To wrap up this month long focus on building soils for market gardens I spoke with three of my favorite collaborators. Neal Hegarty and Jeremy Fellows from Granja Tz’ikin and Shad Qudsi from Atitlan Organics. Each of them share their experiences, trials, and errors from years of intensive soil building methods on rocky marginal land in rural Guatemala and the systems they currently use to build fertility on their farms.

In this episode Shad talks about his integrated poultry operation and how his deep bedding method creates nutrient rich compost for the adjacent salad greens production at Atitlan Organics. Neal speaks in detail about how they’ve integrated goats and chickens in a three tiered composting animal house, and Jeremy explains some of the extra soil fertility amendments they’ve been experimenting with including biochar and effective micro-organisms.

The ongoing learning and experimentation on both Granja Tzikin and Atitlan Organics is something you can participate in yourself, so be sure to check out their websites to see how you can get involved.

Resources:

Granja Tzikin

Atitlan Organics

Previous interviews with Shad

Previous interviews with Neal

Previous interviews with Jeremy