Building Healthy Soil

Understanding soil health and how to build it is a great asset to have when growing your own food. Healthy soils produce healthy crops which are tastier, more fruitful and more nutritious.

A healthy soil is a living, dynamic ecosystem, teeming with organisms that perform many vital functions including nutrient cycling; controlling disease and pests; improving soil structure, amd mitigating climate change through carbon sequestration.

Traditionally, agricultural practices have been damaging to soils. When growing your own, you can look out for the health of our soil by:

• Minimising soil disturbance (not tilling or turning soil)
• Covering bare soil with organic matter i.e., mulch, compost, manure, leaves etc
• Utilising cover crops or green manures
• Reading your weeds
• Improving your soil structure and chemistry
• Caring for the biological life underground

You can carry out some of the monitoring yourself by using tools such as the Northern Rivers Soil Health Card or a store-bought pH test. Other tests, such as chemical analysis, will have to be done in a lab. In the Illawarra, historical pollution from heavy industry is a problem so it may be reassuring to do a toxicity test. These can be done with Macquarie University’s VegeSafe program.