Tired of the hashtags running all over social media around soil?
Are the endless celebrity tweets and reels convincing you that the save-soil campaign is nothing but a stunt?
Well, that's the reason I write this piece, today; as an attempt to penning down my understanding about what is exactly happening to soil, what are the measures being taken, and an effective 'magic' solution I've come up with in doing our bit to conserve this highly valuable resource.
So, let's begin with the primary question: What is Soil Degradation?
Soil degradation is basically what happens when the quality of the resource starts declining and thereby, diminishing its capacity to support terrestrial life, namely, plants and animals. In this process, the soil undergoes certain physical, chemical, and biological loss of qualities that underpin the web of life within it, which results at the beginning of what is famously termed Soil Erosion.
This brings us to the next query: Why, on earth, should I care?
I would prefer to explain the response to this question by taking you via the route that helps you land up with the answer all by yourself!
Soil isn't an inert medium, but a living ecosystem that takes hundreds and thousands of years to form and a couple more centuries to become fertile. While soil degradation is a natural process, it can also be caused by human activity. And that's exactly what happened this time!
In the last few decades, intensive farming practices like deforestation, overgrazing, forest fires, intensive cultivation and construction work sped up the damage caused to soil by five times, atleast. These actions disturbed the soil and left it vulnerable to wind and water erosion, thereby damaging the complex systems underneath.
How? The tilling led to surface runoff, loss of organic matter, disruption in cycles of water, thereby leaving a major negative impact on soil biodiversity. This reduces the amount of carbon the soil can store by approximately 50-75% and with global warming being one of the biggest environmental risks of our time, this signals a major step backwards.
Consequence? Floods and Mass Migration.
Here are a few examples in case the onset of the aforementioned two have gone unnoticed to you,
What can, I, as an urban gardener do to help better the situation?
The answer is Soilless-Soil Mix!
I have been trying and testing different mixes of reaching that perfect concentration of a potting mix completely devoid of soil that would render the exact nutrition and growth to the plants in my balcony for the last six months and I'm ecstatic to finally come up with one that does exactly that.
The ingredients you need for this potting mix are: Cocopeat, compost, sand, neem soil conditioner (optional), perlite, vermiculite, and , any kind of bio fertiliser. Mix them in equal parts and leave it in the open for a day and your soilless mix is ready!
All the aforementioned ingredients are easily available in the plant nursery near you as well as online. If this process seems a tad time-consuming, Satopradhan Vision has come up with a brilliant mix that would help cater to your plant needs equally well,
We might not be in the face of altering policy decisions at climate-change summits, but its time to deviate slightly from that no makeup-makeup tutorial and focus a little more on the soilless-soil mix for the sake of Mother Earth.
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