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the solution to nearly every every soil test

paul wheaton

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Location: missoula, montana (zone 4)

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posted 4 months ago

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Many years ago I tested my soil pH a lot. And got my soils lab tested a lot. And was overly focused on dialing in the correct soil amendments. I did have great success! But, it was a crazy huge amount of work.

And years passed and i did this, my theories evolved a bit .... i tended to do less soil tests and more focus on building rich soil.

And then, 20 years ago, I met Rick Valley. He had a similar story, only his goto solution was deep mulch. A good 4 to 12 inches deep, depending on the material. And the mulch would change for different species. The way that he told the story was that he would get soil tests, put down deep mulch, and the new soil tests would show dramatic improvement. And so, after many years of this, he got in the habit of skipping the soil tests and got the same excellent results. There was only one time that deep mulch did not work, and in that case, he did do a soil test and found toxic levels of P and K, so he added alder trees throughout the system (combined with deep mulch). The alder trees would take up a lot of P and K while putting extra N in the soil.

Simply adding deep mulch is almost always easier than what I was doing: building rich soil.

---

About four months after meeting Rick, I was at a friend's house and my friend asked me to have a look at his yard. Mostly lawn (that was mowed too short) and a couple of trees, and large hedge out front.

There were two trees that were the same. One planted in the front yard and one in the back yard. They were both about 8 feet tall and looked pretty sad. The one in the front yard looked the worse.

I suggested to my friend that he get a half dozen bales of organic hay, and lay that hay about six to eight inches thick around the tree in the front yard, in a sort of donut shape around the tree.

He thought it was a really dumb idea because he had never seen anybody do this, therefore it has to be a bad idea.

So this is my good friend, who knows next to nothing about horticulture, tell me, a certified master gardener, a certified advanced master gardener, and a person with massive experience .... that i am wrong. That I must be wrong because he has not seen others do this.

This position seems to be the utter core of what prevents all amazing things from getting implemented.

I offered to buy the hay and do all the work. He said "whatever."

Done.

He hated the look of it. He thought it looked really junky. But he allowed it even though he felt like his shitty yard was made shittier.

A couple of weeks later, the tree was clearly far healthier than the sister tree in the back yard.

A couple of weeks after that, the tree in the front yard was now a solid 3 feet taller, and there were so many leaves, you couldn't see the sun through the tree. The leaf mass was probably 20x that of the sister tree in the back yard.

The "donut" came within three feet of the hedge. So part of the hedge grew up a foot or two taller than the rest. And thicker. So no my friend complained that his ugly hedge was now lopsided. Even though half the hedge was clearly healthier, the lopsided-ness made it uglier.

But .... as much as my friend complained, he was also intrigued. And now he wanted to talk about growing a garden ... we did that too - with more of that organic hay, but that's another story for another day.

---

(i gotta run for now, but i wanna come back here and expand on a few things)

TODO back to eden
TODO building rich soil when mulch is not available
TODO when I say "deep mulch" to people, it is pretty hilarious what they do and they point at it and say "i did what you said" but what they point at is not even an inch thick
TODO glorious diversity of deep mulch +the correct way to chop and drop

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May Lotito

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posted 3 months ago

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The thin application of mulch reminds me of minimal credit card payment just enough to cover the interest, it won't make a dent in the balance.

I am wondering what happened to the peach tree's root system though. Will it stay shallow near the surface or even upwards into the mulch layer? What happened when the mulch was gone or your friend needs to maintain a thick layer ever after.

People tends to underestimate how much organic matters it takes for deep mulching. Take hay for instance, if an acre of land produces four large round bales (5 ft round by 5 ft high), the volume would be 4x3.14x2.5x2.5x5= 392.5 cu ft. If spread at 1 ft deep, it will cover the area of 392.5 sq ft. Since one acre is 43560 sq ft, the ratio is 43560÷392.5 =111. Over one hundred times of concentration of organic matters. It means for a 200 sq ft garden, if I want to grow potato the Ruth Stout style but use only organic matters within the garden for mulching, I have to set aside over 198 sq ft and only have less than 2 sq ft to grow one plant.

Zone 6, 45 inches precipitation, hard clay soil

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Thom Bri

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posted 3 months ago

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May Lotito wrote:The thin application of mulch reminds me of minimal credit card payment just enough to cover the interest, it won't make a dent in the balance.
People tends to underestimate how much organic matters it takes for deep mulching. Take hay for instance, if an acre of land produces four large round bales (5 ft round by 5 ft high), the volume would be 4x3.14x2.5x2.5x5= 392.5 cu ft. If spread at 1 ft deep, it will cover the area of 392.5 sq ft. .

I feel like mulching is taking nutrition from one place and putting it somewhere else. If farmers do that consistently we call that 'mining the soil'. Fortunately carbon and nitrogen come from the air and there is plenty to go around. P, K and micronutrients have to come from the existing soil.

Talked with my neighbor farmer this summer. Asked him if he had any old, rotten, spoiled hay bales, too poor to feed to his cattle that he needed to get rid of, and he said yes, maybe he did. So I might get a few big round bales for the garden this fall!

Barbara Manning

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Posts: 233

Location: Nikko, Japan Zone 7a-b 740 m or 2,400 ft

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posted 1 month ago

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paul wheaton wrote: I suggested to my friend that he get a half dozen bales of organic hay, and lay that hay about six to eight inches thick around the tree in the front yard, in a sort of donut shape around the tree. He thought it was a really dumb idea because he had never seen anybody do this, therefore it has to be a bad idea. So this is my good friend, who knows next to nothing about horticulture, tell me, a certified master gardener, a certified advanced master gardener, and a person with massive experience .... that i am wrong. That I must be wrong because he has not seen others do this. This position seems to be the utter core of what prevents all amazing things from getting implemented. I offered to buy the hay and do all the work. He said "whatever." Done./quote]

**********

This attitude has been my experience as well, but on an entirely different subject. I'd lived in Tokyo for about 4 years when I was at a friend's party back in Chicago, where another partygoer asked me, "So, what's it like to live in Japan?" I responded that I could tell him what it was like to live in Tokyo, and started to make some mild, general comparisons, when he stopped me to say, "That's not true. Here's what I read." and to go on telling me what he'd read. Really?

My own sister did the same thing when she complained to me that "school children in Japan have to wear hardhats to school" (because there are so many earthquakes). When I tried to tell her that the caps were make of soft cloth and color coded to the school grade, she didn't believe me, insisting that what she saw on TV was the truth, over my actual observations over the course of a school year!

I've read a few articles on this phenomena more so that I could understand and stop arguing, and then to understand more and start addressing the root cause of people's reasons for clinging to their beliefs, no matter what. This article on Pshchology Today explains it better than I can.

Read about Permies.com site basics in this thread: https://permies.com/t/43625/Universal

Kevin Olson

pollinator

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posted 1 month ago

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Thom Bri wrote:
I feel like mulching is taking nutrition from one place and putting it somewhere else. If farmers do that consistently we call that 'mining the soil'. Fortunately carbon and nitrogen come from the air and there is plenty to go around. P, K and micronutrients have to come from the existing soil.

Talked with my neighbor farmer this summer. Asked him if he had any old, rotten, spoiled hay bales, too poor to feed to his cattle that he needed to get rid of, and he said yes, maybe he did. So I might get a few big round bales for the garden this fall!

Sure, mulching is often moving nutrients from one place to another (sometimes, you can just rely on whatever is growing there - chop-n-drop, tree leaves, etc.). But, if you're doing it right, it shouldn't need to be a "forever" thing. That is, at some point, the mulched area should become self sustaining, or at least mostly so. You're trying to assist nature in spreading fertility. Nature tends to spread fertility at the margins, but with a bit of help, can initiate a new hot spot of fertility (in your garden). And, sometimes the mulch is already "waste" materials - to someone, if not to you!

An anecdote: a few years ago, when we lived in a different house, and before I was really fully aware of permaculture, we had skinny but deep town yard. The grassy area was about 24 feet wide, and about 75 feet deep. Ordinary town lots in that municipality were typically 50' X 100', but due to an odd street spacing in that neighborhood, lots were actually 125' deep - bonus! The house was situated at the south end of the lot, and there was a 26' X 52' cement block single story (with attic) garage on the west side of the yard, with the rear of the garage on the back lot line (no set back - old garage, and old zoning rules). So, the back yard had good east and south exposure, and a moderately massive concrete block wall on the west side. We had 2 dogs at the time, so they needed some fenced area to do dog things while unattended, and we had a clothesline strung across the width of the yard (pole on the east side, roughly in the middle, with hooks widely spread down the length of the garage wall). The upshot was that there was a small area at the back of the yard available for a garden, about 10' X 15'. In the northeast corner, there was an existing small patch of raspberries. They had always just stayed in the corner, never offering to spread. Which tells you something about how poor the soil was.

The subsoil in that general area was gravely, cobbly mix of aggregate. The upper soil layers in the garden spot, though not in the rest of the yard - and I hesitate to call it top soil - was a mix of "stamp sand" and furnace clinkers. Stamp sand is a local colloquial term for a coarse basaltic sand which is the remnant of historical mining operations. It gets used for fill, put on the streets for traction in the winter time, used as masonry aggregate, etc. But, it's not the best garden soil, at least not right out of the box.

A friend had recently bought a small acreage parcel with a home on it, all in a state of deferred maintenance. Which meant that a lot of small hardwood brush - birch, tag alder, poplar, box elder and maple - had grown up to 6 or 8 feet of height. He cut down the brushy young trees with a chainsaw, rented a chipper, and chipped it into several large piles. I quite happily hauled off several utility trailer loads of the chipped hardwood. I'd read something about "bois ramial fragmentee" (BRF) or ramial chipped wood (RCW) on the Forestry department website of one of the Canadian universities (Laval? I don't quite remember, now). They'd done experiments with soil building using chipped small diameter mixed northern hardwoods with very good results. The materials were free for the hauling.

So, I made four 4' X 4' raised beds 6" deep ([2] 2" X 6" X 8' nominal white wood per bed, plus some offcuts to reinforce the corners), then filled them with Mel Bartholomew's Square Foot Gardening mix - 1/3 each peat moss, vermiculite and well rotted compost. I did put some corrugated carboard down before filling them, as a temporary weed block. I got a bunch of 2+ year old cow manure (also free for the hauling) from friends, whose daughter had a series of 4H project beef cows on their small acreage homestead for the compost, but bought a bale of peat moss and a big bag of coarse vermiculite from the local greenhouse. I filled up the beds with the SFG mix, and spread about 6" of wood chips on everything - the beds, around the poor raspberries, over the paths between beds, everywhere.

Even the first year, we grew bumper crops of zucchini and other summer squash, paste tomatoes, onions, green beans, snap peas and more. The raspberries started to spread out from the corner where they'd been huddling. The next year, I got another load of cow manure and more wood chips, and spread out maybe an inch of two of manure, and another 4-ish inches of wood chips. The previous batch of chips was already well on its way to being dirt, riddled through and matted by fungal hyphae, moist and dark and full of earth worms.

I only put down wood chips twice, though I think I may have added one dose of manure, but it was basically a self-maintaining plot at that point, with the stalks composted and put back down on the beds. The raspberries became positively rowdy over the subsequent years - lush and rank - and we dug out a lot of starts and gave them away in an effort to keep them more-or-less contained. We moved house a few years after starting the garden, so I don't know what it's like now (and the snow is too deep to effectively wander down the alley and snoop)

I would classify the experiment as a rousing success. I need to replicate that where we are now. I have a small PTO drive chipper, waiting for me to pick it up (but about 7 hours drive away), and the township brush dump is just down the street from me. So I just need to get on the stick. I'm sure it would make a world of difference in our results.

On a broad acre scale, there seems to be quite a lot of success with Johnson-Su (fungally dominant) compost and application of compost extract as liquid fertilizer with conventional ag equipment to give dirt a "kick" into becoming soil.

Thom Bri

pollinator

Posts: 491

Location: Illinois

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posted 1 month ago

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Kevin Olson wrote:

Thom Bri wrote:

Sure, mulching is often moving nutrients from one place to another (sometimes, you can just rely on whatever is growing there - chop-n-drop, tree leaves, etc.). But, if you're doing it right, it shouldn't need to be a "forever" thing. That is, at some point, the mulched area should become self sustaining, or at least mostly so. You're trying to assist nature in spreading fertility. Nature tends to spread fertility at the margins, but with a bit of help, can initiate a new hot spot of fertility (in your garden). And, sometimes the mulch is already "waste" materials - to someone, if not to you!

A very good point!

Christopher Shimanski

Posts: 46

posted 1 month ago

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You don't have to worry about moving nutrients around. 98% of organic material is made up of atmospheric gases. The other 2% is minerals, and those minerals are unlimited. There's enough P, K, Ca, Mg etc in the ground to grow for 10,000 years. The key is having the biological activity to free it from rock particles and get it into plants. And nature does that all on it's own, we just have to not intervene and screw it up.

Kevin Olson

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posted 1 month ago

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Christopher Shimanski wrote:You don't have to worry about moving nutrients around. 98% of organic material is made up of atmospheric gases. The other 2% is minerals, and those minerals are unlimited. There's enough P, K, Ca, Mg etc in the ground to grow for 10,000 years. The key is having the biological activity to free it from rock particles and get it into plants. And nature does that all on it's own, we just have to not intervene and screw it up.

"...those minerals are unlimited."

True, generally speaking, but not necessarily bio-available. I.e., they may (presently) be tied up in ways which plants (in particular) can't easily access. At least, not without help from all manner of microbial soil life. Whereas, whatever is in the chop-n-drop, leaf litter, pine straw, ramial wood chips, moldy hay or whatever has already been rendered bio-available.

Sometime in the past few months, I watched a video on using Johnson-Su compost extract to innoculate broad acre farm land in South Dakota to turn "dirt" into "soil". I'm pretty sure it was on Jay Young's "Young Red Angus" YouTube channel, but I can't spot it right now (he has a lot of videos on Johnson-Su composting - he has a missionary zeal for the practice). It also may have been on Dr. Johnson's channel, but I'm pretty darn certain the farmer was Jay. He'd had some soil analyses done, and found that there was, just as you say, something like hundreds of years worth of phosphorus already in his soil, and that was the most limiting nutrient for his fields and crops. I wish I could find the video and link to it here, so that I am not relying entirely on my (all too faulty) memory for the exact details. I'll see if I can track it down, and add the link on edit. But the point is, putting down more phosphorus when he plants corn or beans by the acre is not the solution to any lack of nutrients his crops might experience. He has been applying a compost extract from a large-scale Johnson-Su (i.e. fungally dominant) composting operation, using the liquid fertilizer injection apparatus already on his seeders. The extract has all sort of microbial and fungal life in it. He is able to "seed" broad scale agricultural fields with these innoculants to re-establish a living soil in fields that had been "depleted" by being subjected to modern industrial ag practices, with great success, so far. (He's also intercropping and other stuff - not exactly a permie operation in the strictest sense, but I am no paragon of permie virtue myself, and applaud steps in the right direction.)

So, exporting fertility from one place to another, and in this case, by the acre.

Christopher Shimanski

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posted 3 weeks ago

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Kevin Olson wrote:

Christopher Shimanski wrote:You don't have to worry about moving nutrients around. 98% of organic material is made up of atmospheric gases. The other 2% is minerals, and those minerals are unlimited. There's enough P, K, Ca, Mg etc in the ground to grow for 10,000 years. The key is having the biological activity to free it from rock particles and get it into plants. And nature does that all on it's own, we just have to not intervene and screw it up.

"...those minerals are unlimited."

True, generally speaking, but not necessarily bio-available. I.e., they may (presently) be tied up in ways which plants (in particular) can't easily access. At least, not without help from all manner of microbial soil life. Whereas, whatever is in the chop-n-drop, leaf litter, pine straw, ramial wood chips, moldy hay or whatever has already been rendered bio-available.

Sometime in the past few months, I watched a video on using Johnson-Su compost extract to innoculate broad acre farm land in South Dakota to turn "dirt" into "soil". I'm pretty sure it was on Jay Young's "Young Red Angus" YouTube channel, but I can't spot it right now (he has a lot of videos on Johnson-Su composting - he has a missionary zeal for the practice). It also may have been on Dr. Johnson's channel, but I'm pretty darn certain the farmer was Jay. He'd had some soil analyses done, and found that there was, just as you say, something like hundreds of years worth of phosphorus already in his soil, and that was the most limiting nutrient for his fields and crops. I wish I could find the video and link to it here, so that I am not relying entirely on my (all too faulty) memory for the exact details. I'll see if I can track it down, and add the link on edit. But the point is, putting down more phosphorus when he plants corn or beans by the acre is not the solution to any lack of nutrients his crops might experience. He has been applying a compost extract from a large-scale Johnson-Su (i.e. fungally dominant) composting operation, using the liquid fertilizer injection apparatus already on his seeders. The extract has all sort of microbial and fungal life in it. He is able to "seed" broad scale agricultural fields with these innoculants to re-establish a living soil in fields that had been "depleted" by being subjected to modern industrial ag practices, with great success, so far. (He's also intercropping and other stuff - not exactly a permie operation in the strictest sense, but I am no paragon of permie virtue myself, and applaud steps in the right direction.)

So, exporting fertility from one place to another, and in this case, by the acre.

You don't even need to do that. Grow diverse big biomass crops, and keep your soil alive with plants year round, and there will be no nutrient problems. The reason plants turn purple after germination is because they're following a fallow period, and that fallow period causes that fallow syndrome. When it comes to biological fertility, doing less is way more. I haven't applied any fertilizer on my soils in 6 years, and they've only performed better the further I've gotten away from pellets and fallows.

Last year i stumbled upon a biennial cover crop cocktail that terminates itself at the same time in early August, and I can broadcast anything into it and simply roll it flat and walk away. Don't even need a fancy crimper, because almost all of it just seasonally terminated with the exception of chicory.

Samantha Lewis

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posted 6 days ago

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Ben Zumeta

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posted 6 days ago

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I love alder trees and think they may be the most under appreciated of PNW native species. Burnt Ridge nursery sells them by the 10 and 100 bundle, for 2$ a piece when I got them. These have survived better than those I salvaged transplanted from places they would have likely been driven over, and if I actually value my time were worth the money. Of course seed is still likely the best, but I like supporting the good folks at Burnt Ridge and get an alder for every 1-2 other trees I get from them.

This is all just my opinion based on a flawed memory

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Rick Valley

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posted 4 days ago

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Apologies, I don't have a phone, suddenly, and I was placating the automotive gnomes- and got lucky. But I hadn't tracked which day was what, which is a bit scary- I didn't have a clue until I was back home and was gonna write down the @2-DO's and low and behold. I'm about to attack the highest mountain of stuff in the house and start packing it out and determine where to- I'm gonna be doing things weekly I think. I would Love to (!?!Jesus Effin K-reist! my cat just got my left earlobe ready to receive an earring. @WTF ) I gotta staunch the blood... bottom line is making headway isn't always easy. doing easy stuff can happen, and so far its been to enter a skeleton timeline for the morning or afternoon and do it, more or less. Now it feels like I`m on the edge of "can't recollect what the schedule is? So to make this hurt less, I'm nailing tomorrow's schedule: : wake pack for the day and hop on LTD bus with my senior pass with a cane and a daypack to the historic WOW Hall by 10:30. ( I will go a tad sooner and grab a Cafe Mam cuppa. en route, to set up chairs for the observance and help coalesce the memorial march ala New Orleans second line tradition. (Eugene has some connection with Mam folk in Guatemala, and they grow good coffee. I've spent some time with Mam folks, and a Mexicano I know has worked with them on getting organic certification. My favorite addiction and self reward (@ not more than 1 cup a day)

Frog made his living peddling the current "Frog's Joke Book", full of old Vaudville-Style jokes, generally a small copy shop-style bifold and stapled, @1/4 thick, max. I admit I do not have a ready copy- perhaps this clean up will reveal one. I will bring any seasoned cane blanks I have ready, so some folks who want to do 'Norlins Style"
cane motions can take it with them- I might make that my Memorial contribution at the WOW Hall. I will post on this, and do a (blind or w/a prologue) if the Muse does not desert me.
As I'm "without a phone", EMail is my link to planetary knowledge. Or I can walk, bus or drive and do real time. Not having a phone has been a kick in the wrong direction, I gotta admit

Rick Valley at Julie's Farm

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