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livingontheland - Re: [Livingontheland] the learning curve

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Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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  • From: "John D'hondt" <dhondt@eircom.net>
  • To: "Healthy soil and sustainable growing" <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] the learning curve
  • Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2011 22:43:19 -0000


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




  • Re: [Livingontheland] the learning curve, John D'hondt, 01/02/2011

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