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  • From: Christian Skiba <c.skiba@gmx.de>
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Quora question: How does one build soil? http://www.quora.com/How-does-one-build-soil
  • Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 11:39:53 +0100

Hi Dieter,

if you have ever seen a good made compost - dark, good smelling, loose structure and full of life - you wouldn't say so.
There are lossses of amount, that's true. But what you get, when the process of composing comes to an end,
is more valuable than the loss.

Alwin Seifert, a german pinoneer of organic gardening, explained it like this:

a wild crab aple tree (with small fruits which are only a shell for the important seeds) grows and lives only from that,
what he took from the soil and what he got back from the leaves falling down in autumn and return to the soil again.
This one layer of leaves is enough for him.

But for our productive apple trees, with big amount of apples this one layer is not enough.

Because it is not possible to put the necessary ten or twenty layers around the trunk he did it on another side nearby
- the compost heap.


In my garden I do both: composing (espacially when a lot of organic matter accumulates in a short time without free
space on the garden beds) and applying organic matter directly whenever possible.

Compost I also need for potting soil, for my greenhouse and as a fertilizer for cabbage and others.

Greetings

Christian




Am 26.12.2011 10:35, schrieb Dieter Brand:
...Composing the organic material before adding it is much
more efficient soil building than adding it straight.
People end up believing this because it is being repeated all the time. In
fact, the opposite is true: the longer something stays on the compost heap,
the greater the losses. Hence, the most efficient way of using organic
matter is by applying it directly to the soil without composting.


A good compost will heat up with microbial activity, and decompose
very quickly.
The greatest losses occur during the high temperature phase.

Happy Christmas,
Dieter

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