Last Updated on January 2, 2025 by Brian Beck
Back in 2017 I was exposed to the biological system changing things forever. It was a completely foreign to what I had learned. My frustration with traditional methods left me wanting for something better. Once I learned some of the fundamentals I knew that there were two major things that I needed to accomplish that would help me sell this new concept, water carrying capacity and nitrogen fixation. For those of you who do not have a geology, biology or chemistry degree let me explain what these two things are because they have completely changed how I do business on my lawn. These two things are what I call my Holy Grails.
Water carrying capacity, the ability for the soil to hold water. There are two hurdles in getting a lower water bill, learning how to get water into the soil effectively and how to keep it there. Carbon plays a major role in the soil in two ways. It is the energy source for the microbes that naturally aerate (porosity) the soil and allows the water to enter rapidly rater than running off or evaporating. Normally people water too shallowly which typically ends up evaporating and causing other problems. Carbon also holds water like a sponge, so much so that a 1% increase in it will allow the soil to hold an additional 600 gallons per 1000 ft² . Because the soils are usually highly compacted and low in carbon it forces people to water more than they need to just to keep the lawn hydrated. We have solved this problem this year in a lawn as we have enabled it to go without water for over a week routinely without any stress in the lawn!
Nitrogen fixation is what happens when atmospheric nitrogen that gets breathed in by plants ends up in the soil. The microbes turn this into a usable form of nitrogen, nitrate which is what helps plants grow. If you have enough microbes in the soil you can develop a population that is diverse enough to convert the nitrogen in the air into free fertilizer! You can have such an efficient process of this happening you can stockpile nitrogen in the soil for use in the future, eliminating the need for nitrogen fertilizer! We achieved this in the same lawn this year as well. We went the entire year without dropping a bit of nitrogen! As a matter of fact, according to our recent soil test for this lawn we have enough nitrate in the soil to last us all of next year!
So, there you are, mission accomplished, TWO Grails in the bag for 2024. This was a long time coming but we finally figured it out and more importantly can replicate it!
