Colleen Barclay

My dream is to get some working systems in place, then be able to offer summer internships that include housing. Young people need help economically and with building life skills like how to repair things and grow food. It's also the beginning of a mindset shift to start considering different ways of living and working. Actually living in it for an extended period of time and getting to see *something* you planted or built go from nothing to a real living plant or working structure is a much more meaningful experience than just learning about it. You also get the real world experience of things not working as expected and that's ok too, you can keep going and try again.

The key is it must be economically viable enough to pay them at least a decent part time wage and provide housing and food. I expect to "lose money" on the internship part even though they would be helping with the work but overall I should have enough resources to provide for them and the system should be profitable enough to pay their salary as well as at least 30% food otherwise I don't feel I'd be in a position to teach them things that will help them personally survive and thrive in this world.

This isn't to say permaculture isn't worth doing for other reasons but those are my personal philosophies when it comes to mentorship of young people who are trying to figure out a path to survive in this world and help the planet at the same time.

Wow this is awesome, thanks so much everyone for your responses.

Thank you in particular Anne Miller for that video of Dr Ingram. What she said along with what Faye commented here makes more sense to me and seems to line up better with other things I've been reading about. My hunch is the lower pH where "acid loving" plants thrive is a byproduct of other conditions in the soil that are also helping them such as higher water throughput, frequently replenished decomposing organic matter, and microorganisms that are producing acid.

Regarding some of the other things that were brought up:

Nothing much is currently growing in the strip of soil I originally asked about and I don't know a whole lot else about it yet either. I was a bit vague about it and what I was trying to grow on purpose even though I knew the advice would be less specific because I'm trying to consider different setups right now (more of a "what if" that I could apply to different possibilities).

I'm in Colorado and there are lots of dry periods and our soil and tap water is alkaline so I don't expect that anything I add in an attempt to lower pH would be permanent because over time repeated applications of tap water and/or those natural conditions are going to return. What I am hoping to be able to do is to use things that are already in my waste stream to slowly and repeatedly apply to lower pH, with the assumption that if it works it will only keep working as long as I keep doing that.

I am actually attempting to grow blueberries but that was not the scenario I was originally asking about. The blueberries are in peat moss in isolated containers from the rest of the soil. I was originally planning on just following the guidance from the Colorado State University extension which essentially involves regular applications of acid to counteract the slow pH increase caused by watering. However, after absorbing the information in this thread further, I'm going to abandon the idea I originally asked about (for now) and see if I can apply some of these ideas to my blueberries instead.

My plan now is to take any waste products I have that are naturally high in acid or sulphur - for example, onions, tomato, raw fish, and bury small amounts 3-6 inches deep (poke a hole and drop in) about once per week to each plant. Luckily I have two of each of different varieties to test on so if I track what I add and test pH regularly, I will be able to report back in a few months to a year whether those plants are did better/worse or maintained soil pH any differently than the ones which just got standard compost and acid treatments.

Ok I'm a newbie so go easy on me..I want to increase the acidity in a strip of soil along the side of my yard so that I can plant some things there that like it about 1-1.5pH lower than it currently is (bring down to 5.5-6.5 range). I'm thinking to plant those more acid-loving plants sometime next year. I've done a bit of reading about adding elemental sulfur to the soil to lower pH over longer periods.

My question is about onions, and to a lesser extent maybe garlic. They contain sulfur compounds so can those be used the same way to lesser effect? When I use an onion for cooking, I usually only use half and I haven't been composting the remainder (I do compost other things).

If they would work, how should I go about this? Should I just dig little holes in that soil strip and drop in my extra raw onion bits as I have them leftover? Or should I try to compost them separately first? If so, how should I do that because I've read that onions and garlic can inhibit the more common compost organisms and be discouraging to worms so would an onion-heavy compost or "soil amendment" work or be more damaging? I don't want to just add them to the rest of my compost because now that I'm thinking about it, I want to see if there's a way to basically super-charge their usage to increase sulfur and therefore acidity over a small area vs. having it spread across the entire compost pile and therefore minimal effect if at all.

I'm having a hard time figuring out whether this might work or at least how to experiment more effectively. Maybe the quantities of sulfur within these veggies are comparatively so low that they wouldn't really have an effect at all? I don't need them to fully lower the pH on their own but was hoping there was a way they could either assist or slow the eventual deterioration of other methods I might use.