This week’s guest is Nigel Palmer, an experimental gardener who brings to bear his experience as an aerospace engineer to analyse, identify and organise the various components that make plants grow well. From his research, he’s compiled a recipe book of garden amendments, some easy to make and some involving more complex methods, but all of which you can recreate at home and use on your garden for better plant health and resilience. 

Dr Ian Bedford’s Bug of the Week: Darwin’s Worms

This episode is sponsored by gardencourses.com

What we talk about:

The book ‘Natural Farming Agriculture Materials’ by Cho Ju-Young and how it influenced Nigel’s work 

When making soil amendments and fertilisers and having them analysed in a laboratory, how does Nigel know the results will be consistent for future batches? 

Why is local biological material important for a garden? 

The theory behind feeding a plant with its own 'ancestors' 

The ability of a plant to change the soil pH in the immediate vicinity of its roots 

How plants need different nutrients and minerals at different stages of their development

Using a refractometer

Fermented plant juice and its uses

What difference can these amendments make to a garden? 

About Nigel Palmer

“Nigel Palmer has been a lifelong gardener in New England relying on the amazing complexity of nature to inspire his gardening philosophy, as well as working as an aerospace engineer sorting, organizing, and resolving complex technical issues. He is the instructor and curriculum developer of the Sustainable, Regenerative Gardening program at The Institute Of Sustainable Nutrition (TIOSN).  ” - https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/the-regenerative-growers-guide-to-garden-amendments/

Links

The Regenerative Grower’s Guide to Garden Amendments: Using Locally Sourced Materials to Make Mineral and Biological Extracts and Ferments by Nigel Palmer - Chelsea Green Publishing, 2020

www.tiosn.com 

Dr James Duke’s Phytochemical and Ethnobotanical Databases