I am just expressing my thoughts and hoping for thoughtful conversation. This is how the truth is attained, by talking about these things and hearing different points of view. Echo chambers are not places of learning. Let’s be nice and allow other points of view. Please do not take offense to me expressing my point of view, even if it’s wrong.
100% agree. I’m a social person but there are lots of times I don’t want to talk about what I’m doing with non-violent gardening with other gardners or growers. That’s because I think I run a higher risk of being subjected to their judgment than having a constructive conversation about my growing context and priorities. In our system non-violence, ecosystem integration, and better understanding plants and natural systems are prioritized over production.
The problem is not no-till, the problem is dogmatically insisting on no-till - - or any growing methodology, even up to and including non-violent growing - - for every grower in every context.
I can only really speak for our growing system, and I’ll change it if there’s a reason I find compelling to change it. I won’t change it because somebody says X or Y, nor will I insist that everyone should grow this way and have no respect for them if they don’t.
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I’ve been wrong about many things. I’ll be wrong about several things today. If I was right 51% of the time, I would quit my job and go to the casino.
But you’re not going to convince me by starting with that language. That kind of attitude will not convince.
Anyways, I am just expressing thoughts and not insisting they are 100% true at all times in all places. Just want to make that clear.
“Have you had success growing other types of vegetable crops in your native, unaided soil? Like tomatoes for example? I am curious to see if you can find success growing something else that also needs potassium.”
oh, yes, definitely, tomatoes grow like weeds here. I just have to look at my garden, think about a tomato and a new tomato plant will start growing there. The reality is that it is probably not only a lack of potassium that causes my weak squash results, but there may be another macro/micronutrient issue or perhaps my soil structure,…
I can do more soil tests, but soil tests don’t really indicate if the mineral is in a plant-available form, so really not foolproof. I can experiment with different soil amendments to see which ones work, but that takes years to figure out. Or I can just add compost, which has a little bit of everything and which seems to work, so I go ahead and continue doing that until I have a seed population that can thrive without compost.
Maarten
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I am splitting my sides at the image of these magic tomatoes!
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I think we must be talking at cross-purposes here.
From my perspective, I’ve just been trying to explain why I (and many others) use compost in some contexts, and you’ve been repeatedly insisting that it’s not a good idea and discounting the reasons offered for the practice as unimportant or inaccurate. To me, it doesn’t feel much like a discussion, it feels like you’re scolding anyone who does things differently than your ideal – even when we actually agree that compost can be a bottleneck, and that there are some contexts where it probably isn’t worth the effort!
Apologies if my defensiveness has come across as aggression, that wasn’t my intention at all. I hope this explanation helps to show how we got here. I don’t want to fight over things like this when we’re actually on the same side: that growing our own food, and selecting resilient seeds, is a good thing to do.
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I heard this somewhere: “You are not your ideas.” I took that to heart. When someone shines a bad light on an idea that I approve of, I don’t take it personally. An idea is just something I approve or disapprove of, and I am flexible to change with new information. I have an uncommon trait of understanding how ignorant I am. Like, I am the first person in the room to admit I don’t know something and I pride myself on that honesty.
When I attempt to poke holes at the compost rational, or anything like that, I am aiming to test the truth of all aspects of the idea, not to outsmart someone or belittle their idea, just to seek the truth. I find deeper discussions entertaining. Most people don’t, and I accept that. The few who like to engage in deep conversation about ideas I appreciate the engagement.
So when I push back on something, I am hoping to open someone’s mind to a different angle, to shine a light on something they may not have thought about before. If I achieve nothing here but to get people to think more for themselves, I would be happy with that result.
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I think part of the cross-purpose conversation here is that there are really two things under consideration; whether compost is necessary, and whether soils have everything they need for plant growth by themselves. These are two separate considerations. (Actually, there may be a third; how to “turn a profit” from growing food, in the wide sense of “profit”.)
Compost is useful in some situations, not useful in others; I’m personally moving away from it, other than a small worm bin for kitchen scraps, because it is a lot of work.
The other two considerations are somewhat linked. If annual crops are grown and harvested year after year on most soils, and no fertilizer or compost or imported mulch is used, and no humanure is returned, yields will decline over time as the soils nutrients are used up, as various experiments have shown. But, and this is a key point, yields won’t drop forever. They will eventually bottom out when they are in balance with natural nutrient inputs (things like the slow breakdown of underlying bedrock, deposition of nutrients in dust, and the fixation of nitrogen by legumes and free-living microorganisms.) This was the situation on most medieval European farms; they were only able to harvest as much as was allowed by that annual increment of fertility. Low yields of this sort mean that more land must be cultivated for a given yield, which means that there is more work per unit of crop production. (Less of a “profit”.)
To avoid this, two things can be done: fields can be abandoned or fallowed while the natural inputs of fertility build back up to higher levels, allowing a higher yield when the field is again cropped; or fertilizer of some sort can be applied to the field. The first choice is used by many slash-and-burn farmers, including most native peoples around the world; the second was used in Europe after early modern times, as well as in China and some other Asian countries.
There is a sort of third possibility, which is a variation of fallow; temporary pasture. By using a field as pasture for a few years, the fertility will build back up, since the animals on pasture won’t be able to “harvest” it all for themselves; but those animals will still allow the farmer to derive some “profit” from the fallow year. (Similarly, slash-and-burn cultivators often harvest many semi-wild plants for regenerating fallows; these smaller harvests still allow nutrients to build up in the soil, while complementing the crops grown in the newly cleared fields.)
I will see if I can find a link to some of the depletion studies which show how yields decline and eventually bottom out in unfertilized fields; I seem to recall that on good soils in the Midwest of the USA, the bottomed out corn yield is about 36 bushels an acre.
The connection to landracing is that vigorous landrace plants would be able to survive better in any of these low-nutrient situations. They still will be constrained by the annual increment of fertility; they can’t produce something from nothing. But they might be able to survive in situations where more modern cultivars simply give up.
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Good thought. It’s the written word without the other human aspects of things like tonality and facial expressions. Text and email have the same problem.
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Nature doesn’t make compost piles, and yet the plants on the forest floor are fed everything they need from leaves. So. It stands to reason that having some rather leafy trees nearby will provide nutrition to the garden without us having to do anything.
But I wonder what the perfect trees would be for adding that fertility every year to the garden, without being too greedy with surface roots that aggressively compete with garden plants. Seems the ideal trees for this purpose would have small leaves or leaflets with light, thin leaves, rather than large heavy leaves that don’t decompose quickly, and would have a deep root system rather than a shallow one. And they can’t be too close to the garden where they’ll create too much shade and space away from growing areas.
I think the trees could also be nitrogen fixing as well. Alders, black locust, acacias in warm climates. Laburnum? That has toxic properties, so less desirable in the forest garden.
Speaking of nitrogen fixers for the forest garden, the goumi, or Eleagnus should maybe be used more. There are many species of Eleagnus, but the one that probably would be most suitable would be the goumi. It has a pleasant edible berry as well as being a nitrogen fixer. However, it is a large shrub, not a tree.
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I use compost in the greenhouse. The lettuces in there are much larger, so is the spinach, the miner’s lettuce, the leeks etc… But what difference does it make? The amount of compost we can get is limited. As is the amount of water, sunlight, frost free days, land you can call yours.
But there are different ways we can boost our soilfoodweb to boost growth.
One of the most important ones is creating landraces but anything you can do to help the soil food web develop is helping outputs as well.
Doesn’t it? A fallen tree is a lot like a linear compost pile; leaves will form drifts if it’s windy enough; ruminant mammals are very nearly walking compost piles given what’s going on in their guts. And humans (who are also part of nature) have been making middens and trash piles (previously all of compostable materials, because anything non-compostable was far too valuable to just throw away) since before recorded history.
Hazel is a pretty useful coppice tree, and can give a crop of nuts with appropriate management. I’m less concerned about nitrogen than carbon in my own composting, but then I have plenty of access to both.
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Compost is extremely beneficial to gardens, and crucial for creating new, productive garden beds. But it is either expensive or time-consuming labor to produce in larger amounts, thus it’s a limiting factor, and there’s an impetus to explore ways to achieve nutrient addition with less input of labor or less expense.
You could say that nature makes compost piles, but this means that composting itself is using the natural process of decomposition in an intensive and intentional way to achieve superior results. If you do a really good job, turning the compost, amassing critical amounts of material, protecting it from excessive rains, so that your temperture is high., then you can achieve very high-quality compost that even has killed off weed seeds due to its higher temperature.
However, what is also interesting is finding ways to add additional nutrients passively, without expense or labor. That is where design of garden and landscape systems to support passive nutrient cycles, utilizing the natural process of annual leaf drop can play a role. Maybe you rake up the leaves and create compost piles. Or maybe you rake them up from paths and driveways, and add that to garden beds to smother weeds and decompose over time to add to the existing soil. Maybe you just have a big oak tree somewhere nearby that pulls nutrients from deep within the subsoil, extracts minerals from soil with the help of mycorrhizal fungi, and subsequently sheds those nutrients in the form of copious amounts of leaves and covers your garden beds without you doing as much supplemental fertilization and annual top-dressing with that valuable compost.
Today we use compost for our squash mounds. We don’t have enough of that valuable product to supplement the garden beds with that precious compost, but we do use lots of leaves (as well as chop-and-drop mulch materials such as comfrey leaves) and add them to garden beds at various times.
When we create new garden beds on top of cleared ground or on top of grassy areas, then we use purchased municipal compost.
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I am probably going to make you laugh when you see my topsoil, subsoil layer photo. I will post it this weekend. I don’t think I have topsoil. I have never seen such a thing in real life. Does it really exist, or is it a mythical relic from history books? I’ve seen such a thing in woods before, but it looks like rotten leaf matter that would disappear if the leaves would stop falling.
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This is about a foot deep hole in my yard. It’s been raining a lot. Grass and weeds grow above.
I can’t tell a difference between the top and the bottom of this hole. That’s the way my garden beds are.
This used to be a cow field.
Does anybody else feel inspired to share a yard hole?
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It would have been a forest most likely. It’s been a meadow for a long time though. We get invaded by pioneer tree species.
In the bed it’s like this.
It’s all been tractortilled 6 years ago. Then dôme compost got dumped.
On the pathways under mulch it’s like this.
It’s been tilled. But always was pathway.
Another pathway
Untilled cows pasture
Not much soil build up i see in there.
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It looks like our clay/sand profile is about the same. I would say you have mostly clay, right?
Your grass roots in the cow pasture do not go deep, exactly like my yard.
At least you have a lot of worms. I can’t keep worms unless in a wet month or directly under a compost pile.
Maybe we can get Kathryn Rose to post her pic. I am curious to see how that London soil is. I bet that soil has been abused for thousands of years.