Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

> I found some things in his Hard Times book that were bizarre as well.
>
> I just started reading Sir Albert Howard's AN AGRICULTURAL TESTAMENT 
> yesterday. One point he made strongly was that soils with a lot of organic 
> matter produce crops that resist disease--and conversely, disease was on 
> the increase where OM was going down with greater reliance on chemical 
> fert's.
>
> ~Harvey

Your mail is almost month old Harvey but I picked up an enormous backlog due 
to a wee accident and I think it is still important to say a bit more on 
this subject.

Not only makes OM plants more resistant to disease, I am quite certain that 
it literally eats disease . It is the general believe that once you have 
blight in your potatoes or clubroot in your brassicas you will have it year 
after year. And that you will not be able to plant the same or related 
plants in that ground for a very long time. I got rid of both by letting 
diseased plant parts rot in situ and putting compost over that. It only took 
a few years to get rid of all blight and clubroot.

Maybe the "few years" will scare plant growers but I reasoned that it was 
better to loose a complete crop (this never happened) when potatoes and 
cabbages were dirt cheap (less than $70 per metric ton for potatoes 
wholesale and maybe 5 cent for a cabbage) and get rid of these problems 
before success in disease free growing would become critical.

One of the advantages is that it has made it possible to not overdo 
rotations. We have plots that are extremely suitable for potatoes and that 
is where we have been growing them for almost 20 years. The reasoning behind 
this was that volunteers (potatoes left in the ground that form new bushes 
next year) seemed to be doing at least as well or better than potatoes on 
fresh ground.

John