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Old 02-03-2007, 02:28 PM posted to aus.gardens
FarmI FarmI is offline
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First recorded activity by GardenBanter: Feb 2007
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Default worms! (book recommendation)

"0tterbot" wrote in message
"FarmI" ask@itshall be given wrote in message


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


lol! stop that g


Sorry, couldn't resist it.

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.


Yes to all of those. The first 10 years are probably the worst/hardest.

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.


Agreed, assuming of course that there is no real toxicity involved.
However, there are some situations which will always have a limited chance
of being "productive" because the inputs would be too great.

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??!


Too simple to say it in plain english. Must better to invoke cosmic forces.

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
:-)


As Mrs Beeton would have said: "first catch your cows............"

(apparently the poo must be fresh, and from lactating cows for some
reason).


Easy round here - more lactating and pooping cows that there has been grass
of recent times.

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.


:-)) You may just have hit the nail on the head in your description of the
way it's done. Protection and nurturing of the bacteria from inception to
spreading. Most gardening is done at human convenience and not for the
benefit of microflora/biota.

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.


But remember if you want to find it with google you must call it a PLOW ( I
assume that they must want to sell into the US market)

atm all i can contemplate is
one of those tiny ride-on jobs. big machinery is out of the question.


But do you have a farm and need to renovate pastures? If not, dont' worry
about it although it I think you would enjoy reading Yeomans. Most
committed gardeners seem to.

(really, i want a pair of donkeys and the type of plough they can pull for
me. :-)
kylie the luddite


Snort! You'll do anything to get pelleted manure!