flowerbug
Garden Master
i'll expand on each of these later... (some of this is quite tongue-in-cheek,
i'll leave it as an exercise for the reader as to figure out which is witch
)...
if you read all of this...
negatives:
- more work
- more noise
- more weeds
- destroys the soil community
- speeds up decomposition
- increases erosion losses
- uses up fertilizer faster
positives:
- need to work off winter fatty layer
- noise keeps critters away
- destroys weeds
- ants be gone[0]
- adds air/water spaces to compacted soils
- buries organic materials
ok, now i shall get on with much more wordings. you have been warned, here be dragons (or dragoons? or lagoons? )...
i've mostly no-tilled for the past 10-12yrs. each year even without cover crops the soils keep improving compared to how they were when i started. crop rotation, using organic materials and [tada!] no-till practices are what keeps things going in the right direction. if i could use more cover crops it would probably be twice as good as it is now as i've been able to observe some places where i have been able to use the cover crops.
more work, yep, certainly, i can scrape a garden clear in about five minutes (many small garden spaces here). if i were to till them each time that would be a lot more work. if the aim is to stop weeds, the D hoe will do that and not disturb the soil or the roots of nearby plants. i only have to hand weed between plants that grow too closely to get the hoe between. i try to plant most things so that this doesn't happen. the extra time in one aspect is traded for more space used in the other aspect. production seems to be ok.
once in a while i do take a garden and completely work through it by hand tilling using a shovel. it is therapy for me and lets me observe all the soil layers and i have usually buried some things deeply which can be now used up top where most of the vegetable roots are going to be hanging out. it isn't noisy (i don't swear too much), i get to see some worm friends (sorry when i happen to cut one in half with the shovel. but i'm glad i've not used a tiller because i've seen what those do to the worms. eek!
the main reason i have to deeply go after a few gardens here or there is that certain weeds are very invasive and since i don't use herbicides i have to remove them by hand. sow-thistle, horsetail, globe thistles, grasses and milkweed are all nice and useful plants in their own spaces, but i can't have them in the flower gardens or veggie patches. some are first colonizers of disturbed soils and will be overgrown in time by taller grasses, shrubs and other things if left to a natural progression of things. a vegetable garden however is an artificial thing where you are having to work to prevent it being taken over by the surrounding plants and eventually your climactic habitat (varies by region - around here that is a mixed white pine or oak forest depending upon soil type/location).
so if you examine the soil and study what makes it fertile you will find out that the soil will layer itself and various creatures and organisms will be in the different layers as it sorts things out. disturbed soils means more oxygen for a while as the bacteria, fungi, various other critters sort things out again. that more oxygen and whatever processes are going on to break down soil organic matter is a temporary boost, but will fade unless you disturb it again, add more fertilizer or some creatures get stirring about. this is where the worms and plants can play a big role. if you plant cover crops you'll find the worms hanging out about the roots of plants, because that is where the action/food is at. the plants give off sugars and other things in trade with the bacteria and fungi in the soil. the fungi can send out fillaments (called hyphae if you want to get technical about it) for quite some distance to find nutrients and then the normal processes of osmosis will carry things from one end to the other (plant roots ). by tilling you are destroying that soil community.
worms are bacteria factories. there can be many kinds of worms active in a garden. some work on the surface organic materials, some work more near the surface, others specialize in deeper digging and will hang out around plant roots and then if you are lucky you can have the really deep miners who dig burrows 10-20 feet down (around here they are called night crawlers). tilling destroys their work and they like some surface cover and a bit of clay in the soil. you don't often find night crawlers above soil and free crawling on the surface unless they are in trouble or mating. it takes them a lot of effort to dig their tunnels (in comparison to the smaller worms) they excavate as they grow bigger until maturity. so if you do find one "nekkid running" stir up some dirt and put it under there so it has a chance to redig a burrow. ok i've gotten side-tracked here by worms (not uncommon with me, like beans )...
ok, so let's get back to the bacteria factory as the bacteria are good kinds that will help feed your plants, the other good part of worms is that they grind soil particles together and they excrete calcium. this is like free plant food too. you're not going to find much better. it's not a huge nutrient spike, but because it is granular and holds together as the worms poop it out it also doesn't tend to wash away as easily as it could.
i use worms as my main fertilizer source for heavy feeding plants. i dig a trench or a hole where i'm putting those specific plants and that is where i scoop the buckets of worms out. i don't bother to separate the worms from their castings because most of them will die off anyways (sorry, but that is a fact of life when you transplant adult worms of various species, most of which when they are larger are not going to like the
changes of location - and in my case i do use some non-native species which will die off in the heat of the summer or the cold of the winter). i also have native worms in the mix and a few of those will survive (the younger they are the better). i've found that it takes about three years to get a garden recovered from no worm life to being able to support some worms naturally (this would be vastly improved if i could do cover crops more often - but that is a problem with Mom likeing bare dirt vs. what nature would like more and since she's the boss/landowner i have to work around her wishes - love you Mom).
the holes that worms dig, those are your plant root tunnels, your air tunnels and also water tunnels. in poorly drained soils that are heavily compacted, if you want to take a longer range approach to things in improving them without disturbing most of the area (it's much more energy intensive to till deeply such a field than to just rip a few deep lines every few feet). this will greatly increase your water and air infiltration and give it a jump start. the added benefit is that you don't move weed seeds around as much and you don't open the entire soil surface to being colonized by invasive weeds...
much the same way you can also plant some things which will help break open heavily compacted soils, winter wheat, winter rye (both grains which can be harvested the next season or just turn them under in the spring or mow them short and then plant into them - some crops will do fine with this, but a few will not - this comes from practice and study, don't worry not all things are going to work first time out - read up, study, etc. - that's what winter is good for )... other good cover crops, the radishes, turnips, buckwheat, rapid growing annuals, chopped back or not, i like them for their flowers and seeds they can regrow. worms love 'em too. the perennial deeper rooted plants like alfalfa and birdsfoot trefoil can be let to grow for several years and you can chop them back after they've been established so they can be used as animal feed or much of what you chop can be left in place to encourage the worms to keep making more tunnels.
having done this sort of thing on some very hard compacted clay soil that could barely support the most scraggly of weeds (due to the fact that the surface was slanted enough that all organic materials the few plants could produce would get washed away) i now am to the point in that area that the garden supports weed life so well i'm going to be turning it back to productive use (strawberries, and anything else i can plant back there, but that also means i have to improve the fences or i'm just growing critter food). i have pictures of the before and after soil conditions. i also did a worm census and checked the water table to see how far certain plants could get rooted before they'd give up... it's lovely back there now and the grasses and weeds want to invade any chance they get. i'm working on it this season to remove the garlic i scattered in there and also to clear the grasses again. i want it to be a mix of flowers and veggies with a few other plantings scattered in for more diversity... removing thistles is the other reason to dig so deeply. and of course more space for beans...
hmm, where was i? daydreaming when i should be working... it's ok, i need a bit of a break this morning.
nothing i've been doing is aimed at making things worse for growing plants and getting food in return, but it does seem like modern farming is aimed at turning fertile topsoil into subsoil. if you want to do that then keep on tilling and giving away your nutrients and energy because that's exactly what it does. that is what the farmers around here mostly do. along with it they ruin their fields, increase soil compaction, decrease rain infiltration. so what do they end up having to do? add drain tiles because the feilds get too wet. which removes nutrients even more and sends them into the rivers. note that fields being too wet is only an issue if you are not giving plants a chance to grow and send down roots, where you kill off your soil community by tilling too much too often and where you don't have cover crops to help keep the soil in place and to break the impacts of the rain/sun/wind. they also think they have to add more fertilizer and other trace nutrients because they get washed away not having any other organic molecules to stick with. it's all a system geared towards selling more poisons and amendments and it destroys what is a much more complicated network of creatures.
there's really no way that this is a good use of land, it's strip mining in a different form... the following generations will pay for it.
note that such destroyed systems will recover in time if left alone. it's not like nature doesn't know what it's doing. there's no grand plan, it's just how a few billion years of life have sorted things out. the millions of species of bacteria, fungi and soil creatures will mostly be harmless to us and plants and animals but you get the most diversity by not killing off the soil community at all to begin with and in that diversity you also get the protective bacteria and fungi and critters which all keep the most destructive versions of them in check. there's no easy home for them to get going in quantity because there is a fairly completely colonized system already in place, it's efficient at collecting the sun's energy and getting that sent to the plants and animals. once you disturb that and reduce the complexity you open up more spaces for the more harmful sorts to have a much easier chance to get going and cause more apparent damage (in the greater scheme of things you can see a version of this happening in weed killers, antibiotics, hospitals, feedlots, and other food production systems where they try to make it sterile but often they end up with harm causing infections to eventually take over - if you keep selecting for harmful things that's what nature will produce - if instead you add/select for diversity you reduce opening spaces for harmful things to get going).
now let's turn this about a bit. what happens when you disturb a system here or there? you create chaos? yes, but if you have a diverse system around that you are also opening up edges and avenues for other creatures to then colonize. if you don't have i diverse system surrounding then you end up with much of the same. perhaps you are opening it up to invasive weeds because the soil seed bank can easily hold many weed species for 100yrs or longer. is that bad? not really in the fact that any disturbed system can eventually recover and during that recovery it may be a much more diverse system than what was there before until it returns to a climax system of whatever your area would support... so nutrient cycling happens, bedrock gets turned into subsoil and then into topsoil. microbes and fungi change as conditions change, life does go on.
where is your place in all of this? you are life's result, you are the brains that can observe, eventually i hope you observe well enough to get us and the entire web of life off this one egg basket and spreading out into the larger universe. take some worms and ants with you too. they're likely to come along anyways (in your gut and all of your community organisms), but with them you also get fungi, bacteria, plants, nutrient cycling, etc. gotta have the decomposers as well as the composers (cue Monty Python ...)...
well this didn't go quite as i'd wanted, but i guess that's what happens when you ramble a bit.
cheers and good day to you you little creatures of chaos and life too...
[0] i happen to really like ants, they're facinating creatures to study if you haven't read the book _The Ants_ it is a good winter read. if anything it does help bring on some napping...
i'll leave it as an exercise for the reader as to figure out which is witch
)...if you read all of this...
negatives:
- more work
- more noise
- more weeds
- destroys the soil community
- speeds up decomposition
- increases erosion losses
- uses up fertilizer faster
positives:
- need to work off winter fatty layer
- noise keeps critters away
- destroys weeds
- ants be gone[0]
- adds air/water spaces to compacted soils
- buries organic materials
ok, now i shall get on with much more wordings. you have been warned, here be dragons (or dragoons? or lagoons?
)...i've mostly no-tilled for the past 10-12yrs. each year even without cover crops the soils keep improving compared to how they were when i started. crop rotation, using organic materials and [tada!] no-till practices are what keeps things going in the right direction. if i could use more cover crops it would probably be twice as good as it is now as i've been able to observe some places where i have been able to use the cover crops.
more work, yep, certainly, i can scrape a garden clear in about five minutes (many small garden spaces here). if i were to till them each time that would be a lot more work. if the aim is to stop weeds, the D hoe will do that and not disturb the soil or the roots of nearby plants. i only have to hand weed between plants that grow too closely to get the hoe between. i try to plant most things so that this doesn't happen. the extra time in one aspect is traded for more space used in the other aspect. production seems to be ok.
once in a while i do take a garden and completely work through it by hand tilling using a shovel. it is therapy for me and lets me observe all the soil layers and i have usually buried some things deeply which can be now used up top where most of the vegetable roots are going to be hanging out. it isn't noisy (i don't swear too much), i get to see some worm friends (sorry when i happen to cut one in half with the shovel. but i'm glad i've not used a tiller because i've seen what those do to the worms. eek!
the main reason i have to deeply go after a few gardens here or there is that certain weeds are very invasive and since i don't use herbicides i have to remove them by hand. sow-thistle, horsetail, globe thistles, grasses and milkweed are all nice and useful plants in their own spaces, but i can't have them in the flower gardens or veggie patches. some are first colonizers of disturbed soils and will be overgrown in time by taller grasses, shrubs and other things if left to a natural progression of things. a vegetable garden however is an artificial thing where you are having to work to prevent it being taken over by the surrounding plants and eventually your climactic habitat (varies by region - around here that is a mixed white pine or oak forest depending upon soil type/location).
so if you examine the soil and study what makes it fertile you will find out that the soil will layer itself and various creatures and organisms will be in the different layers as it sorts things out. disturbed soils means more oxygen for a while as the bacteria, fungi, various other critters sort things out again. that more oxygen and whatever processes are going on to break down soil organic matter is a temporary boost, but will fade unless you disturb it again, add more fertilizer or some creatures get stirring about. this is where the worms and plants can play a big role. if you plant cover crops you'll find the worms hanging out about the roots of plants, because that is where the action/food is at. the plants give off sugars and other things in trade with the bacteria and fungi in the soil. the fungi can send out fillaments (called hyphae if you want to get technical about it) for quite some distance to find nutrients and then the normal processes of osmosis will carry things from one end to the other (plant roots
). by tilling you are destroying that soil community.worms are bacteria factories. there can be many kinds of worms active in a garden. some work on the surface organic materials, some work more near the surface, others specialize in deeper digging and will hang out around plant roots and then if you are lucky you can have the really deep miners who dig burrows 10-20 feet down (around here they are called night crawlers). tilling destroys their work and they like some surface cover and a bit of clay in the soil. you don't often find night crawlers above soil and free crawling on the surface unless they are in trouble or mating. it takes them a lot of effort to dig their tunnels (in comparison to the smaller worms) they excavate as they grow bigger until maturity. so if you do find one "nekkid running" stir up some dirt and put it under there so it has a chance to redig a burrow. ok i've gotten side-tracked here by worms (not uncommon with me, like beans
)...ok, so let's get back to the bacteria factory as the bacteria are good kinds that will help feed your plants, the other good part of worms is that they grind soil particles together and they excrete calcium. this is like free plant food too. you're not going to find much better. it's not a huge nutrient spike, but because it is granular and holds together as the worms poop it out it also doesn't tend to wash away as easily as it could.
i use worms as my main fertilizer source for heavy feeding plants. i dig a trench or a hole where i'm putting those specific plants and that is where i scoop the buckets of worms out. i don't bother to separate the worms from their castings because most of them will die off anyways (sorry, but that is a fact of life when you transplant adult worms of various species, most of which when they are larger are not going to like the
changes of location - and in my case i do use some non-native species which will die off in the heat of the summer or the cold of the winter). i also have native worms in the mix and a few of those will survive (the younger they are the better). i've found that it takes about three years to get a garden recovered from no worm life to being able to support some worms naturally (this would be vastly improved if i could do cover crops more often - but that is a problem with Mom likeing bare dirt vs. what nature would like more and since she's the boss/landowner i have to work around her wishes
- love you Mom).the holes that worms dig, those are your plant root tunnels, your air tunnels and also water tunnels. in poorly drained soils that are heavily compacted, if you want to take a longer range approach to things in improving them without disturbing most of the area (it's much more energy intensive to till deeply such a field than to just rip a few deep lines every few feet). this will greatly increase your water and air infiltration and give it a jump start. the added benefit is that you don't move weed seeds around as much and you don't open the entire soil surface to being colonized by invasive weeds...
much the same way you can also plant some things which will help break open heavily compacted soils, winter wheat, winter rye (both grains which can be harvested the next season or just turn them under in the spring or mow them short and then plant into them - some crops will do fine with this, but a few will not - this comes from practice and study, don't worry not all things are going to work first time out - read up, study, etc. - that's what winter is good for
)... other good cover crops, the radishes, turnips, buckwheat, rapid growing annuals, chopped back or not, i like them for their flowers and seeds they can regrow. worms love 'em too. the perennial deeper rooted plants like alfalfa and birdsfoot trefoil can be let to grow for several years and you can chop them back after they've been established so they can be used as animal feed or much of what you chop can be left in place to encourage the worms to keep making more tunnels.having done this sort of thing on some very hard compacted clay soil that could barely support the most scraggly of weeds (due to the fact that the surface was slanted enough that all organic materials the few plants could produce would get washed away) i now am to the point in that area that the garden supports weed life so well i'm going to be turning it back to productive use (strawberries, and anything else i can plant back there, but that also means i have to improve the fences or i'm just growing critter food). i have pictures of the before and after soil conditions. i also did a worm census and checked the water table to see how far certain plants could get rooted before they'd give up... it's lovely back there now and the grasses and weeds want to invade any chance they get. i'm working on it this season to remove the garlic i scattered in there and also to clear the grasses again. i want it to be a mix of flowers and veggies with a few other plantings scattered in for more diversity... removing thistles is the other reason to dig so deeply. and of course more space for beans...
hmm, where was i? daydreaming when i should be working... it's ok, i need a bit of a break this morning.
nothing i've been doing is aimed at making things worse for growing plants and getting food in return, but it does seem like modern farming is aimed at turning fertile topsoil into subsoil. if you want to do that then keep on tilling and giving away your nutrients and energy because that's exactly what it does. that is what the farmers around here mostly do. along with it they ruin their fields, increase soil compaction, decrease rain infiltration. so what do they end up having to do? add drain tiles because the feilds get too wet. which removes nutrients even more and sends them into the rivers. note that fields being too wet is only an issue if you are not giving plants a chance to grow and send down roots, where you kill off your soil community by tilling too much too often and where you don't have cover crops to help keep the soil in place and to break the impacts of the rain/sun/wind. they also think they have to add more fertilizer and other trace nutrients because they get washed away not having any other organic molecules to stick with. it's all a system geared towards selling more poisons and amendments and it destroys what is a much more complicated network of creatures.
there's really no way that this is a good use of land, it's strip mining in a different form... the following generations will pay for it.
note that such destroyed systems will recover in time if left alone. it's not like nature doesn't know what it's doing. there's no grand plan, it's just how a few billion years of life have sorted things out. the millions of species of bacteria, fungi and soil creatures will mostly be harmless to us and plants and animals but you get the most diversity by not killing off the soil community at all to begin with and in that diversity you also get the protective bacteria and fungi and critters which all keep the most destructive versions of them in check. there's no easy home for them to get going in quantity because there is a fairly completely colonized system already in place, it's efficient at collecting the sun's energy and getting that sent to the plants and animals. once you disturb that and reduce the complexity you open up more spaces for the more harmful sorts to have a much easier chance to get going and cause more apparent damage (in the greater scheme of things you can see a version of this happening in weed killers, antibiotics, hospitals, feedlots, and other food production systems where they try to make it sterile but often they end up with harm causing infections to eventually take over - if you keep selecting for harmful things that's what nature will produce - if instead you add/select for diversity you reduce opening spaces for harmful things to get going).
now let's turn this about a bit.
what happens when you disturb a system here or there? you create chaos? yes, but if you have a diverse system around that you are also opening up edges and avenues for other creatures to then colonize. if you don't have i diverse system surrounding then you end up with much of the same. perhaps you are opening it up to invasive weeds because the soil seed bank can easily hold many weed species for 100yrs or longer. is that bad? not really in the fact that any disturbed system can eventually recover and during that recovery it may be a much more diverse system than what was there before until it returns to a climax system of whatever your area would support... so nutrient cycling happens, bedrock gets turned into subsoil and then into topsoil. microbes and fungi change as conditions change, life does go on.where is your place in all of this? you are life's result, you are the brains that can observe, eventually i hope you observe well enough to get us and the entire web of life off this one egg basket and spreading out into the larger universe.
take some worms and ants with you too. they're likely to come along anyways (in your gut and all of your community organisms), but with them you also get fungi, bacteria, plants, nutrient cycling, etc. gotta have the decomposers as well as the composers (cue Monty Python ...)...well this didn't go quite as i'd wanted, but i guess that's what happens when you ramble a bit.
cheers and good day to you you little creatures of chaos and life too...
[0] i happen to really like ants, they're facinating creatures to study if you haven't read the book _The Ants_ it is a good winter read. if anything it does help bring on some napping...
