How Fertile Soil is Built in the Wild and How to Replicate It in the Garden

Fertile soil has certain qualities that make it, well, fertile. Obviously, there is a need for nutrients, along with a certain level of moisture. Soil needs to have a reasonably neutral pH level, possibly teetering to one side (acidic) or the other (alkaline) but never too far. The structure, too, must be agreeable, allowing air and water to penetrate down to the root zones of plants.

Likely, the most important part of fertile soil is soil life, microbes that come in all shapes and sizes. These organisms have a synergistic relationship with the plants, feeding from the flora and giving growth back to the plants. Generally, soil with plenty of healthy microbes is going to have the qualities listed above.

Wildlands, as a rule, have fertile soils, almost as if nature has evolved to work this way (wink, wink), and if we just let it, voila. Thus, for those of us looking to make or keep our garden soil fertile, it’s a good idea to understand how soil is built in the wild and how to replicate that in our spaces.

Annual Accumulation of Organic Matter

Source: MIgardener/Youtube

It’s very important to understand that in lush wild places, be them prairies, forests, and jungles, there is an annual accumulation of organic matter that drops and feeds the soil and soil life. This organic matter—dead grass and herbs, or fallen leaves and branches—rests atop the ground until the organisms living in the soil process, or decompose, this matter. As the decomposed organic matter builds year after year, the soil/humus is rich with nutrients, develops great structure, and supports more and more soil life.

• What does not happen in the wild is the removal of all organic matter from the soil or deep tilling. Tilling kills the valuable microbes we want in the soil.

Ecological Succession

Source: Matt Powers – The Permaculture Student/Youtube

In addition to maintaining the annual accumulation, we must realize that different settings have different types of organic matter which attract different types of soil life. For example, forests tend to have much more leaf and woody matter, which makes them much more fungal, and that’s exactly the kind of soil trees do best in. On the other hand, grasslands have tons of decaying herbs, and that brings more bacteria, as well as fungi, to the mix. That works great for herbal landscapes like pastures.

• What does not happen is that these areas go through periods with nothing growing. The soil always has plants on the go, including both perennials and annuals.

Replicating Nature Starts with Mulch

Source: joegardenerTV/Youtube

With nearly every gardening situation, whether an orchard or vegetable plot, we start with a situation where these natural processes of accumulation and succession have not occurred. Instead, we have to do our best to recreate what nature does and recognize the type of plant—field or forest—we are trying to grow.

• When growing trees and shrubs, it’s best to focus on mulches that are created by trees and shrubs. This includes leaves, as well as woody matter, usually in the form of wood chips. To speed up the process, we can compost these things (carbon elements) to replicate years of organic accumulation, and we can inoculate the area with mycorrhizal (fungi) species.
• When growing vegetables and crops, it’s best to get into mulches that cycle through more quickly, particularly grass clippings, hay, straw, and cover crops. Shredded leaves work as well. Again, the process is advanced more quickly with the addition of compost, particularly one heavy with bacterial (green) elements with bacteria inoculation.

Using compost is a great way to introduce fertility, steady the pH balance of soil, provide ideal soil structure, and infuse life into a garden. In essence, making a big pile of organic material, i.e. a compost heap, is just a way of replicating what nature does but speeding up the process. We pile the equivalent of years of organic matter in a concentrated space.

Maintaining the Sequence

Once the compost and mulch are in place, maintaining soil fertility and soil organisms is simply a matter of keeping those natural sequences in action. Every year trees drop leaves and bits of wood to the forest floor beneath them. This detritus isn’t cleared away; rather, it is left to decompose and keep the soil life happy and feed. Every year, grasslands have annual plants that die and rot on the soil surface and perennial plants that continue to grow, often being trimmed back by grazing animals.

We just have to do our own version of this. Organic material needs to be continually added to our gardens and orchards, and perennial plants need to work as anchors throughout our garden systems.

Related Content:

• 6 Methods for Building Fertile Soil
• 7 Ways to Keep Your Garden Soil Rich in Minerals Naturally Without Buying Products!
• 7 Plants That Enrich Your Garden Soil
• How to Enrich Your Soil Naturally Without Fertilizer
• How to Use Winter Cover Crops to Keep Gardens Fertile

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