Elizabeth Murphy's Blog

The radio show Science Friday talks to Elizabeth Murphy, author of Building Soil: A Down-to-Earth Approach, and Gerard Lordahl, director of Open Space Greening in NYC. We’re so excited that Ira Flatow and the Science Friday crew knows that it’s never too early or too cold to think about gardens and the soil that grows them. Catch tips for winter gardening, storing bulbs, and the best DIY potting soil mixes in this week’s episode.

The post Bui...

If there’s a single ingredient I recommend for almost any soil, it’s the leaves that carpet the ground every fall. I like to use them any way I can – tilling them in fresh in the fall or shredding them to use as mulch. My favorite way to feed my garden with leaves, though, is to set them and forget them, adding them back as a rich, full-diet compost, known as leaf mold.

Leaf mold, the name for compost mad...

If you’re like me, the momentum of a busy summer builds to takes over my best laid plans for organization and order sometime in mid-August. When autumn arrives, I feel relief that the rush of planting, harvesting, watering, and weeding will soon wind down. But I have long-since learned that before I let myself fall into a winter sleep, there’s a few crucial things to do in the garden that will make life a million times easier in the spr...

As the Down & Dirty workshop tours the West Coast, from Seattle to San Diego, this is the question on everyone’s mind – and for a good reason. Drought, water restrictions, record high temperatures, and the looming threat that these conditions will continue threatens the productivity of farms and home gardens. Loss of snowpack and reservoir storage is forcing us to change how we think about the longevity of irr...

At last, summer has arrived! Gardens overflow and our hands are happily busy weeding, seeding, harvesting spring veggies, and preppingfor fall. If you are like me, the garden schedule, carefully planned out over months of winter dreaming, has vanished in aflurry ofberries to pick, compost to turn, and tomatoes to trellis. Even though precious garden hours and space may seem full...

The post Tips for building healthy soil: A scientist’s down-to-earth approach in The Oregonian appeared first on Dirty Little Secrets.

Soil fertilizers or amendments. Confused? There’s a good reason. There’s not a sharp line between fertilizers and amendments. Fertilizers can be amendments and amendments can be fertilizers. They both can be soil food, but not always.

Fertilizers can be amendments and amendments can be fertilizers. They both can be soil food, but not always.

Compost as an amendment conditions the soil, while building fertility.

Or...

A guest blog post about soil food atGarden Therapy.

The post Soil Food for Greener Gardens: The Best Amendments in Your Own Backyard. appeared first on Dirty Little Secrets.

What’s the secret to rich, productive soil? Food! Soil has to eat…just like us and every other living thing out there. Our most important garden job is feeding the soil. When we do this, the microbes, fungi, worms, and other critters in the soil ecosystem do what they do best: eat and procreate. In the process, they take care of plant nutrition, pest control, water conservation, and tillage. Well-fed and active microbes lead to a garde...

The post The Dirt on Soil. Interview with Mary Beth Breckenridge of the Akron Beacon Journal appeared first on Dirty Little Secrets.