Astoria Living Soil - 2021
The Truth About Organic Potting Soil
H
ave you ever visited one of our beautiful local forests and thought to yourself that the plants look like they need fertilizer?
Of course not. They grow in a thriving living soil full of micro-organisms, fungi, and rotting organic material. But the most expensive organic potting soils available lack these basic elements of soil life, and struggle to get your average backyard tomato plant halfway through it's growth cycle. The reason for this comes as a surprise to most people.
Commercial potting soils all have something in common: they're baked in an oven to make sure nothing is alive before it goes into the bag!
The reason that large soil companies pasteurize their soil is to prevent weed seeds and insect larvae from ending up in your pots and beds, but the side effect is obvious: dead soil. Inert disparate matter, in a strategically varied size of particle, that imitates the structure of soil that you'd find in a place where plants might grow. It's nothing at all like the forest, where plants are healthy and abundant, and everything you can touch on the ground is alive.
Fertilizer is not needed
To get through your harvest with corporate potting soil you'll need to add more aeration, more nitrogen, more phosphorus, and more potassium. Read the label, the first thing it says is to buy their fertilizer. You're almost certainly going to have a calcium deficiency in mid-bloom, especially with tomatoes, and you'll probably be starved for magnesium as well. Fixing these problems that define all corporate soil costs you time and money. I realized years ago that I would rather have thriving, living, natural decaying soil and deal with the (living) consequences than buy anymore of that stuff.
Organic, natural gardening - that is to say, growing food and flowers from rotting organic material the way nature intended - involves nematodes, fungi, insects, bacteria, worms and worm poop, and it's time for you to just deal with it. Those organisms are your friends, and you need them to bring your plants to their full potential.
These living organisms are in our product, Wonder Soil, exclusively available in Astoria, Oregon.
Stop Buying Dead Soil, Buy Local Living Soil Instead
Wonder Soil DOES NOT contain:
Synthetic Fertilizer
Synthetic fertilizer is made by reacting ammonium gas with nitric acid under high heat conditions. Vegetables can not reach their full potential with synthetic fertilizer.
Heavy Metals
Many common gardening amendments, even organic ones, contain high levels of heavy metals such as arsenic, mercury, and lead . Heavy metals do not belong in soil, they can be absorbed by plants and end up in your food and flowers.
Feather Meal
Feather Meal is a common ingredient in organic potting soils, and comes from the chicken slaughterhouse industry. The issue with feather meal is that a large percentage of the feathers are sourced from China, and China allows hormones and antibiotics in chickens that are illegal to use in the United States. Laboratory tests have shown that these dangerous chemicals are present and detectable in even organically certified feather meal sold as fertilizer. I don't want chemicals that the Department of Agriculture have banned from use in livestock in my soil.
Blood and Bone Meal
Blood and Bone Meals are by-products of the beef slaughterhouse industry. They can not be reliably sourced in a way that is safe and environmentally responsible and they may contain traces of any number of animal steroids, antibiotics, and other man-made chemicals. I wouldn't buy the meat from those cows in the Fred Meyer, I'd seek out a better cow. So that cow's blood can't be in the soil. It would be like cooking with a wine you wouldn't drink.
We Deliver to Your Garden
We sell our soil in bulk, and also in ready-to-transplant natural fabric pots. These pots are durable, have sturdy handles, and each one comes with diatomaceous earth across the top, a pack of cover crop seeds, both earthworms and red worms, and a small package of mycorrhizae root-fungi for transplanting. Wonder Soil is also available by the cubic foot, to fill raised beds or replace existing soil. We will carry our pots or soil to the exact spot where you would like them.
We also offer a wide array of the highest quality organic gardening amendments available, in convenient, "smell-free" packaging. Our OMRI listed organic minerals, nutritional sources, and soil conditioners can bring depleted gardens back to life the natural way, without chemicals.
Our youngest employee gathers fresh kelp for the compost barrels
Growing your own food and medicine is extremely rewarding. We deliver the exact products you need, directly to your garden.
Vibrant, pest resistant plants all year long
Our soil is made by human hands and aged by natural organic decay, just like the forest. We are a tiny, local company that cares about the quality of Astoria's plants.
