Farmers and gardeners all over the world know that to grow leafy green vegetables, annuals with sturdy constitutions, and shrubs and perennials to their peak, a soil rich in all the necessary plant food has to be provided. Herbs can play an enormously important role in building up soil fertility and, by way of thanks, a healthy soil grows even better herbs, too.
Organic gardening associations, and those gardeners in many countries who follow organic methods, believe that to avoid the soil starvation and depletion resulting from unbalanced artificial fertilizing, and the consequent reduced ability of crops to withstand insect ravages and disease, natural means only of enriching the soil and maintaining its fertility should be used. “Organic gardening” means returning to the earth everything taken from it in the form of decomposing animal and vegetable matter in a natural form which the plants can use. In Nature, fallen leaves, twigs, roots, grasses, and animal droppings, even the bones of dead animals and the microscopic bodies of the bacteria living in the soil, are returned to it, and slowly decompose to form the balanced plant nutrients necessary to keep forests and pastureland alive.
The so-called “complete fertilizers” of unnatural origin give (like some drugs) an initial boost; but much recent investigation has found that the soil, after this type of shot-in-the-arm, is left actually poorer than ever, and no increased applications of chemical fertilizers can restore vitality and life to it. Moreover, much of the mineral and chemical content of these fertilizers is in a form the plants can not easily assimilate. Composting and building up again with organic matter and humus can slowly, over a matter of many seasons, restore to the soil the fertility it has lost; but this is a long-term solution, and commercial growers can go broke while waiting for it to be effective.
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