Our Organic Northwest Part 1: What's Organic?

This is a transcript of the interview that aired on NWPR the week of May 25th, 2008.

Gillian Coldsnow:

This is Gillian Coldsnow with "Our Organic Northwest" a series of conversations on-air and online about organic farming and organic home gardening. Today: a conversation about the importance of soil and soil amendments to organic gardening.

Correspondent Glenn Mosely spoke with Project Manager of WSU's Organic Farm, Brad Jaeckel (JAY-k'l), who also teaches for the WSU organic agriculture major program, the first such major in the country.

Glenn asked Brad to define organic gardening.

Brad Jaekel:

We are not allowed to use nonapproved substances and those are primarily herbicides and pesticides. But there actually are some organically-approved substances that can be used in certain situations. That's largely changing as the technology allows and new products are available on the market.

I like to think of organic in positive terms. you hear a lot of negative definitions of organic;  what you can't use what you can't do. But really to me organic is about all the good things that you do in an organic system. probably the most imporatnt thing we do is work to build healthy soil. without healthy soil we can't grow healthy plants and [in] turn healthy food to eat.

By definition soil is really a mix of natural ingrediants made up primarily of any organic materials that are largely decomposed. There's also mineral contents in the soil. There will be a combination of clay, sand, silt to make up whatever soil you have. Here on the Palouse we have clays. Different parts of the state have different soils made up of different mixes of those three components.

Glenn Mosley:
Brad, what are the important things we need to remember to help us build healthy soil?

Jaekel:
We really try to encourage building of soil - is what we call it - and part of the building is adding organic matter on a yearly basis. There are a few different ways you can go about doing that.

Compost is going to provide your soil fertilizers...and also a really healthy microbial environment.

You can also do things like growing cover crops. These are going to be crops like grasses, legumes, different peas. They're crops you grow not necessarily to harvest, but to add back to the soil. So you grow them to a certain stage and then you work them back into the ground and they decompose. And they really add the basis of that organic organic material.

Mosley:
So, generally speaking, you want to maintain nutrients in the soil?

Jaekel:
Yep, you want to maintain a healthy nutrient level in your soil. And there's key nutrients that you are primarily interested in. It's going to partly depend on what crops you are growing; you are going to add different green manures to add different nutrients.

And the organic mater is really important because it does a lot of good things to your soil. It helps to increase the capacity of the soil to retain moisture, which is going to be a growing concern in a lot of areas. And it also helps that microbial environment to really thrive.

Mosley:
Brad Jaeckel is project manager of the organic farm at Washington State University in Pullman. I’m Glenn Mosley.

Coldsnow:

For much more information on organic gardening, go to N-W-P-R dot org and click on "Our Northwest". You can ask Brad questions about gardening at your home. There are also links to important resources such as "Local Harvest", which helps you find organic produce in your community. That's "Our Northwest" at N-W-P-R dot org.