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Today I am thinking about ways to improve my soil. I have alkaline soil. I have little to no nitrogen. The process of improvement is slow. The library had a book called "How to Grow More Vegetables" by John Jeavons. It covers the double digging technique. I tried this technique years ago. It's labor intensive and disrupts soil mycelia. The back breaking shoveling is great when you're young, have loose soil, and don't live on a hillside. The downside to that method is adding improvements every year. And more digging. The book has a good section on soil nutrition and composting though.
Compost: My compost pile is slowly decomposing. Recommendations are 45% dried, dead plants or leaves, aka brown material and 45% fresh plants or vegetable scraps, coffee grounds, aka green manure and thin layers of dirt in between, roughly 10 %. When this decomposes, it produces the correct ratio of carbon to nitrogen for your plants, which I believe is 25:1 (you can never find the numbers when you need them). Alfalfa is especially well suited to this ratio in the composting process. Mostly for me, I prepare the new bed for the next season and just dump stuff into it as I weed, periodically adding coffee grounds along with the paper. More of my pile is green than brown which sucks nitrogen from its surroundings in order to decompose. I compensate by adding unrecyclable paper to the mix. Our recycler won't take envelopes. I shred each envelope by hand so it breaks down quicker, removing the plastic windows. I don't use envelopes that are glossy or have lots of bright colors (toxins). I place these at the bottom of a new pile or lay them down first and turn a pile on top of them so they don't blow away. This has reduced the amount of garbage I take to the curb significantly. My compost pile has tons of worms and spiders but no heat. Odd but that is how I know I still don't have the right mix. Now that fall is here, I may start looking for bags of leaves.
Worm castings: I watched an online class offered by the University of NC on vermiculture. I could create a worm bin indoors to take my excess green waste and create worm castings. Worm castings differ from compost. Worm castings simply mean worm poop. Compost is created by using micro organisms to break down garbage into nitrogen and carbon that plants can use. Worm castings act more as a plant growth hormone. UNC did studies on optimum levels of worm castings in the soil. Plants benefit most when the percentage of worm castings is between 15 to 35%. More does very little for the plant and can even hurt the plant. We did our own experiment this year. Having no soil to transplant a cherry tree from my cousin's house to mine, we planted in pure worm castings. A pear tree was transplanted in regular potting soil. Both sat on my front porch until I got around to them this fall, receiving regular water and sunshine. The pear flourished. The cherry looked poor and stayed very small. Side note: The cherry tree is now in the ground and much happier. I surrounded it with garlic bulbs to ward off rabbits and disease.
Nitrogen: Slowly aquiring plants that are nitrogen fixers. Many seeds we bought were killed by this year's weather. Note to self - buy more red clover seed. The backyard is getting a Goumi shrub. It will help mitigate the toxins from the walnut tree and the neighbor's hemlock. It has edible berries, kinda like currants, tart with a seed. Good nitrogen fixer. The grass has a lot of white clover in it which we leave alone for the bees. The herb spiral finally had yarrow sprout. Out of a whole packet of seed, two plants grew. I am also trying to grow False Indigo, Baptisia australis, which is a legume too. Anything in the legume family is a nitrogen fixer. Something resembling the wild indigo showed up in my cabbage patch, even though I din't plant it. One also grew in the west quadrant of the mandela garden. That indigo I did plant on purpose. I've a few precious clover in the main frontyard garden. There are a few plants growing I have never seen before. Still trying to figure them out. We've lots of finches bringing us interesting bird seed plants. They love our sunflowers, dropping the seeds they brought over from someone's feeder. Our sunflower seeds taste better. Anyway, much of the yard has nothing to fix nitrogen. The Lupine were a crop failure. Even the plants I bought died. Hmmm. It's a big experiment. I'll just have to keep trying.
I won an internet raffle! It is with The Seed Guy on Facebook. https://www.theseedguy.com Yes it's real. My prize is some herb seeds, some of which are unusual and I have never grown before. Among them is a nitrogen fixer, Fenugreek. I am so excited and eager to try these out next year. Yay, nitrogen fixers!
Here's a video, showing cereal crops which would increase my brown material ratio in the compost bin. Another blurb I read suggested that 60% of your crops be grass/cereal based, 30% root-based and the rest (10 %), lettuce/salad based. That gives you correct ratios for compost based on what you grow. Interesting idea. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOaPFt_ajvU
Compost: My compost pile is slowly decomposing. Recommendations are 45% dried, dead plants or leaves, aka brown material and 45% fresh plants or vegetable scraps, coffee grounds, aka green manure and thin layers of dirt in between, roughly 10 %. When this decomposes, it produces the correct ratio of carbon to nitrogen for your plants, which I believe is 25:1 (you can never find the numbers when you need them). Alfalfa is especially well suited to this ratio in the composting process. Mostly for me, I prepare the new bed for the next season and just dump stuff into it as I weed, periodically adding coffee grounds along with the paper. More of my pile is green than brown which sucks nitrogen from its surroundings in order to decompose. I compensate by adding unrecyclable paper to the mix. Our recycler won't take envelopes. I shred each envelope by hand so it breaks down quicker, removing the plastic windows. I don't use envelopes that are glossy or have lots of bright colors (toxins). I place these at the bottom of a new pile or lay them down first and turn a pile on top of them so they don't blow away. This has reduced the amount of garbage I take to the curb significantly. My compost pile has tons of worms and spiders but no heat. Odd but that is how I know I still don't have the right mix. Now that fall is here, I may start looking for bags of leaves.
Worm castings: I watched an online class offered by the University of NC on vermiculture. I could create a worm bin indoors to take my excess green waste and create worm castings. Worm castings differ from compost. Worm castings simply mean worm poop. Compost is created by using micro organisms to break down garbage into nitrogen and carbon that plants can use. Worm castings act more as a plant growth hormone. UNC did studies on optimum levels of worm castings in the soil. Plants benefit most when the percentage of worm castings is between 15 to 35%. More does very little for the plant and can even hurt the plant. We did our own experiment this year. Having no soil to transplant a cherry tree from my cousin's house to mine, we planted in pure worm castings. A pear tree was transplanted in regular potting soil. Both sat on my front porch until I got around to them this fall, receiving regular water and sunshine. The pear flourished. The cherry looked poor and stayed very small. Side note: The cherry tree is now in the ground and much happier. I surrounded it with garlic bulbs to ward off rabbits and disease.
Nitrogen: Slowly aquiring plants that are nitrogen fixers. Many seeds we bought were killed by this year's weather. Note to self - buy more red clover seed. The backyard is getting a Goumi shrub. It will help mitigate the toxins from the walnut tree and the neighbor's hemlock. It has edible berries, kinda like currants, tart with a seed. Good nitrogen fixer. The grass has a lot of white clover in it which we leave alone for the bees. The herb spiral finally had yarrow sprout. Out of a whole packet of seed, two plants grew. I am also trying to grow False Indigo, Baptisia australis, which is a legume too. Anything in the legume family is a nitrogen fixer. Something resembling the wild indigo showed up in my cabbage patch, even though I din't plant it. One also grew in the west quadrant of the mandela garden. That indigo I did plant on purpose. I've a few precious clover in the main frontyard garden. There are a few plants growing I have never seen before. Still trying to figure them out. We've lots of finches bringing us interesting bird seed plants. They love our sunflowers, dropping the seeds they brought over from someone's feeder. Our sunflower seeds taste better. Anyway, much of the yard has nothing to fix nitrogen. The Lupine were a crop failure. Even the plants I bought died. Hmmm. It's a big experiment. I'll just have to keep trying.
I won an internet raffle! It is with The Seed Guy on Facebook. https://www.theseedguy.com Yes it's real. My prize is some herb seeds, some of which are unusual and I have never grown before. Among them is a nitrogen fixer, Fenugreek. I am so excited and eager to try these out next year. Yay, nitrogen fixers!
Here's a video, showing cereal crops which would increase my brown material ratio in the compost bin. Another blurb I read suggested that 60% of your crops be grass/cereal based, 30% root-based and the rest (10 %), lettuce/salad based. That gives you correct ratios for compost based on what you grow. Interesting idea. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOaPFt_ajvU
