Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Steve Diver <steved@ipa.net>]

Hey Harvey -

While building soil organic matter and using mulch can
help conserve moisture, it also depends on your soil type,
and it can also take many years of this soil building to
actually raise the percent organic matter.  

My brother's garden in the next county can go
longer without irrigation than mine.  It's an old
garden spot that was manured for many, many
years because the former owners kept horses.

I have a sandy clay loam and once the hot summer
days of July-August are here I have found myself
irrigating every other day or every single day. I'm
pretty sure that nearby trees are sending roots
into the garden and robbing soil moisture. But
when I checked with market growers at our farmers
market, they said they are on the same schedule.  
I'm talking about completely mulched beds.  

Fyi, I've found that each 100 sq. ft. bed takes about
one square bale of wheat straw.   Pathways require
extra mulch.

You can buy straw bales for a much better price in the
summertime or fall, shortly after wheat is harvested.
Then you hold them over in storage so they aren't
exposed to weather and deteoriate.  

One year we came across a wheat field being baled
after harvest and went down and talked to the farmer
and obtained straw bales for $1 each "in field" price,
meaning we stacked and hauled them ourselves.  
We made two trips to load a pickup truck and store 
mulch in a barn for gardening the next two growing
seasons.

I know of a few nearby market farms that contract
with a hauler from here in NW Arkansas to drive
into Oklahoma and Kansas to pick up whole trailer
loads of straw bales.  

Wheat hay is cut before it goes to seed.  That is
preferred over wheat straw since you avoid the
wheat berries which can sometimes sprout in
great numbers and cause extra work with hand
weeding, which is what you're trying to avoid
by mulching in the first place.

I've also seen leaf sucking machines put to use
on market farms.   We are surronded by oak-hickory
forests here in the Ozarks.   A leaf corral, using
large wire bins,  is a great way to store leaves
and develop leaf mould which makes a good,
free mulch.  But one farm quit doing that and
turned to straw mulch because they were concerned
that robbing the forest floor wasn't healthy.  So
it all depends.  

I've also seen vetiver grass and misanthus grass
raised on farms and gardens as a prolific biomass
plant that can be cut with a hand scythe and
used as mulch.

In fact, I visited farms in India that cut grasses from
fence rows and rice bunds to mix with manure in
a 50:50 recipe to raise worms in long beds under
outdoor shade houses.  They made enough of this
vermicompost to apply 2.5 tons per acre.

Good luck,
Steve Diver



> Apologies, I should have specified the scale on which I am focussing. 
> The article I'm writing will be oriented toward the garden/homestead 
> scale, not farm scale. And what your last sentence suggests, Steve, is 
> definitely the direction in which I am heading. The big limitation for 
> me is getting enough mulch material (without purchasing big loads of 
> it). I decided early this year to do a lot more mulching of all my beds, 
> but then we had the driest spring on record, and I only got one cutting 
> off the pasture for mulching--ended up not doing nearly as much mulching 
> as planned/hoped. And what subsequent mulching I did do was from the 
> lawnmower bagger. I'm sure those of you who have tried lawn clippings as 
> mulch know the frustrations.
>
> ~Harvey