Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

Subject: Re: Garden doing poorly
From: npetroff@bowdoin.edu
lehmanslife digest: August 03, 2006


A plant needs a balanced diet.  The main requirements are

Nitrogen - for healthy leaves (from manure, compost, etc)
Potassium - for flowers (wood ashes are a good source)
Phoshorus - for healthy root system (from rock phosphate, etc)

This needs to be balanced.  Just like protein is needed by humans to build
muscles, but if the diet has too much protein and not enough fiber and so
on, you can wreck your kidneys.

Similarly if a plant gets too much potassium (in the form of wood ash), it
can also hurt the plant.

I have a friend who is an organic crop certifier.  He told me that too much
wood ash can choke up the plant's system, so that it can't get enough
nitrogen for the leaves and stem.

Before he told me that, I had an experience with some sunflowers.  I
thought I would make sure that they produced lots of flowers, so I put
plenty of wood ash on them.  Actually it was too much.  Instead of just one
or two flowers on a plant, I had 15 flowers -- but the sunflower could not
get enough nitrogen, so it was only 2 feet high.  And the flowers were only
3 inches wide!!

Also, don't forget, plants "digest" the nutrients in soil by using
mycorryhizal fungi in the soil.  (Which is analogous to the enzymes in a
cow's stomach which help it digest grasses and hay.)  It could be that an
excess of ashes has killed lots of thesesneeded fungi, so that the
nutrients in the soil and not being sufficiently taken up by the plant.

One fascinating book on soil nutrition is "Soul of Soil: A Soil-Building
Guide for Master Gardenters and Farmers" by Joe Smillie and Grace Gershuny.

-- Noma
in Maine