Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

New land should be broken with a plow, a device that generally requires 
either a tractor or a draft animal, but a fair amount can be done with hand 
tools. Much depends on the time of year and the weather. In the spring after 
a good rain, it is possible to dig up 50 m2 in a day, even if one is not 
especially muscular. In August after a long drought, digging even 5 m2 in a 
day might be hard. But there are ways to the task easier: if the grass is 
long, it can be cut with a scythe before the digging begins, and hot weather 
can be avoided by starting work at dawn. When the sod has been dug up, it 
can be shaken thoroughly to release the soil. It should then be piled up and 
burned if it consists of perennial grasses, which are more like to take root 
again than to turn into compost.

<<<Can I just make one suggestion? A much used organic technique here is the 
"sandwich method". In this new land is covered with multiple layers of 
cardboard or newspapers to smother the vegetation and this is weighed down 
with compost covered with cut vegetation. After a few months or even weeks 
it is possible to plant crops with their roots in the compost layer.
A good variant of this is to cover new land with thick black silage plastic 
over the winter. Some silage plastic sheets can be 20 meters long or longer 
and as wide. Roll up carefully in the Spring and most of the resident slugs 
will stick to the plastic and be so removed . Weigh down the edge of the 
plastic with anything heavy. We have used bags of animal manure for this. 
This method does not exclude air from getting in as can be seen when the 
wind blows and the plastic billows up in the middle. Mulch in Spring and 
plant immediately. The plastic can be reused many times over. Potatoes are 
often an ideal first crop.
john