Build soil

• with compost
• worm compost, better
• Beneficial fungi and bacteria contribute to plant health and can provide more water and nutrients.
• Recent research shows that plant and bacteria relationships help produce medicinally significant compounds.
• mulch – can build soil. Large chunks of woody mulch can suck nitrogen out of the soil until they break down if they are worked into the soil. It is useful to till in small amounts of chips to soil if manure or nitrogen sources are added at the same time. The chunky organic matter improves aeration. If you want to have a wild garden where you want to let the plants tell you where they like to grow, too much mulch will block some of the self-seeded plants from growing. This is a management decision. Put heavy mulch where you don’t want seed germination and no or light mulch where you want volunteers to reseed. It will always include some weed seed germination as well which needs to be weeded (in most cases).
• Cover crops – red clover is a good choice because it can block weeds, fix nitrogen, and because it is a medicinal. Michael Pilarski plant oats at a high density when seeding red clover. Red clover is small at first and doesn’t compete with weeds well, but a tall over-story of dense oats really reduces weeds and nurses the red clover which doesn’t begin to grow robustly till late in the growing season that it is seeded. Red clover blossom harvest is light in the fall of year one but is heavy throughout year two if mowed 2 or 3 times a season to rejuvenate growth.