How to Amend Soil with Permaculture

Here’s how to amend soil with simple, economical, and easy to implement permaculture principles like applying compost and cover crops. We also discuss water retention in the homestead garden, as well as what time of year is best to amend soil to increase crop yields. Growing healthy food starts with growing healthy soil – you’ve got this!

The old saying goes that gardeners don’t actually grow veggies, they grow soil. The soil grows the veggies. This is so true!

Healthy soil has its own ecology, or living system full of relationships between elements in the system. Inside that living system is a big mix of:

mycelium
dead roots
dead leaves
worms
beetles

And a whole host of microscopic critters that all help keep the soil’s immune system strong and its nutrient level high.

In the practice of permaculture we grow food by building up the soil ecology with natural methods like using compost instead of putting down commercial chemical soil amendments.

We spend a lot of time observing and interacting with our garden soil. The more we interact with the soil in our garden, the more we can note improvements over time.

Helpful Permaculture Article for Later:

Plan a Permaculture Homestead Layout

Stacking Functions on the Homestead

Finding Homestead Property Information, aka Site Data

Soil Amendment Exercise

To get started with this process:

Push your finger into your current garden soil. How far can you push down your finger?

Get our your notebook and take notes.

Is the soil wet or dry?
What color is it?
What does the soil smell like?
Are there any worms? Or other life?
Are there rocks in the soil? Sand? Clay?

Do a simple soil test to determine the clay, sand, and silt content of your garden bed soil. You need water and a jar with a lid for this test. (It makes a great homeschool project, FYI!)

The Homestead Education can show you how to do a Cheap and Easy Mason Jar Soil Test.

Write the results in your garden notebook. Sometimes, you’ll have an overabundance of one element or variations of the elements. For example, some sand and even small rocks are great in the soil because they provide drainage.

However, some soil is so full of rocks, you have to figure out how to fix that overabundance before you can grow food in it!

(If that’s an issue on your homestead, please visit our article, How to Fix Sandy Soil with Permaculture.)

Functions of Soil Elements

Each element – clay, sand, silt – actually performs a function in the soil ecology.

Clay holds water and provides minerals.
Sandy soil can provide great drainage so water doesn’t clog up in the soil. It also has mineral content.
Size-wise, silt falls between clay and sand, and can also hold onto water and minerals.

To keep better track of your garden notes, I suggest you get a copy of Schneider Peeps garden notebook. This is the one I use every year to keep all my observations and plans in one place.

Amend Soil with Currently Poor Ecology

Where this soil doesn’t exist naturally, we can build it over time. In short, if your soil is not that great, don’t despair – you can grow great dirt!

To begin with, to an empty garden bed, add the following materials in roughly this order:

Paper material – like cardboard or shredded bills or newspaper.
Woody bits – like dead sticks or old bush clippings, or wood chips.
Leaves, as cut up as possible.
Sawdust, sprinkle it in and over the other material to prevent clumping.
Native soil – whatever is in your yard will provide local bacteria and fungus which can act like an immune boost to your plants.
Compost, manure, straw.
Biochar, if you can purchase some or make it yourself. (Joybilee Farm can teach you how to make your own biochar.)
Top soil – from your garden or from building sites.
More compost, manure, and mulch like straw to top it off.

All these materials will provide vital carbon and nitrogen for the soil, as well as “hotels” for all those soil critters to live in. All will also provide other nutrient and water retention in your soil.

Allow your garden bed to sit awhile and decompose some of those materials. I always tell students to give it a full year – or four seasons.

However, few people are willing to wait that long. So, to speed up the process, I suggest they start a batch of cover crops in their garden soil.

Use Biochar to Amend Soil

A super quick explanation of biochar is as follows: charcoal that’s been fermented with water, compost, and maybe a sugar like molasses or sourdough starter to feed beneficial bacteria and yeasts.

Biochar has been used for centuries as a soil amendment. Some of its beneficial properties include:

It attracts and holds nutrients in the soil.
It never decomposes and, because of that, provides permanent housing for microbes like beneficial bacteria & fungi, algae, nematodes, etc.
It stores water.
Is made of carbon and, therefore, sequesters carbon in the soil.

The Easy Way to Make Biochar at Home

This is a super simplified version of an ancient process, FYI.

Purchase a bag of natural charcoal, there are various brands available at hardware stores. I even saw some at Walmart this year!
Empty the bag into a box and cover the charcoal with water. Let it sit for 24 hours.
Empty the box onto your driveway and hammer that charcoal into smaller bits. You can also use your feet to crush them. The more surface area, the more places for microbes to live.
Place them into a shallow pit dug in your backyard and ring it with stones or logs to keep it from overflowing when it fills with water. Be sure the pit is exposed to rainfall or water it weekly for the next 3-4 months.
Cover the charcoal with compost and toss in some of your sourdough starter or even just some sugar.
Mix it in with a shovel and cover it with cardboard, wood chips, or straw. You could also use a tarp.
Allow to sit for 3-4 months and don’t let it dry out. Keeping it moist is very important for continued fermentation.

Apply by sprinkling biochar on your garden soil kind of like salt, and then cover with mulch or more soil. The scientific amount is 10% – 15% biochar to soil.

A little goes a long way!

How to Amend Soil with Cover Crops

To add nitrogen, other nutritive elements, and living roots to your soil, keep the soil planted in cover crops for an entire year or more. If you can’t spare a whole year for cover crops, schedule them for at least one part of the year.

There are cover crops you can grow from later winter to early winter. Each crop comes up, lives until its about to set seed, and then you cut it down to lay onto the soil or ever so lightly mix it into the top layer of the soil.

This “green manure” will feed the soil and build it layer upon layer. Next year, do the same thing.

If you can, add another layer of mulch, compost, straw, wood chips, etc. Over time, a healthy soil will build up that will grow food for your family!

To get you started on using cover crops, try these helpful articles by actual homestead gardeners:

Best Cover Crops for Raised Beds, by Hidden Springs Homestead.

How to Use Cover Crops, by The Seasonal Homestead.

How to Amend Soil by Hand

Permaculture is a “by hand” kind of system, so learning how to amend soil by hand will be right up your alley! In permaculture, small and slow solutions are the first choice in our arsenal when dealing with an issue.

Instead of tilling and deeply digging soil to amend it, in permaculture we layer materials on top of the soil to rehabilitate it. In fact, we discourage deep digging because it breaks up the soil ecology we’re trying to build.

Unnecessary tilling or deep digging is like taking a wrecking ball the the healthy soil neighborhood we’ve been trying to create in our garden beds.

We keep our digging limited to times we actually need to move soil or dig holes for planting perennials. For harvesting, I like to use a broad fork or simple shovel.

There are times you may still decide to use equipment to move soil in a no-till garden, but those times are rare and targeted.

A Few Tips on How to Amend Soil

Never let your soil stand bare in the beds. Never let soil be bare ANYWHERE in your yard.

Bare soil = weak, dead soil.

Always keep your topsoil, aka the soil at the top of your garden bed, covered in mulch, straw, wood chips, pine straw, shredded leaves, etc.

This accomplishes several good things:

Keeps the soil hydrated as long as possible.
Prevents erosion from wind and rain.
Keeps the soil temperature regulated, avoiding large dips and peaks.
This in turn keeps the soil ecology – all the critters and microscopic goodness – alive and healthy.
Cover crops add a layer of protection not only with their leafy aerial parts above the soil but also with their precious roots beneath the soil. Roots exude helpful sugars that attract more beneficial organisms to your soil.
These materials break down over time becoming part of the soil ecology themselves. This continual process of mulch renewal and breaking down creates layers of usable garden soil.

Think of mulch and cover crops as armor for your soil.

Just as you would never send a knight off to do battle in his underwear, neither could you reasonably ask the soil to do battle with your native elements to produce food for your family without these protective and restorative measures.

The best part is that most of these materials can be scrounged, fall from the sky for free, or can be purchased for a reasonable amount (cover crop seeds can often be purchased in bulk from local feed stores).

How to Amend Soil by Learning to Plant Water

During a recent class with permaculture educator Morag Gamble, she taught that we need to start thinking about water sequestration in the soil as,

Planting water.

I had never thought of keeping water in the soil in that way and it was eye-opening. Yes, of course, we want to plant water just like we would a strawberry plant.

First, we prepare the soil with lots of organic matter so that there’s something in the soil besides clay that will hold onto the water. Clay is great for retaining water, but a little can go a long way!

Then, we need to be sure there’s enough drainage material in the soil – a little rock, even a little sand. We don’t want water to stand in the soil, we want it to stay just long enough.

After that, we plant the water in our prepared space by designing our landscape in such a way that the water comes to the spot we need it. We do this by:

Keeping our annual (vegetable) garden spaces open to rainfall. If we mulch the soil of our raised beds or swale gardens, then the water will be retained for much longer.
Capture rainwater off any roof we have available – the house, the chicken coop, the shed, the greenhouse. This rainwater can be saved against a dry day of want and used to cover the mulch material in our gardens where it will happily stay as long as possible.
Cut trenches along the contour of our land to direct even more water toward growing spaces like orchards and perennial fruit bushes. If our land is relatively flat, we can simply cut trenches to move the water where we’d like it to eventually drain into.
Cut swales if our homestead has a slope of 45 degrees* or less, then a swale cut along the contour or just slightly downhill of contour can help move water to where we want it. The water stays in the swales because we’ve filled them with perennial plants, as well as organic material in and on top of the soil. The water gets planted there!

If we have a slope of more than 45 degrees, we should think about creating terrace gardens to prevent excessive runoff and landslides.

A Note on Planting Water with Plants

One of the reasons that permaculture emphasizes the planting of perennials so often is that perennial root systems sequester water in the soil. They basically act like a sponge.

Annual plants (those most often grown in veggies gardens) don’t have extensive root systems because they are only in the soil for one growing season. Instead of putting energy into massive root construction, annual plants put most of their effort into producing their fruit which contains the seed that will perpetuate their growth into future seasons.

Perennials are in the garden for the long-haul and will not only hold water, but also nutrients in the soil for a long time.

While we don’t often think of planting perennial plants in the annual veggie garden, there is a place for them if design for them! Some perennial veggies include:

Asparagus
Rhubarb
Horseradish
Walking Onions
Garlic – can be grown perennially almost on accident since it’s so hard to be sure to get all of it out of the soil at harvest time!

Even if you don’t want to put these perennial veggies, or even other perennials like bulbs, herbs and flowers, into the veggie garden, you can still place them around the annual garden.

Or interspersed here and there with the annual veggies as companion plants; in permaculture parlance, this is called guild planting. In fact, we can teach you how to construct beneficial vegetable guilds in the garden for higher yields.

What is the Fastest Way to Amend Soil?

The quickest way to see lasting results in how to amend soil is to add organic matter. It almost doesn’t matter what kind. Compost, manure, wood chips, sawdust, shredded leaves, pine straw, grass clippings, etc.

Be sure the material hasn’t been sprayed with herbicides or pesticides that can build up in your soil to its detriment.

Also, be aware that animal manure and grass clippings can both contain a lot of nitrogen which can come on little strong when being placed into garden soil. Especially, if you’re going to have shallow rooted veggies like loose leaf lettuce.

It’s best to let high nitrogen botanical material sit out in the elements for for 3-12 months before you put it in with the veggie plants.

This organic material not only feed the soil, making it more fertile, but it also helps hold water in the garden. Remember, we want to plant water as many places as we can around the homestead garden.

Organic material also attracts beneficial ground-nesting insects, as well as microbial life that thrive on and inside the bits and bobs of sticks and manure. Organic material is like an oasis hotel in the soil substrate for these little critters.

The microbes, in turn, attract the beneficial fungi (mushrooms) to the area. This fungi does all kind of amazing things to amend our soil.

In the fine mushroom book, Entangled Life, author Merlin Sheldrake explains one of those functions,

Fungi produce plant growth hormones that manipulate roots, causing them to proliferate into masses of feathery branches… .

More roots, equals healthier plants and healthier soil. All this life is teeming around in the soil beneath our feet and the epicenter is around the root mass of perennial plants.

Note: If you’re interested in mushrooms and fungal activity, you’ve got to read Entangled Life! It’s nerdy mushroom information at its finest! (I usually get my books used at Thriftbooks.com, FYI.)

How to Amend Soil with the Right Attitude: Turn Bad Soil into Good Soil?

There really isn’t any such thing as bad soil. There is only soil that has been depleted of the elements necessary to sustain most plant life.

You’ll observe that even in the driest desert or the most frozen tundra where soil is at its most extreme that there are still those plants that have adapted to living in it all the same.

When we’re trying to grow food in our gardens, we simply need to create the soil that has the most balanced nutrition for what we want it to grow.

If we slowly, steadily, and with great consistency apply the principles we’ve discussed today, we will improve our soil’s health. With healthy soil, the dirt does the great work or growing our vegetables for us.

Healthy soil = Healthy Veggies!

More Permaculture Principles That Can Help:

If you’re new to permaculture , here are some articles that will help you slowly learn more. You’ll layer on knowledge like you do organic materials on top of your soil.

You don’t need to worry that you’ll miss an important point because they’re all tied together. Whatever you do to amend your soil this year, you can improve with a new or improved procedure next year.

Soil is always growing and improving – just like you!

Obtain a Yield: Increase Homestead Garden Harvests

Efficient Energy Storage on the Homesteaders

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle Homestead Waste

What Time of Year Should I Figure out How to Amend My Soil?

The best time of year to figure out how to amend your soil is the minute you think of it. Just do it!

If you want to formulate a plan for the year, though, here are some suggestions:

It’s common to lay down a winter cover crop in late fall, after you’ve cleared away the last of the summer garden. Cover crops are grown to be cut back before the go to seed and then lain on top of the soil, or lightly turned into the soil. They’re allowed to break down to feed the soil in between growing veggies.
Spring cover crops, as well as summer cover crops can be planned for, as well.
Straw makes a fine carbon layer for garden soil, especially during the growing season. It doesn’t cause much of a disturbance to the soil’s chemistry as it decomposes and it keep the soil armored against hot summer sun.
Once the growing season is finished, heavier mulches like shredded leaves and wood chips can be used on garden soil to further add botanical materials. Both these items require a great deal of nitrogen to break down, so they can sometimes be bullies in the summer garden, stealing nutrients from veggies plants. In the off season, though, they’re terrific!
In the late fall or early winter, pile up the organic material as high as you can! 8-14? would be great at the end of fall to go through winter and break down to feed the soil.

Don’t plan to cover crop AND heavily mulch at the same time. Do one or the other, or one first and then the other.

Cover crops seeds can come up through a light layer of straw, but they’d be hard pressed to germinate and reach the sun through a new layer of wood chips.

If you have a favorite natural way to amend the soil, please share it in the comments for the benefit of other readers!

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