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Organic Gardening Part 5: Organic Soil Amendments

Organic compost - St. Clare Heirloom Seeds

Worm Castings are an excellent organic soil amendment, hard to Worm Castings - St. Clare Heirloom Seedsfind in retail stores, but a great addition to your soil. The nice thing is, you can order them by mail.
An amazing fact about worm castings: God in His infinitely awesome abilities in creation made worms to produce organic fertilizer. Even if what they take in for food has any chemicals or such, it comes out the other end organic, filtered by their amazing digestive system. They have been lab tested over and over, and this is how they always come out, pure and 100% organic.


Worm castings (a.k.a. worm manure, vermicompost, or worm excreta) are rich in plant nutrients, trace minerals and growth enhancers, and incorporating castings into the soil significantly increases microbial life in the root zone. Worm castings are extremely beneficial in that they stimulate plant growth more than any other natural product, enhance the ability of your soil to retain water, and also inhibit root diseases such as root rot. The humus in worm castings removes toxins and harmful fungi and bacteria from the soil. Worm Castings therefore have the ability to fight off plant diseases. One of the best features of worm castings is you can use as much as you want without the fear of burning tender young plants as other fertilizers are known to do. Unlike other animal manure and artificial fertilizers it is absorbed very easily and almost instantaneously by plants. The amazing thing is, while the nutrients are easily available they are at the same time naturally endowed with a slow release feature, causing the nutrient benefits to last up to 2 months!

Turning kitchen and garden waste into compost

Turning kitchen and garden waste into compost, the Black Gold of gardens, is an excellent step we can all take in providing our own organic soil amendments.
Why not make this the year to finally try your hand at creating your own compost? You hear about it all the time, you know the benefits, but it seems so daunting to try. There’s plenty of helpful info out there, ideas on simple starting methods for beginners. You have plenty to feed the pile/bin, we all have kitchen scraps, and garden or yard waste to feed the pile with. Give it shot, you can’t have any less than you do now even if it doesn’t work out!

Organic soil amendments come in many different types, if you have any of your own that you would like to share, please leave a comment!

1 thought on “Organic Gardening Part 5: Organic Soil Amendments

  1. Composting in a pile never worked for us. Between not having enough plant matter and animals digging thru the pile for food items, we nearly gave up on composting. What ended up working for us was using a blender to make ‘mulch shakes’ (or garden smoothies in today’s terms). I bought an older, cheap yard sale blender with a plastic jar. I keep the jar with lid in a corner of my sink where veggie trimmings that would have gone down the garbage disposal go. When the jar fills up I blend the trimmings and simply mix the slurry into the soil. There is no odor or food to attract animals except worms which love it. This has been helping our garden beds mulch up for years now.

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