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  • From: "Lynda" <lurine AT softcom.net>
  • To: <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Tvo post Mar 98- Trashland Treasure
  • Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 21:41:00 -0700

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!





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