcodes.
In my experience nosodes using specimen taken from the affected areas are most powerful. This means specimen from the very area or person who needs to be treated. For example a person has a skin infection we want to treat with a nosode. We take the sample for our remedy from this person and not from another person with a similar infection. We then use homeopathic principles to prepare systematically diluted remedies which only carry the memory of the original substance. There is absolutely no biological residue of the specimens left.
Isopathy is a fantastic tool to heal soil. I have used it successfully on radioactive soil, GMO-affected soil, and various toxicity contaminations in soil and water.
Isopathic remedies are also fantastic lifters to give the entire property a boost – especially when under unspecific chemical threats like chemtrails or acid rain. Homeopathic remedies can get sprayed out with water (rain water, please) or added to the liquid fertilisers mentioned above.