New garden tools.

[DogDiesel]

Hello,
I've ordered a [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] test kit and a Stirrup hoe. I bought a rake, I've yet
to setup my compost bin.

I'm trying to figure whats better for turning soil about a foot down.
The top 6 inches or so have been tilled . Underneath is hard packed.
Should I get a [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] fork , broadfork, or a shovel. I don't want to break
the [Only registered and activated users can see links. ]. I saw narrow long shovels in Home Depot today.

Thanks Diesel.

[Nad R]

"DogDiesel" <nospam@nospam.none> wrote:

Pointy Shovel for turning [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] a foot deep.
Transfer Shovel for moving soil or finished compost.
[Only registered and activated users can see links. ] rake with a one side that is flat for leveling soil.
Six or more prong [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] forks are best for turning a compost pile.
Broad fork is a luxury item if you have lots of soil to turn that is
already loose.
A "half moon" edging [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] is a nice tool for creating a nice sharp looking
boarder.

As for breaking [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] I find wood is worse. I prefer fiberglass or all
steel, cheap steel will bend and wood breaks to easy.

Now if you have money to burn a John Deer tractor or a Bobcat.... Sweet !

--
Enjoy Life... Nad R (Garden in zone 5a Michigan)

[DogDiesel]

"Nad R" <nadr@positivegogetter.cooldude> wrote in message
news:ihbr7b$43b$1@news.eternal-september.org...


I appreciate the reply. A good Ole shovel is still the way. I saw two good
ones at Home Depot. The broad forks look cool . With two handles, but I
wasn't sure it would break or not.

[DogDiesel]

"Baz" <baz@fawlty.com> wrote in message
news:Xns9E7783961486Ebazfawltycom@69.16.176.253...




It looks like im going to be shoveling dirt. I want to go a foot down and
turn it over. Mix in my straw and some peat and sand.

[Billy]

In article <ihjtqd$3d3$1@dogdiesel.eternal-september.org>,
"DogDiesel" <nospam@nospam.none> wrote:


Turning [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] once, when you first prepare a [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] bed, is a good idea
(not needed but it will speed up development of the garden soil).
Subsequent turning undoes the work of your earthworms and mycorrhiza.
What it does is aerate the soil, which accelerates the decomposition of
the soils organic content, which releases nutrients to feed your plants,
but leads to loss of organic matter in your soil, and possibly consuming
the soils nitrogen, leaving none for your plants. It's much easier to
work with nature using no-till approaches such as lasagna gardening, or
sheet [Only registered and activated users can see links. ].
--
- Billy
³When you give food to the poor, they call you a saint. When you ask why the poor have no food, they call you a communist.²
-Archbishop Helder Camara
[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]
[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]
20111812130964689.html

[Billy]

In article <Xns9E77C50804071bazfawltycom@69.16.176.253>,
Baz <baz@fawlty.com> wrote:


I doubt crainal-rectally inverted, such as yourself, would understand,
but here goes. Please excuse the paucity of invectives that I know you
rely on to communicate, and apologies for lack of any pictures that are
probably necessary to maintain your attention. This forum is usually
used by adults, but give it a go anyway. You have nothing to lose, but
your profound ignorance.

Gaia's [Only registered and activated users can see links. ], Second Edition: A Guide To Home-Scale Permaculture
(Paperback)
by Toby Hemenway
[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]
580298/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1271266976&sr=1-1

p.74
It's early autumn, and the oak tree in an untended corner of your
neighbor's yard is shedding its leaves. One dry leaf nutters down
between tall blades of unmown [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] and settles on a patch of bare [Only registered and activated users can see links. ].
At first, not much happens, because the
leaf is too dry to be appetizing to any of the soil's many denizens
(we'll assume your neighbor doesn't spray pesticides or herbicides on
this corner of her
yard, as these chemicals greatly diminish soil life). Also, this leaf,
like most, contains nasty-tasting compounds to protect it from munching
insects.
The next morning, though, dew has wetted the leaf, and the protective
chemicals have begun to leach out. A light drizzle accelerates the
washing
process. The leaf droops moistly against the soil. When the leaf is
rinsed free of polyphenols and the other bitter-tasting compounds and
tenderized by
moisture, the feast begins. Among the first at the table are bacteria
that have lain dormant on the leaf surface. They revel in the moisture
and begin to
bloom, secreting enzymes that tear apart the long chains of sugar
molecules composing' the leaf cell walls. In just hours, the leaf is
speckled with the
dark blotches of bacterial colonies. Wind-bome spores of fungi land and
burst into life, and soon the white threads of fungal cells, called
hyphae, knit
a lacework across the leaf. Fungi possess a broad spectrum of enzymes
able to digest lignin (the tough molecules that make wood so strong) and
other hard-to-eat components of plants. This gives them a critical niche
in the web of decomposers; without them, Earth might be neck-deep in
fallen, undecomposable tree trunks.

Moistened by rain and softened by microbial feeding, the leaf quickly
succumbs to attack by larger creatures. Millipedes, pill bugs (isopods),
fly larvae, springtails, oribatid mites, enchytraeid worms, and
earthworms begin to feed on the tasty tissue, shredding the leaf into
small scraps. All of these invertebrates, together with bacteria, algae,
fungi, and
threadlike fungal relatives called actinomycetes, are the first to dine
on rotting organic matter. They are called the primary decomposers.
Earthworms are the most visible and among the most important primary
decomposers, so let's watch one as it feeds on our leaf.

The earthworm grabs a leaf chunk and slithers into its burrow. With its
rasping mouthparts, the worm pulverizes the leaf fragment, sucking in
soil at the same time. The mixture churns its way to the worm's gizzard,
where surging muscles grind the leaf and soil mixture into a fine paste.
The paste moves deeper into the earthworm's gut. Here bacteria help with
digestion, much as our own gut flora helps us process otherwise
unavailable nutrients from our food. When the worm has wrung all the
nutrients from the paste, it excretes what remains of the leaf and soil,
along with gut bacteria caught in the paste. These worm castings coat
the burrow with fertile, organically enriched earth. Before long, hungry
bacteria, fungi, and microscopic soil animals will find this cache of
organic matter and flourish in walls of the burrow, adding their own
excretions and dead bodies to the supply.

Fueled by the leaf's nutrients, the worm tunnels deeper into the ground,
loosening, aerating, and fertilizing the soil. Rain will trickle down
the burrow, threading moisture deeper into the earth than previously.
The soil will stay damp a little longer between rains. In spring, a
growing root from the oak tree will find this burrow, and, coaxed by the
easy passage and the tunnel's lining of organic food, will extend deep
enough to tap that stored moisture. The worm, with its fertile castings
and a burrow that lets air, water, and roots penetrate the earth, will
have aided the oak tree and much of the other life in the soil. Worms
are among the most beneficial of soil animals: They turn over as much as
twenty-five tons of soil per acre per year, or the equivalent of one
inch of lopsoil over Earth's land surface every ten years.

Meanwhile, on the surface, the feasting inver-

p.75
tebrates continue to shred the leaf into tiny bits‹or comminute it, in
soil-specialist parlance. Comminution exposes more leaf surface‹tender
inner edges at that‹to attack by bacteria and fungi, further hastening
decomposition. Also, the small army of mites, larvae, and other
invertebrates feeding on the leaf deposit a fair load of droppings, or
frass, which also becomes food for other decomposers (a microscope
reveals that many decomposing leaves are thickly covered with frass,
which adds up to an enormous amount of fertile [Only registered and activated users can see links. ]). Any leaf bits
that aren't fully digested un their first passage through a decomposer's
gut are eaten again and again by one tiny being after another until the
organic matter is mashed into microscopic particles. Soil invertebrates
such as worms and mites don't really alter the chemical composition of
the leaf‹their job is principally to pulverize litter. Their scurrying
and tunneling also mixes the leaf particles with soil, where the
fragments stay moist and palatable for others. In some cases, the
animals' gut microbes can break down tenacious large molecules such as
chitin, keratin, and cellulose into their simpler sugarlike components.
The real alchemy‹the chemical transformation of the leaf into humus and
plant food‹is done by microorganisms.

As the soil animals reduce the leaf to droppings and microscopic
particles, a second wave of

bacteria, fungi, and other microbes descends on the remains. Using
enzymes and the rest of their metabolic chemistry sets, these microbes
snap large
molecules into small, edible fragments. Cellulose and lignin, the tough
components of plant cell walls, are cleaved into tasty sugars and
aromatic carbon rings. Other microbes hack long chains of leaf protein
into short ammo acid pieces. Some of these microbes are highly
specialized, able to break down only a few types of molecules, but soil
diversity is immense‹a teaspoon of soil may hold 5,000 species of
bacteria, each with a different set of chemical [Only registered and activated users can see links. ]. Thus, working
together, this veritable orchestra of thousands of species of bacteria,
fungi, algae, and others fully decompose not only our sample leaf but
almost anything else it encounters.

Besides breaking down organic matter, these microbes also build up soil
structure. As they feed, certain soil bacteria secrete gums, waxes, and
gels that hold tiny particles of earth together. Dividing fungal cells
lengthen into long fingers of hyphae that surround crumbs of soil and
bind them to each
other. These miniclumps give microbially rich soil its good "tilth": the
loose, crumbly structure that gardeners and farmers strive for. Also,
these gooey microbial by-products protect soil from drying and
allow it to hold huge volumes of water. Without soil life, earth just
dries up and blows away or clumps together after a rain and forms
clay-bound, root-
thwarting clods.

Microbes don't live long‹just hours or days. As they die, larger
microbes and soil animals consume their bodies. Also, predators abound
in the soil ecosystem. Voracious amoebae lurk in films of soil moisture,
ready to engulf a hapless bacterium. Mold mites, springtails, certain
beetles, and a host of others feed on the primary decomposers and are
called, in turn, secondary decomposers. Larger predators feed on the
secondary (and some primary) decomposers that have come to our leaf.
These are centipedes, ground beetles, pseudoscorpions, predatory mites,
ants, and spiders, also known as the tertiary decomposers.

Although this order‹primary, secondary, and tertiary decomposers‹seems
to suggest a linear hierarchy, the boundaries are not hard-and-fast. The
frass and dead body of even the largest spider become food for bacteria
and other primary decomposers, so it's hard to say who's on top. Soil
ecology is a set of nested cycles, and a detailed drawing of it would be
laced with arrows, almost blackened with the interconnections that tie
the life and death of each species to many of the others.

How Humus Is Made

Now our leaf is almost fully decomposed. How, then, does it become plant
food‹how does it return to life and reconnect to plants and to our
garden?
The leaf's contents (those that don't forever recycle in life or
dissipate as gases) end up as one of two substances, humus or minerals.
Both are critical to healthy plants. We'll look at humus first.

As our leaf is shredded, chewed, and chemically dissolved by soil
organisms, some parts of the leaf decompose more quickly than others.
The first tissues to go are those made of sugars and starches, which
soil life quickly converts into energy, carbon dioxide, or more
organisms. A little harder to digest are celluloses and some types of
proteins, which are chains and sheets of tightly linked small molecules.
Not all soil organisms have the special enzymes needed to break the
crisscrossed bonds that hold these polymers together, so these compounds
decompose more slowly. Even tougher to break down are polymers known as
lignins, which give wood its strength; chitins, which make up the
armored coats of insects; and certain types of waxes. Only specialized
soil organisms, particularly fungi, can break down these tenacious
molecules. Organisms that can't crack these hardy compounds nevertheless
give it their best shot. Microbes work

p.77
them over, nibbling and modifying the portions they can digest. In a
process that is still poorly understood, microbes and other forces of
decomposition convert lignins and the other hard-core leaf compounds
into humus, a fairly stable, complex collection of many substances that
only slowly undergoes further decomposition. Humus is made up mostly of
carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen, bonded together in ways that
make it difficult for soil organisms to break them down into the
constituent elements.

In a sense, humus is the end of the road for organic matter: By the time
our leaf's remains have reached the humus stage, decomposition has
slowed to a snail's pace. Since organisms can't easily break down humus,
it accumulates in the soil. It will eventually decompose, but in healthy
soil, freshly composting debris arrives at least as fast as the old
humus is broken down, resulting in a slow turnover and constant buildup
of humus.

When pushed, soil organisms can decompose humus, but only grudgingly and
usually if there is nothing else to eat. If humus levels are dropping,
it's a sign that the soil is in very bad shape. It means that all of the
easily digestable organic matter is gone, and the inhabitants are, in
effect, burning down the house to keep warm. Humus is critical to soil
health; thus, wise gardeners keep their soil rich in humus. For now
we'll see why; later we'll learn how.

Of all the ingredients of soil, humus is by far the best at holding
moisture and will absorb four to six times its weight in water. Have you
ever tried to pick up a wet bale of peat moss? It's monstrously heavy,
and it will take months to dry out. Peat moss isn't exactly humus‹it's
organic matter that's been arrested on its way to becoming humus because
peat bogs lack the oxygen for decomposers to finish the job‹but hoisting
a wet bale of peat moss gives some idea of how well humus holds
moisture.

Humus also swells when it's wet, so humus-rich soil will gently heave
upward after a rain. As this soil dries, the humus shrinks, leaving air
spaces between soil crumbs. This expanding and shrinking process
lightens the soil, acting a little like tilling but with far less
disruption and damage to the soil life. In humusy, fluffed-up earth,
roots and soil organisms can easily tunnel in search of nutrients, and
these travelers further aerate the soil. Water penetrates the loosened
soil more deeply and is stored longer by the humus. Here is another
life-enhancing positive feedback loop: Humus allows moisture and soil
organisms to move deeper into the soil, where they create more humus,
allowing yet deeper penetration, building humus again, and so on.

Where humus really excels is in holding nutrients. The humus molecule
illustrated below shows that, from an atom's-eye viewpoint, the face
that humus presents to the world is a bristling array of oxygen atoms.
Oxygen has a strong negative charge, and in chemistry, as in much of
life, opposites attract. Thus, humus's many negative oxygen atoms serve
as "bait" for luring lots of positively charged elements. These include
some of the most important nutrients for both plants and soil animals:
potassium, calcium, magnesium,
p.78
ammonium (a nitrogen compound), copper, zinc, manganese, and many
others. Under the right conditions (in soil with a pH near 7, that is,
neither too acid nor too alkaline), humus can pick up and
store enormous quantities of positively charged nutrients.

How do these nutrients move from the humus to plants? Plant roots, as
noted, secrete very mild acids which break the bonds that hold the
nutrients onto the humus. The nutrients from humus are washed into the
soil moisture, creating a rich soup. Bathed in this nutritious broth,
the plants can absorb as much calcium, ammonium, or other nutrient as
they need. There's evidence to suggest that when plants have supped long
enough, they stop the flow of acid to avoid depleting the humus.

That's the direct method plants use to pull nutrients from humus. Just
as common in healthy soil is an indirect route, in which microbes are
the middlemen. This type of plant feeding involves an exchange. Roots
secrete sugars and vitamins that are ideal food for beneficial bacteria
and fungi. These microbes thrive in huge numbers close to roots and even
attach to them, lapping up the plant-made food
and bathing in the film of moisture that surrounds the roots. In return,
the microbes produce acids and enzymes that release the humus-bound
nutrients and share this food with the plants.

Microbes also excrete food for plants in their waste. One more big plus
for plants is that many of the fungi and other microbes secrete
antibiotics that protect the plants from disease. All of these mutual
exchanges create a truly symbiotic relationship. Many plants have become
dependent on particular species of microbial partners and grow poorly
without them. Even when the plant-microbe partnership isn't this
specific, plants often grow much faster when microbes are present than
they do in a sterile or microbe-depleted environment.

The Soil's Mineral Wealth

Having covered humus, let's look at the parts of our leaf that meet a
mineral fate. Like most living things, leaves are made primarily of
carbon-containing compounds: sugars, proteins, starches, and many other
organic molecules. When soil creatures eat these compounds, some of the
carbon becomes part of the consumer, as cell membrane,
wing case, eyeball, or the like. And some of the carbon is released as a
gas: carbon dioxide, or CO, (our breath contains carbon dioxide for the
same reason). Soil organisms consume the other elements that make up the
leaf, too, such as nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, and all the rest, but
most of those are reincorporated into solid matter‹organism or bug
manure‹and remain earthbound. A substantial portion of the carbon,
however, puffs into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. This means that,
in decomposing matter, the ratio of carbon to the other elements is
decreasing; carbon drifts into the air, but most nitrogen, for example,
stays behind. The carbon-to-nitrogen ratio decreases. (Compost
enthusiasts will recognize this C:N ratio as a critical element of a
good compost pile.) In decomposition, carbon levels drop quickly, while
the amounts of the other elements in our decomposing leaf stay roughly
the same.

By the time the final rank of soil organisms, the microbes, is finished
swarming over the leaf and digesting it, most of the consumable
carbon‹that which is not tied up as humus‹is gone. Little remains but
inorganic (non-carbon-containing) compounds, such as phosphate, nitrate,
sulfate, and other chemicals that most gardeners will recognize from the
printing on bags of fertilizer. That's right: Microbes make plant
fertilizer right in the soil. This process of stripping the inorganic
plant food from organic, carbon-containing compounds and returning it to
the soil is called mineralization. Minerals‹the nitrates and phosphates
and others‹are tiny, usually highly mobile molecules

p.79
that dissolve easily in water. This means that, once the minerals in
organic debris are released or fertilizer is poured onto the soil, these
mineral nutrients don't hang around long but are easily leached out
of soil by rain.

Conventional wisdom has it that plant root are the main imbibers of soil
minerals and that plants can only absorb these minerals (fertilizers) if
they are in a water-soluble form, but neither premise is
true. Roots occupy only a tiny fraction of the soil, so most soil
minerals‹and most chemical fertilizers‹never make direct contact with
roots. Unless these isolated, lonely minerals are snapped up by
humus or soil organisms, they leach away. It's the humus and the life in
the soil that keep the earth fertile by holding on to nutrients that
would otherwise wash out of the soil into streams, lakes, and
eventually the ocean.

Agricultural chemists have missed the boat with their soluble
fertilizers; they're doing things the hard way by using an engineering
approach rather than an ecological one. Yes, plants are quite capable
of absorbing the water-soluble minerals in chemical fertilizer. But
plants often use only 10 percent of the fertilizer that's applied and
rarely more than 50 percent. The rest washes into the groundwater,
which is why so many wells in our farmlands are polluted with toxic
levels of nitrates.

Applying fertilizer the way nature does‹tied to organic matter‹uses far
less fertilizer and also saves the energy consumed in producing,
shipping and applying it. It also supports a broad assortment of soil
life, which widens the base of our living pyramid and enhances rather
than reduces biodiversity. In addition, plants get a balanced diet
instead of being force-fed and are healthier. It's well documented that
plants grown on soil rich in organic matter are more disease- and
insect-resistant than plants in carbon-poor soil.

In short, a properly tuned ecological garden rarely needs soluble
fertilizers because plants and soil animals can knock nutrients loose
from humus and organic debris (or clay, another nutrient storage
source) using secretions of mild acid and enzymes. Most of the nutrients
in healthy soil are "insoluble yet available," in the words of soil
scientist William Albrecht. These nutrients, bound to organic matter or
cycling among fast-living microbes,won't' wash out of the soil yet can
be gently coaxed loose ‹ or traded for sugar secretions‹ by roots. And
the plants take up only what they need. This turns out to be very
little, since plants are 85 percent water, and much of the rest is
carbon from the air. A fat half-pound tomato, for example, only draws
about 50 milligrams of phosphorus and 500 milligrams of potassium from
the soil. That's easy to replace in a humus-rich garden that uses
mulches, composts, and nutrient-accumulating plants.

A Question of Balance

Sometimes gardening books single out soil organisms as bad guys‹they
supposedly "lock up" nutrients, making them unavailable for plants. In
an imbalanced soil, this is true. Soil life is much more mobile than
plants and has a speedier metabolism. When hungry, microbes can grab
nutrients faster than roots. As William Albrecht says, "Microbes dine at
the first table." If the soil life is starved by poor soil, microbes
certainly won't pass on any food to plants.

For example, a common soil problem is too little nitrogen. Nitrogen is
used in proteins and cell membranes, and plants lacking this nutrient
are pale and anemic. Gardeners are often admonished not to use wood
shavings or straw as a soil amendment because they lead to nitrogen
deficiency. This is because shavings and straw, though good sources of
carbon, are very low in nitrogen (see Table 4-1). These nitrogen-poor
amendments are fine for use as mulch, on top of the soil, but when they
are mixed into the soil with a spade or tiller, decomposer organisms,
which need a balanced diet

p.80
of about twenty to thirty parts carbon for each part nitrogen, go on a
carbon-fueled rampage. It's analogous to the whopping metabolic rush
that a big dose of sugar can give you: a great short-term blast, but one
that depletes other nutrients and leaves you drained.

To balance this straw-powered carbon feast, soil life grabs every bit of
available nitrogen, eating, breeding, and growing as fast as the low
levels of this nutrient will allow. The ample but imbalanced food
triggers a population explosion among the microbes. Soon the secondary
and tertiary decomposers (beetles, spiders, ants), spurred by a surge in
their prey, are also breeding like fury. Whenever any valuable nitrogen
is released in the form of dead bodies or waste, some tiny, hungry
critter instantly consumes it before plants can. The plant roots lose
out because the microbes dine at the first table. This madly racing but
lopsided feeding frenzy won't diminish until the overabundant carbon is
either consumed or balanced by imports of nitrogen‹from the air via
bacteria that pull nitrogen from the air, from animal manure, or from an
observant gardener with a bag of blood meal.

The same lockups occur when other nutrients are lacking in the soil.
Until the soil life is properly fed, the plants can't eat. Conventional
farming gets around this problem by flooding- the soil with inorganic
fertilizer, ten times what the plants can consume. But this, the
engineer's approach rather than the biologist's, creates water pollution
and problem-prone plants. The soil life, and the soil itself, suffers
from the imbalance.

Here's what happens to soil life after overzealous application of
chemical fertilizer. Mixing inorganic fertilizer with soil creates a
surplus of mineral nutrients (an excess is always needed, since so much
washes away). Now the food in short supply is carbon. Once again, the
soil life roars into a feeding frenzy, spurred by the more-than-ample
nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium in typical

p.81
NPK fertilizers. Since organisms need about twenty parts carbon for
every one of nitrogen, it isn't long before any available carbon is
pulled from the soil's organic matter to match all that nitrogen and
tied up in living bodies. These organisms exhale carbon dioxide, so a
proportion of carbon is lost with each generation. First the easily
digestible organic matter is eaten, then, more slowly, the humus.
Eventually nearly all the soil's carbon is gone (chemically fed soils
are notoriously poor in organic matter), and the soil life, starved of
this essential food, begins to die. Species of soil organisms that can't
survive the shortages go extinct locally. Some of these creatures may
play critical roles, perhaps secreting antibiotics to protect plants, or
transferring an essential nutrient, or breaking down an otherwise
inedible compound. With important links missing, the soil life falls far
out of balance. Natural predators begin to die off, so some of their
prey organisms, no longer kept in check in this torn food web, surge in
numbers and become pests.

Sadly, many of the creatures that remain after this mineral overdose are
those that have learned to survive on the one remaining source of
carbon: your plants. Burning carbon out of the soil with chemical
fertilizers can actually select for disease organisms. All manner of
chomping, sucking, mildewing, blackening, spotting horrors descend on
the vegetation. With the natural controls gone and disease ravishing
every green thing, humans must step in with sprays. But the
now-destructive organisms have what they need to thrive‹the food and
shelter of garden plants‹and they will breed whenever the now-essential
human intervention diminishes. The gardener is locked on a chemical
treadmill. It's a losing battle, reflected in the fact that we use
twenty times the pesticides we di d fifty years ago, yet crop losses to
insects and disease have doubled, according to USDA statistics.

The other harm done by injudicious use of chemical fertilizers is to the
soil itself. As organic matter is burned up by wildly feeding soil life,
the soil loses its ability to hold water and air. Its tilth is
destroyed. The desperate soil life feeds on the humus itself, the food
of last resort. With humus and all other organic matter gone, the soil
loses its fluffy, friable structure and collapses. Clayey soil compacts
to [Only registered and activated users can see links. ]; silty soil desiccates to dust and blows away.

In contrast, ample soil life boosts both the soil structure and the
health of your plants. When the soil food web is chock-full of
diversity, diseases are held in check. If a bacterial blight begins to
bloom, a balanced supply of predators grazes this food surplus back into
line. When a fungal disease threatens, microbial and insect denizens are
there to capitalize on this new supply of their favorite food.

Living soil is the foundation of a healthy garden.

To Till or Not to Till

We've seen that organic matter keeps soil light and fluffy and easy for
roots to penetrate. What then about the mechanical methods used for
breaking up soil?

The invention of the plow ranks as one of the great steps forward for
humanity. Farmers know that plowing releases locked-up soil fertility.
Plowing also keeps down weeds and thoroughly mingles surface litter with
the soil. We do all this, too, when we drag our power-tiller out of the
garage and push the snorting beast through the garden beds in a cloud of
blue smoke.

What's really happening during tilling? By churning the soil, we're
flushing it with fresh air. All that oxygen invigorates the soil life,
which zooms into action, breaking down organic matter and plucking
minerals from humus and rock particles. Tilling also breaks up the soil,
greatly increasing its surface area by creating many small clumps out of
big ones. Soil microbes then colonize these fresh surfaces, extracting
more nutrients and exploding in population.

p.82
This is great for the first season. The blast of nutrients fuels
stunning plant growth, and the harvest is bountiful. But the life in
tilled soil releases far more nutrients than the plants can use. Unused
fertility leaches away in rains. The next year's tilling burns up more
organic matter, again releasing a surfeit of fertility that is washed
away. After a few seasons, the soil is depleted. The humus is gone, the
mineral ores are played out, and the artificially stimulated soil life
is impoverished. Now the gardener must renew the soil with bales of
organic matter, fertilizer, and plenty of work.

Thus, tilling releases far more nutrients than plants can use. Also, the
constant mechanical battering destroys the soil structure, especially
when perpetrated on too-wet soil (and we're all impatient to get those
seeds in, so this happens often). Frequent tilling smashes loamy soil
crumbs to powder and compacts clayey clods into hardpan. And one tilling
session consumes far more calories of energy than are in a year's worth
of garden
grown food. That's not a sustainable arrangement.

Better to let humus fluff your soil naturally and to use mulches to
smother weeds and renew nutrients. Instead of unleashing fertility at a
breakneck, mechanical pace, we can allow plant roots to do the job.
Questing roots will split nuggets of earth in
their own time, opening the soil to microbial colonization, loosening-
nutrients at just the right rate. Once again, nature makes a better
partner than a slave.

Building Soil Life

OK, enough theory: Let's get our hands dirty. What are some techniques
for creating the kind of soil that gardeners dream of? To answer, I
could end this chapter now with three little words: Add organic matter.

But I won't stop there. Techniques abound for building soil organic
matter, and different situations call for different methods. The
techniques
break down into three broad categories: composts,
mulches, and cover crops.

Compost: The Quick and Dirty Method of
Building Soil

Most gardeners know the value of compost, and
many excellent books and articles have been writ-
ten about this "black gold," so I won't spend too
much time recapitulating what's already out there.
In brief, compost, the rich, humus-y end product
of decomposition, is made by piling surplus organic
matter into a mound or bin and letting it rot.

All homeowners generate excess organic matter:

kitchen scraps, grass clippings, leaf piles, and debris
from pruning and cleaning up a yardful of plants.
Most of this can be recycled right on site and turned
into a valuable source of soil life and nutrients for
your plants. If you're not fussy, simply piling this
stuff in a corner in your yard and waiting a few
months is enough to generate compost. But the
job can be done much more efficiently. The critical
elements of a good compost pile are the right ratio
of carbon to nitrogen, optimum moisture and air,
and proper size.

Let's take size first. Chomping, multiplying
microbes give otf heat, which accelerates their
growth and thus the breakdown of the pile's
contents. But, just as important, a hot compost pile
will sterilize the seeds in yard waste. Piles smaller
than about three feet on a side won't insulate the ;

burgeoning microbe population enough to raise ^
the temperature to the critical 130 to 150 degrees
Fahrenheit necessary to kill seeds. Spreading cold-
processed compost on the garden imports a host of
weeds and other unwanted plants. I've seen tomato
seedlings pop up by the hundreds in a flower bed
after the addition of poorly prepared compost.
Thus, composters should save up their materials
until they have enough for a three-foot heap.

p.83
What to put in the pile? Different ingredients
contain varying ratios of carbon to nitrogen, and
although eventually almost anything organic will
decompose, an overall C:N ratio of 30:1 is ideal.
Table 4^ 1 gives the C:N ratios of many compostable
materials. If you are the meticulous type, you can
calculate a proper balance of high-carbon and
high-nitrogen ingredients to yield 30:1. But for the
less assiduous, here's a good rule of thumb: Green
materials, such as grass clippings and fresh plant
trimmings (and we'll also include kitchen waste
here), are high in nitrogen. Brown items, such as
dried leaves, hay, straw, and wood shavings, are high
in carbon. The exception here is manure, which,
although brown, is high in nitrogen‹consider it
green. Mixing roughly half green with half brown
approximates the ideal 30:1 C:N ratio. If high-
nitrogen materials are scarce, sprinkle in some
cottonseed, fish, or blood meal for balance.

When building the pile, add the materials in
layers no more than six inches thick. For a small
pile, just jumble everything together by turning.
Some gardeners suggest adding soil to the pile,
which I sometimes do if the soil isn't sticky clay. I
also add handfals of finished compost as I build the
heap, which inoculates the pile with soil life and
gives it a boost. When I'm feeling especially fanati-
cal, I do two things. One is to inoculate the new
pile with compost from another young pile if I have
one, figuring that the species of soil organisms I'm
transferring will be suited to the fresh pile's undi-
gested debris. I'll also trek into the woods, into a
field, to a pond margin‹a variety of ecosystems‹€
where I'll grab a quart or two of soil from each and
add the blend. That way I'm maximizing the biodi-
versity of my soil life, importing helpful predators
and decomposers.

The life of the compost heap needs water to '
survive. A good compost pile should be about as
moist as a wrung-out sponge. If the ingredients
are dry when the pile is assembled, it can take an

astonishing amount of water to achieve the right
moisture [Only registered and activated users can see links. ]. When I'm building a pile in August,
I usually have a hose spraying on the pile the entire
time I'm forking the dry debris in place (this is an
excellent use for graywater, whose nutrient load
gives the soil life an extra boost, and it assuages my
guilt about using so much water). I usually cover
the finished pile with a tarp or permanent lid to
retain moisture on sunny days and keep rain from
leaching out the hard-won nutrients.

One age-old compost question is, To turn or not
to turn? Turning a pile supplies oxygen and speeds
up decomposition. If you're in a hurry for compost,
turn the pile as soon as the pile's initial blast of
internal heat‹which begins within days of a pile's
creation‹begins to subside. This will restoke the
metabolic fires of the pile's occupants with oxygen,
and the compost will quickly heat up again. Each
time the pile cools, turn it again. A properly made
pile can be reduced to black gold in three weeks by
well-timed turning.

However, I suggest that you plan ahead so that
you'll have an ample supply of compost when you
need it without turning a pile more than once or
twice. That's enough to incorporate and rot down
the outer layers of the pile.

Here's why. A less-turned pile won't rot down
as quickly as a more ambitiously forked one, but
each turning amps up microbial metabolism enor-
mously. This drives the pile's contents farther down
the two-forked road of folly digested humus and
totally mineralized nutrients. Mineralized nutri-
ents can leach out of soil very quickly. Completely
processed humus, while great for soil texture and
drought resistance, won't feed as much soil life
as less-digested organic matter. A slowly rotted
compost, from my experience, still gets hot enough
during that first heating-up to kill weed seeds, but
it seems to supply my plants with nutrients longer
than the product of rapid turnings.
-----

Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web
Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis
[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]
/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206815176&sr= 1-1

Chapter 1
What Is the Soil Food Web and Why Should Gardeners Care?

GIVEN ITS VITAL IMPORTANCE to our hobby, it is amazing that most of
us don't venture beyond the understanding that good soil supports
plant life, and poor soil doesn't. You've undoubtedly seen worms in
good soil, and unless you habitually use pesticides, you should have come
across other soil life: centipedes, springtails, ants, slugs, ladybird
beetle larvae,
and more. Most of this life is on the surface, in the first 4 inches (10
centimeters); some soil microbes have even been discovered living
comfortably an incredible two miles beneath the surface. Good soil,
however, is not just a few animals. Good soil is absolutely teeming with
life, yet seldom does the realization that this is so engender a
reaction of satisfaction.

In addition to all the living organisms you can see in garden soils (for
ex-
ample, there are up to 50 earthworms in a square foot [0.09 square
meters] of
good soil), there is a whole world of soil organisms that you cannot see
unless
you use sophisticated and expensive optics. Only then do the tiny,
microscopic
organisms‹bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes‹appear, and in numbers
that are nothing less than staggering. A mere teaspoon of good garden
soil, as
measured by microbial geneticists, contains a billion invisible
bacteria, several
yards of equally invisible fungal hyphae, several thousand protozoa, and
a few
dozen nematodes.

The common denominator of all soil life is that every organism needs
energy to survive. While a few bacteria, known as chemosynthesizers,
derive energy from sulfur, nitrogen, or even iron compounds, the rest
have to eat something containing carbon in order to get the energy they
need to sustain life. Carbon may come from organic material supplied by
plants, waste prod-
ucts produced by other organisms, or the bodies of other organisms. The
first order of business of all soil life is obtaining carbon to fuel
metabolism‹it is an eat-and-be-eaten world, in and on soil.

Do you remember the children's song about an old lady who accidentally
swallowed a fly? She then swallows a spider (³that wriggled and jiggled
and tickled inside her") to catch the fly, and then a bird to catch the
spider, and so on, until she eats a horse and [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] (³Of course!"). If
you made a diagram of who was expected to eat whom, starting with the
fly and ending with the improbable horse, you would have what is known
as a food chain.

Most organisms eat more than one kind of prey, so if you make a diagram
of who eats whom in and on the soil, the straight-line food chain
instead becomes a series of food chains linked and cross-linked to each
other, creating a web of food chains, or a soil food web. Each soil
environment has a different set of organisms and thus a different soil
food web. This is the simple, graphical definition of a soil food web,
though as you can imagine, this and other diagrams represent complex and
highly organized sets of interactions, relationships, and chemical and
physical processes. The story each tells, however, is a simple one and
always starts with the plant.

Plants are in control

Most gardeners think of plants as only taking up nutrients through root
systems and feeding the leaves. Few realize that a great deal of the
energy that results from photosynthesis in the leaves is actually used
by plants to produce chemicals they secrete through their roots. These
secretions are known as exudates. A good analogy is perspiration, a
human's exudate.

Root exudates are in the form of carbohydrates (including sugars) and
proteins. Amazingly, their presence wakes up, attracts, and grows
specific beneficial bacteria and fungi living in the soil that subsist
on these exudates and the cellular material sloughed off as the plant's
root tips grow. All this secretion of exudates and sloughing-off of
cells takes place in the rhizosphere, a zone immediately around the
roots, extending out about a tenth of an inch, or a couple of
millimeters (1 millimeter = 1/25 inch). The rhizosphere, which can look
like a jelly or jam under the electron microscope, contains a constantly
changing mix of soil organisms, including bacteria, fungi, nematodes,
protozoa, and even larger organisms. All this ³life" competes for the
exudates in the rhizosphere, or its water or mineral content.

At the bottom of the soil food web are bacteria and fungi, which are
attracted to and consume plant root exudates. In turn, they attract and
are eaten by bigger microbes, specifically nematodes and protozoa
(remember the amoebae, paramecia, flagellates, and ciliates you should
have studied in biology?), who eat bacteria and fungi (primarily for
carbon) to fuel their metabolic functions. Anything they don't need is
excreted as wastes, which plant roots are readily able to absorb as
nutrients. How convenient that this production of plant nutrients takes
place right in the rhizosphere, the site of root-nutrient absorption.

At the center of any viable soil food web are plants. Plants control the
food web for their own benefit, an amazing fact that is too little
understood and surely not appreciated by gardeners who are constantly
interfering with Nature's system. Studies indicate that individual
plants can control the numbers and the different kinds of fungi and
bacteria attracted to the rhizosphere by the exudates they produce.
During different times of the growing season, populations of rhizosphere
bacteria and fungi wax and wane, depending on the nutrient needs of the
plant and the exudates it produces.

Soil bacteria and fungi are like small bags of fertilizer, retaining in
their bodies nitrogen and other nutrients they gain from root exudates
and other organic matter (such as those sloughed-off root-tip cells).
Carrying on the analogy, soil protozoa and nematodes act as ³fertilizer
spreaders" by releasing , the nutrients locked up in the bacteria and
fungi ³fertilizer bags." The nematodes and protozoa in the soil come
along and eat the bacteria and fungi in the, rhizosphere. They digest
what they need to survive and excrete excess carbon and other nutrients
as waste.

Left to their own devices, then, plants produce exudates that attract
fungi and bacteria (and, ultimately, nematodes and protozoa); their
survival depends on the interplay between these microbes. It is a
completely natural system, the very same one that has fueled plants
since they evolved. Soil life provides the nutrients needed for plant
life, and plants initiate and fuel the cycle
by producing exudates.

Soil life creates soil structure

The protozoa and nematodes that feasted on the fungi and bacteria
attracted by plant exudates are in turn eaten by arthropods (animals
with segmented bodies, jointed appendages, and a hard outer covering
called an exoskeleton). Insects, spiders, even shrimp and lobsters are
arthropods. Soil arthropods eat each other and themselves are the food
of snakes, birds, moles, and other animals. Simply put, the soil is one
big fast-food restaurant. In the course of all this eating, members of a
soil food web move about in search of prey or protection, and while they
do, they have an impact on the soil.

Bacteria are so small they need to stick to things, or they will wash
away; to attach themselves, they produce a slime, the secondary result
of which is that individual soil particles are bound together (if the
concept is hard to grasp, think of the plaque produced overnight in your
mouth, which enables mouth bacteria to stick to your teeth). Fungal
hyphae, too, travel through soil particles, sticking to them and binding
them together, thread-like, into aggregates.

Worms, together with insect larvae and moles and other burrowing
animals, move through the soil in search of food and protection,
creating path-ways that allow air and water to enter and leave the soil.
Even microscopic fungi can help in this regard (see chapter 4). The soil
food web, then, in addition to providing nutrients to roots in the
rhizosphere, also helps create soil structure: the activities of its
members bind soil particles together even as they provide for the
passage of air and water through the soil.

Soil life produces soil nutrients

When any member of a soil food web dies, it becomes fodder for other
members of the community. The nutrients in these bodies are passed on to
other members of the community. A larger predator may eat them alive, or
they may be decayed after they die. One way or the other, fungi and
bacteria get involved, be it decaying the organism directly or working
on the dung of the successful
eater. It makes no difference. Nutrients are preserved and eventually
are retained in the bodies of even the smallest fungi and bacteria. When
these are in the rhizosphere, they release nutrients in plant-available
form when they, in turn, are consumed or die.

Without this system, most important nutrients would drain from soil.
Instead, they are retained in the bodies of soil life. Here is the
gardener's truth: when you apply a chemical fertilizer, a tiny bit hits
the rhizosphere, where it is absorbed, but most of it continues to drain
through soil until it hits the water table. Not so with the nutrients
locked up inside soil organisms, a state known as immobilization; these
nutrients are eventually released as wastes, or mineralized. And when
the plants themselves die and are allowed to decay, the nutrients they
retained are again immobilized in the fungi and bacteria that consume
them.

The nutrient supply in the soil is influenced by soil life in other
ways. For example, worms pull organic matter into the soil, where it is
shredded by beetles and the larvae of other insects, opening it up for
fungal and bacterial decay. This worm activity provides yet more
nutrients for the soil community.

Healthy soil food webs control disease

A healthy food web is one that is not being destroyed by pathogenic and
disease-causing organisms. Not all soil organisms are beneficial, after
all. As gardeners you know that pathogenic soil bacteria and fungi cause
many plain diseases. Healthy soil food webs not only have tremendous
numbers of individual organisms but a great diversity of organisms.
Remember that teaspoon of good garden soil? Perhaps 20,000 to 30,000
different species make up its billion bacteria‹a healthy population in
numbers and diversity. A large and diverse community controls
troublemakers. A good analogy is a thief in a crowded market: if there
are enough people around, they will catch or even stop the thief (and it
is in their self-interest to do so). If the market is deserted,
however, the thief will be successful, just as he will be if he is
stronger, faster, or in some other way better adapted than those that
would be in pursuit.

In the soil food web world, the good guys don't usually catch thieves
(though it happens: witness the hapless nematode that started this all
for us); rather, they compete with them for exudates and other
nutrients, air, water, and even space. If the soil food web is a healthy
one, this competition keeps the pathogens in check; they may even be
outcompeted to their death.

Just as important, every member of the soil food web has its place in
the soil community. Each, be it on the surface or subsurface, plays a
specific role. Elimination of even just one group can drastically alter
a soil community. Birds participate by spreading protozoa carried on
their feet or dropping a worm taken from one area into another. Too many
cats, and things will change. Dung from mammals provides nutrients for
beetles in the soil. Kill the mammals, or eliminate their habitat or
food source (which amounts to the same thing), and you won't have as
many beetles. It works in the reverse as well. A healthy soil food web
won't allow one set of members to get so strong as to destroy the web.
If there are too many nematodes and protozoa, the bacteria and fungi on
which they prey are in trouble and, ultimately, so are the plants in the
area.

And there are other benefits. The nets or webs fungi form around roots
act as physical barriers to invasion and protect plants from pathogenic
fungi and bacteria. Bacteria coat surfaces so thoroughly, there is no
room for others to attach themselves. If something impacts these fungi
or bacteria and their numbers drop or they disappear, the plant can
easily be attacked.

Special soil fungi, called mycorrhizal fungi, establish themselves in a
symbiotic relationship with roots, providing them not only with-physical
protection but with nutrient delivery as well. In return for exudates,
these fungi provide water, phosphorus, and other necessary plant
nutrients. Soil food web populations must be in balance, or these fungi
are eaten and the plant suffers.

Bacteria produce exudates of their own, and the slime they use to attach
to surfaces traps pathogens. Sometimes, bacteria work in conjunction
with fungi to form protective layers, not only around roots in the
rhizosphere but on an equivalent area around leaf surfaces, the
phyllosphere. Leaves produce exudates that attract microorganisms in
exactly the same way roots do; these act as a barrier to invasion,
preventing disease-causing organisms from entering the plant's system.

Some fungi and bacteria produce inhibitory compounds, things like
vitamins and antibiotics, which help maintain or improve plant health;
penicillin and streptomycin, for example, are produced by a soil-borne
fungus and a soil-borne bacterium, respectively.

All nitrogen is not the same

Ultimately, from the plant's perspective anyhow, the role of the soil
food web is to cycle down nutrients until they become temporarily
immobilized in the bodies of bacteria and fungi and then mineralized.
The most important of these nutrients is nitrogen‹the basic building
block of amino acids and, therefore, life. The biomass of fungi and
bacteria (that is, the total amount of each in the soil) determines, for
the most part, the amount of nitrogen that is readily available for
plant use.

It wasn't until the 1980s that soil scientists could accurately measure
the amount of bacteria and fungi in soils. Dr. Elaine Ingham at Oregon
State University along with others started publishing research that
showed the ratio of these two organisms in various types of soil. In
general, the least disturbed soils (those that supported old growth
timber) had far more fungi than bacteria, while disturbed soils
(rototilled soil, for example) had far more bacteria than fungi. These
and later studies show that agricultural soils have a fungal to
bacterial biomass (F:B ratio) of 1:1 or less, while forest soils have
ten times or more fungi than bacteria.

Ingham and some of her graduate students at OSU also noticed a
correlation between plants and their preference for soils that were
fungally dominated versus those that were bacterially dominated or
neutral. Since the path from bacterial to fungal domination in soils
follows the general course of plant succession, it became easy to
predict what type of soil particular plants preferred by noting where
they came from. In general, [Only registered and activated users can see links. ], [Only registered and activated users can see links. ], and [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] prefer
fungally dominated soils, while [Only registered and activated users can see links. ], grasses, and vegetables prefer
soils dominated by bacteria.

One implication of these findings, for the gardener, has to do with the
nitrogen in bacteria and fungi. Remember, this is what the soil food web
means to a plant: when these organisms are eaten, some of the nitrogen
is retained by the eater, but much of it is released as waste in the
form of plant-available ammonium (NH3). Depending on the soil
environment, this can either remain as
ammonium or be converted into nitrate (NO3,) by special bacteria. When
does this conversion occur? When ammonium is released in soils that are
dominated by bacteria. This is because such soils generally have an
alkaline pH (thanks to bacterial bioslime), which encourages the
nitrogen-fixing bacteria to thrive. The acids produced by fungi, as
they begin to dominate, lower the pH
and greatly reduce the amount of these bacteria. In fungally dominated
soils, much of the nitrogen remains in ammonium form.

Ah, here is the rub: chemical fertilizers provide plants with nitrogen,
but most do so in the form of nitrates (NO3). An understanding of the
soil food web makes it clear, however, that plants that prefer fungally
dominated soils ultimately won't flourish on a diet of nitrates. Knowing
this can make a great deal of difference in the way you manage your
gardens and yard. If you can cause either fungi or bacteria to dominate,
or provide an equal mix (and you can‹just how is explained in Part 2),
then plants can get the kind of nitrogen they prefer, without chemicals,
and thrive.

Negative impacts on the soil food web

Chemical fertilizers negatively impact the soil food web by killing off
entire portions of it. What gardener hasn't seen what table salt does to
a slug? Fertilizers are salts; they suck the water out of the bacteria,
fungi, protozoa, and nematodes in the soil. Since these microbes are at
the very foundation of the soil food web nutrient system, you have to
keep adding fertilizer once you start using it regularly. The
microbiology is missing and not there to do its job, feeding the plants.

It makes sense that once the bacteria, fungi, nematodes, and protozoa
are gone, other members of the food web disappear as well. Earthworms,
for example, lacking food and irritated by the synthetic nitrates in
soluble nitrogen fertilizers, move out. Since they are major shredders
of organic material, their absence is a great loss. Without the activity
and diversity of a healthy food web, you not only impact the nutrient
system but all the other things a healthy soil food web brings. Soil
structure deteriorates, watering can become problematic," pathogens and
pests establish themselves and, worst of all, gardening becomes a lot
more work than it needs to be.

If the salt-based chemical fertilizers don't kill portions of the soil
food web, rototilling will. This gardening rite of spring breaks up
fungal hyphae, decimates worms, and rips and crushes arthropods. It
destroys soil structure and eventually saps soil of necessary air.
Again, this means more work for you in the end. Air pollution,
pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides, too, kill off important members
of the food web community or ³chase" them away. Any chain is only as
strong as its weakest link: if there is a gap in the soil food web, the
system will break down and stop functioning properly.

Healthy soil food webs benefit you and your plants

Why should a gardener be knowledgeable about how soils and soil food webs
work? Because then you can manage them so they work for you and your
plants. By using techniques that employ soil food web science as you
garden,
you can at least reduce and at best eliminate the need for fertilizers,
herbicides,
fungicides, and pesticides (and a lot of accompanying work). You can
improve
degraded soils and return them to usefulness. Soils will retain
nutrients in the
bodies of soil food web organisms instead of letting them leach out to
God
knows where. Your plants will be getting nutrients in the form each
particular
plant wants and needs so they will be less stressed. You will have
natural disease prevention, protection, and suppression. Your soils will
hold more water.

The organisms in the soil food web will do most of the work of
maintaining plant health. Billions of living organisms will be
continuously at work
throughout the year, doing the heavy chores, providing nutrients to
plants,
building defense systems against pests and diseases, loosening soil and
increasing [Only registered and activated users can see links. ], providing necessary pathways for oxygen and carbon
dioxide.
You won't have to do these things yourself.

Gardening with the soil food web is easy, but you must get the life back
in
your soils. First, however, you have to know something about the soil
in which
the soil food web operates; second, you need to know what each of the
key
members of the food web community does. Both these concerns are taken up
in the rest of Part 1.

-------

<[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]
_files/Myths/Compost%20overdose.pdf>

€ Ideal soils, from a fertility standpoint, are generally defined as
containing no more than 5% OM
by weight or 10% by volume

€ Before you add organic amendments to your garden, have your soil
tested to determine its OM
content and nutrient levels

€ Be conservative with organic amendments; add only what is necessary to
correct deficiencies and
maintain OM at ideal levels

€ Do not incorporate organic amendments into landscapes destined for
permanent installations;
topdress with mulch instead

€ Abnormally high levels of nutrients can have negative effects on plant
and soil health

€ Any nutrients not immediately utilized by microbes or plants
contribute to non-point source pollution
----

<http://www.composting101.com/c-n-ratio.html>

A Balancing Act (Carbon-to-Nitrogen Ratios)

All organic matter is made up of substantial amounts of carbon (C)
combined with lesser amounts of nitrogen (N). The balance of these two
elements in an organism is called the carbon-to-nitrogen ratio (C:N
ratio). For best performance, the compost pile, or more to the point the
composting microorganisms, require the correct proportion of carbon for
energy and nitrogen for protein production. Scientists (yes, there are
compost scientists) have determined that the fastest way to produce
fertile, sweet-smelling compost is to maintain a C:N ratio somewhere
around 25 to 30 parts carbon to 1 part nitrogen, or 25-30:1. If the C:N
ratio is too high (excess carbon), decomposition slows down. If the C:N
ratio is too low (excess nitrogen) you will end up with a stinky pile.
-----

<[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]
rden.htm>

Lasagna*Gardening
No-Till, No-Dig*Gardening
--
- Billy
³When you give food to the poor, they call you a saint. When you ask why the poor have no food, they call you a communist.²
-Archbishop Helder Camara
[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]
[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]
20111812130964689.html

[Billy]

In article
<wildbilly-DEC270.13503924012011@c-61-68-245-199.per.connect.net.au>,
Billy <wildbilly@withouta.net> wrote:


My bad, I forgot to mention
<http://ourgardengang.tripod.com/lasagna_gardening.htm>
Lasagna Gardening 101
by Patricia Lanza, author of the Lasagna Gardening Series

Before you buy the first plant, or lay down the first sheet of wet
newspaper, take a look around your property. Check to see where you get
the best light; that's where you'll put your [Only registered and activated users can see links. ]. Decide on the shape
and contents of your garden. The size of your plot will determine how
much material you need to make your first lasagna.*
Your material list will change depending on where you live. Some folks
have more leaves than others, some have seaweed, others ground
cornstalks or apple pulp. Some of the lucky ones have access to animal
[Only registered and activated users can see links. ].
There's no hard and fast rules about what to use for your layers, just
so long as it's organic and doesn't contain any protein (fat, meat, or
bone).* Before I go any further, let me just say that the basics of
making garden lasagnas are simple:
€ Don't remove the sod or do any extra work, like removing weeds or
rocks.
€ Mark the area for your garden using a water hose or a long rope to
get the desired shape.
€ Cover the area you've marked with wet newspapers, overlapping the
edges (5 or more sheets per layer).
€ Cover the paper with one to two inches of peat moss or other
organic material.*
€ Layer several inches of organic material on top of the peat moss.
€ Continue to alternate layers of peat moss and organic material,
until desired thickness is reached.
€ Water until the garden is the consistency of a damp sponge.
€ Plant, plant, plant and mulch, mulch, mulch.

Start with layers of newspaper or sheets of cardboard.
Then cover with mulch.
You need less loose material to plant in than you might think. In the
spring of '98, I layered an area where a dog pen had stood for years.
The property belongs to a 79-year-old man who was upset about his
inability to garden as he once had. Until recently, a 100-year-old white
pine tree had occupied the center of the fenced-in area. But its roots
had begun to do real damage to my friend's house and surrounding
properties, and so the tree had to be taken down.* Once the tree was
removed, the area was bright and sunny, but, unfortunately, the ground
contained 100 years worth of layered pine needles.

First, we covered the area with lime, then laid whole sections of wet
newspaper on top of the pine needles and covered the paper with peat
moss. We bought a small truckload of barn litter mixed with our local
[Only registered and activated users can see links. ] and covered the peat with two inches of this mix and then two
more inches of peat moss. Additions of one to two inches of [Only registered and activated users can see links. ]
clippings, two inches of peat moss, one to two inches of compost, and
more peat gave us a total of about six to eight inches to plant in.

We pulled the layers apart and planted 31 tomato plants, four squash,
six cucumber, four basil, two rosemary, four parsley, and twelve [Only registered and activated users can see links. ].
It was a jungle, but with staking, pruning, and tying, the garden
produced so much fruit that the entire neighborhood helped eat the
harvest, and the cosmos were so beautiful they took our breath away.

Once the harvest was finished, I pulled the stems and disturbed the
layers for the first time. Pieces of the paper layer came up with the
roots. So, too, did the biggest earthworms you can imagine. The [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] was
still probably a bit acidic, but it will get better in time.

To prepare the new garden for another year of planting, we spread the
contents of a large composter onto the space, and the garden took on
several inches in height. The last mowing of grass provided enough
clippings to add another few inches. When the fall came, we mowed the
leaves for a top dressing of four inches of chipped leaves. I love an
edged garden and so the last thing I did was cut a sharp, clean [Only registered and activated users can see links. ]
around the sides, throwing the edging material up onto the garden, with
grass side down, for another layer of more good dirt. It looked
beautiful!

Close planting and [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] greatly reduced the amount of weeds in the
dog-pen garden, as they do in all my gardens. It also meant less
watering, since the paper and mulch kept the soil around the root zone
cool. Even though we pushed it a bit by planting 31 tomato plants, the
staking, tying, and pruning, in addition to close planting, created a
healthy growing environment, with few garden pests. It was another test,
and the results have left my friend confident that, as he enters his
80th year, he will be able to continue gardening with the lasagna method.

Indeed, lasagna gardening is so simple that the hardest part may be
getting started. I suggest beginning with that walk around your property
to determine what you can do with what you have. If you get lots of
shade, plant a shade garden or cut some tree limbs. Track the light for
a couple of days during the spring and summer. You probably have more
light than you think--not sun, but light. Lots of rocks? Try rock
gardening. You might learn to love the wonderful world of small plants
that thrive in rocky terrain. Too little space? Look again. If there's a
foot of space, you can plant in it.

There's no such thing as work-free gardening, but the lasagna method is
close. Once you train yourself to think layering, and learn to stockpile
your ingredients, you will work less each year.* Following are some of
my favorite vegetables, along with tips on how I grow them the lasagna
way:

ASPARAGUS
Many gardeners shy away from this tasty crop, mainly because it's
difficult to grow through traditional means. Not so with lasagna
gardening. I still remember the first year I planned my asparagus patch.
Turned out to be one of my best vegetable trials yet. For fun, I grew a
tray of plants from [Only registered and activated users can see links. ], started indoors in February. In early spring,
I added the small seedlings to the assembly of roots--one, two, and
three years old--that I had accumulated to plant together.

Using a mattock blade, I scraped a shallow opening in a newly made
lasagna bed, an inch or two deep. I combined the roots and seedlings in
the opening and covered them with a sifting of soil and peat moss. Once
the roots were planted, I covered the top of the row with a mixture of
manure and peat moss.

As the roots sprouted and grew, I added sifted compost and grass
clippings. In the fall, I added more manure and a thick layer of chipped
leaves for winter mulch. During the first spring, I watched the
asparagus emerge and grow. I invited inn guests into the garden to help
me cut and eat the first tender stalks. Then I mulched, mulched, then
mulched some more.*
The second spring, I cut so much asparagus we had some to freeze. It was
all so easy: plant, mulch, harvest, and enjoy.

Site and soil. A heavy feeder, asparagus needs well-drained soil and at
least six hours of sun. The fall before planting, build a lasagna garden
on the site you've chosen for your asparagus, using a base of newspaper
topped with 18 to 24 inches of layered organic material. By spring, the
lasagna bed will have composted to ideal soil conditions for asparagus.

Planting and harvest. The time is right when the soil is thawed and
crumbles in your hand. Plant in rows two feet apart in two shallow
trenches, with a rise in between. This lets the crowns sit on top of the
rise, with the roots in the trenches. Plants should be 18 inches apart
and covered with two to three inches of soil and compost mixture.

As the plants grow during the summer, continue covering with the compost
enriched mixture until crowns are four inches deep. In the fall, cover
the entire bed with a blanket of eight to ten inches of chopped leaves
or other organic mulch. Each spring, feed the bed compost enriched with
manure. In colder regions, pull the mulch back on half the bed to get an
extra early harvest, saving half the bed for later harvesting. Once the
harvest is over, the remaining shoots expand into ferny top growth. When
the ferns turn bronze, cut them back.

BEANS
I usually wind up planting many more beans than I actually need. But
with so many varieties--all so much fun to grow--who can resist!* Once
the last chance of frost is past, plant your favorite bean seeds. Divide
your seeds into thirds and plant every two weeks for a longer harvest.

Once I have a lasagna bed in place, I plant bush bean seeds along the
edges. They only need a few inches, since the plants will lean out over
the sides of the garden, leaving room for taller crops. I plant pole
bean seeds around the base of teepees made from six-foot bamboo poles.
Plant seeds around the base of each pole, and when they start to climb,
give them a boost up the trailing twine you have tied from the top.

Site and soil. Beans grow best in well-drained soil that's high in
organic matter. A new or established lasagna bed in full sun works best
for all types.

Planting and harvest. Fix supports in place before planting pole bean
seeds. For both types, pole and bush, just push the seeds into loose
soil about two inches apart. Cover the seeds and press the soil around
them for direct contact.

Keep the soil evenly moist until seeds emerge, then cover the soil with
a good mulch to keep the soil cool, the leaves clean, and the garden
weed-free. To avoid rust, don't work beans when foliage is wet. Once
beans start to appear, keep crop picked to encourage new bloom. Rotate
crops every year to avoid pests and disease.

CUCUMBERS
Bush cucumbers can be grown in small spaces and containers. Climbing
cucumbers need strong support, so plant close to a fence or trellis. I
like the [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] and try to see what kind of new supports I can come up
with each year to make the garden more interesting. I loved the string
cradles we tied to a stockade fence one year. The vines grew up strings
hanging down into the row, then up the string cradles and onto the fence.

Site and soil. Cucumbers need good [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] and rich soil. Lasagna
gardens are just the thing, when enriched with fresh manure. However,
wait three years before planting in the same place to avoid pests and
disease.

Planting and harvest. Wait until the last frost is past, then plant
prestarted seeds covered with floating row cover in colder regions, and
seeds sown directly in the garden in milder climates. Keep mulched and
don't till, as cucumbers are shallow rooted. Maintaining at least six
inches of mulch at all times keeps the roots cool and moist, but they
still need an inch of water each week. Pick the fruit when it's small
and most flavorful. Once the harvest starts, don't miss a day, or you'll
have candidates for the compost pile instead of the salad bowl.

GARLIC
If you've never tried growing garlic, you've missed something special. I
make a rich lasagna bed, let it cook for four to six weeks under black
plastic, set strings up to keep my rows straight, and push in single
cloves just enough to see they are covered. When the foliage is full and
seed heads form, I cut and use them just as I would cloves. When the
foliage turns yellow or brown, it's time to lift the garlic.

Loosen the earth and gently shake off any dirt. Let the cloves cure by
hanging them in a dry place. The individual cloves will each make a
head, so you will have plenty to use, as well as to save for next year's
seed.

Site and soil. Good drainage, full sun, and plenty of manure-rich
compost are best. A well-built lasagna bed has the perfect growing
conditions to start, then all you have to do is add grass clippings or
chipped leaves for mulch to keep the soil evenly moist and weeds at a
minimum.

Planting and harvest. Gardeners in the Northeast and zone 5 and colder
climates will get best results from hard-neck garlic planted in the fall
and harvested the next summer. Milder climates can grow soft-neck; plant
in the spring and harvest that same fall.

If you haven't room for an entire bed just for garlic, plant some in
groups of three to five cloves in flower or vegetable beds. Folks who
have bug problems swear by the positive effect garlic has on its
companions.

LETTUCE
Anyone can grow lettuce. The problem is most folks grow too much at one
time. Use a little restraint and make successive plantings. Mix lettuce
seed with sand so you will not have to do so much thinning. I broadcast
a mixture of cut-and-come-again lettuce once a month for the duration of
growing time for my zone.

Site and soil. Lettuce likes it cool and so is ideally suited for spring
and fall plantings. I use other taller plants to shade my lettuce in
summer. It's best to prepare a site for lettuce in the fall, adding a
high nitrogen amendment (such as fresh grass clippings) to the top two
inches of soil.

Planting and harvest. Lettuce is a fun crop to grow in containers, as
borders, and in tiny spaces that would only go to waste otherwise.
There's really no safe place to hide when I start looking for places to
plant. I've planted Ruby Red and Oakleaf lettuce in my herb and edible
flower containers and flower boxes. I interplant herbs and lettuce in
the border gardens that surround my antique [Only registered and activated users can see links. ]. The Mesculun mixes
are wonderful in big terra cotta saucers that stand alone in part shade.

When guests come for dinner, I give them a colander and a pair of
scissors and point them toward the garden. They come back with an
interesting collection of edibles and never forget the experience. Lots
of good gardeners start out by getting their feet dirty in someone
else's garden.

POTATOES
No need to dig trenches or to hill up. Build a lasagna bed to eliminate
grass and weeds, don't use any lime or nitrogen-rich materials (such as
grass clippings), lay down one or two sheets of wet newspaper, lay seed
potatoes on top of the paper, and cover with spoiled hay or compost. You
can use pretty much anything you have that is dried. Chipped leaves are
great for covering the tubers. I use hay that is well-cured and lying
next to my potato bed, so I don't have to carry it too far.

Site and soil. Potatoes need full sun, good drainage, and can tolerate
acid soil. Preparing a lasagna bed and adding bone meal or rock sulfate
produces a good harvest and large tubers. Avoid planting potatoes where
you have grown them or their relatives (including eggplant, peppers, and
tomatoes) for the past three years.

Planting and harvest. Be ready to plant in early to midspring and have
enough material to cover the bed with ten inches of mulch. Be prepared
to add several inches of cover to the bed as plants grow. The important
thing here is to keep the tubers covered so they will not see the light
of day. By the end of the growing period, the plants will be propped up
with hay or other soil amendments.

Slip your hand under the mulch to harvest a few small potatoes when the
beans are ready to pick. Let the rest continue growing until the foliage
has yellowed. Don't try to dig! Lift the mulch and pick the clean tubers
up off the newspaper.

Be on the watch for potato bugs. Try to catch them when they are small.
Sweep across the foliage with a broom. They will fall into the mulch
and, when small, not be able to find their way back up to the leaves.

TOMATOES
The toughest part of [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] is choosing the kinds you will
grow. You'll likely want to plant several different varieties each year:
there's early, midseason, and late ones; tiny pear shaped, cherry,
patio, plum, slicing, and cooking varieties; plus, tomatoes for juice
and for stuffing, not to mention new types and heritage.

Site and soil. Tomatoes need full sun, an inch of water per week, and
protection from the wind. Ideal conditions are a lasagna bed that has
been around for at least a year and has not grown any of the relatives:
potatoes, eggplant, or other tomatoes.

I prepare my site by installing water jugs buried up to their shoulders
between where every two plants will be. A pin hole in the sides facing
the plants should let enough seep out to keep up consistent watering. I
place a tall stick in each jug, its top colored with red paint or nail
polish. This helps me find the sticks, which helps me find the openings
to the jugs when all the foliage hides them from view. I fill the jugs
with a funnel and the water hose. You can add liquid plant food to the
water if you like.

Planting and harvest. Wait until after the last frost, then plant the
seedlings. Create a well of soil around the stem to help catch any rain.
If you have prepared the lasagna bed in advance, all you will have to do
is scrape the soil aside and lay the plant down up to the last four
leaves. Press the soil around the plant to make direct contact and push
out any air pockets.

Once the jugs and plants are in place, make a collar of one or two
sheets of wet newspaper, place it around the stem, and cover the paper
with mulch. Depending on the type of tomatoes you have chosen, you will
need to stake, tie, prune, and pinch. Keep the water jugs full and check
plants regularly for bugs or disease. Don't get impatient; tomatoes need
lots of long hot sunny days and warm nights. Again, depending on the
cultivar you have chosen to grow, you can look forward to your first
harvest in 55 to 100 days after you set the plants out.

And, oh, what a delicious harvest! I love tomatoes warm from the
garden--standing over the row, biting into one, the juice running off my
chin, dripping from my elbow, the acid tingling my tongue. It just
doesn't get any better than that.
--
- Billy
³When you give food to the poor, they call you a saint. When you ask why the poor have no food, they call you a communist.²
-Archbishop Helder Camara
[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]
[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]
20111812130964689.html

[Billy]

In article
<wildbilly-DEC270.13503924012011@c-61-68-245-199.per.connect.net.au>,
Billy <wildbilly@withouta.net> wrote:


As you mentioned to Dog, you are wrong again, as you often are.

Your continuing education . . .

[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]

Don't Panic, Go Organic
Be not troubled by Robert Paarlberg's scaremongering. Organic practices
can feed the world -- better, in fact, than wasteful industrial farming.
BY ANNA LAPPÉ | APRIL 29, 2010


In May 2004, Catherine Badgley, an evolutionary biology professor at the
University of Michigan, took her students on a research trip to an
organic farm near their campus. Standing on the acre-and-a-half farm,
Badgley asked the farmer, Rob MacKercher, how much food he produces
annually. "Twenty-seven tons," he said. Badgley did the quick math:
That's enough to provide 150 families one pound of produce every single
day of the year.
"If he can grow that quantity on this tiny parcel," Badgley wondered,
"why can't organic agriculture feed the world?" That question was the
genesis of a multi-year, multidisciplinary study to explore whether we
could, indeed, feed the world with organic, sustainable methods of
farming. The results? A resounding yes.
Unfortunately, you don't hear about this study, or others with similar
findings, in "Attention Whole Foods Shoppers," Robert Paarlberg's
defense of industrial agriculture in the new issue of Foreign Policy.
Instead, organic agriculture, according to Paarlberg, is an "elite
preoccupation," a "trendy cause" for "purist circles." Sure, sidling up
to a Whole Foods in your Lexus SUV and spending $24.99 on artisan
fromage may be the trappings of a privileged foodie, but there's an
SUV-sized difference between obsessing about the texture of your goat
cheese and arguing for a more sustainable food system. Despite
Paarlberg's pronouncements, Badgley's research, along with much more
evidence, helps us see that what's best for the planet and for people --
especially small-scale farmers who are the hungriest among us -- is a
food system based on agroecological practices. What's more, Paarlberg's
impressive-sounding statistics veil the true human and ecological cost
we are paying with industrial agriculture.

*

Since most of us aren't well-versed in the minutia of this debate, we
can't be blamed for falling for Paarlberg's scaremongering, which
suggests that by rejecting biotech and industrial agriculture, we are
keeping developing countries underdeveloped and undernourished.
Paarlberg suggests that we could eliminate starvation across the
continent of Africa were it not that "efforts to deliver such essentials
have been undercut by deeply misguided ... advocacy against agricultural
modernization."

It's a compelling argument, and one industry defenders make all the
time. For who among us would want to think we're starving the poor by
pushing for sustainability? (At a Biotechnology Industry Organization
conference I attended in 2005, a [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] participant even suggested
pro-organic advocates should be "tried for crimes against humanity.")
But the argument for industrial agriculture and biotechnology is built
on a misleading depiction of what organic agriculture is, bolstered with
shaky statistics, and constructed by ignoring the on-the-ground lessons
of success stories across the globe.

For a start, Paarlberg doesn't get what it means to be organic. "Few
smallholder farmers in Africa use any synthetic chemicals," he writes,
"so their food is de facto organic." In contrast, industrial
agriculture, as he sees it, is "science-intensive." But as Doug
Gurian-Sherman, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists
explains, "modern organic practices are defined by much more than just
the absence of synthetic chemicals"; it's knowledge-intensive farming.
Organic farmers improve output, less by applying purchased products and
more by tapping a sophisticated understanding of biological systems to
build [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] fertility and manage pests and weeds through techniques that
include double-dug beds, intercropping, composting, manures, cover
crops, crop sequencing, and natural pest control.

Biotech and industrial agriculture would in fact more aptly be called
water, chemical, and fossil-fuel-intensive farming, requiring external
inputs to boost productivity. Industrial agriculture gobbles up much of
the 70 percent of the planet's freshwater resources diverted to farming,
for example. It relies on petroleum-based chemicals for pest and weed
control and requires massive amounts of synthetic fertilizer. In fact,
in 2007, we used 13 million tons of synthetic fertilizer, five times the
amount used in 1960. Crop yields, by comparison, grew only half that
fast. And it's hardly a harmless increase: Nitrogen fertilizers are the
single biggest cause of global-warming gases from U.S. agriculture and a
major cause of air and water pollution -- including the creation of dead
zones in coastal waters that are devoid of fish. And despite the massive
pesticide increase, the United States loses more crops to pests today
than it did before the chemical agriculture revolution six decades ago.
The diminishing returns of industrial agriculture are one reason why
organic agriculture comes out ahead in all the comprehensive comparative
studies. In Badgley's study, for instance, data from hundreds of
certified-organic, industrial, and low-input farms around the world
revealed that introducing agroecological approaches in developing
countries led to between two and four times the productivity as the
previous practices. Estimating the impact on global food supply if we
shifted the planet to organic production, the study authors found a
yield increase for every single food category they investigated.

In one of the largest studies to analyze how agroecological practices
affect productivity in the developing world, researchers at the
University of Essex in England analyzed 286 projects in 57 countries.
Among the 12.6 million farmers followed, who were transitioning toward
sustainable agriculture, researchers found an average yield increase of
79 percent across a wide variety of crop types.
Even the United Nations backs those claims. A 2008 U.N. Conference on
Trade and Development report concluded that "organic agriculture can be
more conducive to food security in Africa than most conventional
production systems, and ... is more likely to be sustainable in the long
term."

In the most comprehensive analysis of world agriculture to date, several
U.N. agencies and the World Bank engaged more than 400 scientists and
development experts from 80 countries over four years to produce the
International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and
Technology for Development (IAASTD). The conclusion? Our "reliance on
resource-extractive industrial agriculture is risky and unsustainable,
particularly in the face of worsening climate, energy, and water
crises," said Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, a lead author on the report.

Too bad we don't hear these success stories from Paarlberg. Instead he
claims that without industrial food systems, "food would be not only
less abundant but also less safe." To build his case, he points to
improvements in food safety in the United States, such as the drop in E.
coli contamination in U.S. beef. He neglects to mention that the
virulent form of E. coli, a pathogen that can be fatal in humans, only
emerged in the gut of cattle in the 1980s as a direct consequence of
industrial livestock factories -- precisely the model he would export
overseas. Meanwhile, Paarlberg conveniently ignores the diet-related
illnesses spawned by industrial food in the United States, where the
health-care system is now crippled with these preventable diseases.
Hypertension (high blood pressure), heart disease, and Type 2 diabetes
have all been linked in part to diet.

Paarlberg defends his case by pointing to a staggering death toll in
Africa where, he claims, 700,000 people die every year from food- and
water-borne diseases compared with only 5,000 in the United States. But
he's deceptively comparing apples and oranges: Those U.S. figures are
only for food-borne illnesses. And the lack of an industrial food system
isn't responsible for most of that high death toll in Africa. The World
Health Organization attributes much of this tragic toll to unsanitary
drinking water contaminated with pathogens transmitted from human
excreta, causing a massive spike in cholera that year. Oh, and pesticide
poisoning, too. Yes, that would be pesticides from industrial chemical
farming.

Paarlberg's praise for industrial practices is similar to the biotech
industry trumpeting its technology for saving us from famine, farmer
bankruptcy, blindness, disease, poverty, even loss of biodiversity. Back
in 1994, Dan Verakis, a spokesman for the industrial agricultural firm
Monsanto, claimed that biotech crops would reduce herbicide and
pesticide use, in effect reversing "the Silent Spring scenario." In
1999, Monsanto said it had developed genetically engineered rice to be a
vital source of vitamin A, reducing blindness caused by its deficiency.
That same year, then Monsanto CEO Robert Shapiro boasted that GM
technology would trigger an "80 percent reduction in insecticide use in
cotton crops alone in the United States."

Few of these promises have borne fruit. Instead, commercialized biotech
crops have fostered herbicide-resistant weeds and pesticide-resistant
pests, while reducing biodiversity. "In the past, farmers used a variety
of chemical controls and manual labor, making it unlikely that any weed
plant would evolve a resistance to all those different strategies
simultaneously," explains gene ecology expert, Jack Heinemann, another
IAASTD author. "But as we oversimplify -- as we industrialize -- we make
agriculture more vulnerable to the next problem." Already, examples of
herbicide resistance are popping up from canola fields in Canada to
farms in Australia.

Another cause for concern is that industrial agriculture and genetically
modified crops dangerously reduce biodiversity, especially on the farm.
In the United States, 90 percent of soy, 70 percent of corn, and 95
percent of sugarbeets are genetically modified. Industrial farms are by
their very nature monocultures, but diverse crops on a farm, even weeds,
serve multiple functions: Bees feast on their nectar and pollen, birds
munch on weed seeds, worms and other soil invertebrates that help
control pests live among them -- the list goes on.

So are farmers in southern Africa, across India, in villages throughout
the developing world really waiting for biotech and industrial
agriculture to feed them, as Paarlberg suggests? "No," says Sue Edwards,
a British-born botanist who works at the Institute for Sustainable
Development in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. "Farmers we work with don't hold
much hope" for these technologies; they see hope in their fields.

Starting in 1996, Edwards and colleagues engaged smallholder farmers in
drought-prone regions in Ethiopia to investigate whether resilient food
systems could be fostered by tapping ecological agriculture, building
farming skills, emphasizing crops indigenous to the continent that had
evolved to be drought resilient. They enlisted farmers in field trials,
comparing crops grown using ecological methods like composting with
those raised with chemical fertilizer or without any inputs at all.
(That'd be what Paarlberg calls "de facto organic.") The results are
conclusive: By 2006, they were finding significantly higher yields in
the ecological test sites of every single crop compared with the
chemical-fertilizer plots and even more dramatic benefits compared with
the no-input plots.

Among the pitfalls in Paarlberg's analysis, two stand out. First, the
benefits of his approach are speculative, at best; at worst, his
assertions are disengenous, based on cherry-picking evidence and
misrepresenting data. We need only compare his claims with Edwards's
work and similar research around the world that demonstrates that
agroecological approaches can protect natural resources and increase
yields. Not in five years; not in 20. But right now -- today.

Second, his approach ignores power relationships that ultimately
determine who will benefit from any technology. In agroecological
approaches, farmers gain knowledge, including knowledge about ways to
adapt to changing climate and to share their knowledge with each other.
Farmers become less dependent on distant, centralized suppliers of
high-priced biotech seeds and chemical inputs and therefore less
vulnerable to their notoriously unstable prices. Though perhaps harder
to measure, this independence may be the most critical advantages of
agroecological farming.

Take away Paarlberg-esque mythologizing -- along with the government
handouts, international financial institutional backing, tax breaks, and
externalized environmental and human costs that prop up industrial
agriculture and biotechnology -- and industrial agriculture would go the
way of the Hummer: an overhyped footnote in the history books.
--
- Billy
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.
[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]
[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]

[Billy]

In article
<wildbilly-DEC270.13503924012011@c-61-68-245-199.per.connect.net.au>,
Billy <wildbilly@withouta.net> wrote:
(snippety snip)
(snip)

As I expected, you are a slow learner, but I know you don't want to be
ignorant all your life, so here's some more to choke on. It might help
if you take notes ;O)

The Fatal Harvest Reader by Andrew Kimbrell (Editor)
[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]
ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1220837838&sr=1-1

pgs 19 - 23


Smaller farms rarely can compete with this "monoculture" single-crop
yield. They tend to plant crop mixtures, a method known as
"intercropping.' Additionally, where single-crop monocultures have empty
"weed" spaces, small farms use these spaces for crop planting. They are
also more likely to rotate or combine crops and livestock, with the
resulting [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] performing the important function of replenishing [Only registered and activated users can see links. ]
fertility. These small-scale integrated farms produce far more per unit
area than large farms. Though the yield per unit area of one crop ‹
corn, for example‹may be lower, the total output per unit area for small
farms, often composed of more than a dozen crops and numerous animal
products, is virtually always higher than that of larger farms.
Clearly, if we are to compare accurately the productivity of small and
large farms, we should use total agricultural output, balanced against
total farm inputs and "externalities,''' rather than single-crop yield
as our measurement principle. Total output is defined as the sum of
everything a small farmer produces ‹ various grains, fruits, vegetables,
fodder, and animal products ‹ and is the real benchmark of 'efficiency
in farming. Moreover, productivity measurements should also take into
account total input costs, including large-machinery and chemical use,
which often are left out of the equation in the yield efficiency claims.
Perhaps most important, however, is the inclusion of the cost of
externalities such as environmental and human health impacts for which
industrial scale monocultured farms allow society to pay. Continuing to
measure farm efficiency through single-crop "yield" in agricultural
economics represents an unacceptable bias against diversification and
reflects the bizarre conviction that producing one food crop on a large
scale is more important than producing many crops (and higher
productivity) on a small scale.
Once, the flawed yield measurement system is discarded, the "bigger is
better" myth is shattered. As summarized by the food policy expert Peter
Rosset, "Surveying the data, we indeed find that small farms almost
always produce far more agricultural output per unit area than larger
farms. This is now widely recognized by agricultural economists across
the political spectrum, as the "inverse relationship between farm size
and output."' He notes that even the World Bank now advocates
redistributing land to small farmers in the third world as a step toward
increasing overall agricultural productivity.
-----

The Fatal Harvest Reader

ARTIFICIAL FERTILITY by Jason McKenny p.121 - 129

THE BREAKDOWN OF A SYSTEM
We now know that the massive use of synthetic fertilizers to create
artificial fertility has had a cascade of adverse effects on natural
soil fertility and the entire soil system. Fertilizer application begins
the destruction of soil biodiversity by diminishing the role of
nitrogen-fixing bacteria and amplifying the role of everything that
feeds on nitrogen. These feeders then speed up the decomposition of
organic matter and humus. As organic matter decreases, the physical
structure of soils changes. With less pore space and loss of their
sponge-like qualities, soils are less efficient at retaining moisture
and air. More irrigation is needed. Water leaches through soils,
draining away nutrients that no longer have an effective substrate on
which to cling. With less available oxygen the growth of soil
microbiology slows, and the intricate ecosystem of biological exchanges
breaks down. Acidity rises and further breaks down organic matter. As
soil microbes decrease in volume and diversity, they less are less able
to physically hold soils together in groups called aggregates. Water
begins to erode these soils away. Less topsoil means less volume and
biodiversity to buffer

126 McKENNEY
against these changes. More soils wash away. Meanwhile, all of these
events have a cumulative effect of reducing the amount of nutrients
available to plants. Industrial farmers address these observed
deficiencies by adding more fertilizer. Such a scenario is known as a
negative feedback loop; a more blunt comparison is substance abuse.
The adverse effects of fertilizer use do not stop at the farm gate. All
plant-usable forms of nitrogen are very soluble in water. This is why
they are so transient and why they eventually end up in our watersheds.
WATER AND AIR POLLUTION
Every summer, rains carry eroded soils and fertilizer runoff out of
Midwestern fields draining 1.2 million square miles of watershed into
the Mississippi River, down to the Gulf of Mexico. For several years
now, researchers have monitored and studied the by-product of this grand
scale pollution. A huge dead zone, at times encompassing the whole water
column, forms off the coast of the delta estuary. The only marine life
able to survive in this nitrogen-choked, oxygen-depleted expanse are
certain forms of algae. It is a twisted irony that the oil pumped from
the bottom of the gulf is eventually returning energetically as runoff
that pollutes the marine ecosystem. The estuaries of the Chesapeake,
Massachusetts, North Carolina, San Francisco Bay, and nuinerous others
all regularly experience the ecological destruction this runoff brings.
Runoff of soils and synthetic chemicals makes agriculture the largest
non-point source of water pollution in the country. It is estimated that
only 18 percent of all the nitrogen compounds applied to fields in the
United States is actually absorbed in plant tissues. This means that we
are inadvertentiv fertilizing our waters on a gigantic scale. When this
runoff reaches waterways, it promotes robust growth in algae and other
waterbome plants, a process known as eutrophication in fresh waters and
algal bloom in oceanic systems. This unbalanced growth depletes the
[Only registered and activated users can see links. ] of oxygen dissolved into waters. Aquatic life of all varieties is
literally asphyxiated by the transformation. The additional algae blocks
the transmittance of light energy to depth, creating a less biodiverse
water column. Over time this addition of nitrogen changes the whole
structure and function of water

ARTIFICIAL FERTILITY » 127
ecosystems. Less aerobically dependent organisms prevail, which
compromises the productivity of fisheries. Many of these organisms
produce toxic materials as a by-product of their metabolism. Toxic "red
tides" and the resulting fish kills and beach closures are brought on by
excessive nitrogen levels. Pathogenic organisms such as Pfieste-ria and
Pseudo-Nitzschia also proliferate in these polluted waters.
Numerous farming communities in the United States have experienced
nitrogen pollution in their aquifers and drinking supplies. When
ingested by humans, nitrogen compounds are converted to a nitrite form
that combines with hemoglobin in our blood. This changes the structure
and reduces the oxygen-holding capacity of blood, which creates a
dangerous condition known as methemoglobinemia. Various communities
throughout the midwestem United States have suffered from outbreaks of
this condition, which is particularly acute in children.
A large quantity of the nitrogen compounds applied to fields volatizes
into gaseous nitrous oxides, which escape into the atmosphere. These are
[Only registered and activated users can see links. ] gases with far greater potency than simple carbon dioxide.
Elevated levels of these gases have been directly linked to
stratospheric ozone depletion, acid deposition, and ground-level ozone
pollution. In this way, our fertilizer use exacerbates the already
untenable problems of global air pollution and climate change.
THE DEBT IS DUE
All of these adverse effects of fertilizers result from their
application. It is equally important to consider the problems associated
with the production of fertilizers. The Haber process first made for the
direct link of fertility to energy consumption, but this was in a time
when fossil fuels were abundant and their widespread use seemed
harmless. The production of nitrogenous fertilizers consumes more energy
than any other aspect of the agricultural process. It takes the energy
from burning 2,200 pounds of coal to produce 5.5 pounds of usable
nitrogen. This means that within the industrial model of agriculture, as
inputs are compared to outputs, the cost of energy has become
increasingly important. Agriculture's relationship to fertility is now
directly related to the price of oil.

128 McKENNEY
This economic model made some sense throughout a farming
period in which we were mining the biological reserves of fertility
bound in soil humus. Now it is a crisis of diminishing returns. In 1980
in the United States, the application of a ton of fertilizers resulted in
an average yield of 15 to 20 tons of corn. By 1997, this same ton of
fertilizer yielded only 5 to 10 tons. Between 1910 and 1983, United
States corn yields increased 346 percent while our energy consump-
tion for agriculture increased 810 percent. The poor economics of this
industrial agriculture began to surface. The biological health of soils
has been driven into such an impoverished state at the expense of
quick, easy fertility that productivity is now compromised, and fertil-
izers are less and less effective.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in 1997
declared that Mexico and the United States had ³hit the wall" on
wheat yields, with no increases shown in 13 years. Since the late 1980s,
worldwide consumption of fertilizers has been in decline. Farmers are
using fewer fertilizers because crops are physiologically incapable of
absorbing more nutrients. The negative effects of erosion and loss of
biological resiliency exceed our ability to offset them with fertilizers.
The price of farm commodities is so low that it no longer offsets the
cost of fertilizers. We are at full throttle and going nowhere. Economic
systems assume unlimited growth capacity. Ecological systems have
finite limitations. It would be wise to recognize how the industrial
perspective of fertility as a mined resource drives us toward agricul-
tural collapse.
SUSTAINABLE SOLUTIONS
Certainly the adverse effects of fertilizer use come as no sudden
surprise
to farmers. Even those who manage the most chemically based agricultural
systems recognize the important roles of organic matter, microorganisms,
and crop diversity ill fertility maintenance. Unfortunately, under crush-
ing financial pressure most farmers are limited in the changes they
can afford to make.
Some of the greatest reductions in fertilizer use have come from
conservation practices and more careful applications. These represent
a savings for farmers. Better timing and less indiscriminate applica-
ARTIFICIAL FERTILITY € 129
tion of fertilizers reduce the adverse effect on soil biology and the
likelihood of environmental pollution. Equally important are conser-
vation tillage methods in which ground disturbance is minimized and
the decomposition of crop residues is promoted. Less tillage distur-
bance gives a greater opportunity for microorganisms to proliferate,
and more crop decomposition helps provide habitat and resources for
them. More water, nutrients, and soils are retained on the farm.
Organic farmers approach the management of fertility biologi-
cally rather than chemically. Most organic methods work to enhance
soil nutrient cycles by relying upon strategies of crop rotation and
cover-cropping to provide nutrient enrichment. Nitrogen-fixing and
nutrient-building crops are grown explicitly for the purpose of improving
soils, increasing organic matter and soil microbes, preventing erosion,
and attracting other beneficial organisms. Soil diversity is maintained
with crop plant diversity. Multiple varieties of different crops are
grown in successions, which maximize nutrient use by different plant
types and minimize pests and pathogens. Additional fertility is pro-
vided through organic sources. Naturally based organic fertilizers
include composted plant materials, composted manures, fishery by-
products, blood and bonemeals, and other materials which decay and
release nutrients, participating in rather than destabilizing the nutri-
ent cycle. Practiced well, organic methods establish a dynamic yet
stable fertility. Costs of outside inputs dwindle, while soil health and
overall fertility grows.
As an organic farmer myself, I have seen the overwhelmingly posi-
tive effects of these methods. In my experience, soils with an enhanced
organic metabolism have a greater productive capacity than that
offered by synthetic fertilizers. I am told over and over by all my cus-
tomers how my vegetables have flavors beyond what they have come
to expect. I believe that this is directly related to fertility as a
dynamic, interrelated biological process that we have only begun to
understand. Plants are far from simple machines with simple needs.
To understand them as such is to abuse them and, in turn, to deprive
ourselves of the nutrition and taste that we may derive from them.
--
- Billy
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.
[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]
[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]

[Billy]

In article
<wildbilly-DEC270.13503924012011@c-61-68-245-199.per.connect.net.au>,
Billy <wildbilly@withouta.net> wrote:
(whack)

I'm trying to get this information to you before you go into cognitive
collapse. A mind is a terrible thing to lose, but in your case it might
be an improvement ;O)

In response to your request, here is another paquet of information to
fill that void between your ears. Don't want that dormant organ in there
rattling around making noise, do we?

The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability by Lierre Keith
<[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]
4860804/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1281718588&sr=1-1>

250 The Vegetarian Myth

Remember that pine forest that built one-sixteenth of an inch of [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] in
fifty years? Cue those angels again: Salatin's rotating mixture of
animals on pasture is building one inch of'soil annually.4

Peter Bane did some calculations. He estimates that there are a
hundred million agricultural acres in the US similar enough to the
Salatins' to count: "about 2/3 of the area east of the Dakotas, roughly
from Omaha andTopeka east to the Atlantic and south to the Gulf of
Mexico."5 Right now, that land is mostly planted to corn and soy. But
returned to permanent cover, it would sequester 2.2 billion tons of
carbon every year. Bane writes:

That's equal to present gross US atmospheric releases, not
counting the net reduction from the carbon sinks of existing
forests and soils ... Without expanding farm acreage or remov-
ing any existing forests, and even before undertaking changes
in consumer lifestyle, reduction in traffic, and increases in
industrial and transport fuel efficiencies, which arc absolutely
imperative, the US could become a net carbon sink by chang-
ing cultivating practices and marketing on a million farms. In
fact, we could create 5 million new jobs in farming if the land
were used as efficiently as the Salatins use theirs.6

Understand: agriculture was the beginning of global warm-
ing. Ten thousand years of destroying the carbon sinks of [Only registered and activated users can see links. ]
polycultures has added almost as much carbon to the atmosphere as
industrialization (see Figure 5, opposite), an indictment that you,
vegetarians, need to answer. No one has told you this before, but that
is what your food‹those oh so eco-peaceful grains and beans‹has
done.7 Remember the ghost acres and the ghost slaves? What you're
eating in those grains and beans is ghost meat, down to the bare
bones of whole species. There is no reconciling civilization and its
foods with the needs of our living planet.
-----

I forgot to ask, can you read?

If so, do you have any questions about the information that I most
humbly have presented to you?

Or do you have no appreciation for the effort that I've made to help a
clueless soul, such as yourself?

I'm sure that you'll have some snappy response, like uh-uh. Don't feel
bad, some people just aren't literate.

Good luck, and try to get a life.

Now go away, you bother me.
--
- Billy
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.
[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]
[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]