When the colors flash crimson and yellow-flames as the sun lows more and more obliquely to the Earth (neither perpendicular nor parallel,
slanting) and the Winter's face is a fixed-fog of sunrise ice, all the wild abundant bigness of the green season winds down. It shows in the cows furrier and darker backs, cold clearing up the air, and the coming ice shows on brittle stems of unchecked chicory in amongst my blueberries.
Indeed, this transitional and much-too-beautiful Fall is a fine slice of season to contemplate, commiserate, research, dream and generally lay about with wild daydreams of new projects. And lee's not forget to finish the existing ones
down on the permaculture farm. I can hear the banjo lickin in yonder Hills, yeehaw.
Actually, less than dreaming, I've been working on those projects. planning for spring while planting seasonal crops like wheat and winter peas. Researching and sometimes working some more at night, laying in some clay to pelletize seed to run some experiments on some short season crops to follow the wheat and peas, using the
Fukuoka-style of
Natural Farming--also called 'do-nothing' farming. Check out this wikipedia link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_farming
This style of cropping tries to mimic nature and encourages the farmer to overcome the tendency to make more work for oneself. Practically, it means spreading straw on the field and suing pelletized seed, or seed balls to succession plant year round. In the climate of the North Carolina Mountains, I am hoping to follow the wheat and peas coming up in the picture below with an open-pollinate Pink popcorn, asian cowpeas and pumpkins. Then some trials with vegetables and rice, planted in seed balls and as plant starts.
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| Wheat and Austrian field pea coming up from a patch of ground that was tilled in April. The seed was simply thrown over the surface before a period of clouds and rain, then mulched loosely with old hay. Scattering the hay in all directions and avoiding clumps is important, Fukuoka-San says |
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Lasagna Garden Beds
Another exciting Fall garden project is
Sheet Mulching, also called
lasagna gardening. The idea is not to do any soil turning or weed removal beforehand. You can mow the area and then begin to layer the ground with 2-ply corrugated cardboard overlapping the edges 4-5 inches. Alternately you may used 10-20 thicknesses of newspaper. Then, add hay, leaves, compost, manure in alternating layers.
1.) Cardboard! -
2.) Hay. When building up your lasagna garden bed, it's important to get he
Carbon to Nitrogen ration right
in order to ensure digestion of the materials is of an appropriate quality and time-frame. Too much Nitrogen, or
fresh, wet, and
green stuff, you risk putrefaction--a smelly anaerobic 'hot' pile. Too much Carbon material and your decomposition with be
slow and
unattractive for the soil micro-organisms (also the soil pH will dip).
Straw is not Hay. Straw is the
year-end, yellow-colored stems of annual winter grains (barley, oats, rye, wheat) after the seed has been threshed out. It is a carbon, whereas
Hay is cut Green, the nitrogen rich flush of perennial grasses and pasture weeds like orchard grass, timothy, fescue, clover, chicory, dandelion. According to this very informative youtube video from Wisconsin Public TV
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fGnVRlOqHY Hay has the perfect mix of C:N already.
3.) Bio-Char and Manure
This stripe of materials on the pile is what agriculturalists of the cutting-edge call BIO-CHAR. I did not buy this, but instead harvested it by digging up the soil and ashes underneath a burn pile. The charcoal is derived from the incomplete combustion of twigs and branches lying especially low to the ground in the burn pile, later embedding in the earth. This resource has very stable carbon compounds that have a HUGE amount of surface area, and that's where the microbiota and protozoa that exude humic acids, or
humus, like to live.
Humus is the gooey and black 'very dead' organic matter, that typically makes up 70% of the Organic Matter content (OMC) in your average soil. The rest is recently 'dead stuff', 15% and living stuff, 15%-- roots, insects, protozoa. So, humic acids are
very important! they're the habitat where the microorganisms responsible for the long-term fertility of soil live. Charcoal acts like a humic acid, by the action of binding minerals on the cation exchange, moderating soil fertility, and leading to increasing OMC and overall soil structure. What is soil structure? Soil structure describes the arrangement of the solids in a soil and the pore spaces for air and water between them. Basically, how well soil particles clump together and resist extreme drying out or extreme water-logging. Building up OMC in your soil develops good soil structure, whereas cultivation nearly always leads to declines in soil structure because it opens up humic acids and decomposing stuff to higher oxidation and more rapid rates of decay. Normal soil OMC percentage is 1-4%, I'd say a good organic garden soil should be at least 5% Applying nitrogen fertilizer kills micro-organisms that build up OMC. So, manure and burn pile ashes (look for charcoal bits) for habitat to microorganism, then you feed them.
In addition to the ashes and bio-char in the above photo there is a stripe of crumbly drywall which delivers elements similar to Garden Lime, sulfur and calcium. Drywall is Gypsum, or calcium sulfate dihydrate --CaSO~2H
2O -- which is mined from the ground, also created as a byproduct of scrubbers on coal burning power plants. Fertilizer companies sell gypsum as a mineral fertilizer often with phosphorous. It breaks up heavy clay soils just as good as greensand, but I've heard it's not recommended for sodic soils (salty). Just add a little of this free fertilizer resource.
4.) Leaves, these you can find curbside anytime of day in any neighborhood of town. Then some wood bark. I've got a good deal from the Buncombe Landfill for a 6 yard dump truck load.
Then some bone meal (a purchased product) and topped up with plenty of aged cow manure. I also add AZOMITE, volcanic ash, which delivers loads of micronutrients. Oh yea, some old Kelp Meal also, obtained for free somewhere in my ramblings and squirreled away for a rainy day (actually, i tried eating a little, but the taste is too strong, i prefer whole kelp, kombu, alaria or digitata kelp boiled in my stews for optimum health and mineral delivery to the active human =^D
Now, do it all over again! hay, manure, a stripe of bio-char manure, leaves, wood chips, manure, hay, woohoo! Build up the bed knee-high, a minimum of 18 inches.
There's a classic book on Agriculture I'm finishing up called
Farmer's of Forty Centuries: A Permanent Agriculture in Japan, Korea and China. This fellow was considered the father of
Soil Physics, the study of soil physical properties
. An interesting time it was written, 1911, too, because the USA and Europe had recognized the possibility of expanding production per acre with high Nitrogen fertilizers, an aspect of soil chemistry--but would not figure out how to do for another 30 years. This fellow went to Asia for 9 months and meticulously took notes and photos about how people lived-on the landscape: how they built, cooked, cultivated, transported and traded the physical world with only local resources, mostly biological. What he discovered was an economy of ubiquitous thrift in the management of the landscape, a culture of zero-waste and maximum utilization of every scrap of biological fertility (including hand-dredging the canals that simultaneously fertilized and elevated the terrain--adding to the flood control of where people both farmed and lived)
Without going into this subject to any great depth, I would like to say that in comparison to these 100 yr old people who came before the synthesis of Nitrogen fertilizers it's not hard to see that the current economy and culture of at least half the worlds population is exceedingly wasteful of biological fertility; solely dependent on machine-made fertility, Life. If the Earth has a lifeblood, some have said it's her oil that humankind love to burn so copiously, but I would argue it's the replicating movements of minerals and elements dissolved and cycling in her soils. A positive notion of truly becoming native to your place, agriculturally speaking.
If you would like to build an outhouse and begin composting your manure, check out my blogpost of a year and 1/2 ago:
http://ravenridgefarm.blogspot.com/2013/05/fun-project-1-throne-house.html
Overall, this was a very fun project and gave full scope to test my increasingly intuitive carpentry skills using unconventional roundwood. Then, of course, the athleticism of putting on boots and playing lumber-jack is always a joy. I'm working with Dada from a distance to help him arrange rough-cut materials from a sawmill for a wooden roof. For the in-fill around posts (also called walls), he may do 1/2 the way up shale stones and mortar and the rest some kind of wooden latticework like wattle-and daub (wiki click here). At any rate, i look forward to seeing his rustic retreat develop, wishing him all the best !
