Over the last 50 years or more we have been led to believe that the easiest way to have healthy beautiful plants is to use chemical fertilizers to provide them with what they need to grow. They will grow but how healthy are they, how tough are they? Relying on chemical fertilizers to grow our plants is similar to us living on some vitamins and sugar. The vitamins give us some essential ingredients and the sugar the energy but we aren't getting every thing we need as in roughage, minerals and much more. Would an athlete get to the Olympics on this diet; I don't think so.

To have healthy plants you only need to have healthy soil, no chemicals required. Feed the soil and it will feed your plants. Let me explain. What we generally think of as soil that naturally exists in this area of the world is made up of pulverized rock or minerals and organic matter. A healthy soil would have around 95% minerals and 5% organic matter. All of the minerals necessary for healthy plant growth exist in such a high concentration that we could hardly run out of them. Exhausted soil has depleted its organic component and as a result the balance that exists in the soil is out of whack. It is the breaking down of organic matter that releases acids which dissolve the minerals in the soil making them available to the plants. So if there is little or no organic matter in the soil the minerals are still there but they are unavailable to the plant.

Mother Nature's garden is not nearly as neat and tidy as we like to keep ours. Dead plant material falls to the ground and no one rakes it up and carts it the town composter or worse the landfill. Animals come along and leave their waste and it is left to break down and become part of the soil. This is the continual regeneration of organic matter to the soil that is necessary to maintain a healthy balance in the soil. Now let's take a little over-view of landscape maintenance practices in the recent history. We have in the past and sometimes still do, remove our grass clippings and leaf debris, put them in plastic garbage bags, sometimes with pumpkin faces on them and send them off to the landfill. We like black soil, devoid of any messy debris on the surface and we send our household food waste to the landfill in plastic bags or down our garburators where it must be removed from the water at treatment plants which of course uses energy. Now after getting rid of all that free organic matter and perhaps paying for it to be removed we turn around and pay for a chemical substitution and expose the microorganisms, worms and insects to potentially toxic chemicals. Would you want to eat something recently fed with a chemical fertilizer? So feed your soil and let it feed your plants, Mother Nature never over fertilizes!

Here's some ideas on composting organic matter in your yard:

• Use grass clippings to mulch your plants, they will break down quickly and have the added benefit of water conservation that mulching provides while they last.
• Add composted kitchen scraps to the soil. If you don't have room for an out-door composter, try a worm composter in the house.
• Dig fresh kitchen scraps in between the rows of your vegetable garden or empty spots in the flower garden.
• Leave hand pulled weeds where they fall to break down unless they have gone to seed.
• Make a compost tea from weeds (remove any seeds) and garden debris. Use the liquid to fertilize your plants. I won't lie, it smells awful but it works.
• In the fall mulch all of your beds with leaf debris watered down to keep it in place and then dig it into the soil in early spring. Alternately the leaf mold can be left for the worms to digest and incorporate into the soil. If the stems of perennials have been left standing over winter and when the ground is dry in the spring run the lawn mower over all the perennials, including the leaf mold and leave the debris as mulch.
• Collect woodier debris that takes longer to break down and mulch under larger trees and shrubs or other out of the way places while it breaks down to the point it can be incorporated into the soil. This will also provide habitat and winter shelter to insects that can be beneficial in restoring the balance in your yard.
• If you have too much yard debris or large woody waste instead of sending it to the landfill take it to the community composters where is will be put to good use.