In article ,
Bill who putters wrote:
In article ,
Jeff Thies wrote:
Billy wrote:
Was just looking at All New Square Foot Gardening: Grow More in Less
Space by Mel Bartholomew. They sure have some nice pics of Mel, standing
among raised gardens. He says he likes to sell, excuse me, teach to new
gardeners who aren't weighed down by prior knowledge, like the need to
renew the soils nitrogen, uh huh.
Anyone tempted to buy Mel's book would do well to look at "How to Grow
More Vegetables" by John Jeavons
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b/...=search-alias%
3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=How+to+Grow+More+Vegetables&x=0&y=0
first.
There is more practicle information and no necessity of laying out a
physical grid. There are no pictures of John, IIRC, but the book is
information dense. Unfortunately, he doesn't address lasagna gardening,
but then neither does Mel.
Have you got a good resource on lasagna gardening? I can't even find
the thread we had on it.
I've got about 20 SF or so of space by the curb that gets good sun from
11AM on. Too sunny for english ivy (which is everywhere else) and soil
is too poor for anything else. Even the weeds are suffering. Sounds like
a lasagna farm to me.
Jeff
http://organicgardening.about.com/od...en/a/lasagnaga
rden.htm
I guess through creativity or laziness, we all modify what we learn. Two
comments on the above URL. First, digging isn't needed in lasagna
gardening, BUT dug, or double dug the first year, and the first year
only, will speed up the development of your beds.
Left to their own devices, lasagna beds will eventually develop deep
rich soil, but digging, with the appropriate amendments (manure,
phosphate, wood ash, organic material) speeds up this development. After
the first year, the soil is left to the microbes, worms, insects and
small mammals to turn and aerate. You may want to catch the small
mammals, but you don't want to undo their work.
This is my first complaint with Mel and his "Square Foot Gardening".
First he announces his "New Soil - Mel's Mix"
1/3 Peat Moss
1/3 Vermiculite
1/3 Blended Compost
Then he proposes a soil depth of 6".
"For years, experts said your garden soil had to be improved at least
12 inches deep; some even said 18 inches. But my experiments were
proving otherwise, especially when I used good homemade compost
as one-third of the mix. I asked myself, "If six inches of perfect soil
is good enough for windowboxes and commercial greenhouse benches,
why not in backyard gardens?"
Window boxes, I'm sure would benefit from more soil, but are under space
constraints, and commercial greenhouses are labor intensive.
Then Mel says "no fertilizer" only use compost, except he recommends up
to 20% stable or poultry manures in his compost.
It's a nicely produced book with lots of color pictures, but overall it
seems to me to be mostly flash.
Anyway, lasagna gardening, the above URL calls for 2 vertical ft. of
mulch on the vegetable beds, mine are usually 3 - 4". Just make sure
that there is always mulch, no matter how thick it is. If you are
getting weeds, you'll probably want to increase the depth of the mulch.
-----
The World Without Us (Paperback)
by Alan Weisman
http://www.amazon.com/World-Without-...2427905/ref=sr
_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1274206221&sr=1-1
p.191
At Harpenden, near a low stone circle and adjacent stem wall
that are the remains of a Roman shrine, an estate was founded in
the early 13th century. Rothamsted Manor, built of bricks and
timbers and surrounded by a moat and 300 acres, changed hands
five times over as many centuries, accruing more rooms until an
eight-year-old boy named John Bennet Lawes inherited it in
1814.
.. . .
His story began with bones‹although first, some would say,
came chalk. Centuries of Hertfordshire farmers had dug the
chalky remains of ancient sea creatures that underlie local clays
to spread on their furrows, because it helped their turnips and
grains. From Oxford lectures, Lawes knew that liming their
fields didn't nourish plants so much as soften the soil's acidic re-
sistance. But might anything actually feed crops?
A German chemist, Justus von Liebig, had recently noted
that powdered bonemeal restored vigor to soil. Soaking it first in
dilute sulfuric acid, he wrote, made it even more digestible.
Lawes tried it on a turnip field. He was impressed.
Justus von Liebig is remembered as the father of the fertilizer
industry, but he probably would have traded that honor for John
Bennet Lawes . . . (who) Patent in hand, was (soon) selling
"superphosphate" to all his neighbors.
Once again, the hapless von Liebig had identified nitrogen as a key
component of amino and nucleic acids vital to plants, yet failed to
exploit his discovery. While von Liebig published his findings, Lawes
was patenting nitrate mixtures.
To learn which were most effective, in 1843 Lawes began a
series of test plots still going today, which makes Rothamsted Research
both the world's oldest agricultural station, and also the site
of the world's longest continual field experiments.
By the 1850s, it was obvious that when both nitrogen and
phosphate were applied, yields increased, and that trace minerals
helped some crops and slowed others.
(Lawes) biographer quotes him as declaring that any farmer who
thought he could "grow as fine crops by the aid of a few pounds
of some chemical substances as by the same number of tons of
farm-yard dung" was deluded. Law's advised anyone planting
vegetables and garden greens that, if it were him, he would "select
a locality where I could obtain a large supply of yard manure at a
cheap rate." '
----
And that seems to hold true today, as well.
-----
The "World Without Us" for its morbid title is a real "page turner",
that takes you through information that you've probably never
considered. If you read and liked "Guns, Germs, and Steel": The Fates of
Human Societies by Jared Diamond
http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Ste...393061310/ref=
sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269536106&sr=1-1
you'll like this book as well.
--
- Billy
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arn3lF5XSUg
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Zinn/HZinn_page.html