They call it granite. And we’re on a plateau. Old mountains flattened after millions of years of erosion. It’s acidy, some clay but not much, maybe it’s called lime. It’s poor soil, pastures with cows and forests grow here. Few crops. Unless people have access to manure people grow gardiens. But very much the same crops. Pretty boring. Leeks, onions, lettuces,tomatos, beets and if they’re wild some kale and beans.
So i use some compost and try to grow more on this poor soil. Potatoes under grass killing straw worked well. Seeded rye in there after scraping decaying straw to the side. Seems to go ok. I’ve got some of @Richard low input tomatoes i want to try there.
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Mine is something like this, very compacted and a lot of rocks. Yesterday rained kite a lot, so the soil is still wet.
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There are also low input melons growing on the island. I need to grow them for sharing next year.
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Based off your picture, most of the rocks are on the top. If I had a bucket with 3 different rock sizes, pebble size, marble size, and golf ball size, and shook the bucket up, then perhaps the pebbles would for the most part reach the bottom. On the top of the pebbles would be the marbles. And on the very top would be the golf balls.
Yes, it seems that there are no stones apart from the surface. But when I was digging I found many rocks, some of them very big. Those that are underground are covered in mud and cannot be easily distinguished, but believe me, planting seedlings is not an easy task.
It looks nice to me. What was a mistake about it?
Those tomato cages are in the way of me being able to efficiently terminate the clover. I want to plant right away. I might have to do what real farmers do which is plant a cover, spray herbicide, till it under, then throw down some triple 13.
I would go for hoeing, like I did a few hours ago for planting faba beans, and peas:
As for mid march in my place : I should have sown daikon radishes and mustard in the autumn if I wanted to simply crush a flowering cover crop … So to say without hoeing. As all plant inhibit their tillering capacities when flowering so die if you crush and harm the stems without cutting them…
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But maybe that was your mighty sense of humor 
I know another one who has a mighty sense of humor:
I was joking, and I appreciate the compliment. Unfortunately, I don’t have the comedic talent he does. But that doesn’t stop me from trying.
I’ve already watched that video. Unfortunately, he doesn’t post as much any more and I have had to get my fix elsewhere.
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Friends: fine compost and fine soil are a joy to work with. I use them as i am able to. However, not having a car or pickup truck and not having much money, I mostly work with what I have. And working with what you have, brings good results in time.
In a crack in the sidewalk along the street grows a tomatillo which is now setting fruit:
In unamended limestone gravel, I grow Swiss chard, kale, peppers, green onions, flowers:
And I grow flowers in cracks in cement:
Where I have real dirt to work with (under the gravel of what was once a parking lot) I’ve broad-forked and worked the soil, then planted thickly, many things:
I think it is useful to grow many kinds of plants crowded together, as they complement each other’s differing needs. Perhaps they even share nutrients in some cases. Much thought is given to the vertical arrangements of plants in the above-ground landscape, but little thought given to the underground landscape. There should be plants with deep tap roots and plants with shallow roots growing together the same as you would consider the above ground layering of plants.
So in conclusion, compost is lovely if you have it but if you don’t, there are other ways.
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Your image is known as Liebig’s Barrel, after German chemist Justus von Liebig. In chapter 2, section 3 of The Natural Way of Farming Masanobu Fukuoka goes into considerable detail to examine various factors that might prove much more significant than Liebig’s Theory of Limitation. This book is very much in the same philosophical space as Joseph Lofthouse’s book Landrace Gardening. I recommend it to anyone who hasn’t yet read it.
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What an interesting read this thread has been. I thought that maybe you all would like to here some of my experiences.
I’m currently living in Haiti. The land here is so, so sad. The population density is such that almost everything that can grow an ear of corn, no matter how poor, is farmed every year. The hills are unterraced and every rain you can see the soil washing away. There are many fields that are now completely unusable. All that is left is rocks. Most of the farm land grows the most pitiful corn you have ever seen. It’s only down in the little valleys and around people’s yards that the soil can grow much of anything healthy.
When we moved here we bought some land in the middle of the farmers’ fields, a little ways away from the villages. We’ve been working our land for a few years now but it has been a challenge to grow much of anything without adding inputs. We haven’t added any commercial fertilizer at all because or main goal here is to find methods of land improvement that our neighbours can replicate. We’ve been using a composting toilet system and buying most of our food so that has be an input. We also bought about 150 rice sack of bean shells from our neighbours last year. We’ve also collected manure from nearby roadways that no one else wanted. That’s all that we brought in from other land.
Our main method for soil restoration has been to grow pioneer species that can produce lots of biomass and add them to the land as mulch or compost. Elephant grass has been our favorite so far.
After reading Landrace Gardening a couple of months ago I’ve been growing excited to work on producing some seeds that are more suited to our environment than random American seed company seeds. I have 12 varieties of runner been coming into the country in a few days.
That said, it’s very clear that this needs a multiple pronged approach. If I plant radishes they will only reach seed leaf stage and remain in that state for months. I can’t produce a landrace radish like that. Soil without inputs can be OK to work with or it can be terrible depending on the specific conditions and history of the land you are currently working with.
Our land is slowly healing. We are now a green oasis compared to the land around on google earth which warms my heart. We’re starting to be able to grow some new crops here and experiment with new foods. It still has a ways to go before it can grow things like it should. Everything grows very slowly and is stunted except what grows in the old compost piles. That stuff explodes with growth here.
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I had a compost pile once. It composted nicely, and when it was all just soil, the chickens scratched it around, and that was that. I now feel like compost in my situation is just a productive way to get rid of garbage. I always have weeds in my garden, and over winter their roots enrich my soil. I am trying to get a heavy mulch going, and so it will be compost in place. I did get the rabbit when my daughter divorced, you know, until she had a place for it. Which means I have a rabbit now. And he produces an abundance of soil amendment, which I’m going to have to spread out somewhere. More work…
After reading all through this subject I thought it might be interesting to do what the Lord told the Jews to do and that was every 7th year to leave their land for are on work but it’s not practical to do all the land that way you might want to divide your Land and each year habits divided in seven sections and each year leave one section on work it’s just an idea
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Having a system of rotating plots with one fallowed each year is a good idea. That’s been traditionally done for a long time in many cultures, and it’s done for a reason.
I can think of two alternative ideas to do something similar. One would be to plant cover crops in the resting plot, rather than purely fallowing it (mainly so perennial weeds don’t get established). The other would be to use the fallow plot as that year’s latrine, thereby returning nutrients to the soil that got removed and put into your body. I believe both have been traditionally done for a long time, too.
A bonus third idea is to have permanent spaces for wild plants interspersed throughout the growing area. In Britain, those were called hedgerows, and they were a good place for predator species to establish habitats, which kept pest species at much lower levels.
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