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  • From: "Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lfl@intrex.net>
  • To: Sustainable Agriculture Network Discussion Group <SANET-MG@LISTS.IFAS.UFL.EDU>
  • Subject: [permaculture] Re: soil building reference ?
  • Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2002 03:27:54 -0700

Joel Gruver wrote:

Hello Lawrence,
I am located considerably closer to your neck of the woods than Byron and
would like to come take a look at your soil building project.
Perhaps I will even bring some students from the Soil Science class that I
am teaching at the community college in Pittsboro, NC.

That would be wonderful. You all are welcome any time its convenient to come up from CCCC. I'd love for you to see it, analyze, sample, comment on, criticize or admire it. You can probably tell I am quite proud and delighted at the way it has turned out. The 3 1/2 acres got plowed late in the 2001 winter when the soil was wet and we had little rain or freezing weather following that. The disaster zone that I faced in Spring is what drove me to the lengths I've described to rebuild tilth and at the same time fertility over the acreage.

I am wondering how you developed the plan for soil building that you are
currently implementing. Is there a book, an article or some reference that
articulates the approach to soil building that you are pursuing ?

I moved onto this land 1978 and was a landscape contractor/designer at that time and for a number of years afterward. I made all the most obvious mistakes trying
to work up garden soil. Compaction, compaction, hard clodlets, etc. When I arrived, in warm weather, after a rain, walking out on the soil in the fields, you could see little air bubbles coming out of pores in the soil, making popping sounds. I had never seeen this before, must be a characteristic of
Georgeville silt loam that has laid fallow for years. That should have been my
signal to never set foot or tire on this ground except for very controlled materials application or tillage. But I was not wise and paid the price with
compaction and loss of native ground cover (lots of red clover, everywhere).
Anyway, as of next Spring it will have been fully restored and then some.

I used no particular references to guide me in my soil improvement program, only experimentation and trial and error.
1) found sources for rock phosphate and greensand, horse, cow and chicken
manure
and lots of hay (square and round bales) to spread around during summer and
fall
2) used the tried and true method used in my region: plow in early winter or late fall, utilize freeze/thaw cycles to break down hard clods of soil into loose silt by Spring - careful to avoid thermally insulating soil, i.e. no Fall application of compost, manure (unless its tilled in) or mulch
I forgot to mention that I regularly had my acreage "plowed" with a Soil Saver
during the warm seasons and/or in the late Fall. This is a very interesting and effective tillage tool, heavy duty, goes deep (not as deep as Ford 301 3-bottom plow) and takes a big tractor to pull it. There has been some discussion in sanet on this implement. The best all around tractor drawn implement is the Yeoman's Plow System (a kind of subsoiler/tiller that shatters layers of soil
to a great depth and can put soil in a really fine condition to go into winter and, following that, provide tillage to incorporate various materials prior to planting or further preparation and fine tuning with other implements.
3) carefully apply rock dusts and rock quarry pond fines, manure and compost
in spring directly along paths that raised beds will follow, then hill, till and hill them into shape, followed with hand shaping raised beds of varying widths, heights and lengths with hand tools
4) at this point in time I plan to apply apply lots more rock dusts, as many tons as I can afford; its the best drought insurance I can think of and the added fertility and tilth is almost immeasurable.

There's a lot more I could say good and bad about working this soil but the above description contains the most important aspects of the processes I followed. I would hope a newbie farmer might avoid all the pitfalls and mistakes I had to weather. Maybe this small introduction to farm soil building will be of use.

In landscaping I just: 1) removed clay, rock, gravel 2) replaced it with enriched topsoil 3) planted shrubs, trees, ground cover 4) mulched planted zones

You have mentioned that the soils you are amending are of the Georgeville
soil series... Georgeville soils have inherent properties that are rated
quite highly for crop production. Why do you feel that the soil on your site requires such intense modification ?

I have really good reasons for doing this. I need fertilizer (manure and rock powder) - there has been none on my land for many decades until just recently.
I also need the added tilth, fine soil crumb structure and water retention - this means larger and more stable soil microflora populations.
I can show you before and after zones. I now have tilth, fertility and water holding capacity that I feel will allow me to prepare highly productive, low maintenance raised beds just about anywhere on 3 1/2 acres instead of only
on 1/2 acre, previously. I have to irrigate with well water and need to do that as infrequently as possible.

You have mentioned that rock dusts increase the water holding capacity of
soil. I am not aware of a phenomena which would cause this to happen... can
you describe what you have observed that has led you to conclude that rock
dusts improve water holding capacity.

Absolutely. The volcanic tuff pond fines I used 1) will not become compacted
under any conditions (like clay will) and is permeable 2) added micronutrient availability (this dust is "new soil" with its full mineral complement) is beneficial to soil microflora which increase friability and fertility of soil eventually leading to added organic matter resulting in increased water holding capacity 3) the grit of this dust is much finer than that of my Georgeville soil so adding large quantities of it to this soil will ensure that the Georgeville will a) never become compacted (low organic matter Georgeville compacts easily though not as bad as clay) b) Georgeville pore space will be reduced without sacrificing friability and permeability resulting in reduced drainage and greater water retention (you can plainly see this after rainfall in areas where greater amounts of dust have been incorporated). Add manure and/or compost along with the rock dust to the soil and you gain maximum water, nutrient and microbe retention. Kind of a living system, a nutrient, water and microbe catchment,
a unique ecosystem. There's lots more to this that I want to explore (blew off
by mistake hours of research on the Web, links and downloaded text and
graphics
which I hope to regain soon) such as how changes in soil structure and fertility like this affect the soilfoodweb and populations of native and introduced microflora, the rhizosphere, mychorrizal fungi, nitrogen fixing bacteria, free living and symbiotic, protozoa, earthworms, beneficial nematodes and how to manage the chemistry of the soil, while adding massive but balanced amounts of amendments, to ensure that they survive and flourish.

It is my understanding that you are planning to leave your intensively
tilled and highly amended site bare all winter. Is there a reason why you
don't think it would be beneficial to plant a cover crop ?

A cover crop will insulate the soil from cold temperatures. I want it to freeze as hard and as often as possible. This only needs to be done once, usually, for any given area that will be turned into permanent notill raised garden beds. Next winter I will plant cover crops on those beds; others I may mulch and the rest may get plowed once again (within limits the soil improves every year you can do this). I do not have hardpan here; the soil is the same consistency all the way down to parent material, broken decomposing rock further down and pure native rock (maybe more volcanic tuff) below that.

Looking forward to finding out more about the sources of information that
are guiding your soil building efforts.

I'll share everything I have on the subject with you as well as all my experiences. You definitely need to see this dirt - I have shovels you can use to examine the soil profile in various locations. I do have several more acres I had plowed, disk harrowed and disk-hilled in an interesting arrangement/grid to conserve water as it went through years of laying fallow. This area is now covered in volunteer lespedeza, fescue, goldenrod, broomstraw, rabbit tobacco, roses, blackberries, pine trees, daisies amd ragweed. Pretty nice maintenance stand, conveniently lacking Bermuda, pigweed (I may sow some lambs quarters for diversity) or Johnson grass. I have bees at one end of this field.

LL
--
L.F.London
lfl@intrex.net
http://market-farming.com
http://www.ibiblio.org/ecolandtech/pcwiki/index.php/london





  • [permaculture] Re: soil building reference ?, Lawrence F. London, Jr., 10/19/2002

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