What is regenerative gardening?
The growing that gives back, self-sufficiency, gardening for the future. These are just a few ways to describe how regenerative gardening helps to reconnect us to ourselves and to the rest of nature.
Regenerative gardening often represents a food revolution. A revolution of care that restores soil health by nourishing the soil naturally and adapting our gardening practices to be better in tune with the rest of the natural world, instead of degrading it or trying to fix it in artificial ways. In return, the soil cares for us.
Soil teaming with life serves as a vital ecosystem that captures and stores carbon from the atmosphere, builds water resilience, increases biodiversity, and improves nutrient density in the food we grow. Not only that, but did you know that getting our hands dirty can actually help us to feel better? Mycobacterium vaccae, a harmless bacterium commonly found in the soil can trigger the release of serotonin, the happy chemical, in our brains. In other words, by playing in the soil, this bacterium acts as a natural antidepressant!
But why is healthy soil so important? 🌱
Healthy soil supplies the essential nutrients, oxygen, water, and root support that our food-producing plants need to grow and feed us well. It is estimated that roughly 95% of the food we eat is directly or indirectly produced on our soils. However, the climate emergency places great pressure on our ability to grow food globally as it negatively impacts soil health by:
- reducing the amount of organic matter in the soil
- harming the structure of the soil and increasing its vulnerability to erosion
- reducing the soil’s capacity to hold water.
The healthier the soil, the more biodiversity it can support. Soil is home to about 59% of all species on Earth, making it the single most species-rich habitat on Earth and it has been estimated that one teaspoon of healthy soil can contain up to a billion bacteria and more than 1km of fungi!
Healthy soil has great structure, which helps to control soil erosion, improve water filtration and water holding capacity, and these benefits combined help to give plant roots and organisms that live in the soil better living conditions to thrive.
Sounds interesting but how can I help? 💭
Private gardens in Britain cover an area larger than all of its nature reserves combined, estimated at over 10 million acres. As little isolated patches across the UK, our gardens may be small individually but joined together, they represent a remarkable opportunity for collective healing for both us and the rest of the natural world.
If you have access to any kind of greenspace, be it a garden, an allotment, or public planter there are a few things that you can do that can help to restore the soils in your patch and we will be exploring this in more detail in our next post – keep your 👀 peeled!
If this has sparked any interest into the fascinating world of soil, here is a list of a few of our favourite resources and links to current campaigns to get involved:
🪱 https://www.soilassociation.org/take-action/protect-the-environment/