Michal Malinowski

Nick Kitchener wrote:If you harvest the bean at flowering then you naturally wont have any beans. I tried this last year with grains and it worked well.
Fava beans grow pretty big (you need to stake them otherwise they'll fall over and make your lodging problems even worse), and so just after flowering (the bees love them), I cut the plant off at ground level and removed the plant for composting.

With grains, if you introduce Nitrogen at the wrong time, you get too much green growth and not very good seed growth and so any Nitrogen additions should come early in the growing season.

What happened was that the beans didn't die like I expected. In fact it burst forth new growth and flowered again about a month later. It was too late in the season for them to develop beans good enough to eat, but it was good information.

It means that the fava bean self pruned its root system, releasing Nitrogen at the right time. It then continued to grow, accumulating more Nitrogen and storing it until after the grain was harvested. I then had a second Nitrogen harvest that went into the soil ready for the next growing season. It also provided a late bloom of flowers for the bees.

I'm going to do it again this year. The only thing to watch out for is wind blowing over the beans and damaging the grains.

Interesting. So you interplanted the beans with grain or grown grain after beans?

Dobar Dan

Well I come from the north and the north is quite different from Cracow. It is less populated, has a different architecture. So if I would have to say which attraction I think are the most worthwhile to watch I would say:

- The Marienburg Castle: is the largest castle in the world by surface area. Makes the Wawel look like a diorama. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malbork_Castle
- Ethnographic museums of Kashubia specially the one in Wdzydze Kiszewskie. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wdzydze_Kiszewskie
- The Greate Lakes. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Great_Masurian_Lakes?uselang=pl
- The old town of Toruń http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toru%C5%84

That would be mine favorite.

Trevor Walker wrote:What happens when you chop and drop a fully fruited bean plant?
Does it waste the nitrogen? Or do you get it back in the soil through green mulch?

That was my first thought, but then it got to me that maybe I don't want to chop and drop half of the favas when the rest will be still growing to prevent pest problems.

My understanding is that the nodules fix nitrogen, most of which the fava uses for itself when it's putting on those big huge seed pods. So for max nitrogen you till it in right about when it's flowering. For max biomass you let it run it's course and eat as you like.

Yes I know, my poin is would it be possible to eat the favas and boost the nitrogen content in the soil by cutting 50% of the plants when they flower and let the rest go to seed. Would it help in any significant in the term of nitgogen concentration in the bed?

How about eating the beans and returning the pee to the soil?

This is concept for a market garden. I may not mind fertilizing with pee but that is still a taboo for many people.

Hello.

I am trying to come up with a crop rottation method that would involve rotating legumes (mainly fava beans) with grains ( I think mainly rye and corn for start). The aim would not only to grow food but at the same time grow high carbon material (straw) and material rich in nitrogen (legumes) and to use the legumes to boost the nitrogen in the soil. Only the problem is that the during seed formation the nitrogen fixed by the legumes is used by the plant. So if I was aiming for fixing nitrogen into the soil I would have to harvest the fava beans before they flower. So I was thinking how about growing the beans densely and at the point of 50% flower of the fava harvest 50% of the plants in the bed. Does anybody knows if that would have any signifficant effect on the soil nitrogen content?

Hey guys.

I am thinking about producing my own potting mix. The problem is that most recepies involve:

a) Using non renewable resources (peat, vermiculit),
b) Non local resources (coconut)
c) Using an oven to sterilize the mix (not cost efficient).

I know the biointensive farmers use a simple mix of 1 to 1 compost and soil to start seeds in frames. But I am concerned about the potential pathogens in unsterilized soil and compost. The other method I found is using a solar cooker to bake the soil but I do not live in a hot climate.

Any good ideas for a mix to start seeds that would use resources generated on site in a cost effective way?

Some questions that would help to answer:

1. What do you plan to grow on that land?
2. Where do you want to source the wood chips, compost, manure etc.
3. What equipment and manpower do you have to your disposal?

Renting a tractor and tilling the field would cost perhaps $200 including fuel. Some people might badmouth plowing the soil, but I presume that the reason that tilling has survived for 10,000 years is because it has proven itself to be inexpensive and productive. I suppose that tilling has shown itself to be sustainable, because since time immemorial farmers have tilled their fields: Regardless of how bad the economy is. Regardless of availability of fossil fuels. Regardless of social decay or warlords. Regardless of environmentalists or mycologists.

Same could be said about everything. Ploughing is a practice devastating to the soil's wildlife, and that is a sad fact.

The reason that I don't apply mulches or wood chips or other organic matter to my farm is that it's unaffordable. Small-scale growers can pretty much do anything that they want without calculating costs for labor or materials. You ever tried to gather together enough cardboard to cover 22,000 square feet? That's about 4400 boxes, or a pile 140 feet tall if broke down and laid out flat. That's around 20 to 40 pickup trucks full of boxes. You priced gasoline lately? Who can even supply that quantity of boxes? Putting a 4" layer of organic material on a half acre garden requires 272 cubic yards. The cheapest organic material around here costs about $25 per cubic yard delivered, so that works out to around $7000 per half acre. (6" = 407 cubic yards = $10,000.) Have you calculated how much labor it takes to spread out enough wood chips to cover 22,000 square feet? Last time I did the math for my 4 acre garden, it would have taken longer than the available growing season. I suppose that if I had the money to buy the materials that I could pay to have the supplier spread them for me as well.

That is true. It can be hard to find enough cardboard for the patch between the bads let alone for the whole farm. Not to mention to find enough biomatter. And the biomatter should be sourced from the farm itself if we aim at sustainability. So first we should consider what quantities of biomatter we have to our disposal before choosing the method.

Hello.

My name is Michael. I come from Poland. Currently I am saving the money to rent some land to create a market garden/ mini farm. For about 3 years I am gathering knowledge related to organic farming methods. I don't remember quite when I first heard about permaculture, but the idea made a huge impression on me. I started my research with Sepp Holzer's "Permaculture", Fukuokas "One Straw Revolution" and "Gaia's Garden". Before that I was interested in the German "Biogarten" books. At this point the school of organic agriculture that caught most of my attention and closest to my idea of farming is the biointensive method. But still permaculture remains a greate concept to draw inspiration from and I am sure I will learn a lot from all of You. I hope We will have lots of fun together.