Soil-First Gardening: How to Grow Black Gold in the Backyard

Hands-on, permaculture, and beyond-organic gardening techniques to improve your garden soil for healthy plants & family

How to make or find and use the best compost, including compost worms and black soldier flies.

Keep your soil improving with no-till techniques like kill mulches and solarization.

Boost long-term microbial health with biochar and hugelkultur.

Choose and plant cover crops to grow darker soil and a healthy garden ecosystem.

Grow twice the fruits and vegetables in half the space when you turn your soil into black gold!

Have you noticed the extraordinary flavors and yields that come from even a small garden when the soil is just right? If you’ve ever been envious of your neighbor’s dirt or just curious about homesteading, then this course is the perfect fit for you.

Both raw beginners and gardeners who already boast a green thumb will benefit from this course’s focus on hands-on techniques used to boost the quality of your soil on the small scale. Contents include:

  • Compost – why and how to buy or make and use the very best, including compost worms and black soldier flies
  • No-till organic gardening – keep the fertility cycling in your soil with chemical-free, no-till techniques likes solarization and kill mulches
  • Biochar – learn when charcoal boosts your soil and when it’s a fairy tale as well as how to turn waste wood ashes into biochar
  • Hugelkultur – use rotting wood for long-term soil improvement to please fungally-associated plants
  • Cover crops – grow easy ground covers that build soil, attract pollinators, lower weeding pressure, and much more

Each video tells the how as well as the why to help you follow along easily at home. In addition, printable fact sheets can come with you into the garden as a quick reminder of each step.

This course is brought to you by Anna Hess, author of The Weekend Homesteader and The Ultimate Guide to Soil. Based on 15 years of fruit and vegetable gardening in harmony with the natural environment, her books and courses take the guesswork out of beyond-organic and permaculture techniques.

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