About our Farm
Learn about Living Soils and the Soil Food Web
At Hungry Bear Gardens we believe that farming starts and ends with the soil and the Soil Food Web that promotes healthy plant life. We spend more time feeding our soil than we do growing and harvesting vegetables. Every spring starts with making large piles of bio complete compost to feed the next years soils and our Red wiggler vermicompost bins. Every fall ends with feeding our soils with compost and worm casting to prepare it for a long winters nap. We do not use any chemical fertilizers or pesticides on our farm. Plants grown in our living soils are stronger and more resistant to pest and disease. Our produce is more nutritious with more flavor and last much longer in the cooler than anything grown with chemical fertilizers.
Composting
Our compost is certified Bio-Complete meaning that it contains complete Soil Food Web with the proper fungi to bacterial ratio. We use only local wood chips and our own cover crops in our compost. It is very important to use compost that is produce locally in your climate. If you buy compost that is made in Florida it will be of little use to us in Idaho as most of the microbes and soil life will not survive in or climate for more than one winter.
Feeding the soil
We feed our soil with worm castings and our Boi-Complete Compost and cover it with organic straw before the long winter. The soil life thrives all winter under the snow feeding on the compost and the straw. When the spring comes and the soil warms we rake back the straw and plant into soil that is primed and ready to partner with our new seedling to produce the most delicious and nutritious food you will ever eat.
Vermicomposting
The hardest working employees on this farm are our 2 million Red Wiggler composting worms. Every 4 weeks these hard workers pump out about 800 pounds of worm castings that are arguably the very best organic fertilizer on the planet. These little workers are the key to our success as a farm. They happily consume our Bio-Complete compost and in doing so they improve the diversity of beatification soil live and return it to us as beautiful high grade worm castings. It is a privilege to be the caretakers to these amazing creatures. The world would be a much lesser version of itself if not for worms.
The Soil Foodweb
A healthy foodweb occurs when: All the organisms that a plant requires are present and functioning. Nutrients in the soil are in the proper forms that will enable a plant to take-up them up. It is one of the functions of a healthy foodweb to hold nutrients in non-leachable forms that remain in the soil, until such time the plant requires the nutrients. At this point the plant "turns-on” the right biology to convert the nutrients into forms the plant can take-up (but which are typically very leachable). The correct ratio of fungi to bacteria is present, and that the ratio of predator to prey is present ensuring soil pH, soil structure, and nutrient cycling occur at the correct rates producing the right forms of nutrients the plant requires.