Sean Govan

Dr. Redhawk, after reading this thread I have a bunch more questions. Thanks again for putting this out there.

1. Would regular driveway salt (you know, for melting ice) work as a soil amendment if it is 100% halite? Halite has all the same 90 minerals as regular sea salt, right? I ask because this is cheap and abundant at Menards.

2. The bags of halite that I have contain some grayish/blackish chunks. Is this hydrocarbon contamination? If so, will that be a problem for my soil, veggies, or meat?

3. Since beginning rotational grazing this year, I've discovered that I need to scythe under the fence a lot to keep it from shorting out. What do you think of pouring a line of halite under my permanent fencelines to reduce scything? I'm thinking it might keep the plant growth down for a few years, while the minerals slowly spread toward the middle of the pasture through leaching and the food web. Maybe the concentrated salty area would also benefit insects and other wildlife. Or is this a bad idea?

4. Some sites selling sea salt for soil seem to say that all the first 92 elements (of the periodic table) are necessary for optimum plant and animal health. What about things like lead, cadmium, arsenic, mercury, and aluminum? Are these things beneficial in any amount, in any way at all?

5. How to deal with old junkpiles on our property, containing everything from rusty barb wire to asphalt roofing shingles? Bury it in a giant pile of topsoil and wood chips?

6. You mentioned that synthetic nutrients make the soil microbes "fat and lazy" because the plants can just suck up the nutrients. Is that the case for urine?

(The reason I'm using urine is, that I spread some sawdust soaked in cow manure on the garden last winter. Our pigs tilled it into the soil, and then the plants we put there got yellow leaves. So I started pouring diluted urine at the base of the plants every day, and they started greening back up. And now there's huge amounts of mushrooms growing under the shade of the plants. So I feel like the urine activated the mushrooms and they're breaking down the sawdust.)

Thanks for your time,

Sean

By coincidence, I just happened to find that Sam Thayer's new foraging book talks about "natural toilet paper." He has a "best of" index, with the "best" plants to use for toilet paper-- bigleaf aster, and velvetleaf. Perhaps that is the summer solution to the chemical-laced toilet paper problem (if indeed it is a problem outside my own mind). Not sure about winter.

Dr. RedHawk, I have some other burning questions, and you may be the first person I've talked to who can answer them:

1. Can you safely compost cardboard, Kleenex, and junk mail and use it in the garden, or will the chemicals get into the food and hurt you?

2. If you can't use it for vegetables, can you safely use it in other parts of your land? eg, pasture? (That way it gets filtered through  soil organisms, plants, and ruminants before it gets to your body, instead of just soil organisms and plants). Or fruit and nut trees? (That way it gets diluted into a larger plant, so maybe less of it ends up in the food part). Or maybe just ornamentals? (So it doesn't reach your body at all.) Or are we better off just keeping that stuff completely off our land, recycling it until the fibers are too spent to go anywhere but the landfill?

3. The same goes for the toilet paper in humanure compost, a topic which I still find embarrassing but can't get away from. If we don't continually take the minerals that made health-giving food and recycle them into health-giving food, then how can we continue to produce the same quality of food? But if we are mixing them with PFAS and other endocrine disruptors and chemicals in the toilet paper... that doesn't sound good. Do the bad things in toilet paper eventually get broken down by soil microbes? Is there a brand of TP that doesn't have that stuff in it? Should we somehow cultivate our own toilet paper in the form of moss or whatever people used to use? ---or should I just not worry about this topic at all?

4. My sister married a conventional dairy farmer, and I milk cows for them. So I have access to all the fresh manure I want. But if I put straight manure/urine on my garden soil, will it hurt the microbes? (Too much soluble nitrogen?)

5. My brother-in-law cuts hay, and spreads manure on it afterwards to help it grow back faster. Is this a bad idea? It doesn't seem to hurt the grass, is it causing damage long-term?

6. He beds his heifer barn with fresh sawdust from a local sawmill, and spreads that everytime he cleans it out. So with all that carbon to absorb the nitrogen, I'm not worried about burning my microbes. Should I worry about the Ag chemicals in our food, such as the popular weed killer that starts with an R?

If you've addressed these topics farther on in your soil series, then feel free to point me that direction, I am reading through it and I will get there eventually. Thanks again for your time.

Sean

PS I just found out thar certain chemicals can only be talked about in the cider press or pm, so I'm not sure I'm allowed to publish this here. If not, I don't mind if the moderators delete it, that's ok. I will just try to figure out how to pm Dr. Redhawk

Thanks Dr. RedHawk.

Eric, it sounds to me like the differences between your system and Ruth Stout's system are very minimal. After reading three of her books, I've concluded that Ruth Stout gardening can be defined as "year round deep mulch of any kind with no tillage, except possibly the first year."

She would put transplants directly into the mulch, rather than the soil underneath. As for seeds, she did one of two things:

1. In her first method, she would rake aside the top layers of mulch and planted in the soil, covering the soil with a board until germination. After germination, she would remove the board, and slowly replace the hay mulch around the plants as they got taller.

2. In the other case, particularly for carrots, she would not disturb the mulch at all. She would simply spread peat moss on top of the hay mulch, and plant into that. The carrots or whatever would then grow down through the mulch, and eventually into the soil.

One reason I'm asking is that I had our pigs till the garden this spring. They did a great job of knocking back the weeds in the one area that didn't get mulched thick enough last year. (Last year I tried Ruth Stout, and the slugs absolutely killed me). I rotated them through so they wouldn't spend too much time in any one spot and compact it. They tilled in the rotten mulch quite nicely, and brought up rocks for us to pick. As well as adding their own natural fertilizer.

I really like the idea of Ruth Stout and no-till, it's just that I have to figure out something for the slugs. Also the cold soil took forever to warm up in spring, which is a big deal in Zone 3, when winter comes back quickly and every day of growth counts.

I just got Sam Thayer's new 736-page foraging book. Near the end he has a section on finding edible wild plants by habitat and season. Quote:

"Regardless of the habitat, astute foragers learn to look for fertility and disturbance, because both of these factors tend to increase the abundance of edible wild plants. Disturbance is any event that kills plants, resulting in gaps or empty growing spaces where new plants can colonize. These rapidly growing pioneer plants are more likely to be edible." (p. 690)

A couple thoughts:

1. Pigs mix and aerate the surface organic matter, causing it to rot faster and potentially release nutrients faster. So temporarily more fertility, as well as disturbance. Therefore they create ideal conditions for edible wild plants to grow. This is good for a permaculture food forest, right?

2. I guess another word for "ruderal" species is "pioneer" species. The pioneer plants are the first ones to show up after a disturbance, like brambles after logging. Maybe another term would be "early successional."

3. This strengthens my thought that natural pig activity helps create more food for the pigs, similar to natural bison activity helping create more food for the bison. They eat whatever we can eat, but they digest the cellulose parts better due to their big cecum.

Thanks Dr. Redhawk for all this info. A couple questions occurred to me in reading this thread, if you have time.

1. I'm gutting an old house--what do you think of mixing the drywall into the soil? (for gypsum)

2. How do you filter your water to 0.1 microns to get the antibiotics and other drugs out of it?

3. The soil in my area is clay, full of round rocks of all sizes. Farmers constantly have to pick rocks. Every field has huge rockpiles next to it. Frost pushes new rocks out of the ground every year, which need to get picked, making the rockpiles bigger. (Northwoods of Wisconsin, zone 3, frost line 48"). Parts of my pasture that my pigs have tilled look like they were paved in cobblestones, I have a feeling that isn't good for regrowing forage. (Pigs tend to bring all rocks to the surface and bury the soil underneath them). Now, you mentioned that when topsoil touches bedrock, it breaks the bedrock down to make new soil, so I guess the same is true of these round rocks. Is there any low-tech way to dramatically speed up the process of breaking down all these rocks? Do I need to pick all the rocks? Is it beneficial at all to have rocks on the surface?

4. Also, so far I have a very weak grasp of the till vs. no-till debate, so this may not be the right place to ask this question... but I can't help noticing that tillage occurs here and there in nature (eg pigs rooting, grizzly bears digging for roots, elephants tipping over trees to eat the root bark, maybe other examples). Is this natural tillage as bad as the man-made tillage?

5. What is the worst thing about tillage? Is it the pulverization, or the flipping upside down, or what? What if we just flipped big chunks with a plow, like pigs do, and planted into that? Wouldn't each chunk then still have an intact microbial community?

I just googled "plants found in disturbed soil" and found that such plants are referred to as "ruderal."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruderal_species

I'm looking for plants that could grow in between the trees, provide an underground food source for the pigs, and recover quickly after rooting.

This may be what Joel was talking about:

https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/publicworks/trees/oak-decline

"To understand why we see oaks dying in Fairfax County we need to look back at how humans have shaped today’s hardwood forests over the past three centuries. Prior to the arrival and expansion of European settlers in Virginia, fires from lightning and controlled burns created forests with diverse species and age classes. By the turn of the 20th century, most of the land had been burned and logged for wood procurement and agricultural development, which favored fire-resistant species like oaks. Enactment of fire suppression and land conservation policies during this time allowed the existing oak forests to become dense with fire-intolerant species. Fairfax County was mostly agricultural until the mid-1900s when the land urbanized quickly. What remains today are mixed woods with a generation of mature and overmature oaks from the turn of the 20th century, which have survived devastating spongy moth infestations and droughts. These old oaks may appear to die suddenly and without reason, but, in fact, they have weakened over many years of stress until they could no longer defend themselves from otherwise harmless pests or diseases."

Still, rooting is a far different disturbance from fire. Oaks may be fire resistant, but that doesn't make them pig-resistant.

Another reason I want my pigs to live off the land: I don't believe in organic grain from the feed mill. 80% of the organic-labeled grain that is fed to American animals is from other countries, and even many American farmers cheat. Most are just conventional guys who got a label for the money. If I'm buying organic grain raised by someone I don't know, then in my book it's not organic.

Also, I think grain is for people not animals. If we stop feeding animals grain, then all that land can go back to pasture and start building soil. I don't think our ancestors 1000 years ago were feeding much grain to their animals, because they had to do all the labor without modern equipment. In other words, most farmland was pasture. If I'm wrong then please correct me. (Joel says somewhere that calves were fattened in ancient Egypt by locking them up to prevent exercise, and bringing them all the forage they could eat, fresh-cut with a scythe. Now THAT I bet was awesome fat. I think that 1000 years ago in China, people were doing something similar to fatten pigs. Now how about that, a fat pig on a feral-pig diet).