@Lowell_McCampbell I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed the June newsletter. Thank you.
It’s definitely a mindshift, getting into landrace gardening. I’ve helped run gardening courses and a permaculture design certificate course and a common question is what do you do about pests and disease?. My answer now would be celebrate their presence, which is not, I think, what most people would want to hear!
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Got it and enjoyed it. I saw in a book recently a chapter about landscape designers, partners, and their beautiful wild pollinator garden where their goal was “a hole in every leaf”. A nice change in perspective.
BTW, I think this group is doing great work. Will eventually post pics of progress…
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You know what? I think celebrate their presence is an excellent response to that question, anyway! One of the permaculture principles is “the problem is the solution.” Remind them of that, and show them how it applies. I bet most people will go from being disappointed to enthusiastic by the end of it! 
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I didn’t get the newsletter.
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Not sure why. Just forwarded the last one. Can you (an anyone else who didn’t get it) sign up for the newsletter here partway down the page? https://goingtoseed.org/
It’s possible the transition from Thinkific to the new platform didn’t capture everything correctly.
Looks like you aren’t in our database. Like Julia suggested, you can sign up on the website homepage or email me and I’ll get you added. Or just order some seeds and you’ll be automatically added 
Nope, not at all. I’m all for adapting, everybody gets along, select for resistance, and so forth but “celebrate” is pushing it a bit for me. Tolerate, find work arounds, learn to live with, but celebrate, not so much.
On the plus side, after scooting all the way around my biggest garden, on my butt, repairing and replacing the bottom run of chicken wire where it had rusted or been damaged, I’m happy to report that my cowpeas, soybeans and peanuts are now nicely rabbit resistant.
Select for tolerance to diseases and insects, quite possibly, but it isn’t going to happen in a year or ten, unless one or more of the varieties you start with are already resistant. Rabbits, deer, coons, squirrels, in my neighborhood, if there is something they like and they can get to it, it’s done, and that’s all there is too it.
I have to agree with @MarkReed . Snails are loving my newly germinated squash, cucumber and melon seedlings. I can’t even get to first base because so many of the sprouts are getting decapitated. This wasn’t such an issue in years past. I wonder if the environment has become too hospitable. The funny thing is there is lettuce growing all over, but it seems fairly untouched. I just started a tray of squash seeds and will be transplanting the larger starts to try to get around this problem. If anyone has other ideas, please let me know. Thanks!
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Yeah, all my beans seem to be being eaten! It may be snails, or it may be sow bugs. I have a lot this year. Apparently my deep mulch of autumn leaves, which is brilliant idea in our bone dry summers, is causing a pest issue while we’re still getting rain.
I’m not sure what to do. Remove most of the mulch, only to put it back in a few weeks, when I’ll need it? Plant 100 times more seeds than I need, and save seeds from the few survivors? I’m kind of leaning towards the latter, since it would be nice to have the deep mulch in place starting in spring.
Sorry about the slugs. They ate all my pole beans last year. I’ve had good luck using the beer in little containers method to catch snails and they drown.
There is a good discussion of reducing slug populations in this post…
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Thanks, @julia.dakin ! I forgot about that post. It has lots of useful info. Drowning by beer also sounds like a good way to go.
Me neither, there are a lot of contradictions with mulch. It’s wonderful for keeping the ground cool and moist and at suppressing weeds. On the other hand, it prevents the ground from drying out in the spring and during bad dry spells can become hydrophobic. I’m sure how, when and how much to use is completely location and weather specific and I haven’t yet settled on a standard operating procedure for using it.
I’m sort of evolving into leaving it there all or at least most of the time but my mulch isn’t what might be considered normal mulch. It isn’t a layer of some single material but more a random mix of whatever is handy and usually has a bit of soil in with it. Kind of a thin, compost in place sort of thing going on.
I definitely need mulch in summer; that makes a huge difference in how much water the plants need. As in, if I don’t mulch, they need four times more. But while deep mulch is beneficial in summer, maybe it’s a liability when I’m trying to germinate seeds, so maybe I need to have only a very thin mulch then, and keep the rest on standby to add after the seeds germinate. Of course, mulching around plants instead of sowing into an already-present deep mulch is a lot more work.
Still trying to figure this out!
Yes, lots of mulch presents new problems while bringing big benefits. You have to take the good with the bad. Mulch will promote more, depending on your area and climate, of certain pests. Usually pill bugs (Armadillidiidae) for me, for others it can be slugs and beetle larvae. Beetle larvae, known as grubs, are voracious eaters that feed on a wide range of plant roots. But these pest pressures will ultimately select for you in any given landrace projects. In the beginning while first establishing a heavy mulch gardening system and working with unreliable seeds from retail sources or other new sources you will have to help them out in those first years. I have a seed mat or I should say mats and a PID controller (those $20 ones on Amazon) and some LED garage shop lights. The goal is to not use this set up long term as a germination station but only during the initial establishment of more resilient seed lines to the point I can direct sow, at which point the heavy mulch system has also been maturing outside in the garden and developing new soils to support direct sowing. What I have also tried this year is germinating seeds in water in jars (okra this time) and then direct transplanting the just sprouted seeds into a two year mature deep mulch system. This had some success but not high success. I didn’t start a lot of seed, probably 15, and I might have three maybe four plants from the method. There are just a lot of hungry pill bugs out there until I have both more plants constantly growing and generating detritus to satiate the resident populations and have more resilient seeds and plants. Its just a patience game to wait for the ecology to develop and stabilize out there. I expect as with developing landraces with greges (look that one up 
) that the third year of maturity of the deep mulch system is where it start to really come online.
Yeah, I’ve definitely seen an explosion of roly polies. I didn’t see that last year with a thinner mulch layer, so I think the answer is probably simply to put down a thin mulch layer instead of a deep one. As the season progresses and I now have mature plants instead of seeds trying to germinate and little seedlings, I can add deep mulch around them. It’ll be more work, but it’s starting to seem like it’s worth it.
I’ll also want deep mulch for the winter, because that seems to help a lot with keeping overwintering plants alive. Probably because it helps keep the temperature of the soil stable.
What do you mean by “the third year of maturity of the dep mulch system is where it starts to really come online”? I’d love to hear any specifics you know about.
Emily,
The third year statement is related to high carbon deep mulch systems. Those that take longer to decompose and are more fungal dominant as opposed to high nitrogenous mulch (grass clippings, leaves, green garden waste) which are faster decomposition driven by a more bacteria dominant process.
The very first year on a typical high carbon mulch there is very little in the way of decomposition progress. This is the establishment phase for the fungal spores to start to infiltrate the high carbon material and start to break down cellulose structures. It is also where the high carbon mulch system starts to bank a battery of moisture.
The benefit of the high carbon mulch systems is there longevity. The slow decomposition means in exchange for slower start investment upfront you don’t have to work as hard replenishing the mulch material in the long term.
High carbon mulch was popularized in the American documentary Back to Eden. What I tend to find is a lot of people that try to replicate that now more than forty year old established system is that the documentary shows two completely different systems, one for orchard and the second for vegetables. Due to the documentary fillers and editors they didn’t make this as clear as they could have in the final edit sequence in the documentary.
The orchard system is the oldest and consists of arborist tree service company chipped branches and leaves, standard wood chip waste. These are broadcast into the orchard and no other amendments are added, only time drives that system. The rains charge the woodchips with moisture and at the same time create a compost tea if you will naturally and with no human involvement that percolates down to the soil every time it rains.
The vegetable garden is completely different. It is wood chips and green garden waste together that was further ground into fine particles in a large tub grinder machine. The output creating giant piles that were composted. This final composted aged wood chips were screened and then loaded up and taken back to the property and laid down to a depth of approximately three inches. At the same time there is an existing chicken animal system in property that receives all the green waste from the gardens. Dole is eaten but most is mixed with the chickens manure and creates a rich chicken and green waste compost that is also screened and then taken to the vegetable garden and too dressed to a depth of approximate one half to inch. This is what the vegetables are grown in that you see in the documentary and you can start right away growing on day zero.
The majority of folks you hear about implementing it, or making YouTube videos about it all put down the orchard system instead and try to grow vegetables in it from day zero. A lot of them don’t even follow that and lay down pure sawmill waste sawdust in their videos and/or dig them in/till them under the soil. Then as expected they talk about failures to the Back to Eden method which they never followed to start with.
The successful folks I have seen are usually at or beyond year three in their implementation. Even though they implemented the orchard system they still amended with compost and in the beginning pulled back the mulch to gain access to ground.
The more than forty year old orchard system in the documentary can grow vegetables. It’s had all that time to compost and break down in the lowest layers. My system in the backyard is orchard and I have about 180 cubic yards all up. I have multiple loads and varying dimensions of chips depending on how dull the chipper blades were allowed to get by the tree service companies. At year two I can grow vegetables in the fine chip loads that make up the first loads laid down on top of the soil. The last loads were chipped with dull blades and produced very large chips. Those I am not growing vegetables in until they age and break down more. In both sizes I am growing fruit trees as my system is for mixed use in my limited space.
If I had a rural property again with the space I would be taking a lot more cubic yards and I would be piling them up and composting them a year or two before use. And I would still have chickens to provide the annual compost input. But I don’t have one anymore and chickens are banned in this area, as with all “farm livestock”. So I have to work around missing the most important component, an animal system of some sort to provide the compost annual input. So I am using time with a little speed up in the beginning from day zero urea pellet application.
Edit: fixed the chicken compost broadcast rate
Thank you! That’s all really helpful!
Would it be a good idea to add nitrogen source (probably urine, since that’s free) to my carbonaceous mulch? My thinking has been that I should avoid giving nitrogen to my legumes, which is why I only put down the leaves in the bed I set aside for them. But that’s the bed where I’m getting all the roly polies.
Would a mulch of fresh leaves (nitrogen source) be non-attractive to sow bugs, and thus better for early in the season when I’m trying to germinate beans? Hmm, but they keep eating my bean seedlings, so that implies they’re fine with eating fresh leaves.
Would they be driven away if I added urine as a nitrogen source?
Or should I just clear the mulch off completely, let the soil dry out completely, and then resow with a light mulch instead?
If I do that, how long would it take for the soil to be safe to resow beans in again?
I’m glad that I’m learning this now. I think this may explain all my failures to grow beans last year, even though I succeeded in a previous year before I knew how to mulch things.
Emily,
Sow bugs are detritus feeders. They eat dead and decaying plant matter, but they also like to eat fresh food every once in a while too. 
They as well as the rest of the pests are natures police force, they are there to take out the weak and failing plants so that only the strong DNA survives. They convert dead plant and leaf matter and fallen fruits back into soil eating and pooping out the currently useless material back into something plants can uptake nutrients from.
They are land adapted shrimp basically. So like all critters that came from the oceans they like water and damp. This is what all mulches form as that is the property we are seeking. So the two go hand in hand.
A pill bug’s predators are anything larger: frogs, toads, lizards and small mammals. I am starting to see lizards showing up in my garden, I hope to see them establish and remain an ongoing part of the garden ecological system. I understand I will have pill bugs and with lizards and other predators a balance point or population control will establish.
In the meantime in the establishment years to help deal with them I just have to accept the little bit extra work of transplanting and physical barriers until the system develops. Barriers is simple as those large plastic cups you get at Costco or other stores for outdoor picnics, cutting the bottom off and inserting it partway into the ground so that some of it sticks up above ground. Because they lean outwards instead of straight up and down, they accentuate the difficulty of any pill bug trying to crawl up the sides without falling off back to the ground. Because the bottoms are cut off they can be pulled up after a short time of use as the seedling has developed large enough to be able to withstand pill bug pressures.
edit: I keep hitting the wrong reply icon/button, hope I hit the correct one this time.
The comparison to shrimp was enlightening. Thank you for that.
It helped me make a connection. In a bay ecosystem, algae bring in the shrimp. The shrimp bring in the trout, etc. If I want to have a lot of trout, I need to start with the bottom of the food chain.
Likewise, if I want a diverse ecosystem surrounding my garden, I need to start with foundations. Maybe a big pile of leafs or dead grass near the garden.
Also, do you remember the shrimping town in Forest Gump, bayou la batre? I went through there today and saw a lot of shrimp boats. The beach just south of it had way too much algae or sea weed, not sure. I took a bag home and mulched some cucumbers with it.
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Now, that’s really interesting. Does that mean if I deep mulch a lot, I’m going to start getting lizards as part of my garden ecosystem? I like lizards! That would be neat!
I’ve been thinking what I need to do is use a light mulch when I want to germinate seeds, and then put in the heavy mulch only once the seedlings are tall enough that their cotyledons are safely in the air. Then the pill bugs can’t eat them. Meanwhile, the vast majority of weeds that try to germinate under that deep mulch will probably be eaten by the pill bugs, right? So then the pill bugs will be allies!
I just need to understand how to use them as allies. Work with them, instead of against them.