Growing nutritionally dense foods

Phil Nauta’s advice on creating a healthy living soil food web can be helpful for Bowen gardeners.

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• A Tour de France of wines
• Take a fair dose of skill and add a dash of love for Paris
• Warding off caterpillars
• Putting down roots in a place of choice
• Join the circus in North Van

If we are to garden, in an effort to move toward the most nutritionally dense foods, (as our own Lisa Marie Bhattacharya, a registered holistic nutritionist, would undoubtedly guide us), common gardening practices such as deep roto-tilling and adding dolomite lime to the soil may prove of short lived benefit or even completely wrong.

Young genius gardener, Phil Nauta, has dedicated himself to the bottom line of nutritionally dense food, namely healthy soils. His book Building Soils Naturally, steers us away from many mindless but traditional practices and toward the creation of a healthy living soil food web.

As I enter my semi-retirement, what makes sense to me financially and in terms of cheap health insurance, is to eat the healthiest, most nutritionally dense foods I can buy, but preferably grow in my back yard.

I have been aware of Nauta’s work for a few years now, but only last year had the opportunity to create some raised beds and fill them with our local mountain sub soil. It didn’t look too promising, but there were some worms, and I suspect some minerals, in there as well.

My main fertilizer concoction used only three of several soil amendment/fertilizers, that Nauta recommends, namely liquid fish hydrolysate, EM (effective microorganisms) and a ‘no-preservative’ molasses from the Snug Cove General Store. Fertilizing with this simple combination, produced incredible (to me) and very productive Roma tomato vines, seven feet tall!

I feel like I have only scratched the surface so to speak, as Nauta suggests that we are looking at a three to four year process to create the optimally balanced soil for food production.

Soil testing, recognizing soil deficiencies by what weeds grow, applications of compost, mulch and sea minerals are all covered brilliantly in Building Soils Naturally.

It has taken me about two weeks to read through, even in my state of semi-retirement, but my conclusion is that this is a reference book of incredible value.

For those who are serious about growing nutritionally dense foods for a healthier life, this book inoculates our brains with the best available information.

So impressed was I with this book that I bought two additional copies, one is in circulation at the Bowen Island Library and the other through gardening friends who will pass it forward.

Get in touch with Angela at Phoenix on Bowen and get your own copy. Nauta told me he’d be delighted for the information to be passed around. This young Bodhisattva is far more interested in the propagation of soil health truths than he is with book royalties, but buy his book anyway.