The image above shows how the maximum water holding capacity of the barrel is limited by the lowest cut.
Likewise, if someone uses compost for all of their growing, the amount they can grow is dependent on how much compost they can produce or pay for.
A big pile of organic matter turns into a smaller pile of organic matter after period of time. Take the resources from one place to another, or stop growing food for a period of time on a plot. Then grow a cover crop instead. All seems like spinning wheels to me.
If youâre using lots of compost and always bringing it in then ya it probably is a limiting factor. The higher production, the more needed, the more limiting.
No-till growers youtube channel has a video on it. Heâs in Kentucky and doesnât have much access to large amounts of anything⌠straw, wood chips, even really hit and miss on manure, plus heâs staying with organic so you have to be careful with manure sourcing anyways.
I do not use compost for my growing. Are we talking of the bottlenecks of growing food or just for the compost part?
For the compost part, I can not make enought compost for myself, so if I was using compost that I create I will be in trouble. Maybe you need like 80% more land that your garden is to create all that biomass for the compost and with that you solved the compost crisis. I that 80% extra land you got animals, you got food forest, you got cover cropsâŚ
If we talking of bottlenecks of gardening⌠For me and in my context are: water, seeds, time. Probably in less mesure pests, dryness. And in the end will be land space
I was just talking about compost, but other bottle necks are interesting as well. I feel like there are some ideas being pushed on the YouTube algorithm that lead to people learning how to garden the most inefficient and expensive ways. Itâs almost like indoctrination of the next generation of gardening consumers, not just to buy unnecessary products but to take unnecessary steps.
Totally. I was talking to a group of gardeners, and they were super surprised that I use no compost, no inputs, and I got way more tomatoes than all of them combined. They say, what your plants eat if you do not have compost? My answer is that there are weeds that grow over concrete, my tomatoes are like those. They answer something like that their tomatoes are totally spoiled brads.
We use compost once, maybe twice, when we make a new growing area because we simply canât make enough. We try to keep a diversity of living roots in the soil as long as possible to keep the soil biology pumping. Inspired by the practices of syntropic ag we try to grow our mulch in situ. The limiting factor there is seeds if we are using annuals though more and more we use perennials for mulch.
Compost isnât necessary, I have enough to do my beds 2x a year, so I do, but some of the most productive gardens Iâve had were on unimproved soil. The beautiful simplicity of land race growing is that the plants adapt to you. So if you are starting from scratch I would do zero inputs and zero improvements.
Grin one of the tomatoes I am growing this year is a ârepeatâ from last year. It started as a volunteer in a garden in Florida⌠I got seeds and started them last year. Then DH changed everything garden up and I ended up with a flat of indet tomatoes with no where to put them. They got left in the 9 oz cups on my porch all season. Watered when it rained or if I remembered to do it. Marbled Mystery still produced one cherry tomato per plant! Now those are genetics I want in my tomatoes.
I think a much greater bottleneck is people being told by purists of one stripe or another that theyâre doing gardening âwrongâ somehow, despite likely having a very different context and different priorities. I wrote a much longer post here about why and how I compost, but it boils down to picking my battles and balancing both long-term and short-term outcomes.
When i can get the use of a friendâs truck to haul some good compost from the community pile, I like to do it. Probably once or twice a year. Itâs never as much as i would like to have but then again Iâm not certain I really need it. I like what good compost does to the texture of my soil. I also leave plant stems overwinter and break them up manually in the spring before i plant, so that adds a top layer of organic mulch that i put in the paths to prevent muddiness. In Fall when neighbors bag up leaves and put them at the curb, I grab as much as I can to throw on my garden overwinter. Iâm opportunistic like that, using whatever I can get. Itâs what I like to do, not necessarily what I need to do. But any added organic material - even top dressed - definitely does improve the texture of my soil at least from my human perspective.
Yep, the only reason I even bother with composting and mulching heavily is because my soil is heavy clay and we are in a valley so all the surrounding properties water drains into mine. If I had a flat non-soggy plot I wouldnât do jack.
Compost is not always a limiting factor. It depends on your values, priorities, and resources. Good point.
I am surprised I hadnât gotten as much push back about compost. I thought it was as mainstream as you can get. Like nobody talks negative about compost.
I do compost piles and a compost spin barrel. I am not against it. I just think a more nuanced discussion about it would be helpful, especially to those newer to gardening that could use a broader perspective.
I cannot make or buy enough compost to rely on it. Itâs more like the single cherry on top of ice cream.
At the Near Allotment is where I do most of my composting. I also garden at teh Far Allotment, the Soup Garden, my own back garden, and at a local community garden. The allotments plus my back garden add up to about a tenth of an acre; the Soup Garden and community garden are both pretty tiny in terms of actual growing space.
The allotment plot at the Near Allotment was previously managed by someone who didnât add any organic matter to the soil for literally decades, and did lots of digging, and grew mostly low-residue crops, and never ever covered the soil (heavy clay) in winter when we get rain that causes both compaction and nutrient leaching; the surface of the soil in the plot was about a foot below the surrounding path when I took it on.
The allotment site is in a former water meadow with some âŚhydrologically inconvenient choices made (they moved the river in order to put a road in, and while theoretically the drainage still goes to the river, in practice the water just sits); in dry summers this isnât a problem, but every few years we get heavy enough rain that the winter floods are repeated in summer and plants literally drown.
So the soil is in pretty rough shape, and Iâm growing quite a bit in raised beds or raised rows because itâs easier to prevent them going anaerobic. Gotta fill 'em with something though. My options are to dig very deep paths (which I then fill with woodchips, which compost in place eventually) and use the heavy clay to fill the raised beds, or to make compost to fill them.
I also need to keep on top of weeds or the allotment committee will yell at me (and potentially evict me). Closer plant spacing â an intensive rather than extensive approach â makes this easier to do, but the soil I have inherited wonât currently support it without help, and I donât want to use chemical amendments. My own compost is also physically easier to weed as the structure is considerably looser than the heavy clay.
I have ample access to woodchips (from local tree surgeons), spent coffee grounds (from a local coffee chain), and leaves from street trees (bagged up and left on the sidewalk â if I didnât steal them, they would be taken away and incinerated). I donât expect these waste products to be available forever, but while I am trying to fill raised beds it would be silly not to use them. And itâs not like Iâm doing much in the way of weeding and watering over the winter.
Also this allotment is in a frost pocket, and very open to the prevailing winds because of the way the valley is situated; my growing season there is shorter than other sites where I grow, and the plants dry out pretty fast. I kindof have to pick my battles.
My usual practice is to layer the various wastes in pallet-sized bays, as many as I can, in winter. I try to soak the woodchip layers but am limited by soaking space. Iâll turn each heap once, and sometimes I stick some deep trays on top to grow an early crop of quick greens or radishes. In late April or early May when theyâve cooled down enough, I direct sow squashes in them, usually with some netting to keep just a bit more warmth from the heap in (last frost date can be as late as early June). The squashes do well with the extra rambling space given by the height of the compost heaps, and donât mind if the heaps arenât fully mature yet; I get better yield from them there than in the clay soil. In the autumn when itâs time to harvest all the winter squash I do that, then spread the compost on my raised beds to top them up (and fill any new ones), and repeat the whole cycle. Five pallet bays worth of squash plants is about as much as we can manage to eat in a year and I have nine bays (I donât always manage to fill them all), so this year Iâm planning on using at least one bay for watermelons and another for other melons; usually here people only grow melons in greenhouses so if I can get any to fruit well outside, even if itâs âcheatingâ by starting them on a warm heap of compost, thatâs still a significant advantage, freeing up greenhouse space for other crops. If I have space I might try for some gourds too, it would be nifty to grow my own dishes.
I donât purchase much compost at all â maybe a bag in the early spring, for season extension on things I still want to get a yield on before much selection is going to be possible, and another in the autumn (usually dehydrated coir) for my windowsill microgreens over the winter. I probably could replace both of those uses with my own compost if I sieved it and brought it home, but cycling two and a half miles with a bucket of dirt is tedious.
At the Soup Garden I compost because the churchyard is literally builderâs rubble, and I want a yield in the short-term (those vegetables are for the soup kitchen) while I work on removing bricks and landracing some of the stuff thatâs easier to landrace. We did buy in some compost to begin with, but itâs far beyond our budget to do it at scale every year, even though space is quite constrained. Thankfully between street leaves, grass clippings, discarded Christmas trees, and prunings from various perennials, I can make enough compost to expand the growing space a little each year; there are a couple of hot bins and a cold pile (mostly for leaves and woody stuff). I was composting kitchen waste from the soup kitchen to begin with but there are many many volunteers and no amount of telling them not to put in huge chunks and instructing them on appropriate use of âbrownâ materials actually worked, so now I just take the coffee grounds and tea bags. In the back garden I compost because I have to do something with the prunings from various ornamental plants (we rent) and our kitchen waste; at the Far Allotment there is a compost bin also for prunings and any crop residues I donât want to leave on the ground, and for food waste from a friend who lives nearby. The community garden where I do paid work involves lots of composting, because itâs the primary recipient of the coffee grounds from the chain I mentioned before; the hope is that eventually we can sell the resulting compost.
So, my compost heaps give me:
hot beds for early growing, then a main growing space for winter squash
material to fill raised beds and containers, basically as insurance against flooding
easier weeding, a task I am not allowed to ignore completely
a way to process various waste products that would otherwise leave the local ecosystem
something to soak up some of the winter rain and release it for use by plants in summer
a way to increase some short-term yield while I continue to select genetic mateiral for medium-term and long-term resilience
potentially, a source of income which would fund my (very part-time) employment at the community garden
That is worth spending a fair amount of time and energy on, especially if I can concentrate that time in winter when most plants arenât growing fast enough to need much attention.
Should everyone compost? Certainly not. If I had a lot more space, I would probably opt for stronger selection pressure (and lower initial yield). I would also put in large deciduous trees to make lots of leaves, or at least grow some carbon-heavy cover crops, and maybe get some livestock to keep some of the weed pressure down and process crop residues for me. But those options arenât available to me.
I donât think I like that term: allotment. It seems like a word imported from a different era, that of serfdom. The lord âallottedâ or âallowedâ the use of his land for crop production. I watched the old 1987 Hansel and Gretel with my kids the other day. They spoke an English accent, and it showed a very hard life in those times.
I donât think my ancestors did well at all back in England (about 83% British & Irish). I donât think most people decide to migrate to a different country across an ocean unless there are some serious problems/pain they are trying to get out of.
I own the land I garden on, as long as I keep making payments to the bank for the next 28 years! I plan to move to a property with more land some day when it is more affordable. This is another reason I donât focus on soil improvement too much. I cannot bring the dirt with me but I can bring the seeds. I focus on making my seed bank stronger. And I can take that anywhere I go.
We donât have animals now, but if you have chickens and a barn full of goats, then you are always generating piles of manure.
Sadly, without animals in the system, and also working a job and farming only on my spare time, I agree itâs a challenge to create high-quality compost. So, I have occasionally purchased compost delivered and dumped in a heap from a company that makes it from municipal yard waste. It is a big bill all at once, and I sometimes gripe about too much trashy bits in the compost, but it is 100% worth it for people who have jobs and not much free time. If youâre farming full time, I would think about what animals might be practical in your system.
Iâm glad you have the opportunity to âownâ and steward land, but that isnât an option for me here. The enclosures did impact a lot of people in the UK and elsewhere in Europe; not all were able to leave and settle abroad. But the project of the enclosures and the project of colonialism were related, not two separate things.
I know a thing or two about the disparity in standard of living between the UK and North America because I was born and raised in Canada, and moved to England at the age of 19.
You can like or dislike the term allotment, but it is exactly what I have; see Allotment (gardening) - Wikipedia for some basic information.
I wish you all the best with your plans to move to a property with more land, should âmore landâ ever become more affordable. As they arenât making it any more Iâm not sure I would count on that happening! And of course, if you improve the quality of your own local soil you are doing a solid favour not only for whoever has legal ownership of the property after you, but for all of the ecosystem. But itâs perfectly valid to decide to do it the slow way (i.e. let plants do all of the work and donât bother with any soil amendments at all) rather than the fast way, especially if you arenât that fussed about yield in the meantime.
Thanks for this which looks to me like one of the major discussions we can have.
Depends on what you put in the equation, and the practicality . Undressing Paul to dress Jacques so to say. Which would make not much sense - if I get what you say.
We have been clear cuting the forests to do gardening, or to build houses, shops, cities, etc. Humans have a long track of sterilizing the earth + in recent decades an exponential tendency to bring in âââfertilityâââ - using seeds adapted to these new âsemi-artificialâ conditions. So they tend to âeatâ directly in the input solution. Needing no collaboration with soil life.
To be clear: I see compost from a non-practitionner point of view + from a point of view of one who wants increase the habitats of the soil inhabitants, so to say favor âsoil lifeâ, so that my crop has some kind of natural nutrition, favouring endophytes collaboration, and so to to say I concentrate on bringing them:
a roof (a cover crop)
something in the âfridgeâ (a cover crop and crop residues including roots which stay in the ground)
habitats (no till for as long as I can)
That is where I a coming from, and so I donât even imagine composting : if I compost what grows on my fields I loose the cover (roof), then whatâs in the fridge (nothing to eat in the field for my inhabitants), then I tend to impact the habitats due to the absence of cover (sun, rain). But I know the interest of composting or manure or fertilizers to boost cultivation (which I donât see as different: nutrient rich materials). And I can use them, for specific reasons : like if I need to make a harvest, with a still too poor soil and/or not sufficiently locally adapted seeds.
So it is kind of a different technical track, which costs me 0.05⏠per square meter per year, so to say 0.05 US$ per 10square feet per year. Then crushing the cover crop at flowering stage costs is 15 minutes per 100 square meter, so 2.5 hours for 1000 square feet, which is more than enough to feed a family. Only the sowing stage may be time consuming, as you may want to weed a bit for example, but as much as tilling time I would say. As I start reproducing my cover crop seeds I will be 100% autonomous in inputs within a few years, as seeds are the only âinputâ I need. One major interest is that you donât need a tractor, gasoline, etc.
As we all know, it is easier to see trends than documenting an intentionnality. But I fully get your point. I see the exact same trends, but starting prior to the Internet age, which makes it exponential. We come all from rural societies, with very differentiated agricultural practises, but with lower and sometimes no inputs 150 years ago. We moved into cities and now all the trends come from those who come back from the cities, or those living in suburbs, and can access some land. As a mindset it sounds to me like gardening with no roots. An âhydroponic mindsetâ. But there is good will, and - in my place - old neighbors who know the traditionnal way, and notably : timings. The only thing is that their seeds are crap, all bought from stores. Prior to tell them anything about seeds, I ask the newcomers to go see their neighbors, and ask for the basics. Otherwise they are just following the last trend - and I donât think cover cropping and landrace gardening are ⌠and if I was to choose, I would go for the later, as seeds, and locally adapted seeds, as the most important parameter.
+1
+1 for the first year, as âbreakingâ a meadow or any ânot-too-deadâ soil liberates many nutrients. Then, I would try to keep or enhance the living conditions of potential endophytes by alterning with cover crops. Other option: if I had a too small place to produce all vegetables I need, so to say if I could not include a 25-33% share of cover crops, I would rely on inputs (to boost my harvests) + some machinery or good hoeing to make a âgoodâ cultivation ground - structurally speaking⌠or I would maintain a near to zero input approach, but not dogmatic, because I would have to adapt it progressively to my yields.
Anyway, I would always ask myself: am I losing my soil? And if I suspect a loss - whose first symptom would be a lack of observable animals (specially anecic worms in my context) compared to surrounding grounds - : is my breeding barely compensating my losses, or fully overcomes it? Then why not making adjustments of one type or another? etc. Then it would only be a mater of what is accesible around, and for the budget I can afford.
+1
Sorry about insisting on my cover crops but here it is, âmulch inclusiveâ:
May be not enough though.
Anyway, it takes some time to master a technique. And I have been working in a network, and helped by a âmasterâ, so I do not advise anybody doing it exclusively. Many adjustments will have to be made.
But once again, I would say that if I was to choose between two things, I would go for landrace gardening first, as I see seeds and locally adapted seeds, as the most important parameter. If the other is essential to me, it is hard to get and a number of failures are necessary to master it. Adapting your own seeds pays (slightly) faster, especially if you can seed swap or buy many seeds first. And even⌠They are not to oppose.
And then, if I was to start with landrace gardening only, why not adding some manure or compost or fertilizer, but I would beware of not making my plants dependant on these inputs.
We have a good example in France with Pascal Poot : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5J6bFWifLvE he is very well known for his dry farmed tomatoes with no pruning no watering, no âciding of any kind, etc. And very rich in antioxydants. But his tomatoes are less known for their dependancy on inputs, and in that case on manure, which he alludes to from time to time in different videos - like if it was, letâs say⌠ânormalâ. This is not to say that what he does is âbaaaaaaadâ, what he did is great actually, but that I see Josephâs track and ours as more advanced in understanding the complexity of things. Revolution a giant step further.
What a fascinating subject! Thanks for the reading !
For my part, I would probably start like @artsyhonker. Whether in the world of gardening or market gardening, I find that we are very much subject to the âgreat truthsâ. Whether on one side or the other, justified or not, often in very specific contexts and terrains, we are indeed very receptive to solutions that seem to work. Except that, if I have learned anything, it is that many of our practices are absolutely not generalizable. Just like our seeds, our land has its own history and specific physical characteristics. Techniques that work very well in one specific context may be disastrous elsewhere. This is why I very often call for a form of caution, both in receiving information and in the way we give it! (some are much more categorical than others, and we will quickly write a bible where they claim to have all the truths of the universe!).
This is a little digression that I find useful, which in our interests is often linked to these questions of fertilization, mulching and irrigation.
In my opinion, I would say that it depends on several factors.
The first, the land. For me, we cannot interact in the same way with rich soil, which has benefited from a very advantageous context for decades or even hundreds of years, as with soil degraded by intensive agriculture for 30 years.
I would say that even in an advantaged context we could ask ourselves some questions. Indeed, beyond the eating habits that we give to our plants (which will probably have an impact on their genetic makeup after several generations), we can also think about preserving the qualities of our soils. And this is a question that I find quite thorny, since we must indeed find a balance between the resources that we import (compost, manure, green manure, mulch, etc.) to partly maintain the nutrition of these soils and the production areas that they necessarily represent. This is a phenomenon that I see a lot among my colleagues: they create real paradises and produce tons of vegetables, but use astronomical quantities of organic matter to do so. And this requires surfaces, very often large engines. So for me, this is not sustainable in the long term. On the other hand, producing without input requires good technical mastery so as not to empty our soil of its wealth. Since we must indeed think of those who will follow us. In some systems, we think about earthworms as much as we do about our plants!
For the management of fertilization without inputs, some enthusiasts are also starting to carry out very interesting tests on permanent plant covers. It is very different from organic mulches: it involves green manure, clover for example, planted for at least several years. It is managed by successive mowing (At least 8 per year for clover), which makes it possible to regulate weeds which cannot tolerate such frequent mowing (in the tests carried out, after 6 months only clover and dandelion remained). If managed correctly, simply mow the canopy twice (2 weeks apart) before planting the crop and there is no competition. Tests are just beginning, but it is already very effective for all tall plants (tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, beans, peas, etc.) and sowing large seeds. On paper, it goes even further than that: thanks to plant cover, photosynthesis and a good population of earthworms to mix it all up, apparently this would be enough to create a phenomenon of self-fertilty. Even in a system that relies heavily on compost and manure (bio-intensive market gardening popularized by Fortier and very popular in France), this alternative seems to satisfy. They talk about simply adding a little âboostâ for lazy plants like eggplants. And with so much diversity, the main initiator of this research tells us that rotations are no longer necessary. Biodiversity monitoring also showed that after a few months it had become almost equal to that of a meadow.
Of course, I put big quotation marks on all of this. The tests are recent, and probably there will be as many nuances as there are technical contexts. But I find great potential in it, since whatever our practices it would allow us to bring balance. For those who use inputs, use less. For those who work their soil, work it less. So less disruption and fewer exterior surfaces used.
The second factor is linked to something even more personal: our objectives, our desires, our sensitivities. If I separate the gardener from the market gardener, it is because the objectives and means are different. For the solution I just talked about for example, for a market gardener the limit will be the sowing of small seeds and a few low crops. For the gardener on a smaller area, it is more possible to have manual actions which will make crops such as salad possible (currently, for a market gardener the technical route would involve: mowing twice, putting a tarpaulin with large openings , plant the salads, wait two weeks, remove the tarpaulin. Itâs a bit tedious but itâs about giving the salad a head start. In another context, it would simply be a matter of being able to continue cutting between these salads until they take over). In short, the means and surfaces are already different. The need for financial profitability too (we are talking about compost, but for most of my colleagues it is even unthinkable to give up commercial F1 hybrids). And there will be as many nuances between several market gardeners as between several gardeners. And so all of this will inevitably have impacts on technical conduct, and I think that it is as necessary to hear these contexts as to understand their practices. The two cannot be separated. And itâs sometimes complicated, since gardening is ultimately as much a collective adventure as something very personal. We quickly become affected by other peopleâs way of doing things!
In any case, these exchanges are fascinating and I really enjoy reading you! This is important in a climate where the notion of âtransmissionâ is today reduced to almost nothing. People who truly want to teach and share are increasingly rare. Among the producers, there are above all a lot of desperate people who need a good workforce and who forget their commitments when it comes to welcoming young enthusiasts.
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