Hi Richard, and @Hugo, nothing allium specific here but wanted to know if you tried faba beans or lupine to improve the soil nitrogen matter + give a good structure. That works very well with acidic soil. Otherwise the third plant used for ages as a preceding to demanding crops is sainfoin on basic soil.
That is part of my strategy… once again not reinventing the wheel but rediscovering what we forgot, as those three plants were highlighted in Olivier de Serre manual, and other middle age manuals. It could be part of “soil care” as @isabelle puts it nicely.
For example : my uncle, now retired, went from conventionnal agriculture in the 80’s to no till approaches in late 90’s and then did many many experiments on 800 hectares (=2000 acres) as he was the farm manager of the biggest popcorn farm in France, maybe in Europe. Now he is just a gardener, doing many things in his house, so willing to do gardening easy, simple and productive. I think it is interesting because the only thing he kept from 25 years of experiments is… faba beans! (next timings apply to France) Sown the earlier possible in the Autumn : either it frosts when flowering so the plant dies and you are ready to plant onions in February or so, or you sow later, frosts don’t harm the not-flowering faba, and you just can crush it whenever you want later in the season: it fixes nitrogen, collaborates intensely with micro-organisms, improves drastically the soil structure + gives a ground cover for a while so rain andsun don’t affect it that much. Then, when crushed, it dies and goes black very fast, so the soil warms up, and is ready soon for planting whatever. Following mineralization of the nodules content starts fast and is progressive - unlike common nitrogen.
This is part of his garden in the foggy Gers 3 weeks ago:
Closer look:
The limiting factor is that he doesn’t bring that much organic matter (carbon) to the soil, but as far as it is a small garden, he can bring, from time to time, some other inputs (straw or whatever): it works fine. (That you could not do on big farms, so they need to keep part of the straw on the ground, and roots in the ground, for the soil to stay balanced while improving its “natural” fertility… )
Just saying that because I imagine the work it is to bring all this material I see on your photo. As I have had 10 cubic meters of wood chips to spread manually following a cutting last august… About one tenth of it:
I don’t want to do this kind of hard work again and will stand by simple intermediary cover cropping, with dosages, densities adapted. I just may, once in a while, bring some of my neighbor’s cows’ manure to the field, but small amounts, and only for specific reasons. If my patches get too weedy, I just may, once every few years - and if possible never - ask a neighbour to come with a disk harrow or that kind of tool.
…The Fertile Crescent was once fertile, and after millenias of soil cultivation sucking all the organic matter, is now partially dead, near to a desert, relying on inputs, and as far as I can see your soil, it looks extremely fragile… I don’t want preach for “my” practises (which are not personnal actually) but just want to say that faba could do the same fertilising job easily + benefit the soil life, and other collateral… Gifts! You may have already tried it…
