Hello everyone - Asking for some good advice about soil remediation from pesticides and herbicides. I'll give you a quick overview:
I've recently acquired an property of about 1.5 hectares/3.7 acres, flat riverbottom
land here in southern Ecuador (4degrees south of the equator) that has a 5 year history of pesticide and herbicide application on a maracuya/passionfruit crop. The maracuya vines have just about lived their normal lifespan, so I'll be removing all of it.
This land is located at about 1620m/5300' elevation in the Andes mountains. That gives us a year-round temp range of 12-30C/55-85F. It's considered a semi-arid climate, with a 6-7 month wet season and 5-6 month dry season, though in our particular location we tend to have a little longer rainy season. Total precip is about 1000-1500mm/40-60" per year, though we've got a very clean river coming from high altitude rainforest mountains which provides us unlimited
water to work with.
I've attached some pics below - a couple views of the maracuya vineyard at peak dry season, and a couple views of the river valley during wet season.
My first thought about remediation is to just let natural weeds grow to their heart's content for a year or so. Because of the nice non-freezing climate here, we've got a huge variety of natural plants/weeds that spring up on their own, and I realize that Nature can certainly take care of business on Her own, given
enough time.
I'm looking for any tips on how I might augment Her processes... add certain minerals? Special elixirs or brews? Certain plants? Fungi? Other catalysts of some kind?
I also have the option of using flood irrigation, so maybe I could (gently) flood the whole area, saturating it, and simply wash away some degree of contamination? Or maybe better to leave the soil as is, and remediate in place?
Also if anyone has any thoughts concerning how long it would reasonably take to get most of the toxins remediated, say 80-90%?
I greatly appreciate any advice, tips, suggestions!
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