Soil Amendment

I have spent many sleepless nights trying to find the right kind of soil amendment strategy for gardening or farming when facing a SHTF situation.. There are a lot of great ideas out there, but where I run into a problem is not using outside inputs. I have included a list of my favorite in case you want to do some more research.

Soil Food Web: So far I have decided this is the one I will be using. A great all round system, not needing a lot of outside amendments. You do need to take some classes that get kind of expensive so it's more of a long term goal though.

Ruth Stout: One of the first things I tried. Works great for enriching your soil beforehand, but needs inputs.

Vermiculture: Great system for disposing of extra vegetable food waste. I am giving up Red Wigglers, and starting to try to breed Night Crawlers.

Bokashi: Great for disposing of problematic foods you wouldn't want to throw directly in a compost bin because of pests. Rotten meat, cheese etc.

Back to Eden: Again a great system to prepare your garden/orchard, but once the S hits the F, you won't be able to get enough wood chips.

KNF: Korean Natural Farming. A great system that would suit SHTF gardening. If I didn't find Soil Food Web I would be using KNF. I would love to see if it would help to combine the two.

Right now I am working on trying to improve my soil as much as I can, as fast as I can. I am working on getting a fast compost pile done right. I also use leaves and grass clippings in my garden in a kind of 'Ruth Stout' method. My newest project is breeding Night Crawlers to release into the garden. It feels like having those guys burrowing up to eat compost, and then down to sleep every night will do wonders for getting organic matter into the garden without tilling.

The garden 'soil' we started out with was basically clay. Giant rock hard clumpy balls that was hard to dig with a shovel on a dry day. After one year of applying as much organic matter as we can, it is starting to look much better. If you stand on it, you sink in an inch or two (but don't do it! compaction is your enemy).