Vibrant Soils

Grow Your Own

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Take Home Notes

• If you don't know about the soil the food was grown in, you can't possibly know how nutrient rich the end product will be.
• What I am striving for is food that tastes powerful and IS powerful and it has everything to do with the soil that the food is grown in.
• If you don't have land there are other strategies like guerrilla gardening.
• If you do have land, you may need to do some work to prepare the space for your microbiological partners.  Then, to speed things up a bit, you many need to use a soil starter to jump start the system.  I describe it as hosting a party and inviting the guests.  Both parts are needed to convert a cultivated system back into its natural self-sustaining state.

Resources

What I specialize in, is creating Vibrant Soils.  So what exactly is a Vibrant Soil?

A Vibrant Soil is an artful balance between soil microorganisms and the plants that grow there.   It is a system that provides for all of the nutritional needs of the plants.  Just as in nature, no one is irrigating, plowing, or fertilizing.  Instead, a living sponge develops and holds the water and nutrients until they are needed.  Nothing is wasted.  Death is immediately cycled back into new life. 

Instead of an agricultural system that depletes a finite amount of raw natural resources, a Vibrant Soil creates natural resources continuously.  It is a system, a series of biological processes that propels forward creating abundance.  If you want validation that these biological processes exist, go for a short walk into an abandoned area, preferably a wild area, and roll over that downed log.  Lift up that flat rock.  Pick up the bucket that has been sitting in your yard for far too long.  One time I did this and found a spotted salamander.  Having never seen one before, I literally screeched.  It looked like a real life comic book character and I just could not believe my eyes.

Vibrant Soils are certified via soil samples evaluated under a microscope.  Having met baseline standards, this soil is equipped to provide plants with all of the needed components and results in exceptional food.  In the absence of microscope evaluation, there are outward signs you can look for on your own property.  For example, does the ground yield under your foot as you walk on it?  Do you see white or yellow strands in the soil?  Does the soil clump in aggregates and have variability in texture?  Do you have to water it very often?  Does a shovel glide in smoothly with little to no effort?  Do you see an abundance of small insects and critters running, flying, or burrowing away from sunlight?  Any earthworms around?  How many per square foot? These are some of the outward signs that a food web is established.

Many organic gardening practices support the continuation of an established soil food web.  Many permaculture strategies and techniques can be used to construct the habitat preferred by microorganisms.  And left on their own, over time, any mistreated piece of land will become populated with varying populations of microorganisms.  Some friendly.  Some not so friendly.  But over time, the system equilibrates and sorts itself out. 

I have developed the Vibrant Soils System to streamline the time it takes to transform a cultivated system, heavy on human intervention, into one that can use and benefit from the natural biological processes that sustain our wilderness areas.  Widely used cultivation practices interrupt, disrupt, and sometimes outright destroy those delicate natural biological processes.  So the Vibrant Soils System outlines both what to do and what not to do if the goal is to return to building soil structure and fertility naturally.

I like to describe it as hosting a party and inviting the guests.  It is these two components working together that drastically speeds up implementation time.  What took me 3-4 years to accomplish, I can now achieve in one growing season.  This is possible once you have a firm understanding of what is really going on down there in the soil.

Expression of Interest

If you would like to apply for the Vibrant Soils online training program/ in person workshops / or off site retreats on the topic of Growing Your Own using the Vibrant Soils System, please indicate your interest here.

An additional option to consider

If you are a DIY, roll up your sleeves kind of person, and you like the free '5 Strategies to Secure Nutrient Rich Food Close to Home' guide that you are using now, then I have for you a step by step guide to help you transition your soils into Vibrant Soils.  There are discrete steps presented that you can implement on the ground at your own convenience.  So even if you don't have land right now, if you dream of growing food in the near future, this guide will be tremendously helpful.  During this early bird period, prices are discounted.  The rate will be going up shortly as we get closer to the end of the year. The guide will be distributed on January 21, 2017.  By securing your copy at these early bird prices, you ensure you will have access when it is released.