Ultimate Guide to Making Free High-Quality Gardening Soil from Random Grass and Flowering Plants [Gardening] [Foraging] [PHOTO]

Easy & free soil creation recipe:

Collect tons of grass and flowering plant matter into a cardboard box furnished by a lot of papers such as newspapers.
Keep adding minuscule amounts of water into the plant waste pile to avoid complete dehydration.
Just wait a couple months.
Once the the bottom-most soil turns into a dark clay-type soil, dig it out and pile it on top of the less decomposed top-soil to greatly hasten its decomposing.

The main advantages:

You can be sure that the soil is nutrient-rich by making it from such stuff i.e. grasses and flowering plants, especially dandelions and stinging nettles that specialize in sucking nutrients from the deep soil.
As it is made purely from plant waste, it is all soil without any rocks or gravel that can hinder root development. E.g. carrots are especially sensitive to root restrictions caused by rocks and easily become malformed as a result.
It is free and you can be sure that it is good stuff. For example, if you want to farm tomatoes and do not want to have iron-rich stinging nettle waste there, you can guarantee that arrangement. Also, the available plant waste quantities are nigh-limitless and you only need to collect the waste and let the omnipresent decomposers do their thing. All you need to do is to wait and add some water if the soil starts to get too dry or the time comes for you to bury the top-soil to decompose it. Absolutely no money investing required and everything you need can be picked up from the ground or from trash piles (the cardboard and the papers, also possible plastic bags for carrying the plant waste to the decomposing box).

[Gardening] Do Not Buy Fertilizers for Casual Gardening, Make Your Own Fertilizers from Foraged Plants and a Bucket Almost Full of Water

In short, get some live or dead plants and fill half a bucket with them and fill the rest of the bucket with water ( to dissolve and absorb the plant nutrients ) up to 90% full. Any more water and you will be splashing stain-happy liquid around during the use. Mix it once a day to bubble out the decomposing gasses, to hasten the dissolving process.

The there are many kinds of fertilizers for different uses, based on the selection of the plant waste. The most important fertilizer nutrients are nitrogen (roots), phosphorus (fruit & flowers ) and kalium (leaves and stem), shorthanded as NPK fertilizers. Flowering/fruiting plants benefit from phosphorus fertilizer ( e.g. flower & grass waste ) and the leafy ones benefit from potassium aka kalium and nitrogen (generally very big plants, preferably with roots ). Optionally, you can plant clover to increase the nitrogen in your soil. It is a small plant and will not interfere with your other species, making it a super useful companion plant.

For most leafy plants, there is a really good plant to fertilizer-dissolve: stinging nettle. The caveat with it is that its fertilizers contain too much minerals such as iron for gentle, slow-growing, sensitive species such as tomato. Stinging nettle is an omnipresent species that grows even in sandy wastelands. Stinging nettle fertilizer is extremely potent for any species that can take its nutrients.

You can use the “tea” from your fertilizer bucket as a substitute for your irrigation water. That helps your thirsty annual plants to not run out of minerals before the cropping season ends.

P.S. If you plan to keep gardening and irrigating plants in winter i.e. past october in four-season regions, you should stockpile a couple cube meters of plant waste to keep your irrigation business going. That should be enough even for a large plantation. Package it with tons of newspapers and/or cardboard to minimize staining and smell issues.

[Foraging] Condominium End-of-the-Month Moving out Dumps

If you have an access to a communal trash dump, you should check it out every last weekend of the month. There is likely to be a lot of stuff dumped there around that time as most people suck at using up their spare supplies in an efficient way. Shoes, carpets, unopened or barely reduced foodstuff, bagfuls of kitchen glasses of all sorts, oven trays, woven baskets, clothes, exercising tools and frying pans, tons of frying pans. Basically anything too big to effortlessly fit into a woman’s handbag can be commonly found at these dumps. GUARANTEED. The last person I foraged clearly had a thing for tomato sauce. I found a lot of it in an unopened form as if they were that person’s memento items. 🙂

[Foraging] Idiot Prepares Wild Stinging Nettle for Good Eatin’

I am in a hurry, so here’s the from-foraging-to-eating guide.

Find the stinging nettles around fertile wastelands and sunny roadsides. Avoid touching the main branch that is very spiky, the leaf branches and leaves, not so much. Whatever you do, do not scratch the stung skin parts. This will spread the responsible & contained histamine, increasing the irritation ten-fold (at least). Your body can deal with histamine with antihistamine and will probably make you immune to the irritation with more antihistamine secretion if you do this kind of nettle leaf harvesting often. So get yourself about a pound / 0.5 kg / a couple liters of nettle leaves. Just rip the leaves off the stems. You cannot eat the stems without specific, arduous preparation.
Get a heat-enduring container and stuff the leaves there.
Heat up about a liter / two pints of water to the boiling point and dump it onto the leaves. Try to compress the nettles with a tool to get the fluids out of the leaves. A cabbage-like smell should saturate the air.
Put a lid on the container (optional) to get the most out of the water heat.

You can use boiled nettle leaves for a lot of stuff. Unlike cabbage, they are extremely flavourful and do not lose their flavours completely when heated. That makes nettle useful for bakeries and stuff that requires a flavour source. Nettle delivers. It also works as tea (the most common use), though I am going to use it for bread, pizza and stuff like that. I am going to harvest it like a boss pretty soon. Stinging nettle is probably the best and most widely available wild crop-species (the leaves are crop-level goods) out there. Two million thumbs up.

P.S. The last pictures detail my use of cut nettle leaves as a cocoa drink extra component. Man, it works even there. Meaty i.e. clumpy cocoa is already the king of nourishing beverages and adding the minced nettle makes it much better. Stinging nettle leaf mince is a great addition to probably most dishes out there.