Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["mcoldiron" <mcoldiron@crcom.net>]

For those of you who practice intensive gardening, how do you plant?  Do you 
go along with a stick, make a hole and drop a seed in, or do you grow the 
plants ahead of time and plant that way.  If you use a planter, I just don't 
see how you do it through the mulch.  Also can't see how you plant fields of 
corn, black eyed peas, okra, oats, rye, wheat, etc..., without a planter. 
What am I missing?

Thanks

TxBeeFarmer (Mark)
West Texas Zone 7b


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
To: <diebrand@yahoo.com>; <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Friday, July 04, 2008 10:26 PM
Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] TxBee Dry Land Farming


> And dryland farming exposes the soil to wind and water erosion, which has 
> ruined farmland throughout history. Vanished civilizations often owed 
> their demise to unsustainable farming methods. Serious stuff. We once 
> lived in an area where they dryland farmed pinto beans in the '30s and 
> '40s, but there is nothing growing there at all now. I took pains to point 
> out that without water the aim of growing organic no-till is out of the 
> question. And even conventional dryland growing with little rain and no 
> irrigation is usually unprofitable in the first place.
>
> For my part I grow vegetables with little rain and adequate irrigation on 
> a small plot. By growing intensively, getting the most production from a 
> small plot, the weeding, machinery, mulching, and soil amending is minimal 
> compared to the amount of production. Without intensive growing it would 
> take an area at least four times as large, and that much larger area would 
> require far more weeding, mulching, soil amending, plus machinery and even 
> more water to get the same production. Some intensive growers report much 
> higher production than I do. Of course if you reach a no-till point then 
> labor drops even more.
>
> This is the crux of the matter. Small plots grown intensively (with 
> adequate water) can be far more profitable for market or more worthwhile 
> for home use - not to mention sustainable in the long run. By intensive I 
> mean close planting in well amended permanent beds, double cropping in the 
> season, and season extension methods. Too many growers will go on trying 
> to imitate industrial row cropping with wholesale marketing, and go belly 
> up in the process. It's too much work for too little profit - if any.
>
> paul tradingpost@lobo.net
>
> *********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********
>
> On 7/4/2008 at 2:17 PM Dieter Brand wrote:
>
> > I have tried to stay out of the discussion since it is driven by dogma
> > rather than facts.
> >
> > Without wanting to repeat my arguments that have been ignored too often, I
> > would like to remind everyone that there is no method of no-till farming
> > (and I’m talking farming not mulched gardening) for arid or semi-arid
> > regions. Dry-land farming is practiced by millions of farmers in the arid
> > regions of the World by ploughing the soil at the onset of the dry season
> > so as to produce a dirt mulch that will very effectively conserve
> > humidity. It is not possible to grow crops in these regions without
> > ploughing.
> >
> > Dieter
>
>
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