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  • From: Bill Jones <billj AT harborside.com>
  • To: Homestead mailing list digest <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Homestead] Re: Garden soil: it's much more than dirt
  • Date: Fri, 04 Mar 2005 15:35:54 -0800

Someone wrote:

The guy I used to buy my popcorn from has told me that is his definition of biodynamic. Nothing imported. He raises cattle and many different crops, and has an essentially closed loop except for the sun and rain coming in and the popcorn and beef going out.

I've been involved with BD people for many years. It's really more a religion than a science. The first hint is that you have to believe in the preparations for them to work for you. When you suggest a scientific explanation, you're treated with amusement and distrust, and reminded that it's really the astrological forces and the transdimensional beings who create the phosphorus for your garden.

But many do in fact use a variety of rock powders, lime at the very least, and they were indeed my original inspiration to seek out colemanite (insoluble calcium borate). I notice that within a decade of my first online mention of colemanite (ironically named), it's now become the latest new thing in the world of organics, but it's cheaper at the pottery supply. BD people also use granite dust, and my friends here in town use phosphate rock. By far the best way to use these (except lime, which needs no help to become available) is to sprinkle an admixture on each layer of a compost pile, so that bacterial activity can liberate the minerals. My own favorite for potting mix is powdered hi-potash feldspar (also available from a pottery supply store).

The BD people have latched onto certain myths based loosely on science, much as some movie writer once found the words "force field" in a graduate physics text and used them to create a fictional construct. For instance, it's well known that earthworms process phosphate rock into more soluble forms of P in their intestines; BD teaches that living organisms actually transform silicon into phosphorus. But no one has yet exhibited a closed earthworm terrarium that ended up with more P than it started with, so the basic principle of science --that no element changes into another except through radioactivity or inside stars-- remains unchallenged.

But in reality the BD farms' soil in most places will have plenty of reserves of P and K, which only need to liberated by buckwheat and earthworms and other soil life, so the illusion that you can continue to remove large quantities of elements (other than the 4 free ones, CHON) indefinitely could be maintained for decades, with apparent success, and still be quite wrong.

It's interesting to think about some of the neat processes which might bring nutrients back to your soil. Lovelace showed that large amounts of iodine are reintroduced to the land through bacterial release of methyl iodide in the oceans, which rains back down upon the land, where thankfully, other bacteria which had no real use for the iodine on their own nevertheless hoard the iodine, and it eventually becomes available to animals. Nature can only do this so fast, but now we just haul it out of the oceans by the ton, in seaweed.

An organic farm is such a nice place, compared to a city or a sprayed farm, or a place where kids are constantly shooting birds and killing bees, that butterflies and all sorts of life are drawn to it. Maybe this is another way that nutrients come back to the farm.

Fortunately those who are only looking to grow food for their families need not wonder about these things, since our nutrients will all be destined to be recycled, when the day comes when we must (of neccesity) become a closed system. Another good way to ensure that nutrients aren't leached away is to plant pasture or cover crops and shrubs for coppicing, downwill from the garden, so that the runoff can be absorbed and kept in the system. I'm lucky that my land is sloped just right for that.

If you're looking for a practical way to fertilize, there are still better and worse fertilizers. It's better if they don't contain large quantities of sulfates or chlorides. It's cheaper to fertilize with alfalfa pellets that have been soaked in water than to buy chemical fertilizers. I also use potash-enriched peat moss which is just peat moss soaked and allowed to stand in a solution of potassium carbonate (wine pH-neutralizer available from brewery supply; wood ash tea is the same thing). And I use a mixture of all those rock powders, including some others. It's a good idea to dig these things into the soil some. So far I've been really happy with this approach, but I still make as much compost as I can as well. It gives the same basic advantages as having the luxury to garden with pure compost affords. You only need to apply fertilizer once in the beginning, the nutrients are released slowly, there are no missing trace minerals, and the soil seems improved afterward.

Bill
S. Oregon coast





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