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[Bill Jones <billj AT harborside.com>]

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