Wild Tip: Building Garden Soil Without Hot Composting

This year I built a brand new kitchen garden. But the native soil that I used in the beds is really poor. Almost no organic material and in the sun it turns light grey and gets rock hard.

I knew this when I built the garden and despite the poor soil I still managed to get a decent vegetable harvest this year.

But I really need to improve the soil and I don't want to pay to bring in more soil and dealing with hot composting is just too big of a pain to me. I have never liked hot composting...

So what am I going to do? Here are the easy and simple steps I'm taking this fall to build soil before next spring.

Adding Wine Cap Mushrooms to the Mulch

I had already mulched my garden beds with wood chips which helped keep the soil moist and prevent it from drying out. Each garden bed also has a bunch of wood buried in it (the garden beds are all hugelkultur beds). In the long run this will help build soil but something needed to happen in the short run.

After doing some research I decided to add wine cap mushrooms to my garden beds. Wine caps are easy to identify and are supposed to be very tasty and easy to cook with. Plus they grow easily in mulch from wood chips, fall leaves, and straw. They just need a little soil contact to grow.

Sounds like the perfect mushroom for me to try!

I recently ordered over 10 lbs of wine cap mushroom sawdust spawn from Field and Forest Products. This spawn will be spread out and mixed in with the existing wood chip mulch on my garden beds and in a few areas in 2 of my food forests.

I don't need to spread it everywhere since the mushrooms will spread overtime.

These mushrooms will help breakdown the existing mulch (plus the new mulch I'm adding!) and turn it into rich dark soil that my vegetables will love.

But this is just step 1.

Adding Fall Leaves as Leaf Mould

Last year I made 2 large bins out of untreated pallets and filled them with fall leaves from my neighbors. Since then these leaves have been slowly breaking down through fungal action--not bacterial action.

This is a slow and cold decomposition as opposed to the quick and hot bacterial composting you might be more familiar with.

The result is a material called leaf mould. Leaf mould is dark with a nice earthy smell to it. But it's not a soil fertilizer but is instead a soil amendment.

It adds organic material to the soil which improves soil structure and it also adds minerals to the soil (it can be equivalent and often superior to rock dust). Plus, it feeds a lot of soil life such as the wine cap mushrooms!

In my garden the leaf mould will be added on top of the wood chips and mushroom spawn. This will provide more food for the wine caps and support other soil life such as earthworms which will pull the leaf mould down into the soil.

This will protect the soil from evaporation, increase the water holding capacity of the soil, add minerals to the soil, and most importantly feed and protect soil life.

The next step will top this all off and keep everything in place.

Chop-and-Drop Spent Vegetables

So at this point I have wood chip mulch mixed with wine cap mushroom spawn which is covered with leaf mould. But this could blow away in winter storms so the next step is to chop-and-drop the old vegetables.

As any gardener knows there tends to be a lot of dead and dying vegetable material left over in the garden at the end of summer. This could be hauled away and composted but I like to just chop it up and drop it on the garden beds.

This is known as chop-and-drop.

In my garden I will be chopping everything up to 4-5 inch pieces and using it to help hold the leaf mould in place and work as an additional mulch.

This will also leave the roots of the vegetables in the ground which will further feed soil life and help build rich soil.

While the mushroom spawn will help with breaking all this mulch down the next step will help ensure the material breaks down in a timely manner.

Creating a New Worm Bin for Worm Castings and Worm Tea

Soon I will be making a simple worm bin based on the bath tube (mine will be in a large plastic bin that I have sitting around) one shown in the video. This is a simple design that should meet my needs.

This bin will compost most of my food waste and a lot of the food waste generated by the office I work in (just a small office).

The worms will then turn this food waste into worm castings and worm tea. Both materials will be spread on the garden on a regular cycle. The tea will be diluted to help it go further but it does not need to be.

Both the tea and the castings will be filled with beneficial bacteria that will help the large amount of mulch on my garden beds to breakdown into rich soil.

The castings will also work as a soil amendment to further improve the soil in my garden.

One Final Ingredient -- Time

To summarize here is what I'm doing to build soil in my garden:

1. Build the garden using the hugelkultur bed technique (buried wood).
2. Add an initial layer of wood chip mulch to the soil surface.
3. Add wine cap mushroom spawn to the existing mulch.
4. Add 1 year old leaf mould to the garden beds as mulch.
5. Chop-and-drop the spent vegetables making sure to leave the roots in the ground.
6. Create a worm bin to produce worm castings and tea from food waste. Add the castings and tea to the garden on a regular cycle.
7. Bonus: Plant perennial vegetables in the garden!

That last one is a bonus step that will also help build soil. I'm slowly adding perennial vegetables to my garden as a way to minimize soil disturbance and ensure some living plants are present in the garden year round.

But there is one final ingredient to this list of 7 steps and that is time. Working with nature is by far the best way to build soil but it takes time. The fungi, bacteria and other soil life will need time to build up in numbers before they can breakdown the mulch and support my vegetables.

In time the result will be dark rich soil filled with life that will quickly turn mulch into rich soil which will then support healthy and abundant vegetables for my family and I.

You can do this too! Do you rake up leaves each fall? Build 1 or 2 simple bins using 4 pallets and fill them with the leaves. Just wait a year or 2 and you will have leaf mould to add to your garden.

Once you start doing this you will always have leaf mould every fall.

Another great option is to make a basic worm bin like the one shown in the video. The castings and tea will really help your garden and add beneficial bacteria to your garden's soil.

You can add mushroom spawn to your garden or just wait for mushrooms to move in on their own. But they might not be edible--I like wine caps since they will provide me an additional harvest twice a year.

But as I said before this approach takes time. This method works by working with soil life so you have to work at their pace not at yours.

Each year you use these 7 methods the better your soil will get. Just make sure to stick with it for a few years so you can see the results. Your garden will thank you and you will love what it does for your vegetables.

Plus you are using up potential waste (food scraps, fall leaves, etc.) and turning it into soil.

Finally, this is a very cheap way to build soil.

The only cost are the mushroom spawn blocks, and any materials you need to buy for the worm bin and leaf mould bins. If you salvage the materials this won't cost you much at all and it's much cheaper then buying compost or garden soil.

In the end this system is designed to mimic how soil is built in a forest but in a way that works for a kitchen garden.

Well what do you think? Does this sound like a method that could work in your garden? Do you use other methods to build your soil?

Please leave a comment with your thoughts. I would love to hear from you!

Thanks!

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