Soil Improvement, the Plan!

Having the best soil is something that every gardener wants and strives for. We all do something to improve it every year whether it be applying manure, compost, compost tea, fertiliser or even growing green manure. If we want good results we NEED good soil. And like all gardeners with the internet I have spent many an hour reading blogs and watching YouTube video's on how to do this. I think I must have seen every way you can, to improve your soil by now! But strangely enough I was watching a documentary about the Amazon many months back that set me off on Terra Preta. The Documentary was from the BBC and was challenging our perceptions of the Amazon as a 'pristine wilderness' and one fact they used to do this was the existence of Terra Preta. Terra Preta is Portuguese for 'black earth' and is the most fertile soil in the world found only in the Amazon. This soil was man made and has been found to be located around sites that homed settle communities.Needless to say our modern view of the Amazon as a pristine wilderness may well be unfounded. Certainly the techniques employed by many of the tribes living there now (slash and burn) did not and are unable to produce Terra Preta. I highly recommend taking an hour of your time to watch the documentary below. 

             The BBC Documentary on the Amazon and the Pre Columbian Cultures.

After watching the documentary I started reading up online about Terra Preta, what it was, how it was made and what was in it. It seems it is a mixture of manure, organic matter and charcoal on the most basic level. So it seemed to me quite an easy thing to reproduce on my own plot of land. And other people are doing the same....See next video.

Although the above video was helpful I will be approaching it with a different recipe, with a few more added ingredients which I think will improve my soil more. The basic list is this.

1. Charcoal/Ash
2. Well rotted Leaf Mulch
3. Garden compost
4. Manure
5. Bokashi
6. Blood, Fish and Bone

Over the last couple of months I have been collecting these ingredients, wood, dried garden vegetation and sawdust from the chicken coop to make ash and charcoal with. I have a good stock of well rotted shredded leaf mulch as well as chicken manure on tap. The added ingredient for my improvement plan is Bokashi, which I have been adding to my mulch as well as some of the manure I have been collecting. What the Bokashi gives is good microbes needed for a healthy soil, breaking up the nutrients in all the other ingredients that I am adding. Come spring I will layer across my beds and dig in well and hey presto Terra Preta! Well probably not as easy as that but it should surely improve the soil no end.