Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

Yes, I'd like to know more about my soil too. The point I've been making is 
how little we know, how limited our methods - yet we grow and grow well. You 
mention timing and temperature, etc. I suspect something else is going on - 
that once plants are growing in that soil the available nutrients change, and 
whatever the tests told us is now out of date. Plants communicate with soil 
microbes. The fungi and other guys they need start appearing and symbiosis is 
set up, all without our intervention. IF it has the raw material to work 
with, the plant matter or compost.

Yet that knowledge is only a means to an end, sustainable production of 
healthy food. If we attain the end, then what further knowledge is needed to 
feed ourselves? There is such a thing as OCD control for the sake of control. 
Control the rivers, control the atmosphere, control everything. See a bug, 
kill it. Sterilize the pots and germinate in soilless mix. Kill everything in 
the ground and on the ground. Dominate and beat Nature into submission. But 
that mindset isn't necessary for our survival or prosperity; it's 
counterproductive and unnatural. Meanwhile, we're growing just fine. I have a 
wall of books too, but sometimes I think I'd be better off to compost them ;-)

paul tradingpost@lobo.net

   "The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not 
television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism. Only 
those who know the most about it can appreciate how little we know about it."
-- Leopold, Aldo:  Round River, Oxford University Press, New York, 1993, pp. 
145-146.


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

On 8/24/2010 at 11:06 AM Pete Vukovich wrote:

>I think I'd want to know as much about my soil as I can, but sometimes
>conclusions soil tests suggest are confusing. Some labs are just going to
>recommend adding stuff, some run better tests than others. I think the
>results are just more information some of it good some not so good, some
>incidental. What you do with them is a totally different matter.
>
>I run nitrogen tests every once and a while and they tend to show up low,
>but then again what I plant there seems to do just fine without adding
>anything (other than compost and a little bat guano every few years).
>
>I suspect timing is a factor here as well, all of these nutrients cycle
>(become more or less available) depending on temperature, ambient light,
>soil physics and so on. These days I'm more curious about getting soils
>tested for bacterial population densities which also cycle depending on
>soil moisture content , temperature , etc. Still the best tool I think for
>me is just looking at it and smelling it, particularly when its wet.
>
>Either way its a fascinating subject, I have a metric ton of soil books
>(chemistry, physics, biology, etc) I keep hoping to get to someday to make
>more sense of it all. Based on the constantly changing classifications and
>new discoveries in soil biology its a long way from being well understood
>in spite of what some of the books suggest. Of course pretty much every
>science has advocates that think their field is nearing completion (I
>remember Steven Weinberg saying physics would be finished in another
>decade 20 years ago - this nonsense in spite of getting a Nobel prize) and
>those who think its due for a few more revolutionary revisions. Of course
>like Berry says, science and technology always happen in the future.
>