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  • From: Neil Bertrando <neilbertrando@gmail.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] strategies for boron rich and/or hydrophobic soils
  • Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2011 07:41:01 -0700

Hi all,

Has anyone here worked with boron rich soils (5 ppm at 0-12 inches, up to 40
ppm at 3 feet)? how about combined with summer hydrophobic soils?

We're in an winter wet-summer dry arid climate with cold winters and have
applied 1 year of keyline pattern cultivation treatments and coupled it with
compost extracts in some fields. Currently we're struggling with getting
seeds to germinate and/or establish, and we think the Boron plays a
significant role in this struggle. We're planting native rangeland
grasses, forbes and shrubs and have used drill seeding, disk seeding, and
broadcast seeding methods.

We spoke with some local soil scientists who said we have 2 options re the
boron issue:

1. only plant boron-tolerant species, which we included in our seed mix,
or
2. irrigate enough during the summer to keep the boron washed below the
root zones.

The areas we're working on are not set up to have permanent irrigation. We
can have temporary access to reclaimed water from the nearby wastewater
treatment plant if we purchase the irrigation supplies.

Some other notes about the context.

- Soils are silty floodplain sediment,
- many of the areas are near monoculture with an invasive perennial
brassicaceae *Lepidium latifolium,*
- the total area is about 35-40 acres
- we've been treating the invasive with periodic mowing at the flowering
stage

Any thoughts or lines of research to suggest on this issue?

I did read in Water for Every Farm p. 293-297 (yellow edition) that in a
climate like ours we may want to plow in the mid-late spring when it starts
to warm up and water is still present in the soils and rain is still
expected. Has anyone tried this alternative timing of plowing? we did
treat about 5 acres this spring with keyline pattern cultivation, no
noticable difference yet, but I'd like to give it a year to see.

Thanks,
Neil




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