How You Too can Heal your Soil

How You Too can Heal your Soil

Fires in Nature usually are a good thing. It helps in recycling carbon back into the soil. Carbon and trace minerals are essential is making available the trace minerals. Without the carbon, the microbes cannot make carbonic acid, which is needed to convert the trace minerals into a usable solution.

However, fires that burn homes (and their toxic materials such as pesticides, fertilizers, plastic, and many other toxins we make). These materials are not found in Nature,

Radiation, while common through the Universe, is not a good thing for the soil and all living things, if it comes from human-made sources.

You cannot grow food in this toxic soil. You cannot walk barefoot on it. You cannot let your animals walk on it. Forget letting your children go out and play in it. Trees that didn't die in the fire will have a hard time recovering because the soil is so toxic that it killed off all of the beneficial microbes. Animals, birds, insects, even fish, and creatures that live in the ocean will also be adversely affected.

Even the air we breathe will be toxic for many years, especially after a dry, hot spell followed by Santa Ana winds, which spread the toxins out more.

There are chemicals called Forever Chemicals. They aren't called that because they are short-lived either. In many places where fires have burned, the soil is removed and replaced, hopefully with clean topsoil. Clean top soil usually does not also contain the necessary microbial life. Only live compost contains these little Nature's soil army.

So what can we do about this?

Here is a list of steps you can take to help speed up the healing process of the soil.

First- Protect yourself whenever working on the soil as the dust is toxic, and you will end up breathing it. Use a masked made for this use N95 masks that filter out fine particles. Wear gloves when handling the soil. Have your workers wear these masks and gloves also.

While you cannot remove all of the soil, you can remove the top 12 inches and have it hauled away to a toxic deposal site. I would then replace it with a mix of rock dust, clean topsoil, and live compost. Topsoil alone won't do it as the soil needs its microbial army, and you only get that from Live compost. Not all compost sold is alive. Instead, most sterilized before bagging. By law, compost cannot be made with animal manure for safely reasons( so they say, but it is really for money reasons). Making clean healthy compost with animal manure can be done but not the way they are doing it now. So you will need to local a local source. In the Malibu area there are many, try Peach Hill Soils in Moorpark. In my opinion, homemade compost is the best, so look for someone that is making it or make it yourself. If buying compost, make sure it does not contain sewer sludge. It's funny, they can't make compost from animal manure, but they can make compost from human waste?

You should additionally, add rock dust and microbes to the mix. The more varied the rock dust sources and microbial sources, the better. This is Mother Nature's first line of toxin removal. The microbials will eat through any toxin.

 I would spray the entire property with enzymes. There are many such products available today. I love AgriGro's Ultra and Nitron's A-35. Both are excellent enzyme products. Mixing the two will go a long way to healing the soil. The AgriGro product was sent to Kuwait to clean up the oil from the oil spills and oil fires after the war. I also use a product called Superseaweed, which is a microbiological activator. This can be sprayed not just on the soil but on the plants themselves. It comes with the Nitron and the AgriGro, as well as many other natural products mixed in.

If you have a garden in the ground, I would remove as much of the soil as possible. Try 3 feet is you can go down that far. I made a raised bed once and went down 6 feet — the farther down, the better. Then refill with a clean mix as I mention before but add an organic potting soil. I would make gopher proof it with rocks along the bottom and sides. While you are at it, you might as well make it a raised bed since that will provide you with an additional 24 inches above the soil level. 

If you already have a raised bed, I would do the same as above. Take all the soil out and go down as deep as you can. I would replace the raised bed, make it from rocks, concrete blocks, or untreated wood. You can grow 4 to 7 times more food in a raised bed then just if grown in the soil. 

If you have damaged trees, I would do the following:

  a. Prune back all dead wood. Clean your tools to avoid spreading diseases.

  b. Repair any damaged sprinklers. Trees should only get watered via drip systems.

  c. Since you can't remove topsoil, you will need to add approx. A 6-inch layer of live compost and minerals (rock dust) and microbes.

  d. Here comes the most crucial part. In order to help your trees etc, heal, they will need an immediate source of nutrients and minerals. Any fertilizers, whether organic or chemical, will not work. The chemical fertilizers cause rapid growth at the expense of trace mineral absorption. Chemical fertilizers have very little of the 90 trace minerals and no microbes at all Organic fertilizers only work if there are microbes in the soil. We are in luck, since there are now many organic fertilizers with minerals and microbes. Try Doctor Earth's Organic fertilizers. The soil has been damaged and will take time to recover, so monthly foliar spraying is needed to provide them the food they need.

 Any questions? Email me andy@invisiblegardener.com

andy Lopez (note to editor..please use little a..thank you)

Invisible Gardener