"FarmI" ask@itshall be given wrote in message
...
best-ever lettuces (i'm not generally good at lettuce, but these ones are
pretty good!) all praise horse poo!

Perhaps it wasn't the horse poop but cosmic forces???????????????

lol! stop that g

Actually I'm always gobbsmacked by how astoundingly well the earth can
respond. I started my veg garden on what had effectively been "virgin"
soil. This farm was originally a soldier settler block which wasn't
cleared until the 60s and where the veg garden is had never even been
pasture improved - just the claysubsoil (to describe it as being topsoil
would be laughable) with lots of quartz and shale rocks and not a worm in
sight and with limited native grasses as cover. Your description of your
place fits very well with my own experience. But, give even that
unpromising start a bit of help and care and all that soil biota just
seems to burst into life, but the effort has to go on for a few years.

i'm kind of assuming, the rest of my life g but i know it won't always be
as hard (work) as it is atm. it's encouraging to know it WILL happen. i'm
pretty sure any soil can be retrieved - it's just a question of how much it
is worth it to you to do so.

Thank you for the description, which actually makes sense when put in that
way. Friendly bacteria, bred in an environment much as we would breed
earthworms and then used in a way that will cause least loss of the
bacterial benefits.

that's exactly it, & don't you just wish they'd say so??!

i love these sorts of ideas, but all the faff about cosmic forces etc
just puts me off.

Yes - rather gag making but then it does seem to work, but I keep asking
could it work without all that faffing about and the way you describe it,
then it would appear that it could.

i really would think so. gather ye some boiled cow horns & give it a go :-)
(apparently the poo must be fresh, and from lactating cows for some reason).
what is annoying me extraordinarily is: anyone can see it works, yet almost
everyone is put off it because of all the cosmic twaddle. IF steiner had
made some attempt to work out in 1926 or whenever it was exactly how & why
it works, it could have become mainstream by now & we'd all be better off.
instead, the preparations cost a fortune, nobody will go into how or why it
works, & it's a minor (albeit growing) "movement" when it really should be
perfectly ordinary. wtf is a "cosmic force"? there are loads of them!
gravity, sunlight, weather, tides, bla bla bla.

are you thinking about converting your farm to biodynamics?

No bloody way! I like our animals to be protected by the correct
vaccinations for illnesses such as the clostridial diseases and from my
reading it seems that none of the broader "organic" schools of thought
believe in the use of vaccinations. I think that is daft and flying in
the face of good use of science. However, I certainly don't like to use
chemicals willy nilly either. Even glyphosate, which I think is a
reasonably good product, I use very sparingly and only when I can't get
rid of a weed by using a less intrusive method.

I've been nagging my husband for years now to check out the Yeomans Plow
(how's that for an Aussie company? - silly sods cant' even spell plough!).
The Yeomans seems to me to be a very sensible invention for soil airation
and improvement along the same lines and we veg gardeners try to achieve
all the time and I have finally managed to get him to show an interest -
the drought has done some good at long last but we still have to use some
herbicides on the pastures as some weeds are too invasive to be dealt with
by hand.

i'll have to look for the yeomans PLOUGH g. atm all i can contemplate is
one of those tiny ride-on jobs. big machinery is out of the question.
(really, i want a pair of donkeys and the type of plough they can pull for
me. :-)
kylie the luddite