Soil preparation is critical if you are going in for organic farming. You do not have the liberty of adding a load of chemical fertilizers later if you find some deficiencies in the soil; and the motto for organic farming remains, “do adequate preparation rather than react later”.
Making sure that the soil is healthy is an important first step in the preparation for organic farming. If the soil used for organic farming was earlier used for commercial farming, then you need to spend time to ensure that the presense of chemical fertilizers and pesticides have been removed from the soil (how to do this is a separate post), the duration for which you need to have kept such soil clean before using it for organic farming depends on the organic gardening certification in your country or state, and you should check those regulations.
The steps that you should take in order to get your soil ready are:
- Make sure that there are no weeds, stones, or pieces of other debris in the soil, and that it is ready for next steps
- Do a soil analysis. You can get a proper soil analysis done, or you can look at the rough ways of estimating the quality and breakup of your soil. Soil should have 3 main components (sand – 40%, silt 40%, and clay 20%). The soil should be one that you can compress with your hand, and it forms a solid mass that breaks when you poke it. If it either is unable to form a solid mass, or does not crumble when you apply effort, then the soil either has too much sand, or too much clay. An imbalance can result in the soil not being optimum, with imapct on water logging, or the ability of soil to let plants grow in it.
- You can also take a sample of your soil, put it in a glass beaker or jug of water, and then shake, and then let the soil settle down. The settling inside the glass leaves you with 3 different layers, of sand, silt and clay (with clay on top). The levels of each will slowly start giving you an idea of what is missing, and then you can add more of the missing element to get a better mixture. of course, if you are not able to get a correct mixture, go to the store and ask them for the amount of soil you require (make sure that you specify that you are going to grow organically)
- Look to see how you can encourage the growth of healthy stuff such as microbes, earthworms, etc. They do a lot to make your soil better.
- Read up about the various fertilizers you can add to your soil to make up for deficiencies. This would mean that you need to find out what your soil is missing, and requires some amount of knowledge (or if you don’t have knowledge, either learn, or get somebody who can advise). Be sure that adding some good compost is typically helpful for the soil.
- Learn about crop rotation, so that you plan ahead for the crops you are going to put in the soil, and learn about which plants add which element, and remove which nutrient from the soil. Doing this is essential if you want to make sure that you soil is good in terms of nutrients, not only now, but for the future.
- Soil is improved when you add organic matter to the soil. This means that you should items such as compost, and even some more strange items such as hair (for nitrogen), grass clippings, purchased organic fertilizer, peat moss
- If you can, enable poultry to have free access to your soil. Hens do a fair amount of the manual hard work required, such as removing weeds, adding manure, and undertaking tilling of the soil.

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Now you are onto the organic farming bandwagon, either convinced by the health and environmental benefits, or convinced by the economics of it (or a combination of both). Now you want to know what are some of the fertilizers you can use as a part of organic farming ? After all, it is not possible any more to use the chemical fertilizers since these are not permitted as a part of organic farming, and go against the principles of using organic additives.

Compost: Compost is an excellent organic fertilizer that provides a rich source of nutrients to the soil. Making compost is not very complicated, the only thing it takes is some attention and time required for converting the organic waste to compost (months usually). It also helps in utilizing waste such as leaves, kitchen waste (except for meat), etc.

Nitrogen: Nitrogen in the soil is provided through the system of plant rotation, where nitrogen enhancing plants (that provide legumes) such as Alfalfa (as another example, potatoes should be grown on soil where sweet corn has been grown, since sweet corn adds to the soil what potato needs).

Livestock manure: Livestock manure is a natural method of adding nutrients into the soil and making it richer, a practice that has been followed since the beginning of farming. It is only in recent times that fertilizers started getting used; however, getting livestock manure as fertilizer for organic farming works fairly well.

Seaweed and kelp: This is an additive that is often ignored, but should be used. For those near sea coasts, this is plentiful, and provides nutrients, including materials that are not found elsewhere.

Compost tea: This additive sounds a bit strange, but is actually rich runoff during the composting process. Make sure that you have provisions to collect it, and use it as another fertilizer. It works great with potted plants.

Naturally occurring minerals such as mine rock phosphate, sulfate of potash and limestone are also considered organic fertilizers.

Slurry: A mixture of animal waste and water is used as organic fertilizer

Vermicompost: This is a mixture of decomposing vegetable / food waste, bedding materials, and pure vermicast produced during the course of normal vermiculture operations. This mixture contains water-soluble nutrients and bacteria, and makes for rich fertilizer, ideal for organic usage.

Guano: It is the excrement (feces and urine) of seabirds, bats, and seals. Soil that is deficient in organic matter can be made more productive by addition of this manure. Guano is rich in phosphorus and is an effective phosphorus fertilizer.

Blood meal: Blood meal is dried, powdered blood used as a high-nitrogen fertilizer. It is one of the highest non-synthetic sources of nitrogen and if over-applied it can burn plants with excessive ammonia. Blood meal is completely soluble and can be mixed with water to be used as a liquid fertilizer.

Epsom Salts: Commonly used to provide magnesium and sulfur to the soil. Promotes bushier growth and more flowers.

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What do you mean by Organic Gardening ?
Organic Gardening primarily means not using synthetic products such as fertilizers and pesticides. It means working much more closely with nature, and using natural means to increase the level of ingredients and essential materials such as nitrogen to the soil, and using natural means to counter pests such as insects.
An important part of going organic is that you need to change your style of dealing with problems. In normal gardening, where you do not have to follow organic principles, you can deal with pests once they occur by treating them with pesticide; you can deal with scarcity of nutrients by adding fertilizer. If you are following organic gardening principles, what you really need to do is to try and prevent problems rather than having to deal with them as they occur. Taking the initial steps to make your garden healthier results in having fewer problems to deal with and healthier plants, fewer pest and disease problems.
As a part of this, you need to make sure that your soil is healthy, has all the required nutrients, that you take care to ensure that the plants you are planting are healthy (and you have enough knowledge of the plants you are planting in terms of their requirements and their growth cycles), that you check your plants on a regular basis and have setup a frequency of checking along with a checklist of what to check. It is very important to have a knowledge of the pests in your garden, as not all insects and animals in the garden are harmful (many insects and animals actually help in pest control); further, the damange inflicted by some pests can be minimal and not really affect your plants.
The insistence of not using synthetic pesticides and fertilizers is an important part of the growth of an organic garden, and not to be compromized with. It is more of a mind set change that you need to rule out the use of such chemicals. This does not mean that you cannot use pesticides, there are a whole range of pesticides and insect repellants that are based on organic ingredients and which are overall of benefit to the environment (the run-off of pesticides and fertilizers into water systems is now a major environmental and health problem).
Finally, let me round off this summary of organic gardening principles with this definition:

“an ecological production management system that promotes and enhances biodiversity, biological cycles and soil biological activity. It is based on minimal use of off-farm inputs and on management practices that restore, maintain and enhance ecological harmony”

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The previous post talked about crop rotation in a brief way, without going into too much detail about why this is required, which are the types of crops for which this is needed, and so on. So, here are some more details.

The whole purpose of rotating crops is to:
1) Ensure that harmful pathogens (insects or disease) specific to the crop do not build up in the soil over a number of years, and;
2) To ensure that soil does not get depleted of specific nutrients due to some plants that are heavy feeding. It is an integral management tool for organic farmers, and homeowners with large vegetable gardens.

Protection against pests and disease: If you want to rotate your crops, and want to avail the best benefits in doing so, make sure you choose plants from different plant type over successive years, and so to be not closely related, else you lose the benefit. If you rotate broccoli and then cabbage, you are not likely to get away form insects and diseases that tend to zero in on the Cruciferae family (to which both cabbage and brocooli belong), and your crop rotation won’t do much good, because they are both attacked by the same types of insects and disease.
Now onto the other major reason for crop rotation, being able to fix nutrients.

Adding to nutrients in the soil: There are an awful lot of people who have not done enough research to find out more about crop rotation, in terms of both crops that use up nutrients, and those crops that add nutrients to the soil. For example, if you consider the Fabaceae family of plants (legumes, beans, peas, lentils, alfalfa, clover, caraganas, honeylocusts, etc.), they have a very useful ability to add nitrogen to the soil, under certain conditions. This is a process whereby they are able to extract nitrogen from the air and turn it into the soil (actually in special nodules along the roots) in a form that’s usable by plants.
The contra position for these plants is that one should not add nitrogen to the soil if these plants are being grown, since an excess of nitrogen would be harmful for these plants. They are very useful if you have soil that is deficient in nitrogen, and are used by knowledgable gardeners and enthusiasts, especially since these legumes remain in the soil even when the plants die. The idea is by rotating crops all around the garden, section by section, one can spread the ability to enrich nitrogen around the garden.
How does this actually happen ? This is also called “inoculation”. Inoculation defines the process by which members of these specific plant families are able to fix atmospheric nitrogen, and this is done in collaboration with a set of bacteria that attach themselves to the roots of these plants. These bacteria are essential to do this fixing. Most decent garden soils already have these necessary bacteria in them, so usually it’s not an issue. However, if you don’t have some “inoculants” in your soil, you can buy them and put it in the soil. These are mixed into the soil when planting happens, to ensure that the plants will have the proper bacteria when they develop their roots so that they can fix their nitrogen and thrive.

When you read all about the plants that help in increasing nitrogen, what about the plants that suck up all the nutrients from the soil. One of the main families is called nightshades (Tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, and eggplants).
The plants belonging to the nightshades family are part of some of the biggest starvation incidents in history. They are equally famous for being the plants that encourage pests, soil infections, and disease. If you grow them in your garden, then don’t grow them in the same soil until other crops have been grown that give the nutrients back, and not before a period of 3-4 years.