Soil ph

This may be a silly question, I’m a bit of a noob, but I don’t seem to understand how soil ph is accounted for in permaculture principles. All these different plants I read about seem to have super specific needs for ph- if you’re doing a sort of poly culture/high diversity/food forest setup, are you just supposed to pick things that all have the same soil preference? Or does the resilience of high diversity setups sort of overcome soil ph needs??

If you have soil at one extreme or other then some plants will struggle. Those that have evolved in an acidic environment will not be comfortable in an alkaline one and vice versa. However, my opinion is that plants don't read books and generally just want to grow! I have a very acidic soil here. I'm hoping to mitigate that by improving the drainage and getting a greater variety of plants to grow and slowly improve the soil. In the meantime I'm happy my blueberries are doing so well!  It isn't that my apple trees have died for example, they just struggle a bit to get the nutrients they need, so are a bit slower than they might be in a more neutral soil. If your soil is not at an extreme, then I wouldn't worry too much about it and just plant what you fancy growing.

em write wrote:This may be a silly question, I’m a bit of a noob, but I don’t seem to understand how soil ph is accounted for in permaculture principles. All these different plants I read about seem to have super specific needs for ph- if you’re doing a sort of poly culture/high diversity/food forest setup, are you just supposed to pick things that all have the same soil preference? Or does the resilience of high diversity setups sort of overcome soil ph needs??

I try to start simple.....   What is now growing without any PH changes?      I start with those things and multiply them if they provide me food or firewood or other benefits.     Everytime you start messing with PH then you have to pay in time and $ to keep that going.

I take what I have growing, and then I use that to create compost,   from compost and adding minerals one can then move on to other ph ranges but have it fueled by chopping and dropping that which already grows well.

In my area that is Bolivian Sunflowers, zero fertilization needed and it grows 15 feet tall about every time I plant it and it comes back year after year.

I find that any sort of PH issues can be corrected with heaps of compost and time.

Organic matter improves the soil and moderates the PH from the extremes. I highly recommend utilizing known good quality compost that has gone through the whole process and isn't hot anymore. Sometimes there are folks/companies selling what they call compost but it is of poor quality and requires more time before plants will appreciate it.

I appreciate this thread. I was going to make a new thread with a similar subject but this one has basically answered my questions.

Now that I've committed to growing a couple apple trees, and will soon-ish be growing other fruits and vegetables, I've been seeing the matter of pH pop up more frequently in ways that make me pay attention. I heard about people measuring the pH in their compost heaps to make adjustments but I could pretty easily sweep that aside like "I don't wanna." But when it came to the health of my soon-to-be trees and other food crops, I started to wonder just how neurotic should I be. It sounds like I don't need to worry much about it - keep the soil generally healthy and give it compost etc and my food should be fine. I'm not much of a scientist and I tend to approach things in a broader way of having fun/being present with it such that constantly measuring the soil's pH would interfere with that. But if it might seriously affect the health and output of my plants I would measure occasionally I suppose.

I think my primary question for tapping all the expertise here would be if anybody had run into any food crops that *really* required a lot of care for the pH. I'd probably end up just avoiding those if they exist, lol, I want to avoid fragile high-maintenance plants in general. I mean, I enjoy paying attention and doing the work, I just don't want to have a bad day or three and get several dead plants because of it. (This sort of thing is what recently dissuaded me from pursuing a coral reef aquarium hobby.) Come to think of it, though, it'd probably be worth giving my new trees' soil some special attention periodically for the next few years while they get established. Long-term benefits & rewards for that, I'd imagine.

Most plants and trees do well in a pH 6 to pH 7 range. Basically, slightly acidic. Obviously, there are exceptions, but that range will do well for most things.