My Self Reliance · Free Download
Building Soil
from Nothing
What four years on degraded land taught me
What's inside
Six principles. In the order that they matter.
The land I built on was not good land. Sandy, acidic, stripped bare by logging a hundred years ago and left to fail. The soil, where there was any at all, was essentially sand and moss. Nothing grew there that I wanted to grow.
This guide is what I learned over four years of working it back. Not theory. What I actually did, what worked, and what I would do again if I were starting from zero. There's also a section on what to plant while the soil builds, because you still need to eat in the meantime.
01
Understand what you have
Read the land before you change it
02
Cover the ground
Wood chips, straw, leaves — stop the loss first
03
Add carbon underground
Logs, branches, hugelkultur
04
Build a compost system
Everything organic, nothing wasted
05
Plant what fixes things
Nitrogen fixers, dynamic accumulators
06
Let it work
Observation and patience as tools
"The soil does not care how ambitious your plan is. It responds to what you actually put into it, over time. A quarter acre of good, deep soil will feed you. Ten acres of neglected ground will not. Start small. Get it right."
— Shawn James · My Self Reliance