I could have worded that better. The wanted outcome is plant available nutrition. That comes in the form of broken down inputs. These broken down inputs are either immediately plant available or locked inside living and dead bacteria. The dead bacteria decompose quickly. The living bacteria die fast either because of a change in environmental conditions or just because their life span is short. Then all of this is absorbed by either soil microbes or plant roots.
To your point about space, I don’t have a lot of land. If I did, I might do normal composting instead.
One benefit I think I am getting from this practice is low waste. During normal composting, some of it gets lost due to evaporation, run off, etc. With this process, the inputs are being processed in a somewhat sealed container.
When I use this stuff, I like to add more inputs, that way I never run out. I want to keep the life growing inside those buckets. When I harvested my carrots, I cut all the tops off and put them inside those buckets. It must have been 200 carrot tops. It makes common sense to me that whatever was inside those carrot tops, will be transformed into plant available nutrition inside those buckets. The exact stuff my new carrots will need.
It’s highly concentrated at this point since it’s been continuously cooking for about a year. I am careful now to use 1 part fertilizer and 10 parts water.
When it comes to adding aerobic or anaerobic bacteria to a garden, what makes sense to me is putting some thought into the oxygen levels that are typical to soil type and other relevant conditions of the garden soil.
If I add billions of aerobic bacteria to an anaerobic soil, the aerobic bacteria will be introduced to a hostile environment. They will die and be consumed by anaerobic bacteria. It would be like sending a rocket full of monkeys to Mars. When the ship lands and the monkeys open the door, they all die.
Plant roots generally need oxygenated conditions. As far as I am aware, oxygen depth is a major limiting factor in how deep roots can generally travel underground.
If plant roots are by default, within oxygenated conditions, that means the conditions necessary for anaerobic bacteria to outcompete have not been met.
I also think a typical garden soil is a mixture of both anaerobic and aerobic conditions, and it varies in percentage throughout the day.
I also believe there are many species of bacteria within each category. They have strengths and weaknesses and outcompete one another as the conditions change. Some are better at decomposing. Others are better at trading resources with plants, etc.
I don’t personally think it’s effective to add a bunch of bacteria for the sake of adding bacteria unless the conditions for them to thrive can be maintained.
Other trivia, the human gut microbiome is mostly anaerobic.
I stumbled on an article that I think will be of interest to someone in this community. It’s about a Mexican corn that harvests it’s own nitrogen from the air with relationships with certain bacteria.
I found it on a digitized copy of Grow, Wisconsin’s Magazine for the Life Sciences, spring 2019: page 6 & 7. I’ve attached a link here:
I’ve been testing the synthetic fertilizer on my lazy watermelon plants. They have been stubborn. It seems like they were on strike, waiting to be fed the fertilizer like they were probably bred for. Ever since I’ve kept the feeding every other weekend, growth has been decent. My first watermelon fruit has set.
This synthetic fertilizer has made me a believer. I’ve been adding it to other plants given certain situations. Since I am done selecting for my mature carrots, I gave them a gentle amount, hoping to increase chances to reach seed.
The old timers who use synthetic fertilizer, tillers and tractors had it right. I added a mantis tiller to my wish list and will have it by growing season next year. I have spent enormous amounts of time creating garden beds with a simple shovel and hoe. As many calories I have put in, I think I would starve to death if I relied on calories that have been produced from my labor.
I was one of them for 30 years and it did work but when I moved to my current place, I decided to stop using fertilizers or anything else I couldn’t find right here for free. For the first fifteen years here, I used the tiller but phased it out about ten years ago. It took a while for me to figure it out, but my garden is just as or more productive than it was before and it’s actually less work and a lot more enjoyable work.
One important thing I’ve learned is that weeds are not necessarily bad, in fact often, quite the opposite. The roots of dandelions, dock, even thistles can basically till for you and much deeper than a tiller and their tops make fine mulch. Planting tillage radishes, do the same. Spreading ground cover weeds like purslane and creeping Charlie can keep the soil moist and cool and provide camouflage for young plants against birds and other critters.
Here is an example. The woman here has a mantis tiller and when she retired, she appropriated my back garden. Six or so weeks ago I went out to my garden and pulled the creeping Charlie up in little spots in one of my beds and planted corn. She couldn’t plant her corn because the mantis can’t handle the creeping charlie and the ground was too wet. She cleaned off the weed but then it got too dry, and her tiller kicked up tons of dust to go along with its normal roaring and stinking. She finally got her corn in just yesterday, in a three-inch-deep dusty layer on top of packed subsoil, bare as a desert and frying in the sun. Then she spent a couple of hours covering it with bird netting.
Until about a week ago I nor the birds could even see my corn buried in the weeds, but it was big enough to be safe from the birds, so I spent about 1/2 an hour pulling the weeds and piling them between the rows. The little puny corn plants exploded almost overnight into robust stalks with wide, dark green leaves and will need little more attention the rest of the season. Her corn, if it comes up will need constant watering and probably a bit of fertilizer as well.
I wish I could direct you to a book or resource that would help but to me there are just too many of them, some good, some ridiculous. Following the specific instructions even in the better ones is mostly a waste of time but you can get ideas and try them out. There is a learning curve, and it takes time, but I encourage you to set aside a bed or two to continue experimenting without the tiller and fertilizer and figure out what works for you.
I’ve tried all the home growing practices as well. I started conventional, but like Mark said growing without tilling, or fertilizing, or needing to run 2 mi of irrigation lines is a hell of a lot more enjoyable. Now I just apply a little compost them mulch thickly with wood chips once a year. I’ll let low growing weeds like chickweed, purslane, carpetweed, clover etc grow, but honestly not many weeds come up. For me landrace gardening fits with my personality. Gardening should be fun, rewarding, and enrich your life. Not be another job or expensive hobby like having a perfect lawn.
That’s the most compelling way I’ve heard no till explained. I think of cardboard and bought compost when someone says no till but your description sounds better.
ya, the fertilizer idea is a difficult one. I mean the goal of landrace is to find plants that work the way we do, so fertilizer isn’t inherently bad. However, if you make landraces that require fertilizer at some point you’ll have to make another landrace if you decide to stop. My muskmelons and watermelons this year are just moving really slow and it’s tempting, but I really want to find the few that can live without anything (other than I plan to add jadam microbial solution and some jadam liquid fertilizer since those are sustainable on my garden (and give another great benefit to having weeds)
Profit seeking farmers have been using synthetic fertilizers for a century. It works or else they wouldn’t use it.
Special YouTube tricks and special concoctions are almost certainly a waste of time at best, and at worst harmful.
Tilling works. Successful farmers till their ground. Even the no tillers seem to be aiming for loose soil. If your soil is compacted then you have to loosen it somehow and tilling is a great option.
I believe the most common options nature uses for loosening compacted soil are a) plants with thick and/or deep roots, or b) digging and/or burrowing animals. The equivalent from humans would be cover crops and tillage, so it’s no wonder those work.
I haven’t thought about the camouflage benefit for new seedlings. That may be something I try in the future. As far as tillage goes, I plan to use it primarily for building new beds or the efficient termination of a cover crop.
Personally, the concept of “no till” is confusing to me. I have a lot less experience than you and I respect the time you have spent.
The way I understand things is this. To build a new garden bed, without bringing in soil or compost, it is necessary to first destroy the current vegetation by means of tillage or sun deprivation.
I will continue to use cover crops and allow the existence of certain weeds in my garden. I have been allowing certain things to take place in my garden and observing the results. I have been disappointed so far. I have discovered only one local weed that I like. It is a very low growing weed that keeps the ground covered, doesn’t threaten my plants with crazy roots or shade. The other weeds, even wild clover, has created negative effects in my garden or positive effects, depending on proximity to my actual crops or time of the year.
I have observed on multiple occasions my crop plants do not grow well next to weeds, even the clover i intentionally plant. This is a more recent observation. I have never observed with my own eyes my actual crops growing better because they are next to a weed.
Since I have limited space, I prefer to be growing something that I can eat as much as possible, in every month of the year. I don’t plan to grow just clover or some other crop for several months when I could be growing edible food instead.
It seems to me that accumulating enough material to produce enough compost that would make a sizable difference is resource intensive. It would require machinery. I don’t see how a person just using simple hand tools could destroy enough plants from one area, haul this material, turn the piles, and be in a calorie surplus situation.
It seems to me over the last 100 years, food plants have weakened so badly now that we are having to feed these plants the stolen energy from stronger plants.
One of these days, when I get enough time, I plan on hopefully finding out how people used to garden in colonial times, like George Washington times. Those men were strong enough to make it in a new world without machines or running water.
Yeah the sustainable part and making use of weeds was the selling point that won me over.
Recently, I have made mistakes on it by not diluting it enough. I thought my new batch that was made a couple months ago was weak enough to dilute 1-1, boy was I wrong.
They used hand power, and worked from dawn to dusk and beyond.
A big part of the industrial revolution was that advances in food production raised much of the world from a subsistence level where yearly starvation was reality. There’s a reason they called spring “The starving time.”
They also had the wisdom to recognize that inbreeding wasn’t good for plants or animals, and if a good landrace got established in their area everyone wanted it.
Animals mostly took care of themselves, and like the people if they weren’t strong enough they died. Coddling animals or plants meant more work, which meant, as you said, a calorie deficit.
None of this wasting resources on a plant that can’t survive without constant attention.
Most families had a “close to the kitchen” garden that kept them fed until the main crops came in, and that’s where most of the attention went. Fields farther out were for densely planted crops that could withstand weed and pest pressure, usually grains of some kind or tubers.
Perennials and trees were another big advantage, if they had the space for them, requiring fewer resources and less time than the kitchen garden.
A friend of mine has a family favorite dish that I suspect was a product of near starvation at some point–apple onion soup.
I didn’t think about that either, I discovered it by accident when I got behind on weeding one time. It works especially good with corn and with setting out transplants like tomatoes, both of which are subject to being pulled up by birds when first planted. **The type and concentration of weeds certainly matters of course.
To me it just means not using a tiller, and as it’s evolved in my garden, to rarely even dig in the soil other than scraping out row to plant seeds or transplants. As @rylan pointed out tilling does work. And as mentioned the point is to loosen the soil and remove other dense vegetation. I think in the long run though not tilling, tills better.
When I used a tiller, I was only going to the depth of the tiller’s tines. Below that never got tilled. Worm holes or rotted root channels below that got filled back up with the first rain. All of that type of thing in the tilled layer was just destroyed, every year. The loose, fluffy six-inch tilled layer only stayed that way until the first hard rain. Now the loose fluffy layer is a foot and half deep and is there all the time. If a big dandelion is in a spot I don’t like I can just pull it up, root and all.
I don’t know that I have either, but I commonly observe them growing nicely in some association with weeds. But again **The type and concentration of weeds certainly matters. Clover is a weed in my garden and one that I limit pretty severely. It is just too tenacious to be allowed free reign. I have big patches of it in the yard though, which I cut and use for mulch.
I view everything through the lens of my own situation, and I’m lucky to have more than enough such resources on my own ground so it’s easy to just gather haul what I need over in my hand cart. I do view compost as a waste of time though. I just don’t see the point. I just throw stuff between the rows or in a pile and leave it be. That “turning” thing is for the birds in my opinion, I just don’t care if my piles don’t get hot enough to kill the weed seeds let alone the microbes. I’ll leave that to the youtubers with their soil thermometers. I’ve never had a soil test, I have no clue of the PH.
That is an issue I can’t address. I also have limited space in the gardens themselves but plenty of space to gather materials. Do you have other space in the yard maybe, where you could grow something like burdock, or clary sage or whatever to harvest for mulch and rot in the garden? Or maybe an accessible place to gather fall leaves?
Yea, that might be, but it’s doable and I think preferable to resorting to machines and chemicals. Also, I think when observing any situation where a lot of different plants are growing together, sometimes they seem to complement each other but often times they’re in competition. In my garden the complement arrangement is pretty rare I think, but with the competition situation it is fairly easy for me to intervene and give the vegetables the upper hand and I only have to do it once because once they have the upper hand, they don’t look back.
You mentioned a couple of times what you observe or have observed. I think that represents the most powerful tool there can be. Now, just figure out exactly why and how what you observed came to be. Maybe it’s obvious, maybe you’ll have to run an experiment to see if you can reproduce or eliminate it, whichever the case may be, in a predictable way. Consider advice and if it makes sense, test it to make sure it’s true. It might take a bit, years maybe, but you’ll figure it out.
I used pure urea one time. When first laying down the woodchips mulch on the ground. It was not for the plants as I had none growing at the time. It was to feed bacteria and the fungi as a kick start as a day zero application. I have never applied it since.
There is a time and place for all things I still feel in founding a given system to get you off the synthetics grid in future use for the long term.
Wow, that makes total sense. Some of my friends and customers think using urine in the garden is gross, but to me it makes perfect sense and why in the world would you flush a down a free resource? People are so removed from nature.
Yes. A problem with most synthetics is the salts used as a carrier. I didn’t have a worry about long term effects of a one time application as it has been shown that fungi can bind the salts into inert compounds (other studies show them binding toxins in the soil into inert compounds), as was shown in the original Greening the Desert Video/s.
Many of our crops have been bred for the use of urine, since that’s what our ancestors had available.
Personally I think that has contributed to so many of our crop plants demanding more and more nitrogen, when the wild plants don’t need nearly as much.
