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    Personality Tests For Your Soil: The Ultimate Guide to Soil, #1
    Personality Tests For Your Soil: The Ultimate Guide to Soil, #1
    Personality Tests For Your Soil: The Ultimate Guide to Soil, #1
    Ebook101 pages53 minutes

    Personality Tests For Your Soil: The Ultimate Guide to Soil, #1

    By Anna Hess

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    About this ebook

    Grow twice the fruits and vegetables in half the space on the farm, in the backyard, or even in your window!

    Have you noticed the extraordinary flavors and yields emanating from even a small garden when the soil is just right? If you’ve ever been envious of your neighbor’s dirt or just curious about homesteading, then The Ultimate Guide to Soil is the perfect fit for you.

    This first volume in the series walks new and experienced gardeners through fun and easy personality tests for their soil. You'll measure carrots, play with mud pies, and assess your weeds to get a big-picture idea of what's right or wrong with your dirt. Then follow Hess's tips to figure out which professional soil tests --- if any --- are necessary to bring your garden to the next level of ecosystem health.

    With an emphasis on simple techniques suitable for the backyard gardener, The Ultimate Guide to Soil gives you the real dirt on good soil. Maybe next year your neighbor will be envious of you!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWetknee Books
    Release dateJan 5, 2016
    ISBN9781519931450
    Personality Tests For Your Soil: The Ultimate Guide to Soil, #1

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      Book preview

      Personality Tests For Your Soil - Anna Hess

      Personality Tests For Your Soil:

      The Real Dirt on Cultivating Crops, Compost, and a Healthier Home

      Volume 1 in The Ultimate Guide to Soil

      by Anna Hess

      Copyright © 2016 by Anna Hess

      All rights reserved.

      No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

      Visit my blog at www.waldeneffect.org or read more about my books at www.wetknee.com.

      Contents

      Introduction

      A love affair with soil

      The big picture

      What to do if your soil isn't so friendly

      Personality Tests For Your Soil

      Chapter 1: The Big Picture

      Weeds and growability

      Where did your soil come from?

      Broccoli test

      Chapter 2: Soil Aggregates

      Carrot test

      Muddy-water test

      Crusting and clods

      Erosion

      Chapter 3: Soil Type

      Ribbon test

      Jar test

      Online soil surveys

      Chapter 4: Organic Matter and Drainage

      Worm test

      Soil color

      Chapter 5: Professional Soil Tests

      When it's time to pay for a soil test

      Selecting a soil-testing laboratory

      Understanding your test results

      Organic matter and nitrogen

      Organic matter and CEC

      About the Author

      Other Books You May Enjoy

      Introduction

      A love affair with soil

      Soil is at the heart of a healthy garden.

      When my husband wants to make my day, he doesn't buy roses; instead, he comes home with a truckload of horse manure. On summer nights, he checks to see how much dirt is embedded in the soles of my perennially bare feet before allowing me into bed. And he looks on slightly bemused when I rush out during February thaws to weed the berry patch just for the sake of plunging my hands into rich, dark garden soil.

      Most gardeners know where I'm coming from since they share my deep-seated attraction to dirt. Part of that fascination lies in the purely mechanistic understanding that good soil makes healthy plants and eases the labors of weeding. But are any of us really immune to the seductive aroma of actinomycetes wafting out of a deep loam? When we read that scientists are running controlled trials to determine how well another soil microorganism (Mycobacterium vaccae) works as an antidepressant by tricking our brains into producing extra serotonin, are we really surprised?

      Joel Salatin likes to say that he's a grass farmer. But for most of us, soil is the ultimate heart of our garden and homestead. Luckily, that heart is easy to nurture. A few easy changes to our usual gardening routines will create soil so resilient and healthy that bountiful, nutrient-dense harvests become a fact of life.

      In my own garden, I've used the tips and tricks in this book to turn over-farmed, waterlogged, eroded ground into black gold that forms the focus of a vibrant homestead. And if you keep reading, your garden's journey back to good health will be even faster and simpler than mine was. So why wait? Nurture your soil and reap the rewards of nourishing, homegrown fruits and vegetables today!

      The big picture

      Each year, sorghum-sudangrass hybrids sequester three times as much carbon per acre as is packed away by a mature deciduous forest.

      If feeding your garden's soil isn't a lofty enough goal for you, here's something to consider—agricultural soil is one of the easiest places to sequester carbon in an effort to fight climate change. Every time your soil turns one shade blacker, that's carbon dioxide you've pulled out of the air and put to work where it can't melt glaciers and raise sea levels.

      So how do you maximize your garden's ability to pack on the carbon? Simply changing over to no-till practices sequesters 90 to 230 pounds of additional carbon per acre per year, but cover crops are the real heavy hitters. A planting of oilseed radishes will pump a massive 3,200 pounds of carbon per acre per year into the ground...while still leaving you all summer to grow tomatoes! That's equivalent to the amount of carbon sequestered in a 120-year-old northeastern woodland of the same size. But why stop there? Sorghum-sudangrass hybrids triple oilseed radish's humus-building powers, sequestering up to 10,565 pounds of carbon per acre into the earth and creating topsoil so rich that earthworms will go nuts.

      The great thing about the carbon sequestration powers of soil is that every trick

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