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market-farming - Re: [Market-farming] Easy soil fertility test

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  • From: Bill Shoemaker <wshoemak AT illinois.edu>
  • To: "Market Farming" <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Market-farming] Easy soil fertility test
  • Date: Mon, 1 Nov 2010 07:42:03 -0500 (CDT)

>
>BTW, Dr. Bill, weeds are plants that thrive in half-dead soil with
>lots of chemical fertilizers according to Elaine Ingham of
>www.soilfoodweb.com She says they don't mind their nutrients
>coming in pulses.


After fighting weeds for decades, I've come to respect them as competitors
who are finely adapted to the situation they find themselves in. If the soil
is half-dead, they will still out-compete crops, but they'll have more
difficulty doing it. They aren't aliens, or mutants. They're just
exceptionally well adapted native plants.

By the way, many of the plants we fight as weeds have been used as food by
native peoples in the past, such as lambsquarter, pigweed, purslane, etc.
They are "undeveloped" as weeds, so they have all their genetic resources for
competing in the environments they prefer. Once we start developing them as
crops, we strip away genetic traits which work to their advantage as "weeds"
to gain productivity, yield and size. Later on, we begin to look to their
native ancestors to recover many of those "stripped" traits for resistance,
improved nutrition, competitive ability, etc. Examples include western
hemisphere crops like tomatoes, peppers, squash, corn, as well as eatsern
hemisphere crops, such as apples, or wheat.

Bill


William H Shoemaker, UI-Crop Sciences
Sr Research Specialist, Food Crops
St Charles Horticulture Research Center
535 Randall Road St Charles, IL 60174
630-584-7254; FAX-584-4610




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