Good soil is important in agriculture especially organic agriculture which doesn’t use synthetic fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides but uses naturally occurring inputs to produce safe food using environmentally friendly approaches.
Soil building
To build/ make soil for organic gardening, you can use wood chips which can be obtained from a local timber processing factory hence no need for cutting down trees to get wood chips. To make soil from wood chips, pile your wood chips in a layer that is about 6 inches in depth and let the wood chips break down naturally. This produces humus which is a good soil amendment.
To make larger quantities of soil used for filling a planting pot from wood chips, you need to compost them. This is done by heaping them in a pile and adding a source of nitrogen. The nitrogen source can be from green plants, weeds, sea weed and others. The nitrogen helps break down the wood chips into soil in as little as 6 months.
You can as well make soil from leaves. Collect leaves from the forest and compost them into humus. You can as well collect the leaves into bags and then add some water or let it rain on the leaves. Make some holes on the sides of the polythene bags for air circulation, tie the top of the polythene and put it in a shade. Wait for about a year and the leaves will turn into fungus rich compost.
The other soil building method is using animal manure like horse manure/ cow manure. This is turned into soil by composting it together with green materials for about 3 months.
