Homestead mailing list

["Lynda" <lurine AT softcom.net>]

Ya know, there's a real problem with universities and other folks that spend 
all their time in ivory towers.  They lack real life experience.  They 
choose one little space and then predicate the way the rest of the world 
will act on that little space.

I've got a whole bunch more pines than you have on our house and garden 
terrace.  We had a garden on the slope but found out there wasn't enough sun 
in the afternoon even though it was west facing.  AND, even with two fences, 
we couldn't keep the deer out.  However, even though we were gardening 
around Doug Fir and Ponderosa Pine stumps, tomatoes, peppers (bell, 
jalapeno), lemon cucumbers, pumpkins, sugar baby watermelons, raspberries, 
marionberries, beans, squash, peas, corn, kohlrabi, strawberries, lavendar, 
cantelope, and various and sundry herbs all did as well as could be expected 
as they fought for their lives over a deer, ground squirrel and jack rabbit 
invasion <g>

We've moved the rapsberries, strawberries and marionberries up to the level 
area by the house and built cages over everything and they are doing just 
great.  We've had to do raised beds up here because the only thing growing 
right by the house "naturally" are rocks <g>  But, the soil we put in the 
beds is what we dug up from the old garden.  Soil that had spend a few 
hundred years under some towering (youngest did a ring count on the smallest 
stump and it was 62 years old) Ponderosa pines and ringed by Doug Fir (which 
is not a true fir but a pine).

This spring, grass came up in the old garden area.  We didn't plant it, it 
was obviously volunteer seeded by the wind and birds.  By June it was more 
than waist high and plenty thick.

We have lots of wild native goodies growing under those pines (onions, 
berries, oregon grapes) which we will be harvesting.  And some old imports 
such as crab apples which do just fine.  The only manure ever added was what 
the deer and rabbits have left behind naturally.  Oaks, madrone, dogwood, 
redbud seem to do fine under a canopy of the pines also.

We also have a couple of areas that are all white and black oak and nothing 
grows under them!  By the creek we have alder and several other trees, some 
of which I haven't identified yet, but they are all growing under 120' plus 
Ponderosa pine, some sugar pine and a bunch of gray pine (digger pine). 
Some of the canopy is so thick it looks like dusk in the middle of the day 
but all these plants and plenty more are still doing quite nicely only the 
pines.

Are you sure your area isn't one where they did a clear cut and then did 
some heavy spraying (Oust and other nasties) or the slash and burn where 
they scrape everything, top soil included, into a pile to burn?  Sounds like 
your problem is something more than just being in a pine forested area!

Lynda
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bill Jones" <billj AT harborside.com>
> ALL plant material will compost if you grind it fine and mix in enough
> manure, but will the result leave "humus", and who has a huge quantity
> of manure to mix with pine needles?  Apparently much less humus results
> from hot, bacterial composting than with slower fungal methods of
> composting.
>
> There are three common types of lignin (and many other more specific
> ones).  The people at LaVal U. seem to think that dry grass, hardwood
> chips, and softwood chips break down differently (i. e., they tested
> countless samples of soil mixed with various types of sheet composting
> materials and analyzed the evolution of both the material left behind
> and the soil leachates).  They found that grass lignin breaks down
> quickly to form humus, resulting in a brown soil, but that the humus
> doesn't persist for very long in soil thereafter.  Conifer lignin takes
> forever to break down, but when it does it produces compounds toxic to
> most plants, and little persisting humus.  Hardwood lignin breaks down
> into healthy soil at a moderate rate, if I recall, but the abundant
> humic compounds that result are purported to have half-lives of 1000
> years in the soil!