Chicken Soup for the Soil

Sometimes the mineral balance in the soil is just fine, the pH is in the correct range, but the plants are diseased and not growing well. That’s what happened with my friend Kristy’s soil. She lives in an area of class 1 prime farmland which, like so much farmland in the US, has been covered with houses. She also has a lifetime of experience successfully growing vegetables. Yet she struggled to grow the most basic peppers, carrots and fruit trees. Her soil test report looked great; the minerals were nicely balanced (although she could have used more boron). There was no clear reason she couldn’t grow whatever she wanted to.

We checked whether it could be

• Herbicide damage. Unlikely since the grapes were doing fine and they are very susceptible.
• Water, too little or too much. Unlikely since she’s an experienced gardener and knows how to water.
• Root damage, such as from root knot nematodes. The roots looked okay.
• Something eating the stem at the base of the plant. She found nothing on inspection.

Christy is a backyard gardener and does not have the resources to send her diseased plants to a pathology lab to test for viral diseases. It would have been prohibitively expensive. The internet was of no help either. None of the photos of the typical diseases in our area looked like what her plants had.

Our best hope was to give the soil a nice biological reset. We decided to start inoculating the soil with beneficial microbes.  The microbes would help break down what was already there and would help to provide a beneficial soil ecology, rather than a diseased one. Sometime soil needs chicken soup (or cashew squash soup if your soil is vegan). We mixed up a batch loosely based on a recipe in The Farm as Ecosystem by Jerry Brunetti.

Here’s the recipe for a 5 gallon bucket.

• Water with vitamin C in it. The vitamin C will eliminate the chlorine in the water. Chlorine kills microbes, including the good ones. I buy powdered ascorbic acid, which is the same as vitamin C (like this). Less than 1/8^th tsp per 5 gallons is enough.
• Blackstrap molasses – 1.5 cups.  This feeds the bacteria, not the fungi.
• Liquid Fish and Kelp – 1 cup. Here is one possible brand. Also feeds the bacteria and the plants.
• EM-1 microbial inoculant – ½ cup.  Here is the brand I use. It’s expensive, so I only buy it only once per year, and then brew more from the one bottle. Here is a link to how to brew more. (I just make it in a plastic bottle and let the air out if the bottle puffs up.) Or you can make it for free, but that takes time. I use this stuff as often as I can and the plants love it. EM1 is a concoction of microbes designed to be self-sustaining. It contains a lot of lactobacillus and yeast, both microbes are present in sourdough starter.
• You can add other yummy things the microbes might like. I put in a little worm compost and sprouted grain (malted barley). If you have mineral powders such as basalt dust, add a small handful.

How to mix it. Heat some of the water to about 100° F. and dissolve the molasses in it, stirring until it’s no longer sticking to the pot. You can add the EM1 at this point, and the rest of the water but keep the temperature below 100° F and ideally above 80° F.

Ideally you will let it brew for at least 3 days. I keep mine at 90° F. for three days until it is all active and bubbling. Others let it go longer. My feeling is that I want to apply it while there is a good population of microbes and something left for them to eat.

How to apply.

• Water the soil if it is not already wet. Let the water sink in. You want the chicken soup to spread through capillary action.
• Pour the soup evenly on the soil. A gallon can do about 50 young plants or 20 mature ones.
• Repeat at least once a week.