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  • From: "Lawrence F. London, Jr." <venaurafarm@bellsouth.net>
  • To: permaculture <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 06:09:18 -0500

On 12/26/2011 5:39 AM, Christian Skiba wrote:
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.

If you have a diversified permaculture homestead you probably have a continuous but regulated supply of various manures, other nitrogenous materials (food waste, vegetables and fruit, meat scraps, etc) plus plant biomass from a number of sources with varying C/N ratios. Applying this or layering these materials directly on crop soil within an existing layer of surface litter or into various types of cover crops can be considered a natural process in balance with and in harmony with existing soil conditions. Site drainage is all-important
to maintain aerobic conditions therefore trenching between raised beds is wise. These trenches can contain a deep layer of compost and mulch
into which raw soil amendments can be carefully added. Rotating cropping areas allows for adding larger concentrations of nitrogenous amendments to a garden site by lightly cultivating them into an existing, deep, layer of litter being careful to maintain aerobic conditions. Making a "cold" compost pile is also useful to create large quantities of enriched humus to use in seed starting, potting plants or top dressing seedling starts. Of course you could glean this same material from the surfaces of fallow gardens in a rotation sequence.
Gaining seed starting and potting compost could always be accomplished
by removing controlled quantities from fallow gardens. Raw materials can be added directly within the drip zones of tree and shrub crops, into existing beds of high-fertility litter, for high efficiency utilization of raw soil amendments.




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