On 01/12/2015 07:20 PM, David Hare-Scott wrote:
Brooklyn1 wrote:
Todd wrote:

What I don't understand is how the plant would have enough
power left in it to grow both potatoes and tomatoes. Must
be the richest soil the plant could handle without burning
the plant!

When kindergartners are taught to plant beans with just blotting paper
and water even five year olds quickly learn that once germinatiom
occurs (in darkness) plants receive most of their growth energy from
sunlight. Plants will thrive and fruit in the poorest soil given
sufficient water and sunlight. Left to their own devices plants set
only enough fruit to reproduce. Using fertilzers and other agri
techniques is only to increase yield in less time... actually
selective hand harvesting will increase yield better than fertilizing.
Commercial growers fertilize because that costs less than constant
labor. As a home grower I don't use any feretilizers but all else
equal (water and sunlight) I selectively harvest constantly and end up
with a larger/better crop than had I just fertilized... easy to prove
by planting several tomato plants and fertilizing half and selectively
harvesting the other half while adding no fertilizer... constant
selective harvesting ensures a large less seedy crop... I'd much
rather an abundance of smaller veggies than a few giant seedy
specimens Most home gardeners over fertilize and over water, they do
more harm than good. More and more produce is being produced
hydroponically with no soil.


While it is true that much fertilisation of plants is ill advised, most
plants will NOT thrive in the poorest soil with only sunlight and water.
Heavy feeders exhaust the minerals in soil quickly and the rest more
slowly and unless they are replaced your crop will get smaller and your
plants weaker year after year. Farmers may well try to get crops to
market quickly but they are also interested in yield and that is the
primary reason for the application of fertiliser in agriculture. We
might talk about whether the large scale application of synthetic
fertiliser is the best way to get the result in the long term but to say
that the present world could be fed without some kind of fertiliser
applied to cropland is just daft.

If you don't plant annuals you might imagine that your trees, shrubs and
grass are indicative of cropping but it isn't so.

Note that we are talking about crops here, where you take away large
amounts of organic material regularly, you can get systems that are
approximately closed regarding minerals (eg an undisturbed natural
forest) that don't need fertiliser applied by humans to but that isn't
cropping.

But perhaps things are different in your part of the world, the
Breatharian spaceship must be right over your plot. Do you still eat
three meals a day?


Hi David and Brooklyn1,

My soil is "decomposed sandstone". Like Decomposed granite (also
called DG), only way uglier. Even the weeds have a hard time growing
in it. I would probably have better luck trying to grow things
with soil from the moon.

If you read my running whine about how few zucchinis I got
off my plants, my research shows it is all the fault of the soil.

The way I look at it is the the same way I look at cooking. You can
make good ingredients taste bad, but you can't make bad ingredients
taste good. So it ALL starts with the soil. But, as with anything,
the poison is in the dosage. I suppose if you had good soil to
start with, you could really muck it up by over fertilizing,
especially if you used conventional fertilizers instead of organic
one.

The successful home gardens out here are all raided beds with top soil
imported from the local compost place. (I ask every customer I
have that gardens how they do it.) My plans to convert my back
yard to to raised beds came to a screeching halt with this stinking
recession.

One lady plows under goat skat (polite farmer talk for animal poop).
She has to give away produce.

I remember Songbird wonderful advice about just go straight to the
ground and skip the raised beds -- get a lot more space. And she
really struck a cord. But, no one is successful with that out
here due to the decomposed sandstone. If I were to do my whole
back yard, the cost of importing good topsoil would be greater than
the raised beds.

I am rambling.

-T

My garlic seems to love this cold weather.