Residential

What does it mean to have microbes in your yard? At first, when we started our learning curve, we didn't know. What we have learned has really changed our view of our yards and what we can do with the soil that we own.

It turns out that many of the problems we have are systems/cycles in our soil that are dysfunctional. Our rain water cycling is dysfunctional (creeks that quickly go from overflowing to dry); carbon cycling is weak (the mulch doesn't break down); nutrient cycling is almost non-existent; and the engine of all those primary cycles is the microbial community in our soil. That is a big part of the reason why soil (and thus plants and trees) responds so well to good compost -- its the microbes in the compost. 

Instead of relying on short term toxic chemical ~cides (i.e. pesticide, herbicide, fungicide) to provide you with targetted effects, we believe that the better long term goal is to have properly functioning cycles in your property. There is a role for the ~cides when the problems are so great that you can no longer remediate. An alternative to the ~cides would be to just replace your soil. However, in most cases, we believe that with on-site composting, mulching, compost tea and some adjustments to the mineral balance, we can go a long way to capturing more of your rain water, cycling the nutrients to your plant's fruits and vegetables, and increasing their disease resistance.

Drought stress. How valuable are our trees in terms of shade and reduced air-conditioning costs? Help your trees by treating the soil that they grow in. Azomite minerals help relieve the most limiting step in the soil chemical composition. It is not the N-P-K which has been neglected over time, but the lack of trace minerals that have been added back to the soil. Elements such as Selenium, Moly-B, Iron etc. That is what Azomite contains. Compost Extract sprayed into the canopy of the trees helps the plants absorb more of these minerals, as well as improve the plants to utilize water, reduce disease stress, and cycle the nutrients back into the soil from the plant's dead leaves.

When we think of an enjoyable property, we imagine that all of the plants are performing at their best. The scents, colors, shapes and vitality of the plants, tell us that the world is good. There are so many things in our households which we can use with out wasting, which can help our plants and trees. Leachates from our composting systems such as Bokashi are an excellent way to cycle the waste nutrients from our kitchen.  Leachates from our food scraps can cycle upto 17x faster than conventional composting.

The most important lesson we learned in the summer of 2011 was to prevent the evaporation of the moisture from our soils. It is critical to protect the soil so that the wind cannot take the water that you took time to add to your soil.  You can do this with several inches of mulch made from the fall leaves.  Even shredded oak leaves are an excellent resource as they don't hold the water above the soil like wood mulch does.  That can be a problem when the dry winds blow through the wood mulch's coarser structure.

In short, the answers are among us.  We just have to think ind different ways to get different, and new results.