Pro tip: bury your underpants in the vegetable garden
If you’re an enthusiastic vegetable gardener, you know exactly how important it is to have healthy soil in your garden beds. So how do you determine whether the soil in your allotment or backyard is healthy and alive? The test comes from California: bury a pair of underpants in your garden, and you’ll see for yourself.
You probably think this is a ridiculous story when you read it. But it turns out to be true: farmers in America and England bury cotton underpants in their fields and meadows to check on the soil life. A healthy garden, where everything grows and flourishes, is also teeming with life below the surface. If the garden has been completely sprayed with weed killer, pumped full of artificial fertiliser or is otherwise out of balance, the soil is as dead as a doornail too.
Laundry basket
So how do you find out which category your green oasis falls into? It’s very simple: bury a pair of cotton underpants or boxers and dig them up again after two months. Can you put them straight back on – well, after a spin in the washing machine, of course – then there’s work to be done in your vegetable garden: get started with compost, because there’s no life in the soil. Is there nothing left of the briefs? Long live your garden; everything will flourish there! ‘Cotton is a naturally biodegradable material,’ says Evan Wiig of the Californian Farmers Guild. ‘If you put something made of cotton in the compost heap, there would be nothing left of it within two months either, just like the other natural materials being composted there.’
Good meat
No complicated soil analyses, no laboratory—just bury something from the laundry basket in the garden and you know exactly where you stand: farmers in Scotland liked the sound of that too. They carried out the same test, even in meadows where their livestock graze. ‘It’s important too, because fertile, healthy soil produces nutritious grass, which is good for the cows,’ explains a Scottish farmer. ‘That leads to good, full-fat milk and tasty meat.’ What do you think: their underpants were broken down right down to the elastic. Not a thread was left. Top-quality soil, top-quality grass—no need to change a thing.
Silk briefs
Are you going to put your own garden through the underpants test? It doesn’t matter whether you take a pair of underpants from the cupboard or fish one out of the laundry basket. Bury them approximately thirty to fifty centimetres deep. One important point: they must be one hundred per cent cotton; synthetic fabrics don’t work as well. And silk briefs? Those farmers didn’t try them, so there’s nothing to say about that yet—but if you want to give it a go: go for it.
Read more:
- You’ll be shocked: your tomato is a mini vegetable garden
- These vegetable garden disasters wouldn’t look out of place in Madurodam
- At this well-known supermarket, you can now only buy organic dairy
Source: Food & Wine
