Avoid Chemicals that Kill

Avoid using any chemical that ends in ‘cide’ – as that suffix that means killing. Replace those for products with ‘Organically Certified’ signs on their package. That means that the contents comply with Australian 2022 standards for organic and biodynamic production. The need for protection will reduce as your soil biology gets healthier, and with complete plant nutrition, will almost completely disappear, see the Plant Health Pyramid for an explanation.

Feed Your Plants with Biology-friendly Products

Artificial fertilisers are highly concentrated simple salts that kill or interfere with soil biology. Use natural fertilisers such as kelp oil, fish oil, molasses, blood and bone, soft rock phosphate, rock dust, chook pellets, manure, compost and so on.

Feed Your Soil Biology with Sea Minerals

The tens of thousands different species in soil biology have their own needs for minerals, and Sea Minerals have the widest range of minerals of supplementary fertilisers. The case studies show improvements in yields and quality from applying it to crops and orchards, while applying pastures with Sea Minerals has produced substantial increases in Dry Matter and the benefits of using Sea Minerals in Pasture.

Keep the Soil Covered where Possible

Where possible, use cover crops, crop residue or stubble mulch. They protect the soil biology and when they decay, they feed it in the next season. In gardens, use the ‘Chop and Drop’ method: all parts of the plant that are not used by us get cut up and left on the bed where it grew to build up the soil biology.

Leave Plenty of Leaves when Grazing

In pastures, use short grazing/long spelling rotations, which leave a far larger surface area of leaves to catch the sun’s energy. This allows for faster re-growth and yields more Dry Matter per year than overgrazing.

Encourage Diversity

In pasture, short term rotational grazing also reduces the selective grazing of plants favoured by cattle. This helps to maintain diversity in plant species and thus a more diverse soil biology, leading to better overall nutritional quality of the pasture.

In crops and orchards, encourage diversity in the soil biology by crop rotation, multi-species cover crops, or using a diverse mix of different crops grown between rows when and where possible.

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Healthy Soil-Biology is Essential for Healthy Plants

Soil-Biology refers to the viruses, bacteria, archaea, fungi, algae, slime moulds, protozoa, and nematodes which feed the plants and create many compounds the plants require for healthy growth.

Stones lack the large surface area needed by the soil-biology

The Soil-Biology needs surfaces to attach themselves to and countless hidey-holes for protection. Stones are solid without hidey-holes and provide a very limited surface area. A spoonful of clay when spread out has far greater surface —equivalent to the size of a tennis court. Because of this, using stones in a wicking bed is a waste of space that should instead be occupied by nutrient-rich soil, home to a vibrant soil biology.

Cloth Will Create Airlocks and Stop Wicking

Some people add cloth to cover the reservoir and stones to prevent soil from washing into the reservoir pipe. This is not an issue in properly made wicking beds, where the holes on the reservoir pipes point downwards.

The fine roots can penetrate the cloth and larger roots grow around it to reach the water. As the water level drops, this space is filled with air as it moves in to replace the water. Air does not wick water, and this creates an airlock between the cloth and the water.

The bed above the cloth ends up like a reduced regular garden bed. It has a permanent water supply at the bottom, rather than wicking soil, and the space below the cloth has no soil biology.
As the water becomes permanent, it can become a haven for mosquito larvae. In a wicking bed the reservoir pipe is surrounded by soil and there is no permanent water as it gets used within days.

In the photos below, we show a simple demonstration of the wicking effect on the left and the lack of it on the right.

The pipe with only soil (left) was able to wick water up 35cm in 24 hours (and further) but the pipe with stones and cloth (right) failed to wick. In the photo above, it is clear how the air gap caused by using cloth and stones prevents wicking.

Soil Holds More Water than Sand or Stones

A good soil mix retains more water than the same volume of stones, coarse sand, pebbles, or fine sand. To demonstrate this, one-litre samples of soil, stones, and sand were dried in the hot sun, weighed, soaked, and then measured again to determine how much water they held.

Since a gram of water is equal to one millilitre, the difference tells us how much water there is in each litre of soil. In the tables below, ‘Inert material’ refers to rocks, stones, sand, loam, and clay.

As the soils in our beds vary a lot, we first took one litre of soil from three beds, filled each container with water, drained the free water out and weighed it wet. We then spread the soil out on a table, let it dry in the sun and weighed it again in the container.

Average Soil Mix

We used the average of those three samples from the table above in the table below. We then filled four containers, with respectively stones, coarse sand, pebbles and fine sand. As with the soils, we filled them with water, drained that, spread the content out to dry in the hot sun, put it back into their containers and weighed those again.

Comparison of the Five Materials

Conclusion

Our soil mix held more water than stones, which held more than pebbles or sand. Much of that water is normally held in the bodies of the soil biology. For suggestions to improve your soils and stimulate your soil biology to grow, see our guide to create and improve your own soil.

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