Keep your soil

A nice read on how we're losing soil, but at least it gives a possible solution (ought to seem familiar!):

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/348200_dirt22.html

It's good to hear about some local no-till farmers. My only experience with it before has been in Oklahoma, and hearing my grandfather, an agronomist, tell me about it. He still tills his garden every spring, but has a very permaculture-without-saying-so hedgerow that is really cool to visit. My thoughts are that the no-till model is great to get more ideas circulating among big-acreage farmers. Of course permaculture goes in its whole crazy direction, so it's nice to have middle ground that isn't too much of a stretch. I eagerly look forward to what the http://www.landinstitute.org/| Land Institute is discovering. My attempt to correctly sum it up, is that they are discovering prairie perennial polycultures, whether native or with some tweaking. And they're just a hop, skip, jump from my grandparents.

The thing is that like Mollison et al point out if you got a market garden then you're exporting soil, one way or another.

I wrote this a while ago and we're promoting the idea over here, I've put a link rather than type it all out again.

http://permacultures.blogspot.com/


SteveR


www.permaculture.be