Easy As Organics Soil Blend – What’s it made from?
In our soil blends, humus is the most important factor as it contains all biology required for a fertile and highly productive soil blend. These microorganisms produce humic substances, stimulating root and shoot growth and increasing the breakdown of NPK and trace minerals. They create soil structure and protect your plants from disease-causing organisms. Quality humus is essential as it contains all life, carbon and humic acids to build ultimate soil structure for water holding capacity and nutrient availability. Bacteria make the glues that create aggregates which fungal hyphae then hold together. This creates larger particles and opens pathways for plenty of oxygen and water to enter the soil. Bacteria and fungi create slimes, acids and enzymes which break down raw, organic nutrients and exchange these ions for plant root exudates. The microbial activity then attracts larger microbes that prey on bacteria, fungi and organic matter, further cycling plant available nutrients and creating pathways for water and oxygen. This natural process builds a fertile soil, an aerobic environment which is essential to fostering a productive soil food web. This food web includes all the beneficial, disease-supressing microbes that will ultimately work for you and your plants. Living compost increases water holding capacity and eliminates the need for chemical fertiliser input. It chelates minerals through a natural abundance of humic and fulvic substances. Compost contains positive and negatively charged ions that attract and hold on to nutrients and minerals, eliminating any leeching that would occur in soil devoid of humus. After a few weeks of growth in our soil blends, you will notice worms crawling around underneath the mulch. Their cocoons which are in the castings will hatch and produce worms that are hugely beneficial to the nutrient cycling process.
Our soil is produced on site at Circular Food, Australia’s largest urban worm farm. These castings are used in our blend and are added directly from the worm beds with no transportation. We use high quality aged compost and Big Bio Worm Castings to ensure the widest spectrum of humic substances, nutrients, enzymes and microbes are present in abundance. This is the driving force of Easy As Organics Soil Blends and is what makes multiple bountiful harvests possible in single fabric containers as small as 50L!
Neem Meal and Kelp Meal provide a huge array of plant and microbe-promoting benefits beyond the NPK profile. Neem seed meal is an amazing botanical source of nutrients with balanced macro and micro nutrient profile. Neem seed meal is created after the oil is pressed from the seed and is a true sustainable source of green manure. It contains pest-resisting limonoids which act as an anti-feedant and also disrupts breeding and laying of pest eggs. Acadian kelp meal is minimally processed. This preserves the many secondary metabolites present in kelp that are hugely beneficial to plant health and growth. These beneficial secondary metabolites are destroyed during the processing of concentrated kelp extracts. Kelp contains cytokinins, gibberellins, auxins, indoles and other natural growth promoting hormones which all act as powerful growth promoters. This whole kelp meal will provide the full balanced spectrum of minerals and micro-nutrients. Kelp contains over 60 trace elements.
Biochar is blended into the soil and has been pre-charged with nutrients and microbes. We source our biochar from Charman who produces the highest quality char that we could find in Australia. It’s made from walnut shells and has a massive surface area. It holds carbon in soils for an extremely long period of time, increasing long term soil fertility, stimulating microbial activity. This helps immensely in long term no-till container gardening due to char’s ability to hold on to water and nutrients like a sponge and provides a perfect home for the plethora of life present in the soil.
Malted barley has been added for it’s chitin which is broken down by bacteria to create the enzyme chitinase. This enzyme degrades pest eggs and prevents gnat and other larvae from maturing. It helps nutrient cycling at the initial stage of composting a new soil mix due to the large amounts of enzymes released into the soil.
The mineral mix that is added includes basalt rock dust of the highest paramagnetic reading of any quarry in Australia. It reads at about 1600 to 2000 cgs. Calcium bentonite from Western Australia is added to increase CEC and calcium availability while gypsum and Gippsland Coral Lime (oyster shell flour) is added to this mineral blend and mixed into our soil at luxury levels. Crushed rock dust provides mineral food for soil life and stimulates their activity.
Canadian sphagnum peat moss and an aeration amendment of scoria is used as a base for this soil blend. Canadian sphagnum peat moss has been chosen instead of coco coir due to its superior cation exchange capacity 100 – 200 compared with coco’s 40 – 60. There are many naturally occurring microorganisms and elements in peat moss including sulphur which helps terpene expression significantly. It has an incredible water holding capacity.
After all of the above components are thoroughly mixed, inoculated with task-specific bacteria and mycorrhizal strains, then hydrated and left to sit in cubic metre piles to allow a microbial nutrient cycling process to take place and create a perfect soil blend. After a few weeks, the soil is bagged down and sold. You can expect amazing performance, stunning plant health and vigorous growth in Easy As Organics Living Organic Water Only Soil.
