Slowly, slowly I am getting the point that gardening is about mulch because mulch is about good soil and gardening is all about soil quality. I've read it many times but as with so many things in life, doing is my way to learn and eventually accept that others are correct in their advice. The vege garden area which I mulched yesterday is looking better already. I'd mulched around one parsley plant a week or two ago and lifting the peastraw today, the difference between the muched soil and the outlying bare soil was significant. So I added pea straw to my newly composted area that recently held non-performing brassicas tonight and then watered over it with Bokashi liquid (waterd down to some appropriate looking ratio) in the watering can.
That was after I'd buried the latest Bokashi mix in an area of lawn until now untouched by my gardening fingers. Ha ha ha, nothing is safe forever. It is by a boundary fence where the neighbours have lots of large trees so I'd expect the soil nutrients to be all taken up by the tree roots. Since we culled the large bush/tree ruining that area, the lone plant which looks like a zantedeschia of some kind has started to look more healthy and one day it might even get healthy enough to flower for me. So I dug up the soil beside the zantedeschia (canna lilly I think) and found:
1. a few worms. good.
2. dry soil. Par for the course this week, though drier than I'd expected.
3. plastic rubbish. Previous inhabitants of our house have left plastic legacies all over the section.
4. Lots of roots. Expected.
5. Some vertebrae with spiky bits on them. Sharp and not expected. I suspect it is groper bones buried after a fishing outing. I know inhabitants in the past have been keen hunters as one day I met a man who'd once lived here and had arrived to take possession from another town and found the remnants of a recently slaughtered deer in the lounge. I'm pleased to report that much had improved inside our home by the time we bought it 20 years later.
I'm disinclined to plant edibles there at this stage, but flowers could be good. Also thinking of things chickens like, as I may well start the chickens there. When I get them. If I end up having to do a permanent night shelter house rather than a portable one, then that is where it would go.
Where happiness is lurking
1 week ago
3 comments:
Hi Sandra,
Good to hear that your Bokashi waste is being put to good use - nothing better for perking up a bit of poor soil.
Karen, Wiggly Wigglers
The things we gardeners inherit from other people! Sometimes I think the only reason we are around is to clean up other people's messes.
When you think about improving the soil by adding mulch, Bokashi, compost and so on, keep in mind that these are more soil conditioners than anything else. It's great to add them, and they will improve the health of the soil, attract beneficial organisms and reduce compaction.
In particular, one of the great things about adding this kind of thing to the soil is that if something is wrong with your soil it will probably fix it. If your soil is too compact or holds too much water, compost will help it drain better. If you soil is too lose and doesn't hold enough water, compost and mulch will help it hold the moisture in. If the pH if off, compost will help. Almost anything that can be wrong with your soil, adding compost and similar things can help.
Adding all of these things now is a great way to get a garden started, but in the long run it won't be necessary to add so much organic material.
Plants need nutrients to grow, in particular nitrogen, and all these things I just mentioned are not very rich in nutrients. These things all have some nutrients for sure, but adding them to your garden is not a very efficient way of making sure there is enough nitrogen and other nutrients in the soil in the long run.
There is a mindset we've inherited from farmers. Long ago farmers used to maintain nutrient balance in their soil completely with crop rotations. What they discovered was some of the most profitable crops were not necessarily the ones that added the right nutrients to the soil at the right time, and it was a waste of time for them to grow a lot of things like beans and peas. What they discovered is they could grow fewer of these nitrogen fixing crops, if they added certain things to the ground.
This has led to the idea that if things aren't growing right in our garden, we must go to the garden center and buy a box of fertilizer. In modern times, because we are now organic gardeners, this has become the idea that we must add some kind of organic fertilizer to our gardens.
In fact, other than returning your garden's own organic waste by way of composting or another method, your garden doesn't need anything added to it. In fact it's often better not to add anything to it. It's not that with Bokashi or chickens you can't take some things that would otherwise be waste and add them to the garden, but these things are not really necessary in the long run for a healthy garden. In fact the idea of permaculture is specifically managing the inputs and outputs of your garden, and minimizing them where possible. Many people feel very strongly about permaculture ideas.
One of the problems with adding any kind of nutrients to your garden, in particular nitrogen, is there are three kinds of nitrogen. There is the gas in the air we breath, there is soluble nitrogen in manures and commercial fertilizers and there is fixed nitrogen in compost and in the ground. Fixed is by far the most useful to plants. Plants can use a little bit of soluble nitrogen, but when it is added to the ground most of it washes away and often pollutes the environment or is converted to gas and goes into the air. Too much soluble nitrogen (like what is in fresh chicken manure) can burn the roots of plants and kill them.
The best, most efficient and environmentally friendly nitrogen for plants is what is put in the ground by nitrogen fixing plants that are part of a proper crop rotation. Compost, mulch, Bokashi or chicken litter all help too, but there is not enough of the right kind of nitrogen in it in the long run.
If you think you might use this spot for a future vegetable garden, you might want to put a nitrogen fixing plant there. This could be a vegetable of a more ornamental nature like a field pea or a pea or bean you just grow for seeds. I just made a post about nitrogen fixing trees you might want to have a look at, and maybe you want to plant a bush or flower along these lines.
Like the wombles then Patrick!
I have read your nitrogen fixing posts with interest. I've done a green manure crop and a broad bean crop already on different parts of the garden.
Have you read Linda Woodrow's "Permaculture Home Garden"? It's pretty much my permaculture bible and she is big on mulch and returning waste and finding waste from elsewhere and plonking that on also.
I often remind myself that while nature does have its own balancing mechanisms, I am essentially wanting to speed up certain aspects of that in order to gain large amounts of edible food from a small space. Hence I'm confident that mulch and compost and compost teas and chooks (and crop rotation, including nitrogen fixing crops) will be central to my gardening practice for the long run as well as in the short term.
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