Explore how you can apply ecological principles and compost to ensure the health of your garden’s soil.
Building and maintaining healthy soils is critical to ensuring an abundant, sustainable future. The best place to begin is our gardens. One of the easiest methods for building and maintaining healthy soil in your garden is using compost and compost teas that you can produce yourself at home.
Join Us in The Ecology Center garden to learn hands-on how to build and maintain healthy soil in your garden and beyond.
In this workshop, we will:
- Discuss the basics of healthy organic garden soils
- Learn how to build soils using nitrogen fixers, bioaccumulators, and other soil building plants
- Demonstrate hands-on how to implement the best composting method for your home
- Learn how to utilize compost and compost tea in your garden
All attendees will receive an informational hand-out to complement the subjects covered in the workshop, and take home a few samples of different compost from The Ecology Center.
Healthy soil is a living, breathing community of organisms interacting dynamically to provide a wide variety of benefits to their ecosystems. In your garden, healthy soils:
- Retain moisture and save water (healthy soil can retain 9 times its volume in water!)
- Keep plant diseases and pests at bay to grow healthy, strong plants
- Suppress weeds and soil-borne diseases
- Loosen clay and compacted soils
- Prevent erosion
- Eliminate the need for chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides that pollute our environment
Instructor: Lucian Toma
Instructor Bio: Lucian became a passionate organic gardener during his Master’s Program in Global Leadership and Sustainable Development. Currently he grows much of the vegetables and herbs consumed in his household in San Clemente, with surplus for sharing with neighbors, extended family, and local wildlife. To keep the garden thriving he has been maintaining and experimenting with a hot pile and worm composting system for the past 5 years. Professionally, he leads Public Programs at The Ecology Center and can be found in the gardens quite often.
