the quest for super soil

ian labo wrote:Hello Dr Redhawk. Do you  think your super soil can equal the amount of harvest in a chemically fertilize farm. And how about  the amount of work invested. I have concerns over the prohibitive price  of chemical fertelizer in the near future due to many things but primarily due to the cost of petrol.

Thanks

Ian

When your soil is in a state of good quantities of bioactivity the yield will be equal to or surpass the "modern fertilized farm". There will also be higher nutritional values in the bioactive farm product.  Chemicals tend to remain in the soil or wash away to contaminate the hydrological area. That's why many ground water and channels and streams/rivers are contaminated by field run off. The artificial nutrients, by lack of proper soil biology, simply can't be used by the plants.

Redhawk

Skip Smith wrote:Hi Redhawk.
My garden is recently cleared oak forest with stumps intact.  There is sc orange  clay soil that drains well. Last year the potatos grew to half an inch instead of full sized.  It has earthworms and snails ladybugs stink bugs and big black ants.  It's all on a 1:6 n facing slope.  
I need to grow food fast.  I broke up the mat of roots and decayed leaves on the surface and mixed it with the orange clay soil beneath and added lime and some wood ash.  It needs more nitrogen.  I bought some ca nitrate.  Can I put a very small amount in to get things jumpstarted without hurting the worms and good bacteria too much?  Nothing wants to grow but I have grown about 5 huge daikon after scattering hundred of seeds.  My radishes and  turnips only grew to one inch but my dads are three in high.  Similar weather.  Temperature max 65 F and min 35.  
Also I want to make use of all the leaves and urine but don't want to smell it at all.  How can I make a completely inoffensive smellin leaf compost pile that has lots of microbes?  I got molasses hoRse salt lick and can  chop the leaves with a weedwaker. Thanks

 

At this point I would spread that leaf heap over the soil as Hans suggested. Then I would start building wood chips on top of that to a thickness of 3 to 6 inches. Then I would make mushroom sluries and pour those over the wood chips. When you are ready to plant again, just plant inches wood chips, the roots will go down into the soil through the chips and composting leaf mulch.

Redhawk

Have boards 3 foot wide for my 3 beds per 3 rows.   Growing watermelon, spreaded out all over, tried planting sweet potatoes in part of a lawn.  they like to spread too.  got some super size beets too.  have mints in buckets in front yard.

Thanks Dr. Redhawk for all this info. A couple questions occurred to me in reading this thread, if you have time.

1. I'm gutting an old house--what do you think of mixing the drywall into the soil? (for gypsum)

2. How do you filter your water to 0.1 microns to get the antibiotics and other drugs out of it?

3. The soil in my area is clay, full of round rocks of all sizes. Farmers constantly have to pick rocks. Every field has huge rockpiles next to it. Frost pushes new rocks out of the ground every year, which need to get picked, making the rockpiles bigger. (Northwoods of Wisconsin, zone 3, frost line 48"). Parts of my pasture that my pigs have tilled look like they were paved in cobblestones, I have a feeling that isn't good for regrowing forage. (Pigs tend to bring all rocks to the surface and bury the soil underneath them). Now, you mentioned that when topsoil touches bedrock, it breaks the bedrock down to make new soil, so I guess the same is true of these round rocks. Is there any low-tech way to dramatically speed up the process of breaking down all these rocks? Do I need to pick all the rocks? Is it beneficial at all to have rocks on the surface?

4. Also, so far I have a very weak grasp of the till vs. no-till debate, so this may not be the right place to ask this question... but I can't help noticing that tillage occurs here and there in nature (eg pigs rooting, grizzly bears digging for roots, elephants tipping over trees to eat the root bark, maybe other examples). Is this natural tillage as bad as the man-made tillage?

5. What is the worst thing about tillage? Is it the pulverization, or the flipping upside down, or what? What if we just flipped big chunks with a plow, like pigs do, and planted into that? Wouldn't each chunk then still have an intact microbial community?

One reason I'm asking is that I had our pigs till the garden this spring. They did a great job of knocking back the weeds in the one area that didn't get mulched thick enough last year. (Last year I tried Ruth Stout, and the slugs absolutely killed me). I rotated them through so they wouldn't spend too much time in any one spot and compact it. They tilled in the rotten mulch quite nicely, and brought up rocks for us to pick. As well as adding their own natural fertilizer.

I really like the idea of Ruth Stout and no-till, it's just that I have to figure out something for the slugs. Also the cold soil took forever to warm up in spring, which is a big deal in Zone 3, when winter comes back quickly and every day of growth counts.

Hau Steve, interesting questions so let me go in order.

Drywall that is more than 23 years old is safe to use as soil amendment material as long as you break it into smallish pieces or even crush it well. But! Be sure you need gypsum as an addition, before you go down that road.

Filtering water to 0.1 micron is an expensive undertaking for a home owner. The filters are high cost and need frequent changing. An alternative is a series of sand, charcoal, sand then a clarity filter. It's not 0.1 micron but you won't be spending thousands of dollars for the equipment.

Two ways to address rocky clay soil. 1. Remove surfaced rocks and use them to build with.(slip-form construction, or stacked walls) 2. Deep mulch with woodchips, mulches can be used as topping. This would need to be around 12 inches thick. And you would add to the layer every year to build a layer of good soil over the rocky clay. (Bacteria and weathering break down rocks into soil, that happens in geological time (1000 year type timing)

Nature's tilling is a one shot done event. Human tilling is done every time a crop is planted and that's usually 3-5 turns. Tilling exposes the microbiome to deadly UV a,b & c which kills off the micro organisms that are what makes soil instead of dirt.

From what I've read about Ruth Stout's methodology it has a fairly large learning curve to adjust the method to a piece of land.  No till works with certain crops, others take some adjusting. Lettuce and other small seed plants might require a close cut for the seed row for germination needs.

Hope that helps.

Redhawk

Sean,

I want to echo everything that RedHawk already said, but I will relay my own experience.  Firstly, I don’t really do Ruth Stout gardening, but I do something that has parallels.  I have garden beds that are filled with wood chips that are then broken down into mushroom compost by the action of Wine Cap mushrooms which leave a wonderfully fertile compost in their wake.  I do grow vegetables in the wood chips the first year by planting in fertile holes and fertile trenches.  I am still importing bagged compost/topsoil, but just enough to fill a few trenches.  Eventually the bagged soil/compost will be phased out.  

I have not brought in any fertility since I put the mushrooms in—they provided that much fertility on their own.  My Wine Caps have tapered off, but secondary mushrooms are taking their place and breaking the wood chips down further.  I also have an active population of bacteria and other microbes.  My experience has been that the biology in the garden bedding is far more important than the chemistry.

All of this is to say that if you want to try a Ruth Stoutish garden system, I say go for it!  I still get weeds, but I can get around those.  And I am amazed at how fertile the bedding becomes as the biology grows.  If you want any pointers, I can help out there.

I hope this helps.  Good Luck!!

Eric

Thanks Dr. RedHawk.

Eric, it sounds to me like the differences between your system and Ruth Stout's system are very minimal. After reading three of her books, I've concluded that Ruth Stout gardening can be defined as "year round deep mulch of any kind with no tillage, except possibly the first year."

She would put transplants directly into the mulch, rather than the soil underneath. As for seeds, she did one of two things:

1. In her first method, she would rake aside the top layers of mulch and planted in the soil, covering the soil with a board until germination. After germination, she would remove the board, and slowly replace the hay mulch around the plants as they got taller.

2. In the other case, particularly for carrots, she would not disturb the mulch at all. She would simply spread peat moss on top of the hay mulch, and plant into that. The carrots or whatever would then grow down through the mulch, and eventually into the soil.

Dr. RedHawk, I have some other burning questions, and you may be the first person I've talked to who can answer them:

1. Can you safely compost cardboard, Kleenex, and junk mail and use it in the garden, or will the chemicals get into the food and hurt you?

2. If you can't use it for vegetables, can you safely use it in other parts of your land? eg, pasture? (That way it gets filtered through  soil organisms, plants, and ruminants before it gets to your body, instead of just soil organisms and plants). Or fruit and nut trees? (That way it gets diluted into a larger plant, so maybe less of it ends up in the food part). Or maybe just ornamentals? (So it doesn't reach your body at all.) Or are we better off just keeping that stuff completely off our land, recycling it until the fibers are too spent to go anywhere but the landfill?

3. The same goes for the toilet paper in humanure compost, a topic which I still find embarrassing but can't get away from. If we don't continually take the minerals that made health-giving food and recycle them into health-giving food, then how can we continue to produce the same quality of food? But if we are mixing them with PFAS and other endocrine disruptors and chemicals in the toilet paper... that doesn't sound good. Do the bad things in toilet paper eventually get broken down by soil microbes? Is there a brand of TP that doesn't have that stuff in it? Should we somehow cultivate our own toilet paper in the form of moss or whatever people used to use? ---or should I just not worry about this topic at all?

4. My sister married a conventional dairy farmer, and I milk cows for them. So I have access to all the fresh manure I want. But if I put straight manure/urine on my garden soil, will it hurt the microbes? (Too much soluble nitrogen?)

5. My brother-in-law cuts hay, and spreads manure on it afterwards to help it grow back faster. Is this a bad idea? It doesn't seem to hurt the grass, is it causing damage long-term?

6. He beds his heifer barn with fresh sawdust from a local sawmill, and spreads that everytime he cleans it out. So with all that carbon to absorb the nitrogen, I'm not worried about burning my microbes. Should I worry about the Ag chemicals in our food, such as the popular weed killer that starts with an R?

If you've addressed these topics farther on in your soil series, then feel free to point me that direction, I am reading through it and I will get there eventually. Thanks again for your time.

Sean

PS I just found out thar certain chemicals can only be talked about in the cider press or pm, so I'm not sure I'm allowed to publish this here. If not, I don't mind if the moderators delete it, that's ok. I will just try to figure out how to pm Dr. Redhawk

By coincidence, I just happened to find that Sam Thayer's new foraging book talks about "natural toilet paper." He has a "best of" index, with the "best" plants to use for toilet paper-- bigleaf aster, and velvetleaf. Perhaps that is the summer solution to the chemical-laced toilet paper problem (if indeed it is a problem outside my own mind). Not sure about winter.