What’s up Farm Chads?
The other day I was reading an interesting article from the Giga Brain Chad BowTiedOx, about hydration. (LINK)
He went on to talk about electrolytes and how they help to restore your body’s nutrients that can deplete through exercise, sweating, and other tasks throughout the day.
But, what are electrolytes? They are basically micronutrients like sodium, potassium, and chloride along with magnesium, calcium, phosphate, and bicarbonates.
You can buy drink powders, drinks, and other solutions for replenishing electrolytes, but I’m always looking for the natural way. Take a guess where another great source of these micro nutrients can be found… you guessed right, vegetables and fruits are another great source for these micronutrients.
So then I started to think about what is required in order to grow nutrient packed produce. You need good soil that contains the minerals and nutrients, in order to grow vegetables that are mineral and nutrient powerhouses.
How do you know the nutrient contents of your soil? Usually with a soil test.
Picture a chad farmer testing his soil twice a year, adding the necessary nutrients to the garden soil to get a nutrient packed powerhouse.
Just like a body builder optimizing for gainz in the gym through proper diet, exercise, and sleep.
In theory that’s exactly what the goal is for a successful garden, to get the soil just right so that it’s packed with micro nutrients resulting in healthy, nutrient packed produce, which can then be transferred to us at the dinner table. 🤠
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Soil Quality
A common problem we hear about on twitter all the time is that many of the fruits and veggies at the grocery store don’t contain the amount of micro nutrients as they did in the past.
This is due to large agricultural farming, the soil is not getting replenished properly, leaving the produce with less nutrient content.
Larger operations are focused on the macro nutrients Nitrogen Phosphorus and Potassium. And they’re likely getting these three in the form of synthetic fertilizer.
As a gardener, you’re probably growing food so that you can get better nutrition from a chemical free source, that should be your number one goal anyway.
A big problem gardeners face is soil quality. If your soil isn’t healthy, you can’t grow healthy vegetables, and your produce is going to be much less nutrient packed (jacked).
So we need to look at the soil nutrients and get a better understanding of how they work.
Soil Nutrients
There are 16 elements essential to growth of crop plants:
Supplied by air and water: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen
Macronutrients: nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium
Secondary Nutrients: calcium, magnesium, sulfur
Micronutrients: boron (B), chlorine (Cl), copper (Cu), iron (Fe), manganese (Mn), molybdenum (Mo), and zinc (Zn).
Crops get these nutrients from the garden to your table mainly from the soil.
For a basic gardening refresher…
You typically start your garden in the spring. Crops are planted and harvested over the course of several months.
Extra macro nutrients (fertilizers) may be needed for certain crops during the growing season to boost output and plant health.
Toward the end of the growing season, you pull the old crops and begin the process of preparing for the next growing season.
It is at that time you would need to “amend” the soil. This means to bring in compost, manure, or other soil amendments to build the nutrients back up for the next growing season.
If you don’t do this, eventually your soil will become depleted to the point where crops will not grow, and your soil will be unworkable.
Soil Tests
The best way to know what your soil nutrient makeup looks like is through a soil test. Soil tests can be done before and after amendment to see progress and to get an idea of what nutrients are deficient and which ones are high. I covered soil tests in depth in a previous post. (LINK)
To briefly cover soil tests, here is a sample soil test which shows you the breakdown of macro and micro nutrients. The results here look pretty darn good to be honest. As you can see, none of the nutrient levels are marked low.
From the results of this soil test, it would be safe to assume the soil is good and should provide nutrients to the crops for a healthy harvest and sufficient nutrient intake.
This one was taken a few years ago,
Here’s is one I took about a month ago…
I’ll go over how to get your soil numbers up later.
Brix Method
But how do you know exactly how “jacked” your produce is? How do you know you’re getting nutrient packed goodness from all of your hard labor?
I came across another interesting article that talked about this very subject, they call it the Brix Method. (LINK)
Basically you squeeze juice from the plant or fruit that you want to test and put it on a refractometer which will give you a reading on a scale from 0-32 . You then look up the produce on the chart below to get an idea of your nutrient density.
(I don’t know why some of the ratings on the chart below are higher than 32, the refractometer only goes to 32, lol.)
Using this method will give you a very basic reading as an indicator of nutrient density. You wont be able to measure the exact amounts of each micronutrient from this analysis, but you can get an overall idea of your plant nutrients and an overall plant health reading this way.
Soil Amendments
The next question is what to add to your soil to beef it up, and where to buy?
You can buy all types of soil amendments. There are different materials which add different amounts of micronutrients to the soil. (we are only interested in natural or organic amendments…. right?)
We’ll cover a complete list of soil amendments and fertilizers soon.
Thanks for reading, have any of you ever heard of the Brix Method?
WAGMI
Farmer