Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Emery Mitchamore <emitch@att.net>]

I thought you might have some thoughts on the subject.  It's not my idea; it came from the book Teaming With Microbes by Lowenfels and Lewis, recommended by Elaine Ingham.  Appendix A, Rule 3.  Since I'm primarily concerned with growing trees, for my Forest Garden, as well as commercially, it is interesting to consider how to influence the soil biology toward healthy trees instead of the invasive grass we have around here.

E. E. "Mitch" Mitchamore
www.hillcountrynatives.net

On Dec 16, 2010, at 3:41 PM, John D'hondt wrote:

That is a strange question to me Mitch. Just from my own experience I can say that there are many trees that do very poorly under my soil and climate conditions. I am thinking especially about hard fruit like apples , pears and plums. They don't like our wind at 800 feet above sea level too much.

Another thing that I do know for a fact is that even a small dose of ammoniacal N kills an apple tree here faster than anything else.

Some trees do very well here though and our probably best and fastest growing hardwoods are the ash, willows, the alders (especially the red) and Japanese walnuts.

 

The alders live in symbiosis with a root nodule forming soil bacterium "Frankia" that suplies it with air nitrogen but the others have no root nodules and grow as fast. Obviously they get it from the air thanks to the metabolism of bacteria for they are getting none from me. The only thing I have ever given these trees (mostly planted for shelter in poor ground) was some saw dust or wood shavings from Sitka spruce when I had too much of the stuff to use in the stables as bedding and I did not need it for weed supression in the garden.

 

It is often said that this material robs nitrogen from plants and makes for poor crops of vegetables but I have never seen this happen probably because I have always left it on the surface and never dug it in. When we first started here 25 years ago that would have been completely impossible. I broke pick axes here without making much of an impression on the rocky ground.

 

But the saw dust broke down into nice friable soil (more than 2 feet deep after 25 years) which must mean that bacteria and fungi used it as an energy source while converting N2 gas in the air to useful N. It could have come from nowhere else.

 

I can not put a name on these microbes and I am not in the least interested myself what name they go by or if they have already all been named. I am sure there are more than a few different ones.

The reason I am not interested in such trivia is that I expect some bad shit to hit the fan quite soon and I am busy with other things (such as trying to overcome apple bark cancer)

I spend 2-3 years cultivating a microbe that eats Phytophtra infestans (Irish potato blight) and I have been growing potatoes for almost 25 years without spraying anything. With no blight damage whatsoever in the last 20. This in Ireland where many professional potato farmers see their crop rot to slime quite regularly while spraying expensive and highly toxic pesticides at least once a week against blight.

 

I have explained in the past on several listst how to get the same results against blight as I have here but I am afraid that it did not much good. Very few people are prepared to work at it for 2-3 years while seeing a crop rot in the first few years. Most would like to buy a proprietary culture of anti- blight microbes. And if I had ten years of my life to waste at this I am sure that I could come up with a commercial solution. I simply don't have that time.

 

Now to come back to your question : You should know what sort of trees grow well in your area. Those are the ones I would go for and you may find you do not need to pamper them to do well.

Ammoniacal N is produced from valuable nitrogen holding molecules like protein under anaerobic conditions. I would advice strongly not to aim for that. Anaerobic fermentation stinks and causes most of the N to get lost. That is one golden rule to always remember : if your compost/manure heap smells bad something is very wrong. You should never encourage that.

john

OK, now that you've revealed that you're not a "dumb farmer" ;-) I've got a related question: What (microbes?) produce ammoniacal N, that trees most prefer, and how do I encourage them?

E. E. "Mitch" Mitchamore
www.hillcountrynatives.net

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