Sue Hiers

stephen lowe wrote:

Bryant RedHawk wrote:Teas are meant to be sprayed as a folar feeding.  This is great if you are treating diseases or infestations, but not the best overall use of your compost.
Extracts are meant to be poured on the soil.  This will condition soil quickly, get the organisms where we want them and it will help them populate the roots of the plants faster.

To be continued.

Redhawk

This is the statement that lead to my question, Redhawk. I apologize if I overstated the case, but I am curious as to why you think that teas are not the best overall use? I have always considered teas to be the most efficient way to use compost so I am curious to hear an opposing opinion from someone with your level of knowledge and experience working with the soil.

My understanding, from taking Dr. Ingham's course, is the process of making a tea, as opposed to an extract, gets the microbes actively making glues so that they stick to the plant when sprayed on. This isn't necessary when applying it to the soil. It doesn't hurt but it isn't necessary.

I don't understand the reference to vibration of the different materials. What does that mean?

I'd like to get opinions on converting an above ground vinyl pool to a raised bed garden. The walls are 42" tall galvanized panels and are covered with a vinyl liner. The bottom is a concrete pad. The dimensions are approximately 8' x 14'. I wanted to leave the vinyl walls intact to stop evaporation from the sides.    For drainage I'm thinking about cutting the floor out of the liner or cutting slits 6" up the walls at the four corners. So what's your opinion? Will the vinyl taint the food grown near it? Which is the better drainage solution?

Angelika Maier wrote:Swales are great but need earthworks too. I woudld first have a closer look at the costs. In a cohousing project the pond could be a great feature, with ducks and some benches, if big enough you could take a dip in summer and do ice skating in winter. It is actually a great feature you can stock and raise some fish too.

A real pond would be a great asset but I don't think detention ponds hold water for very long. They are meant to temporarily stop the runoff from a large rain event. Around here I've seen completely dry man-made depressions at new developments. They are not pretty. The code says the property can have no more runoff after all the houses/roads are built than before. So we have to detain (and the code says detain not retain) all the water that hits these new structures. It seems to me that a real pond would just overflow and not detain the water.

I am peripherally involved in a small developing co-housing neighborhood on 15 acres of land in Durham county, North Carolina, USA. The land does not have steep slopes (approx 1 ft rise over 20 ft). The planning department requires a detention pond to catch the extra rain water runoff due to the addition of houses and roads. I am just learning about permaculture but is seems to me that swales should be able to replace the detention pond as long as the combined swales hold the same volume of water as the detention pond. The advantage is that no dam has to be built and you get an orchard which is much prettier in my opinion.  Has anyone done this successfully? Are there any professionals in central North Carolina that could help us with strategies for the planning department? (I suspect the planning department will object.)

The landscape architect involved does not understand how swales work (or maybe I don't). His response to this suggestion was that they have not been successful at getting approval for vegetative mitigation of runoff. My understanding is swales do not use vegetation to detain the water but that the swale structure itself is what detains the water on the land until it can seep into the ground, i.e. swales are just a bunch of small oblong detention ponds built on contour without dams. The berm is optional for this purpose and does not need to be built to dam specs since it doesn't hold back the detained water. But with the berm the whole system gives you an orchard as a bonus.

All advice is appreciated.