How to put minerals back into your garden

We desperately need to improve the mineral content in the foods we eat. Good soil that is nutrient and mineral rich does not happen by accident. You need to build your soil.

The most important part of that process is using worms to digest and develop the positive bacteria we need.

What you feed your worms will be another critical part of that process.

I incorporate volcanic ash, Nordic sea kelp, fire place ash, a wide variety of vegetable and fruit waste, wood shavings free of pesticides and leaves from maple and ash trees.

Worms quickly take these elements and digest them into very rich soil that is loaded with the mineral content you need in your diet after the plant has metabolized through a process called mycorrhiza.

Your total worm casting percentage will be from 10 to 20%. You will still need natural compost, a water retaining soil that has the proper balance (see link on soil), and natural composted manure.

You simply can not depend on a organic garden or a GMO producer to provide those nutrients and minerals. You are the best assurance that it is done right.

How plants give us minerals

The correct way to replenish the minerals in our bodies is to get those minerals back into the soil of the plants we eat.

How plants absorb minerals is a very complex process dependent on cations, soil ph and most importantly how minerals in a plant effect other minerals that may be lacking.

To quote the site listed below; In order to maintain rapid, optimal growth, all plant tissues must have a favorable nutrient status. Although a plant may be marginally low in a number of nutrients, only one nutrient at a time will limit overall growth. However, if the supply of that limiting nutrient is increased even slightly, the resulting increase in growth will increase the demand for all other nutrients and another nutrient, the next lowest in availability, will become limiting. As farmers push specific nutrients such as nitrogen into plants to make them larger and more productive, it throws off the balance that allows the absorption and some cases production of other minerals that we need from that plant when we eat it. Source: Further more the same university article quoted points out;  Plants do not grow in isolation, they are part of the overall environment and as such they respond to environmental changes as that affect nutrient availability. Also, plants do influence their environment and can contribute to environmental changes, which in turn can affect the nutrient status of the plant.

So if we are going to reclaim balance in our own diet, we are going to have to return to nature and create the same environment for our garden as nature intended. Short cuts such as hydroponics are not the answer. We have to create good living soil, use natures tools in building that soil with earth worms and feed that true organic loop nutrients that nature created with fish meal, volcanic ash, sea kelp and natural nitrogen sources, such as leaf and grass organic, matter breaking down through the composting process.

Well half the readers just signed off because that sounded like work. It does take some time; but it is not as difficult as you would think. If you are trying to introduce a organic garden into your life you  will be adding some things. One way is to simply trench next to your garden row and add some of the items listed above.

Most importantly you are going to have to make sure you are adding everything and add it in a balanced way. That is how health in nature works and we are going to have to mirror that.

Our GMO foods lack minerals

Why has the taste left so much of our grocery store food? The answer is over farming the land with Genetically Altered food. This has created grocery vegetables and fruits without the minerals that should have been in them.

Our bodies need these minerals to be healthy. So how do we get the minerals back into our diets?

The answer is harder than you think. Many people are trying organic gardens, but if they take a plastic bag of compost and throw in some of their own vegetable scraps from the counter, this is not going to re-introduce the minerals back into the soil for the plant to uptake and you to partake. You are going to have to create an environment that you can actually put those minerals back into and reclaim the organic loop that was supposed to be in the soil in the first place.

Most of these minerals are what are called minor minerals in our diets. However the chemical balance in your body is a very delicate one that can be thrown off by ph, lack of iron, magnesium, even phosphate, unprocessed salt and amino acids. An in-balance greatly effects how your body reacts to stress and physical exertion.

Once these minerals are removed from your body you can not replenish them with a drug or pill. The chemistry in your body as digestive fluids and the biological process evolves in your body is designed to mine these elements out naturally. You can not add sulfur by taking a large dose of sulfur or it will kill you, but you need that element as it naturally becomes available when present in meats and diary products or even eggs.

So to truly have a healthy diet with the minerals your body needs, there is not healthy short cut. You have to grow food that absorbs these minerals in a way that makes them available to you.

Organic is just a name label, it does not guarantee you will get these minerals. The true test is in the taste. Your taste buds know what is good and will tell you when a fruit or vegetable is balanced with a flavor that you enjoy. I know that sounds odd but that is how your body originally was designed to crave those foods it needed.

We are going to cover a lot of areas of how to introduce these minerals back into our bodies, most of which is through gardening and because organic garden raised food does not guarantee it was done right, we will probably have to do this gardening ourselves.