Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["John D'hondt" <dhondt@eircom.net>]

I think that if you had seen our land with it's lack of soil that you would have seen the light sooner  Ken :) I used to break pickaxes here and a spade was completely useless at the start. Now it would be possible but we have learned to work with no dig and find it extremely easy and productive.

john

In 1982? I read How To Grow More Vegetables by J Jeavons. Went in my backyard and went to work.  It is very productive.  More productive than most people can realize but it labor intensive to the Nth degree.  I corresponded with him, etc.  In 1997 went to CA and took his three days workshop.  I was teaching double digging in my workshops.  In the Dominican Republic I visited a demonstration farm that was "triple digging". 

 

I was already reading about no-till and the more I read, the better it sounded.  Around 2000 I stopped teaching double digging to make "raised beds" and went to teaching no-till in "permanent beds".    It can be nearly as productive and with almost no labor. Farmers in Central America can farm 10 acres of land in corn and beans with only a machete.  Most of the time they have nothing to do.  Roland Bunch has a website on this.

 

Ken Hargesheimer

 

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