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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Organic Fertilizer: What can you use ?

Now you are onto the organic farming bandwagon, either convinced by the health and environmental benefits, or convinced by the economics of it (or a combination of both). Now you want to know what are some of the fertilizers you can use as a part of organic farming ? After all, it is not possible any more to use the chemical fertilizers since these are not permitted as a part of organic farming, and go against the principles of using organic additives.

Compost: Compost is an excellent organic fertilizer that provides a rich source of nutrients to the soil. Making compost is not very complicated, the only thing it takes is some attention and time required for converting the organic waste to compost (months usually). It also helps in utilizing waste such as leaves, kitchen waste (except for meat), etc.

Nitrogen: Nitrogen in the soil is provided through the system of plant rotation, where nitrogen enhancing plants (that provide legumes) such as Alfalfa (as another example, potatoes should be grown on soil where sweet corn has been grown, since sweet corn adds to the soil what potato needs).

Livestock manure: Livestock manure is a natural method of adding nutrients into the soil and making it richer, a practice that has been followed since the beginning of farming. It is only in recent times that fertilizers started getting used; however, getting livestock manure as fertilizer for organic farming works fairly well.

Seaweed and kelp: This is an additive that is often ignored, but should be used. For those near sea coasts, this is plentiful, and provides nutrients, including materials that are not found elsewhere.

Compost tea: This additive sounds a bit strange, but is actually rich runoff during the composting process. Make sure that you have provisions to collect it, and use it as another fertilizer. It works great with potted plants.

Naturally occurring minerals such as mine rock phosphate, sulfate of potash and limestone are also considered organic fertilizers.

Slurry: A mixture of animal waste and water is used as organic fertilizer

Vermicompost: This is a mixture of decomposing vegetable / food waste, bedding materials, and pure vermicast produced during the course of normal vermiculture operations. This mixture contains water-soluble nutrients and bacteria, and makes for rich fertilizer, ideal for organic usage.

Guano: It is the excrement (feces and urine) of seabirds, bats, and seals. Soil that is deficient in organic matter can be made more productive by addition of this manure. Guano is rich in phosphorus and is an effective phosphorus fertilizer.

Blood meal: Blood meal is dried, powdered blood used as a high-nitrogen fertilizer. It is one of the highest non-synthetic sources of nitrogen and if over-applied it can burn plants with excessive ammonia. Blood meal is completely soluble and can be mixed with water to be used as a liquid fertilizer.

Epsom Salts: Commonly used to provide magnesium and sulfur to the soil. Promotes bushier growth and more flowers.

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How to start an Organic Garden - tips

What do you mean by Organic Gardening ?
Organic Gardening primarily means not using synthetic products such as fertilizers and pesticides. It means working much more closely with nature, and using natural means to increase the level of ingredients and essential materials such as nitrogen to the soil, and using natural means to counter pests such as insects.
An important part of going organic is that you need to change your style of dealing with problems. In normal gardening, where you do not have to follow organic principles, you can deal with pests once they occur by treating them with pesticide; you can deal with scarcity of nutrients by adding fertilizer. If you are following organic gardening principles, what you really need to do is to try and prevent problems rather than having to deal with them as they occur. Taking the initial steps to make your garden healthier results in having fewer problems to deal with and healthier plants, fewer pest and disease problems.
As a part of this, you need to make sure that your soil is healthy, has all the required nutrients, that you take care to ensure that the plants you are planting are healthy (and you have enough knowledge of the plants you are planting in terms of their requirements and their growth cycles), that you check your plants on a regular basis and have setup a frequency of checking along with a checklist of what to check. It is very important to have a knowledge of the pests in your garden, as not all insects and animals in the garden are harmful (many insects and animals actually help in pest control); further, the damange inflicted by some pests can be minimal and not really affect your plants.
The insistence of not using synthetic pesticides and fertilizers is an important part of the growth of an organic garden, and not to be compromized with. It is more of a mind set change that you need to rule out the use of such chemicals. This does not mean that you cannot use pesticides, there are a whole range of pesticides and insect repellants that are based on organic ingredients and which are overall of benefit to the environment (the run-off of pesticides and fertilizers into water systems is now a major environmental and health problem).
Finally, let me round off this summary of organic gardening principles with this definition:

"an ecological production management system that promotes and enhances biodiversity, biological cycles and soil biological activity. It is based on minimal use of off-farm inputs and on management practices that restore, maintain and enhance ecological harmony"

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Growing plants: Rotating crops in a garden - helps in providing nitrogen

Crop rotation means growing a particular family of plants for one growing season, using a different family of plants for the next season, and so on. Why does this need to be done ? For a lot of growers, this is not something they are aware of; so read on.
A quick reason as to why you should do drop rotation (for details, you will need to read the next post). Monoculture (growing the same crop in the same spot for many seasons) used to cause problems such as failure of plants, either due to disease, or due to poor growth. Why does this happen ? Typically, plants from the same species like the same sort of nutrients from the soil, and continue to use up these nutrients as the seasons go by (and it is an expert grower who can supply the exact same nutrients on a regular basis). The problem is that specific nutrients are lost the one that the crop likes. How do you rectify this ? You make a good attempt to do this through the practice of crop rotation (Crop rotation is when you switch the type of plant grown on a piece of land over seasons). This problem of nutrients is especially problematic when it comes to nitrogen use. And there are plants that cause the problem, and there are plants that solve the problem (by adding nitrogen to the soil). If you rotate between plants that need nitrogen and plants that add nitrogen, your land will always be healthy. Another health (healthy for your plants) benefit for rotating plants is to reduce the chance of disease getting worse. If the same crops are grown, then the disease gets more stronger, more concentrated, and some of the disease will become resistant to the disease killers you may be employing. By changing the plants, the disease will not get a chance to become more concentrated, since a different plant most likely will not get affected by the same disease.
Why worry about nitrogen ?
Nitrogen is one of the major nutrients required for the healthy growth of plants. Lack of nitrogen will lead the plant to not grow properly, including stunted growth, poor fruits, and so on. Plants which are most susceptible to nitrogen shortages include leafy vegetables such as broccoli and spinach. The leaves will be pale, smaller than normal and possible blotched with reddish or purple tints. Typically, however, All vegetable gardens are prone to nitrogen shortages because of the demands of food plants.