Organic Farming: How to prepare the soil ?

Soil preparation is critical if you are going in for organic farming. You do not have the liberty of adding a load of chemical fertilizers later if you find some deficiencies in the soil; and the motto for organic farming remains, "do adequate preparation rather than react later".
Making sure that the soil is healthy is an important first step in the preparation for organic farming. If the soil used for organic farming was earlier used for commercial farming, then you need to spend time to ensure that the presense of chemical fertilizers and pesticides have been removed from the soil (how to do this is a separate post), the duration for which you need to have kept such soil clean before using it for organic farming depends on the organic gardening certification in your country or state, and you should check those regulations.
The steps that you should take in order to get your soil ready are:
- Make sure that there are no weeds, stones, or pieces of other debris in the soil, and that it is ready for next steps
- Do a soil analysis. You can get a proper soil analysis done, or you can look at the rough ways of estimating the quality and breakup of your soil. Soil should have 3 main components (sand - 40%, silt 40%, and clay 20%). The soil should be one that you can compress with your hand, and it forms a solid mass that breaks when you poke it. If it either is unable to form a solid mass, or does not crumble when you apply effort, then the soil either has too much sand, or too much clay. An imbalance can result in the soil not being optimum, with imapct on water logging, or the ability of soil to let plants grow in it.
- You can also take a sample of your soil, put it in a glass beaker or jug of water, and then shake, and then let the soil settle down. The settling inside the glass leaves you with 3 different layers, of sand, silt and clay (with clay on top). The levels of each will slowly start giving you an idea of what is missing, and then you can add more of the missing element to get a better mixture. of course, if you are not able to get a correct mixture, go to the store and ask them for the amount of soil you require (make sure that you specify that you are going to grow organically)
- Look to see how you can encourage the growth of healthy stuff such as microbes, earthworms, etc. They do a lot to make your soil better.
- Read up about the various fertilizers you can add to your soil to make up for deficiencies. This would mean that you need to find out what your soil is missing, and requires some amount of knowledge (or if you don't have knowledge, either learn, or get somebody who can advise). Be sure that adding some good compost is typically helpful for the soil.
- Learn about crop rotation, so that you plan ahead for the crops you are going to put in the soil, and learn about which plants add which element, and remove which nutrient from the soil. Doing this is essential if you want to make sure that you soil is good in terms of nutrients, not only now, but for the future.
- Soil is improved when you add organic matter to the soil. This means that you should items such as compost, and even some more strange items such as hair (for nitrogen), grass clippings, purchased organic fertilizer, peat moss
- If you can, enable poultry to have free access to your soil. Hens do a fair amount of the manual hard work required, such as removing weeds, adding manure, and undertaking tilling of the soil.

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Tips for growing organic food - 1

Organic food has a lot of promises. At the very base level, organic food meets the expectation of people that their food be grown without a fertilizer and chemical cocktail. In organic farming, some of the concepts revolve around food growing practices that rely on crop rotation, green manure, compost, biological pest control, and mechanical cultivation to maintain soil productivity and control pests. Some of the practices that are strictly excluded include limiting the use of synthetic fertilizers and synthetic pesticides, plant growth regulators, livestock feed additives, and genetically modified organisms. Demand for organic food has grown massively.
What are some of the tips that one should follow when attempting to start the process of growing organic food.
1. Be convinced about not using weed killers and pesticides to your garden. If you are not convinced, then there is no point in going organic.
2. When starting out, do not plant in areas close to walls or fences. Such areas could be contaminated by paint, heavy chemicals, metals, etc.
3. Search for areas in your garden that received sun or are in partial shade the year round.
4. Clean the entire area, including removing earlier plants (if starting out organic the first time). Use a shovel if necessary to remove the roots from earlier plants.
5. Get into the habit of using organic compost material (learn how to prepare compost - an excellent growth material for the soil)
6. Prepare the garden by spreading leaves / already prepared compost all over your garden. This ensures that your garden gets its fill of organisms that are beneficial to it.
7. Once you have spread the compost / leaves / other such organic material over the soil of the garden, turn the top soil over, mixing the soil with the organic material so as to make sure that the top layer of the soil is very rich.
8. Water the soil frequently so as to make sure that it remains damp (not a flowing river though); this ensures that organisms get a good environment to propagate in
9. Do not take steps that could harden the soil - this includes stepping on the soil yourself, or moving heavy objects on the soil.
10. Learn about crop rotations for getting different sorts on nutrients in the soil.
This is it for this post. In the next post, there will be more details on how to get a good organic garden up and running.

Preparing a good composting pile - the procedure

Compost is raw material for plants, an incredible boost to getting great plants. And this is something that can be made at home without too much effort or complication; however, not everybody is able to get it right. So here are some steps to ensure that you can prepare compost.

Where to make compost in:
You can make compost even under a big polythene sheet, but a bin makes the process a bit neater and cleaner. The bin just acts as a container, so having bins with different exteriors does not really matter.
The bin should have a lid, should not have gaps in the sides (to protect from natural elements), and should be easy enough for you to access (which means tall cyliners that you cannot see insides may not work).

What can you compost:
Well, almost anything organic can be put in a compost pile, and it will over a period of time convert it compost. However, there are some exclusions.
You should not put meat scraps and too oil based material, since meat attracts vermin.
Similarly, even if you have access to a lot of wood scraps, don't put too much
What can you put ?
As I said, almost anything. Put kitchen waste (peeling, roughings, vegetable cores, fruit pulp), lawn clippings, leaves (but larger leaves need to be cut into smaller sections for faster decay), branches (shredded), paper waste, hay, newspaper, and you can guess, many other similar things.

What do you do to get started:
Once you have the bin, start preparing layers of the various compost raw material. Once you have a six inch layer of such material, you need to add a 4 inch later of ready compost (you should save a bit of compost that has been prepared earlier), or soil, or manure.
Keep on making alternate layers of these materials until you have a pile that is around 3-4 feet high.

Maintenance during the composting process:
The pile should be in a region that is not directly exposed to harsh sunlight; a semi-shaded region is ideal. Keeping under sunlight would dry it out too much.
Water conditions for the compost pile is always where most failures occur. The pile should not be wet or dry, but moist. If you add too much water, you will get a sludge and certainly not compost.
You should turn the pile once in a while, a week or later. This allows more air and oxygen into all parts of the pile, ensuring that the bacteria and fungi get everything they need to grow.
Using urine (even though it seems sometimes a bit repulsive) acts as an accelerator to the compost pile and is pretty useful.

How do you know when the pile is ready:
It can take anywhere between 2 months and one year to form compost.
When you open the compost pile and find that the ingredients have turned to a material that looks dark brown and smells somewhat like earth, the compost is literally done. However, it should still be left for a period of 2 weeks to a month before being used.
If you find some large particles still in the compost, you can either use them along with the compost, or you can add them back to the new compost pile you may be creating.

In addition to this, there are many reasons why a compost pile may fail, so the next post will contain some tips for the compost making process.