stephen sinnott

are these soil organisims fungal or bacterial?

well even legumes do contribute to humus production but it depends on the legume eg. bean stalks are high in carbon. dont forget about the microrizzal relationships formed by the roots of legumes and other crops. legume roots are important humus builders as they break down and legumes are generally high in protein which will increase worm biomass and that is extremely important.

green manure crops do build humus. if you have all this spent straw and sawdust then you could use that as your mulch around the trees, far better than tillage. it has been proven that with proper managment pastures can build an inch of soil a year, that would be very hard to beat.




these three guys in these videos are amazing innovators and are leading the way in soil building and soil health, the concepts they bring up are mind blowing and far beyond anything bill mollison wrote on soil building.
carbon is far more important than nitrogen in healthy soil.
the first video is colin seis who invented pasture cropping, this is the direction i would go in to change your soil and prepare it for the forest to come.
remember if you use animals in a food forest you can virtually eliminate the need for nitrogen fixers.

mature grass is high in carbon and is therefore a good fungal food, roll the grass once it is mature and zero till your cover crop seed into the residue, tillage has been proven to favor bacterial domination and tillage ruins soil structure in the long term by degrading glomulin and creates new hardpan at the plowing depth, a heavy mulch around your trees will let virtually nothing through, plant your guilds in straight lines wit 15-20 feet between and you will still be able to use machinery in the rows.

use the seed, sell the tiller, you asked for advice do you want any?

i wouldnt till it, tilling will lose you organic matter and give you a huge weed problem. decide where your main trees are going and mulch those ares to kill the grass and feed the soil then plant your trees keep doing this for the different levels and then for the ground cover you could leave the grass and get chickens to turn the grass into rich fertilizer or use mobile chicken netting to kill off the grass then plant tillage radish, peas, beans, vetch and rye.
grass builds soil almost as well as anything else given a long enough recovery time, you already have grass so why not use it, when you grass is going dormant you can broadcast rye and vetch as an added soil builder.

some of your canopy trees will take many years to mature so why not get them in as quickly as possible and enjoy their bounty all the sooner.

oh they get something from grass sure but they dont get what a rumenant gets from it, stick to the 3 day stage for ease of prep a few more days wont hurt either if there not on pasture.

dont grow the grains to the grass stage as pigs dont have a rumen and wont benefit too much from it, 3 days or so should be perfect.

you need to remember that it is october and egg production will start to drop off, let them out after 12 if possible and feed them a bit in the coop to tether them to it.

the thing that gets larger and smaller is the vent, the other sounds like it is the umbilical cord, leave this alone, i wouldnt interfere, the chicken might have been cleaning the chick, if she is going to kill it i would let her, it seems harsh but its nature. remember a hen is better at being a hen than you are.