Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

Maybe add one more certainty: it's really hard to get too much organic
matter into the soil. From all I've read, from Sir Albert Howard and Eve
Balfour on down to Rodales and many other contemporaries, the soil with its
microbes and other critters absorbs and breaks down compost and most other
organic matter about as soon as a new year rolls around. This is esp true
in warmer, wetter climates. 

Seventy years ago Sir Albert was urging people to return all available
organic waste to agricultural soil. Today our organic waste is a hundred
times more than it was then, and still our soil, as you say, is badly
depleted. Our Midwest is possibly the worst. 

Can't raise healthy crops without healthy soil. And we can't raise healthy
children without healthy crops. 

paul tradingpost@lobo.net

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 9/3/2007 at 5:26 AM Dieter Brand wrote:

>Scientists have extolled the virtues of clay-humus complexes for
>generations;
>however, when it comes to translating this into practical methods of soil
>building,
>  we, the practitioners, are mostly left to our own devices and mix
>compost with
>  soil at various ratios or simply apply it to the soil surface according
>to gusto.
>   
>  Among all the unanswered questions, there seems to be only one
certainty,
>  that is that most agricultural soils are badly depleted of organic
>matter and
>  it is hard to imagine a situation in which there is too much of it.
>   
>  Dieter Brand,
>  in sun-scorched humus-depleted Portugal.
>  
>Michael Nevin <mikepnevin@yahoo.ca> wrote:
>    Hi - where I work as the food scrap composter, our rule of thumb is to
>use about 1/3 well-aged, well-screened finished compost to about 2/3
>planting mix for our seedlings.  Pure compost might be quite rich.
>However, if you are doing intensive ag in raised beds such that the plant
>roots can not spread out due to the density of your planting, you might
>wish to jack up the fertility of your soil by going with more compost.
>  Is there any chance you could try several different %s of compost in
>otherwise identical raised beds? Many books on soil and compost seem to
>say that  organic matter % could be in the 5 - 10 % range. In other words,
>there is a lot of sand, clay,  air space, water in addition to organic
>matter.
>  Cheers, Mike in Toronto
>
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