I started writing my thoughts about it all but there are so many issues, variables and nuances that when I got to about ten pages and had barely scratched the surface, I gave up. I’ll try to abbreviate a few things.
Wood chips, I haven’t had all that much experience but have had mixed results. It’s hard to not let them get mixed in the soil where I guess they do rob nitrogen, and they can suck out moisture, but as long as they are just on top, they do work very well as mulch. What I like to do with them is mix with soil in a pile and let it set for a year or so, then use it a mulch.
I don’t have access to a continuous supply of wood chips, and I doubt many people do but I do have access to lots of leaves and use them similarly. Right now, they are piled about a foot deep in my paths and will eventually be used as mulch under plants or incorporated in the soil. I use them and crass clippings from around my yard, but I don’t like to take them form my woods because I’m afraid it will mess up my mayapples, morel mushrooms and little wood land wildflowers. I live near a small town and observe to see who uses a yard company to spray chemicals and who doesn’t. When they rake them into piles by the street, I swoop in with some bags and swipe them before the leaf sucker gets there. There is a giant umbrella magnolia tree in the yard of an old church, it has great leaves.
Wood rotted to the point you can crumble with your fingers has worked good for me in the bottom of containers to hold water and it seems work as fertilizer as well, but my opinion of the magical hügelkultur thing is that there is no such thing as magic, although it may work well in some climates. Since the emerald ash borers killed all my big ash trees some years ago, I have plenty of rotted wood, but I know a lot of people don’t.
No-till has also worked very well but especially combined with mulch has both positive and negative effects. When I came here the soil was hard packed clay with three or four inches of good stuff on top. Although I immediately started adding organic material, I also attacked it with a rototiller. For twenty years it never improved all that much. The tiller did a fine job of loosening the soil and mixing the organics in but only to the depth of the tines, below that the hard pack remained and the good stuff on top was subject to leeching and erosion. When I ditched the tiller and let the radishes, turnips, dandelions, thistles, burdock and other things sort of run wild I was a bit shocked at how fast it improved. Now the loose black layer is a foot or more deep, rather than a few inches. Now if I let a big old thistle get five feet tall and ready to bloom, I can just put on gloves and pull it up the entire root. I don’t usually do that though, instead I cut it off at soil level and leave that big root to root in the ground. When I first came here, I didn’t have fences, so I harvested the big thistles from across the road to use as mulch, the stickers kept the rabbits out. I used them, the burdock and the Jhonson grass until they almost went extinct in the neighborhood, recently I’ve been encouraging them to come back. Far too valuable resources to completely eliminate them. I guess a lesson here is to work with what you have and that pretty much anything in nature, has its place.
I’ve done the no-till for about fifteen years now and the drawbacks so far are that my feral radishes, dill, marigolds and other such easily self-seeding things started to decline. They apparently need that bare often tilled soil to really thrive. I just had to adjust to make sure some bare ground was available for them to drop their seeds and I started saving some seeds again, just in case. The other drawback, which I think is related is increased populations of little snails and flea beetles that attack my seedlings. They became apparent more recently and I’ve developed work arounds but still experimenting with more effective solutions.
I’ve seen people argue over the definition of no-till. Arguing over definitions of words is pretty stupid in my opinion. I guess by some standards I do plenty of tilling. There is a big difference between digging around with shovels, hoes, rakes or even a broad fork and using a machine to grind the surface to near powder while leaving hard pack underneath.
The Ruth Stout method of deep mulch all the time would be a disaster here. Still an interesting method with something to learn, but as Ruth herself pointed out in her book, her soil was mostly sand. Deep sand and deep clay are very, very different things. It dries up here in summer way worse than it used to but even with my improved topsoil a deep permanent mulch combined with the moisture we still get in winter is not a good idea. I want to plant as early as possible, so I need the ground to dry a little in late winter and early spring.
During the growing season I keep my paths alternately scaped bare and lightly mulched from piles of last year’s leaves. I have moles and voles. They can live in my grow beds without being obvious until the damage is done but if they try to cross the more hardpacked paths I’m tipped off, and they are dead meat, the cat sees to that. Sometimes, he spends a little time in the nip patch by the gate and even catches a lot of the imaginary ones. I keep the paths somewhat as depressions and build or remove little dams as necessary to hold or drain water, more and more though the dams are left in place, even in winter.
Most of my garden adaptation in recent years has had to do with water. I’ve adapted practices much more than seeds and have started growing species traditionally thought of as more southern. Five or six years ago I had never even eaten okra, or cowpeas. Okra is sooo good, who knew? If it doesn’t rain for four or six weeks though, even they need water. I have pretty much everything I need here for a garden, except water and that’s a big one. A mistake in planning that is hard and or expensive to remedy. I just didn’t expect the climate to change this much this fast; the few hundred gallons of rain collection is just not enough.
I think it’s fun to use corn stalks to grow peas. I just cut the tops off to reduce the wind weakening them over winter and stick a few peas around each one in early spring. Pea tendrils don’t grab the thick stalks all that well, but they grab each other and together use the stalk between them for support. It works good for beans too, in the same season. When the corn is starting to dry down, I strip off the lower leaves and plant a few beans by each stalk. Of course, at this time of year the beans will need a lot of watering.
I think TPS is a waste of time, almost certainly so in my climate. I expect in zone 8 it would be even worse, but I don’t know that. There is a lot to be said for experimentation, observation, determination and an attitude of “I don’t really care what you think, I’m going to do it anyway”. The only way to guarantee failure, is not to try.
Some things I think are pretty much universally true are that your soil will improve faster if you don’t use a machine to grind it up. The nutrient content and microbial life will be better off if you don’t use fertilizer, bug killers and certainly not fungicides, even organic ones. Don’t throw anything away, nothing leaves the patch except the seeds you share and the produce you eat, toss in other stuff like leaves and grass clippings. Don’t mess with soil analysis or tests unless you intend to purchase and apply the recommended remedy without regard to how fixing one issue might create others. Similarly, don’t mess with accurately identifying particular specific bugs and diseases unless you are going to apply specific remedies, again likely creating new problems.
That’s all for now.
) My success with cucumbers has so far been nil, too. But I’ll admit I haven’t planted very many, because I prefer cantaloupes. See, an unripe cantaloupe tastes exactly the same as a cucumber, so why not just use a cantaloupe instead? (Of course, in practice, I never want to harvest them unripe because I want to eat them ripe, so that question does sort of answer itself.)
sooo I gotta ask around and see if anyone will spare some!
so that’s a thing now? Don’t touch the ground at all, just drop seeds on top and reap the abundance?Perhaps I need enlightened, is there a video about that, maybe I can buy a book or click a donate now button.