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Read about the origin of organic farming! #OrganicFarming #OrganicNoniFarm #SustainableFarming

Earth Day Fun- Earthworms

Aloha!

With spring in full swing I suspect that many of us ask for a bit of help in the garden. Pulling weeds, planting, mulching...... However, did you know there is help already in the ground? I'm talking about earthworms!

Earthworms and Soil:

An important role earthworms play is tunneling through the soil. Tunneling accentuates the percolation (from the Latin word meaning to strain through) of water into the soil. This loosens the soil so oxygen and aerobic bacteria can get into plant roots allowing deeper penetration growing bigger, healthier plants.

Another role worms play is recycling organic waste by turning your kitchen scraps into worm castings(worm poop). Worm castings enrich the soil. We all know the better the soil, the better the garden.

Did you know? If there were only 5,000 worms in an acre of soil, they can produce up to 50 tons of worm castings!

Click here to learn why worm castings are beneficial

Earth Day Fun - Sustainable Farming

Why sustainable farming?

Farmers who practice sustainable farming work with nature without depleting its precious resources. This can even be done in your own backyard!

Sustainable Farming Techniques:

No Till Agriculture

Most conventional farmers rely on tilling the soil. Tilling turns over the soil making it easier to plant new crops. However tilling kills living organisms (including earthworms), allows vital nutrients to escape, and gives weeds a chance to germinate.

Water and Solar Power

Utilizing what mother nature has already given us is a cost effective way to work the land. Solar and wind power are great natural energy resources. The cost may seem high up front, but the results will more than pay for itself. Regarding water conversation, only use the water you need, mulch heavily and collect rainwater when possible can also make your carbon foot lighter.

To read more click here

Earth Day Fun - DIY Organic Mulching

Organic mulching is:

Truly the best thing to help plants remain healthy. If one does nothing but mulch, plants will respond positively and grow much healthier.

Organic mulching creates an environment for lots of good things to happen. Mulching creates a cool, dark, and moist environment where earthworms (your best friends) thrive. Earthworms loosen the earth, aerate and fertilize plants. Click here to learn more about earthworms

Spreading organic mulch saves labor and nurtures plants by preventing most weed seeds from germinating. By maintaining moist soil during summer months, organic mulch reduces the need to water. Click here for 9 tips to save water at home.

Did you know? Myth: Mulching prevents soil from freezing. Fact: Mulching decreases the possibility of plants being trapped in freeze/thaw cycles. Organic mulching allows soil to warm up gradually in spring, preventing damage to plants that germinate early before temperatures are warm enough to sustain them.

Click here to read more

An Intro to Vermicomposting

Waste is a tricky part of the sustainability puzzle, but it’s one we need to get a handle on as we continue to deplete our planet of finite resources. We all know we’re supposed to recycle metal, glass, paper, plastic, and cardboard. But what about kitchen scraps?

Many people don’t worry about that kind of waste. After all, it’s a “renewable” resource, right? It breaks down quickly and safely in the landfill, right? There’s no harm in throwing it out or tossing it down the garbage disposal, right?

Unfortunately, that’s not the case. But there’s a fun, sustainable way you can do your part: vermicomposting. Vermicomposting is composting using worms, which makes the process faster, creates rich compost, and gives you a really fun family project!

Why Kitchen & Yard Scraps Matter

Our nation’s problem of throwing out food scraps dislocates nutrients from the places they’re needed most: farms, gardens, and wilderness land.

When nutrients are instead concentrated in landfills, they release huge amounts of methane gas, a major agent of climate change. Click here to learn more about this phenomenon. Plus, we lose the chance to put those nutrients to work growing plants, animals, and people!

So...Vermicomposting?

If you’re worried about composting at home, you’re in good company. People are afraid to compost for a variety of reasons, including:

• Perceived difficulty to set up
• Fear of bad smells, microbes, and pests
• Long time to create compost

Vermicomposting eliminates many of these concerns. Worms are incredibly efficient at breaking down organic waste into nutrients, so they do it quickly and with very little smell. Worms are also very forgiving, and there are easy ways to get started.

We do lots of vermicomposting on our organic noni farm, collecting worms in the Worm Hotel and feeding them our kitchen and farm scraps. They reward us by helping us keep our soil incredibly fertile. We believe they’re a big part of the reason our noni trees produce fruit year-round.

Learn more about the amazing benefits of Vermicomposting here.

How Do I Get Started?

I’d recommend starting with this very complete resource provided by the Canadian government —click here — which provides all the information you need for happy, healthy, productive worms. They cover everything from feed and moisture preferences to light sensitivity to composting timelines.

If you’re looking for an easy system you can buy and set up, check out this option from Nature’s Footprint. Ask around at your local farmer’s market for worms, which may be better suited to the unique environmental challenges where you live. If you strike out, buying worms online should be fine.

Once your bins are all set up, it’s time to start feeding! Worms love most fruits, vegetables and coffee grounds, but they have a few favorites (pumpkin, leftover corn cobs, melon rinds) and a few foods they just tolerate (citrus, onions, garlic). Make sure to keep bones, meat, dairy, salty foods, oils, and anything inorganic out!

One key to success with your worms is making sure to include some gritty foods, like coffee grounds. Worms don’t have teeth, so this grit actually helps worms fully digest their food. Also, you will find that worms love to lay eggs (for new worms) in coffee grounds.

Before you know it, you’ll be using up your kitchen scraps while also creating awesome fertilizer for your garden!

Let us know if you have any questions about vermicomposting! We’d be delighted to share our decades of experience with you.

How We Boost Soil Fertility on Our Organic Farm

My wife Richele and I have been organic farmers for over 40 years, first in California, then here on Kauai. As you can imagine, in that time we’ve tried a lot of farming techniques, perfecting some and putting others aside.

Most important to us are the techniques to keep our soil fertile, healthy, and full of nutrients!

Why Does Soil Fertility Matter?

Contrary to today’s ethics of interchangeability, commoditization, and globalization, not all produce is created equal. The fruits of two apple trees, even of the same varietal, can have widely different levels of key nutrients, depending on the soil each tree was grown in.

We firmly believe that the reason our noni trees produce fruit 12 months a year, rather than the usual 10 months per year, is because we have taken such pains to keep the soil on our farm highly fertile.

The care we take shows up in our fruits as well. When we sent our Noni Fruit Leather to an independent lab, it was found to have 6,024 ORAC units per serving. ORAC units are used by the USDA to measure antioxidant content. For comparison, an average apple has barely 300-500 ORAC units.

Preserving the potency of noni fruit is one of our passions — we want our customers to get the maximum healing benefits per serving!

Soil Fertility in Trouble

America’s soil fertility has been on the decline for decades because, as a society, we’ve stopped prioritizing soil health. Modern industrial agriculture uses large amounts of synthetic fertilizer, which boosts soil fertility in the short term. Unfortunately, this disincentivizes farmers from doing the techniques that boost soil fertility in the long term.

These long-term cycles of soil fertility are ultimately the ones that allow nature to stay ahead of the damage done by farming. Ignoring them means that farmers are taking out more than they’re putting back in.

That leads to depletion of topsoil, reduced nutrient content of food grown in the soil, increased problems with weeds and pests, and many other concerns.

Techniques to Enrich Soil Fertility

On our family farm, we’ve taken it upon ourselves to do all we can to preserve and contribute to the soil fertility on our land. You can do the same in your garden. Especially if you grow any fruits or vegetables, soil fertility can make a big difference to how your produce looks, tastes, and nourishes you body.

Here are some of the techniques we use on our farm to keep our soil a living, healthy entity. We hope you’ll borrow some to use yourself! They’re easier than you imagine to set up.

If you’d like to see any of these techniques in action, and happen to be planning a trip up to Kauai, we encourage you to come visit us for a free farm tour! Click here for more details.

Mulching

Mulching is probably the easiest way to enrich soil fertility. You’re basically composting in place, right around the plants. We do this around all our noni trees, and get great results.

• Maintains more constant soil temperature
• Provides habitat for insects, microbes, and other animals, including beneficial worms
• Keeps moisture from evaporating
• Returns nutrients to the soil

In essence, mulching imitates the natural cycle of leaves, wood, and other plant matter building up on the ground to cover the soil.

How to Get Started:

You can start mulching very easily by gathering your yard waste, including fallen leaves and grass clippings. You can also add wood chips, sawdust, and shredded newsprint. Once you have a good amount collected, you can cover your soil.

You can either put your mulch all around individual plants, or you can evenly cover your soil.

Worm Castings

We have tons of wild worms on our farm, but we also cultivate our own special vermiculture (worm composting) worms. We simply put the worms in a closed environment and let them break down food scraps and other compostables by digesting them.

The “castings” (aka worm poop) that the worms produce as waste is extremely rich in nutrients. We gather the castings and spread them around the farm. "Black gold," another name for these worm castings, makes an amazingly effective fertilizer!

How to Get Started:

You can get inexpensive kits to start your own vermicomposting operation, or you can make your own “worm hotel” out of plastic bins or other materials. Just Google search for “worm bins.”

Basically, all you have to do is give the worms a damp, dark place with lots of compostable materials for them to eat!

Interested in traditional composting? Click here for our original post.

No Till System

One final way we keep our soil fertile is by never tilling our land. Tilling means turning the soil over to make it easier for farmers to dig into, start new plants, and weed. Unfortunately, tilling has a lot of negative consequences:

• Disturbs and kills living things in the soil
• Releases carbon, oxygen, and water that were locked into the soil into the air
• Gives weed seeds the chance to germinate

We don’t till the soil on our farm, to preserve the fertility of the land. It’s harder work sometimes, but fertile soil isn’t that difficult to work with, even without tilling.

You can bring all of these practices into your own home garden and greatly improve the fertility of your soil. We’ve seen the rewards firsthand here on our farm, as we continue to grow healthy noni trees that produce the most nutritious noni fruits out there.

How do you preserve soil fertility in your garden? Let us know in the comments!