Paul Gurnsey

For 10 bucks i can get an inuculated mycelium log of iether king oyster or matsutakie mushrooms. I was thinking of placing this in the compost/leaf layer but have some concerns about creating a dominant fungi that will smother other fungi from starting like microrhizal fungi. Would the mushrooms do this and consume all of the leaves and leave me with a nutrient dead layer? The mushrooms will not take hold of the pine woodchips....pine isnt to their liking. All I can get is pine. Good idea about making pockets of forest soil where I am gonna plant...it will really speed things up.

I have woodchips and kitchen scraps burried a foot under the initial grade. I self nitrogenized it after soaking the chips in water. I filled it back up with native soil and added sand and forest mulch and mixed it in.....the top 10 inches only. I am gonna add compost then leaves then chips on top of that.  

I did my garden like this in 5 foot by 2~3 foot sections.

Look at all those rocks....i had no choice.

Here are pics of what i didto amend my super rocky clay soil. It was good exercise.

I only flooded a few inches of dirt that i put over the rocks i burried.there were many different sizes of rocks and so much empty space that it was needed. I didnt do this to the material i put over the rocks because i dont want my clay to compact together again.

Used coffee grounds are 2% nitrogen.

Nothing was sprayed on the leaves. They are from a natural forest where bee keepers make honey from low light tolerant plants that flowers in the summer. I didnt disturb them all and am far enough away so that my leaf mining will have no impact.

I am most concerned about the leaves smothering the soil and preventing it from breathing.

Also....that honey is awesome.  

I dont have any chickens but only a 3' x 10' x 5' x 10' plot.

I have coffee grounds!?!?

I didnt dig the hole to stop weeds......i dug it because I had so many rocks....big ones....small ones....fat ones....skinny ones that it would have drastically impeded the roots of whatever I was growing. I also have clay soil so I had to break it up and will mix sand with it when I happen to come across some that isnt too salty. I dont want to buy much more than a shovel.....which I could not do without. The hard work now with the shovel was free exercise.

I am in Korea on a volcanic island and the locals here make piles of rocks and dead plants/weeds in the middle of their fields/gardens. I can only say this is most likely due to copycat behavior and really serves no purpose. I watch one of my neighbors spend countless hours once a week pulling up weeds in a field he only uses as a pumpkin patch. His plants are 100 feet long if you include all of the offshoots. I wonder why he doesnt put cardboard down on the 95% of ground that these plants occupy. The plants need a small root area but massive growing area...it makes no sense. The field is only tended to by hand with no machinery. His "trash" pile is an oval about 15' long' 5' wide and 4' high in the middle of his 50'x50' plot.

Yet at the end of the driveway there is a parsimmon farm that lays down cardboard all over the ground to supress their weeds. You would have thought this guy would have seen this and wondered what they were doing. This orchard is the only place I have ever seen weed suppression used besides a western style hotel that used wood chips.

Another neighbor lets his tomato plants grow 3', then he cuts off the top as soon as he sees tomatoes. He gets his initial tomato harvest but it is only the first growth that he keeps. He cuts off the suckers and then he gets no tomatoes for the rest of the year with his beefsteaks. His cherry tomatoes were indeterminate and managed to pop out a few extra fruits but not nearly what they could or should have.

Another neighbor grew and threw out yellow cucumbers all summer long because she doesnt water enough.

One neighbor decided to sweat herself to death clearing out weeds in the middle of summer to plant lettuce and didnt water it so it died.

i have driven past many different feilds of corn that had about 2" spacing between each plant. There were no rows and the corn it produced was very very small. And no......it wasnt the baby chinese corn.....I had to see what it was so I stopped and picked an ear at a couple places and it was full sized kernels....very few of them.

Here they love to use fertilizer....and sprays. Small gardeners and big farmers alike. Black plastic is a staple to keep weeds at bay. Buying food here is something that must be done with pure ignorance as to how it is produced.

I have very few good examples to draw from the local farmers or gardeners here.

When I want to use the BTE gardening method I am doing it for all of the right reasons. I don't want to feed my family chemical crap from the supermarkets. I have done most of the hard work already and am going to collect the final resources(sawdust/woodchips) to finish it off. I just want to know if my plan has any problems or if you have any recommendations.