Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

A poly tunnel does help but that is also where now all the rodents come to be out of their flooded holes. Blue sky and sun is what we need most and get very little of.

John

UNbelievable. How can anyone grow in those conditions.

On 1/28/2014 12:34 PM, John D'hondt wrote:

We had almost 10% of all days in the last three months with wind speeds of over 130 km/hr. Hail showers with hail like marbles on 8 occasions. At least half the nights and a quarter of the days with frost and then temperatures swinging up to 10 degrees C again. It is this jo-jo weather that kills plants

John

Now that's smart. That rule of thumb is what the writers now call resilience, or I'd call redundancy. Something that's still a challenge for us here with our limitations.

Speaking of climate, it's crazy. We had a new years day deep freeze 1st week of Dec, then 6 weeks of spring without any precip. Northern NM US at 6200 elev.

On 1/27/2014 1:09 PM, John D'hondt wrote:

I agree and that is why I said at least. Also climate change that already can be felt enormously here is not helping. In fact we don't seem to have a climate any more but just weather and with plenty of extremes too. You can just any longer count on crops that have been a staple for 20 years.

However, there are still rules of thumb that do work such as having a huge variety in the ground when at all possible. Up to now there has always been something that survived the worst of conditions. We are still eating our own fresh vegetables every day even if about half of our winter standby vegetables failed miserably. After 27 years of trial and error we even have an idea of why this happened. We planted too late because previous years summer crops were very late. And then of course the weather was atrocious in at least the last three months.

Anyway, even a thousand packets of seed are not going to save you if you have never experienced what can happen in reality and only start after the shops run dry.

John

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