On 8/31/2016 9:49 AM, songbird wrote:
George Shirley wrote:
songbird wrote:
...
you must also be fertilizing?
I don't, but wife loves Miracle Grow.

ah, ok.


and yeah, hard to keep organic matter in the
soils in warmer areas. some clay can slow the
rate of loss down.

Our "native" dirt here is two inches of sand over five feet of Houston
gumbo clay, put in at build to raise the houses above the minimum flood
zone, saves on $$$ but is very bad for gardening, hence the raised beds.

that will be where any earthworms will hide from
the heat when it gets too bad out.


however, what i meant was that if the compost is
disappearing then add that on top and it will get
mixed in eventually as you plant. especially with
that shallow of a bed. i guess i'm lazy that ways.
think plants and worms can figure it out well
enough without me messing it up.

are the beds isolated from the subsoil clay you
have in place? like by a weed barrier fabric or
sheet plastic?

Yup, but the barrier fabric is pretty much gone by now, has been in
place since early 2013 and was intended to rot away eventually.

oh, that's ok, at least you have sand and clay if
you ever need it and the worms can get in and out.


i hope they will continue to live there. it's
a good sign when the soil can support a diverse
community of critters.
...
Yup, we both grew up on small farms, almost always had composting in
place, plus we had large critters for several years and they dropped
enough good stuff on the land that it became very rich. Horses, mules,
cows, goats, etc. Improved grass lands, eaten by large critters then
given back to the earth. In Louisiana we had access to friends who had
large critters and we always had a pickup truck. Go clean out a rain
shed that had two feet of excrement that was aged from two to five
years, take an axe, cut out large chunks, use the hay fork to toss into
truck, repeat many times. Take it home, put the stuff through the wood
chipper and blow it into the garden, Use the tiller to turn it under,
water, plant seeds, jump back as they grow. I miss those days, about the
only big critter poop you can get here is Black Cow in bags and that is
from huge feed lots and no telling what was going through the critters
and into the bags.

i know. i don't buy the stuff any more, but i did
try a few bags when i first put in the strawberries.
decided i could grow/harvest green manure crops for
a fraction of the expense and run it through the worm
bins.

i envy younger people who can handle larger animals
and have the inclination. you can do a lot of regenerative
grazing on beat up farmland to bring it back to prime
condition, run chickens through right after you graze
and the chickens will pick through the cow plops to
get the fly grubs, and scatter the plops around.

in those winter sheds, this guy takes whole shelled
out corn and sprinkles it in there once in a while and
then as the pile builds up he doesn't do anything until
after the cows come out of the shed and then he puts
his pigs in there and they root through it all and
turn it looking for the corn. i think that's a
great idea for stirring compost... using an animal
to do it.

for me, worms are about as far as i can go for now.
eventually i hope i can do some quail here just to
get a population back that has been eradicated.


songbird

My Mom always had several dozen laying hens, she sold the fresh eggs to
folks in town at a good price. The chickens had free run of the ten
acres during daylight hours and then went to their roost before dark. We
also fed them "laying hen feed." The yolks of the eggs were a deep,
golden color and the taste was much better than those from the
supermarket. Chickens, ducks, etc. do a good job of fertilizing the
fields too. Our guinea hens roosted in the tallest trees on the
property, they didn't much like hen houses but they went there to lay
their eggs. The occasional hawk would get one once in awhile but those
roosting trees always had deep green leaves. Lots of guinea poop on the
ground.