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  • From: Bill Jones <billj AT harborside.com>
  • To: Homestead mailing list digest <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Homestead] Results of Native Clover Experiment
  • Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2007 21:43:00 -0800

Last year I acquired some rhizomes of the native clover, Trifolium wormskjoldii. I've fallen in love with this plant. Imagine starting a cover crop just by tossing some plugs into the bed:: $0 cost. It spreads rapidly over rodent-protected beds. All last summer there was a continuous bloom of purple clover flowers. It's winter rhizomes are indeed delightfully sweet, but so tough that they would need juicing or a whole lot of tenderizing.

Anyway, it's already coming out in last year's bed (really it was a bed of pole beans and parsley, with an interplanting of clover), so I'm trying it out in the "deciduous humus" experiment. Last fall we shredded some bare twigs harvested from a variety of dormant trees and vines, and mixed this into the top 2" of a raised bed. The bed was inoculated with some white mycelium we found under a huge big-leaf maple. Then we planted broadbeans which have already sprouted. Yesterday I dug in a few plugs of the clover. The idea is that the profusion of roots, together with the action of fungi on the twig wood in the shaded ground, will produce good humus quickly. At the very minimum, the clover planting is a good excuse to keep it watered through the summer, which is really key to humus formation. And there's something to follow the broadbeans, which will probably be pulled and pulverized to fertilize potted starts, depending on which of the two broadbean beds I decide to leave for harvest (it's problematic to harvest the ones with the clover experiment, since I always cut off water for dry favas early). Apparently it's *not* recommended that the broadbeans be tilled into their own bed, at least not yet, because a bacterial bloom will result that will actually interfere with fungal growth. It makes sense that later on, when I apply compost, something will be there to hold those nutrients, in a way that plain dirt would not. The bizarre part is that you could probably feed this soil a little dilute chemical fertilizer too, as long as it was never used at such a concentration that it disturbed the fungal ecosystem.

Speaking of which, I don't normally do fiction, but I really recommend a futuristic farce called "Idiocracy". It's about a guy who gets sent to the future in suspended animation in a time capsule. When he arrives he learns that everyone has been dumbed down to the point that they all sound like wrestling announcers. Anyway, in the 26th century the crops are all dying because, instead of water, they're all being given a sports beverage called Brawnndo that fills all the drinking fountains ("it's got 'lecter lice'"). So this guy who's not even especially bright saves the world by teaching people to water crops with ordinary "toilet water". The turning point was when the narrator said poignantly, "This time Joe decided that he would not just get out of the way, but that he would lead" (lead, follow, or... ).

Bill
S. Oregon coast




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