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permaculture - Re: [permaculture] strategies for boron rich and/or hydrophobic soils

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  • From: Michael Snow <msnow@valley.net>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] strategies for boron rich and/or hydrophobic soils
  • Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2011 13:11:10 -0400

Done, I'll let you know if there are any bites. Where are you?

Mike

On Jul 7, 2011, at 10:41 AM, Neil Bertrando wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Has anyone here worked with boron rich soils (5 ppm at 0-12 inches, up to 40
> ppm at 3 feet)? how about combined with summer hydrophobic soils?
>
> We're in an winter wet-summer dry arid climate with cold winters and have
> applied 1 year of keyline pattern cultivation treatments and coupled it with
> compost extracts in some fields. Currently we're struggling with getting
> seeds to germinate and/or establish, and we think the Boron plays a
> significant role in this struggle. We're planting native rangeland
> grasses, forbes and shrubs and have used drill seeding, disk seeding, and
> broadcast seeding methods.
>
> We spoke with some local soil scientists who said we have 2 options re the
> boron issue:
>
> 1. only plant boron-tolerant species, which we included in our seed mix,
> or
> 2. irrigate enough during the summer to keep the boron washed below the
> root zones.
>
> The areas we're working on are not set up to have permanent irrigation. We
> can have temporary access to reclaimed water from the nearby wastewater
> treatment plant if we purchase the irrigation supplies.
>
> Some other notes about the context.
>
> - Soils are silty floodplain sediment,
> - many of the areas are near monoculture with an invasive perennial
> brassicaceae *Lepidium latifolium,*
> - the total area is about 35-40 acres
> - we've been treating the invasive with periodic mowing at the flowering
> stage
>
> Any thoughts or lines of research to suggest on this issue?
>
> I did read in Water for Every Farm p. 293-297 (yellow edition) that in a
> climate like ours we may want to plow in the mid-late spring when it starts
> to warm up and water is still present in the soils and rain is still
> expected. Has anyone tried this alternative timing of plowing? we did
> treat about 5 acres this spring with keyline pattern cultivation, no
> noticable difference yet, but I'd like to give it a year to see.
>
> Thanks,
> Neil
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