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Post by macmex on Nov 22, 2019 9:11:51 GMT -6
Hey folks,
A friend of mine has been experimenting with No Till or Low Till gardening. Below is a link to an article, featuring a friend of his who is doing a lot of work with this. I'd like input from you folks, especially Bon, as I suspect she may already be working on this. This is fascinating!
Article from the Vineyard Gazzette
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Post by macmex on Nov 22, 2019 13:02:04 GMT -6
I feel somewhat insecure in it, but I'm going to try to do this in part of my main garden.
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Post by glen on Nov 27, 2019 12:51:11 GMT -6
I have never tried no-till gardening. I see it done here in Panama with corn. People just plant corn seeds in the ground in little divots they dig. No till. No fertilizer. They do this during the rainy season. I guess this works for them. They keep doing it. I have a friend in Africa, named Afrane. I sent him some okra seed. Now, Ghana is okra country. This is where okra came from. Weather in Kumasi is milder than my weather. Afrane decided to plant the seed using the no till method. He just walked along and planted the seed in divots. Afrane had terrible success with his precious no-till method. He learned about this method I assume in the University. I tried to tell him that his soil is probably too poor to do no-till gardening. He has the same type of garbage soil that I do. The soil is barren of any organic material and is very acidic. Just poor soil. I can see why Afrane wanted to try this method. To till the soil it has to be done with pick-mattocks and its back breaking work. But, unless you know what you are doing, it will not work for you. In the tropics, organic material will not stay in the soil for very long and it has to be applied continously. If not, nothing will grow to its potential. I can see the value of just applying organic material as a top dressing as well and continuously doing this to feed the soil. This would definitely improve the potential of no till gardening. Afrane did not apply organic material as a top soil dressing. His planting failed.
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Post by macmex on Nov 29, 2019 6:48:14 GMT -6
When we lived in Central Mexico much of what they do for no till gardening would have been quite difficult to accomplish, as materials for mulch were scarce, and in the tropics and subtropics organic material breaks down at an alarming rate. Living mulch would have been more feasible.
Glen, if you can ever find seed for velvet bean, (a.k.a. pica pica) that produces a lot of organic material in a hot climate. Eco has a strain which doesn't cause itching.
Wikipedia on Velvet Bean
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Post by glen on Nov 29, 2019 10:50:38 GMT -6
As you know, seed is real hard to come by here in Panama. You are right, things are different in the tropics. Also, people don't own vehicles. The average person, if they don't produce their own organic material for use in the garden, has no practical way to haul it. Gardens are hand tilled with pick-mattocks. Everything is done by hand. Soil where I live is barren. Where I live at one time was one giant dry season forest. Its all been deforested to make room for the cattle industry. What is left is dirt, devoid of nutrients. Last March, I bought 1000 lbs of Abonat which is a fermented, composted saw dust type material. I have a small garden. I used all of this material in my little garden. All of it is leached away now. As if it was never applied. I will need to do the same thing again every year. The no-till method sounds like an ideal method of easy gardening. No pick-mattock needed? I am in.
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Post by glen on Nov 29, 2019 13:58:24 GMT -6
George, in my back yard is a cow pasture. Folks like to use living fences here. They cut the poles for the fences from certain trees. Problem is that the poles take root and grow. If a property is cared for they prune the fence line. If not the fence becomes a line of tree's. In the back, a neglected fence line was then pruned by a new owner of some property on the other side of the cow pasture. They prune all the big branches off the fence line and just made a huge running pile in the cow pasture all along the fence. I thought to myself, self?--Aren't they going to haul away all this debris? No. They just let it sit there in the sun and rain to rot. A giant running pile of debris that looked just horrid in the cow pasture. Within no time and I was amazed at how quickly the pile got smaller. And, continued to do so until this running pile of lawn debris completely disappeared. It took probably one year. You would never know that huge pile was ever there. Amazing how fast organic material breaks down and leaches away into the abyss.
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Post by john on Nov 29, 2019 19:40:46 GMT -6
I have done no till gardens with a permanent mulch. If you haven't watched the Movie "Back to Eden" it is well worth watching. In the documentary, the main character( Paul Gautschi) uses wood chips as his mulch. I have tried using woodchips, hay and leaves on certain garden spots. It does work but you will need lots and lots of organic matter. If you are small time gardener with a good source of organic matter it is worth trying. Some of the spots that I had the permanent mulch on are now spots than I use conventional tillage in and the soil is clearly superior in those locations. It is soft and dark with lots of humus. One of the problems of tilling it after it has been in mulch for a while is that the soil tends to dry out very quickly it almost becomes excessively drained. When you keep the "skin" layer of un-decomposed mulch on the surface it holds water beautifully and your watering needs will be greatly reduced. Earthworms love the untilled soil and will quickly become very numerous. I decided give the permanent mulch a try with my giant pumpkins back in 2016. I had a good year and I grew a pumpkin the weighed in at 1,063 pounds that year. (my second biggest to date) I got the confidence to try it, because I had been in email correspondence with a giant pumpkin grower in Australia who had been having very good results with his pumpkins using a thick permanent mulch in his sub tropical climate. He used primarily sugar cane stalks and soy bean hay. (neither of which is available to me here in CT) . So I used a layer of cow manure mixed with shavings, covered with a thick layer of hay. One of the drawbacks you will find with a permanent mulch is that voles find it a nice place to tunnel in. So you will have to be ready with a means to control the population. Here is a link to the Australian pumpkin growers diary. www.bigpumpkins.com/Diary/DiaryViewOne.asp?eid=211863 You can watch the Back to Eden documentary on this site for free. www.documentarystorm.com/back-to-eden/After watching the movie I began to watch other youtube videos with Paul Gautchi in them. (This is the channel) Paul is a Christian and often has some interesting insight into the spiritual and the natural world. I am often inspired by his level of faith and also his ability to garden even though he is physically handicapped. As a gardener I like to test all new and different methods before recommending them to others. Climates can and do differ..... so what works in some places may not prove to work in others. Paul is in the Northwest US which has a climate that is different than mine. I love to try new things and am still learning a ton every year. Gardening can be very humbling at times, because you never get things figured out completely. There are too many variables that our unknown to us, science is discovering more all the time about how infinitely complex our soil is. Relationships that occur between fungi, bacteria, soil microbes, insects and how they affect crop yield and nutrient availability is fascinating to me. With a permanent mulch and no till you are definitely feeding the soil which will in turn feed the plants. Often as gardeners we can be very pragmatic and get stuck in a rut, thinking that there is only one way to skin a cat, I try to overcome this by forcing myself to try new things and keep an open mind. Paul says some things that are definitely contrary to what we are often taught in modern Agricultural universities, however I think he is definitely worth listening to.
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Post by macmex on Nov 29, 2019 22:55:44 GMT -6
LARGE amounts of organic material are a common denominator in the various no till methods. And as John mentioned, there are many variables, especially in climate and soil. I don't believe one can go wrong by using lots an lots of organic material. So, as in Bon's case, it is a huge blessing to come into a large amount. I believe, the link, in the very first post mentions them using tarps to cover the ground, at least in part. That draws my attention, as tarps could cover a relatively large area, and not break down so quickly. True, a tarp won't add organic material, but it will maintain moisture and allow microbes in the soil to stay active, in much the same way as we observe with plasticulture.
I think one can hardly go wrong, planting something to produce lots of biomass, for mulch and compost.
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