Rock Dust

LoveGreen

I have always thought that growing organic vegetables produced healthy food from healthy soil. Traditionally this means taking care of the soil; the aim is to feed the soil and not the plant. I thought that was it, and I was doing all I could, but maybe there was something missing.
The idea of soil lacking something important was brought home by a recent report that showed the level of minerals in fresh fruit and vegetables has decreased by 70% over the last 50 years. Minerals have disappeared from the soil thereby reducing the minerals in our diet.


To understand more about soil it is important to know about how it is made. After the last ice age around 10,000 years ago there were vast quantities of ground up rock produced by glaciers. When living things died they rotted down to make humus. This produced rich soils and plant life flourished. We are now at the end of an interglacial period and the rock dust in most soils has been used up. Some argue that modern farming techniques have hastened the depletion of minerals while others say it is an entirely natural process. The reason why rock dust has gone is not as important as how we can get minerals back into soil to correct the deficiencies.


There is also another characteristic of remineralisation that could have profound effects. When the minerals are broken down into a form that they can be used by plants, atmospheric carbon dioxide is locked up. Large scale remineralisation has the potential to reduce CO2by significant amounts.

(source : http://organicgarden.org.uk/gardening/soil-remineralisation )

Just wondering does anybody out there use rock dust or subscribe to the reasoning behind it? I am very new to gardening but when I get down to planting some vegetables I would to try this out and see how it goes.

bbam

It's common practice on farms to spread ground limestone on the land. It's not as fertilizer but balances the PH of the soil and allows better ability of plants to access the nutrients in the soil..