Well, here it is, folks: my Big Garden Hope.
Two and a half months ago, I started systematically mulching my garden beds with rabbit and chicken manure. I liked the "closed loop" of fertility, and it felt right, but only today have I begun to grasp where this could be leading. My current hypothesis:
*Regular manure mulch spreads will replace fertility and organic matter (combined with leaf mulching, and there is straw in the manure) to maintain bed fertility at a level that other fertilizer (outsourced) will be unnecessary.
*I will not have to DIG these beds (this is a hypothesis -- stay posted), protecting the microherds of bacteria and funghi as well as long-term tilth and fertility. All of that, and my ease as well.
*Because I will not be turning whole beds at a time to mix in compost or manure, I will be able to take out and add in individual plants year-round, relaxing my bed "planning" to a degree. For example, in one bed, there are a mix of young lettuce and swiss chard. The lettuce may go to seed in a month while the swiss chard goes on -- and could last until next winter. Now, I will not need to carefully dig around the chard and risk fertility for those or tear out the chard completely. I can just remove the lettuce and plant something else.
*As I am able to remove and add plants at my leisure, there is a natural movement toward integrating perennials and annuals (as I have been wanting to do for some time). It is a more balanced approach in terms of taking nutrients from the soil and, again, supporting the no-dig bent which will protect the natural processes that support the structure and life of the soil.
I don't know how the rest of you are doing it out there, and I'd love to hear. Post a comment if you have some wisdom to share (or maybe you've been doing this for a year or so and can tell me what's what).
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12 years ago
3 comments:
Yes, I definitely think you are on to something there, Kristin. A mix-and-match approach, depending on various crop types, is obviously needed, but the foundational trajectory - toward building up-and-up-and-up, while encouraging uninterrupted soil biology, is, I sense, sound. I am, as you know, a big fan of the way you are incorporating your chicken and rabbit poop into this dynamic. On a small, home-scale, my sense is your fertility management is as about as sophisticated as it gets.
Some crop types don't quite lend themselves to this approach. Potatoes, for example, which have to be dug up with all the soil disturbance that goes with such a requirement. But I recall visiting the garden of one very experienced hand a few years back and he pointed me at his potato patch in which he had been growing potatoes for the previous 12 years! Which suggests that even with crops which have traditionally been cultivated with much in the way of annual soil disturbance, there is room for greater constancy. The shift to perennial grains has very significant implications in this regard, perhaps. All told, I have a strong sense we will be moving toward crop types and varieties which better lend themselves to the type of management approach you are exploring. Who knows, if you begin saving seed, you may well find yourself selecting on this very basis.
I keep harking back to Bill Mollison's notion of the 'designer as recliner' - the idea that what we paradise-gardeners aspire to is the creation of self-supporting, self-sustaining food forest ecologies in which Nature takes care of the foundational garden needs, such as fertility and disease-management, while the gardener spends more time in her or his hammock, making art, music and children. I sense, there will come a time in the years ahead, when we have restored ourselves and our world to a point where we will derive much of our food from within a hands-grasp of an Edenic wonderland. The native american memory is that our landscapes hereabouts were once absolutely loaded with food. This reality, updated to incorporate the astounding wealth of plant and animal resources and knowhow of our 'modern' experience, seems not too much to hope for.
The fertility approach you are exploring also explains why, of course, so many of us have such a keen interest in nitrogen-fixing plants. The low-growing white clover seed you saved me from your backyard, I grew up and have been transplanting around my garden. I transplanted baby native vetches a month or two back (they didn't much care for the experience, but they have taken) and, of course, I have been planting more lupin and ceonothus this year. On the annuals front, my garden is now chock-a-block with nitrogen-fixing favas in full swing, which I think I will chop down in the next week or so and incorporate in place. I am very much inclined to move toward an approach which simply annihilates the distinction between garden and compost pile - even as I have spent the past week or so building two big new piles with an eye to fertilizing my winter crops in August. When I ever get my act together to begin incorporating animals into my garden ecology, as you so fascinatingly do, perhaps I will be excused, in part, the back-breaking labor of cutting grass by hand around my landscape, and moving it, along with the manure and leaves I shipped in, to a compost pile, thence to move it back out to the garden again.
By the by, listening to you muse about the place of mulch plants has foundationally shifted my understanding of the place of trees in my landscape. All those alder trees I put in three years ago - because they were given to me? I now regard them as important not only for their nitrogen-fixing qualities, but for the leaf-mulch they will be gifting me, in time. I am constantly made aware how much I learn from your experiential insights into gardening and the hypotheses they birth.
You got it!
I gave up the big spring push a few years back. Also digging, except initially in some cases. It feels better to be always harvesting, always starting new seeds, always moving stuff. I move everything, even perennials and nothing seems to do more than wilt a couple of days.
Plants are much hardier than people think if they have adequate nutritution for a start (like people!). You also have to know the cycle of a plant. Lettuce and other annuals can be moved all over before they want to go to seed. As soon as they know it's time to go to seed, any kind of stress will make that worse. But with more plants going in all the time, plants can go to seed.
These days I'm totally against the traditional garden that goes in in the spring into dug and fertilized beds. I also made many changeovers from annuals to their perennial cousins. But I still move all the perennials!
You don't need to be that careful digging around the chard. If the chard has a good root system, it won't be as close to the surface as is the norm in gardens.
My philosophy was always, "try it and see what happens."
Fun! Way to go, girl!
p.s. Nick
You can eat the alder leaves in your salad.
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