Tim Springston

Nancy Reading wrote:The simple three field rotation of grains, followed by legumes, followed by fallow (animal grazing) was pretty standard in much of Europe in the medieval period I understand. I find it difficult to believe though, that people stuck loads of pea stick in the fields for their peas and beans to grow on and then took them off again the following year - it just sounds like rather too much work on a field sized system!

How did they manage it? I experimented this year with not supporting most of my peas. I interplanted some with my fava beans and some were just by themselves, but (as you might expect!) the results were less than satisfactory - the pea vines scrambled over the ground, and the slugs and mice had most of the peas produced (despite a good growing year for me generally). I don't think shorter peas (which are one obvious solution) were available till about the 19th century this article has some background reading on peas...) so that wouldn't be the medieval solution.

So my questions are - did they use pea sticks or another method? What do you think might work with less labour on a larger scale?

This is a great question.  I've been messing around with soup peas the last few years, and harvesting them before they are ruined by the weather is the biggest hassle about them.  I've grown four different varieties, Roveja, Blackeyed Marrowfat, Australian, and Blue-pod Capucijners.  I like the Roveja and Blackeyed Marrowfat the best in the kitchen, but Blue-pod Capucijners is by far the easiest to harvest with the least mold and ruined seeds, as well as having the easiest pods to find when harvesting by hand.  

The problem with no trellis/supports is that the tall peas flop all over the place and lots of seed is ruined before harvest, and it is a PITA to harvest them.  Easiest is to cut the entire mass and haul it someplace under a roof to dry down completely and then thresh the whole thing.  I think this might be the historical way?  At least in the Colonial era here in the Western/Northern hemisphere.  Beans and peas brought into the barn to thresh out.  It is most time efficient but wastes a LOT of the harvest.  

Trellising keeps the vines up off the ground, but when they start to dry down they tend to let go of the supports, especially in wet windy conditions, and it is much harder to separate the plants to thresh them when they are tangled up in a trellis or pea brush.  I want an efficient way to harvest these.  

I extremely doubt they were using dwarf varieties or any of the modern soup pea genetics like hypertendrils etc.  I might switch to those varieties or try crossing these old fashioned soup peas with the modern dwarf, self standing types, to waste less of the harvest.  

Xisca Nicolas wrote:Thanks for feedback and sharing! So basically you used 15 times more surface to cut than the one you covered?


When you did this, did you find it was "no work"? just joking.... well, "less weeding" method is right! Or "no dig".

Yes, 15 units of area of mulch production for every 1 unit of mulched growing space.  

I think the "No Work" aspect of this gardening system is highly dependent on your source of mulch.  When Ruth Stout wrote the book, the primary unit of hay available was the standard square bale (at least here in the USA).  These days square bales are much less common, and are usually only made for higher quality hay that is being grown for sale, probably mostly for the horse feeding market I assume.  Lower quality hay that is intended for cattle feeding and on farm uses etc is almost always baled using round bales these days.  At least it is in my area.  So there is less "spoiled" hay available on average, and the spoiled hay that is available is most often in the form of round bales.  Most home gardeners are not going to have the ability to use round bales.  They are a significant materials handling problem, you pretty much need a tractor with a bale spear unless you have a great set up where you can roll the bale around by hand safely.  

For this trial, I did end up doing lots of hauling of loose greenchop/overmature pasture, and a lot of time was spend raking, forking, hauling and spreading the mulch.  I'm not actually an advocate of this system per se, but I am interested in experimenting with it for potatoes.  

Xisca Nicolas wrote:If I want to use this method and not work after 11 am, I have to figure out how to solve a few ..."difficulties"!

- I cannot find hay, maybe straw imported from mainland Spain... (not organic, so full of round up?)

- Whatever natural hay we still have (wild oats grow in winter) goes to the animals.

So, unless you rely on a truck and live in a place with hay ...who can answer THIS question:
"What is the surface of land you need, planted with grass, for what surface of garden you grow?"

or put it this way:
"Out of your garden, what % do you have to dedicate to mulch production?"

Hi Xisca,  I think this is an interesting question.  I am trying to do a Ruth Stout experiment in 2019.  I have mulched an area that is 13 feet by 50 feet to a 8-12 inch depth.  I did not use hay exactly.  I cut an area of unused pasture (I did not use a scythe, I used a walk behind sicklebar mower).  About half of the length of the mulched area also had a layer of autumn leaves added prior to the grass mulch. I am planning to plant this area in potatoes, and do a direct comparison of Ruth Stout mulched potatoes vs my current potato growing method.  I am interested in comparing yield, maintenance/work time, and most especially vole damage between the two systems.  

Total area mulched was approximately 650 square feet or 60 square meters.  In order to mulch this area I cut an area of pasture very close to 100 by 100 feet, so 10000 square feet or about 930 square meters.  This is approximately a mulch production area : mulched growing space of 15:1.  The pasture I was using for the mulch had not been grazed or mown other than by the deer this season, it is in the far corner of the pasture and I never got over there with my livestock.  It is also fairly low production, unimproved pasture, so I'm sure more biomass could be produced with focussed attention paid to management and fertility.  It does seem clear to me that in order to use this system, a significant area of land has to be devoted to producing the mulch biomass.  For Ruth Stout and many people, the mulch used is purchased or salvaged waste/spoiled hay so the system is repurposing a waste product essentially.  

It would be interesting to look at different forms of biomass mulch, and different grass/plant species that might be more productive of biomass per unit area.  

Bryant RedHawk wrote:download the book

scribd site download of the book

There you go.

Redhawk

Most book stores will order in books for you, many public libraries will have those two books too.

I am confused about which two books?  Both of those links seem to be for the SARRA book.

I am also a little uncertain about the SARRA book.  Is it an English translation of Cho's own writing, or is it a consolidation of Korean Natural Farming techniques collected by SARRA?  Given how many times it refers to Cho in the third person it seems to be the latter.

I guess what I am hoping for is more depth on the rationale, including the science behind the collection and propagation steps for all of these recipes/preparations.  

I am very interested in the idea of collecting diverse suites of micro-organisms to inoculate my soil.  The hesitation I have with these techniques is I don't understand how they are supposed to work.  I am not particularly interested in perfoming rituals that I don't understand.

I am hoping that there is some literature about these techniques that goes more in depth into the microbiology of these techniques, particularly for the Indigenous Micro-organism processes.  There are questions I have about how this system actually works.

If I were designing a protocol for harvesting a diverse suite of microbes/micro-organisms from the wild from scratch, I am not sure if this is the protocol I would design.  My hesitation is that in a wild setting, different organisms are adapted to specific conditions, food substrates, and parameters.  If an organism is native to a forest soil ecosystem or a grassland soil, how effective will it be at colonizing steamed rice?  I understand that many organisms will quickly grow on such a rich carbohydrate source given the chance, but is this a substrate that will favor the organisms most useful in an agricultural soil vs other organisms that are more adapted to swiftly colonize a windfall of food such a batch of rice would represent?  And in the second step, where this rice culture is mixed with sugar, it seems intuitive to me that adding a rich sugar solution will absolutely favor certain types of microbes over others.  It is hard to see how adding sugar can make a culture shelf stable indefinitely.  It seems clear that if you mix the rice culture with jaggery/sugar 1:1 you will lower the water activity below the ability of most microbes to grow, but if held at that state over time, the cells of most bacteria and fungi are going to slowly die off, and it seems likely that most protozoans etc will be killed?  

When you change the conditions it seems obvious that you will quickly change the species composition from what you started with.  So do these techniques truly culture wild biology or are they more like sauerkraut where there are all kinds of bacteria/microbes initially but you create conditions that favor very specific suites that do what you want?  If it is the second one, then what organisms are they?  If these steps are in fact a fantastic screening system for extracting the most useful species from wild ecosystems to be used in agricultural contexts that is also interesting, but I'd like to have some explanation as to what species and what they are doing etc.  

I'm hoping that this information exists in some form.  Thanks.

Hello,

 I have recently seen some mention of Korean Natural Farming on a market gardening resource I follow.  I am interested in learning more about the system.  I found a few Youtube videos by Chris Trump and others, and I found this subforum on permies, as well as a large number of very confusing websites that purport to be about various versions/flavors of Asian Natural Farming, whether it be Korean, JADAM, etc.  

I will say that the idea of increasing soil biodiversity by inoculating it with useful native organisms harvested from natural environments is interesting, but I find some of the claims of the effectiveness of these methods to be hard to believe. I am curious about experimenting.  I would also like to better understand these systems by reading some texts from the original sources vs reading materials developed by others.

I would love it if I could be directed to resources where I can read/buy/download a book about Korean Natural Farming by Cho Han Kyu. I have seen a book written by him mentioned, but i cannot FIND it.  Likewise any material about JADAM or EM, etc written explaining the theory/philosophy behind the methods?  

It is strange to me that I can find many places that will explain the recipes for the various preparations, but almost nothing about the rationale for WHY they are made in the way they are, and what they are supposed to do?  I cannot travel to take expensive courses in Hawaii etc.  I do have time to read.