Seed Bank Project

[Stephen]

I see you've got the good stuff for ground cover. Many years ago, I tried the "ground cover" from Lowes or Home Depot. It didn't last and quickly fell apart. There's a good ag supply place about 15 minutes from here that has that. When it comes to cutting it across off the roll, I've been using several 2x4s across the ground cover and then using the torch to cut between them. It gives a nice clean straight line. I have surrounded my garden with that, and it keeps the weeds and grass from encroaching. It also acts as a buffer to reduce some of the weed seeds that get blown around.

RE: the wood chip compost
If you haven't already done so, you might want to add a high Nitrogen fertilizer to wherever you're using it. While it's great for adding organic matter, the decomposition process (especially for wood chips) uses Nitrogen, so you could end up with Nitrogen depletion. Chicken manure works well for that. I've got some 34-0-0 fertilizer for my corn, and that really gives it a boost. You can no longer buy it without a commercial license though - it very easily makes stuff that goes boom. It's a great fertilizer though!

[Stephen]

Stephen,

I'm interested to hear why you think no till won't work on a large scale. Here's a guy that teaches farmers how to do it. He uses cattle to enrich his soil without fertilizer and has never put a chemical on his pasture. Right now I'm using chickens for weeding and fertilizing. I'd like to hear more. The video is long but worth it; however it does challenge many people these days with short attention spans having gotten used to Cliff notes and such:

...

I hope to hear back. Best wishes

I wish I had time to watch the video, but I just don't. Thanks for posting it though.
Just from your description, he's got cattle to use as a resource. An even more effective way is to use pigs - they fertilize and turn up the soil without shredding it. When I say that no-till isn't practical on a large scale, I'm talking about a large scale garden - I've never heard of anyone in this part of the country using it on a farm. I've got a 120 acre farm (I'm selling it to my brother to make sure it stays in the family; however, I am NOT a farmer - just a large scale gardener), and a good number of farmers in the family, and never heard of anyone using that.
1) It could be that some do, but don't talk about it in those terms.
2) It could also be that it doesn't work in this area.

Hoss Tools did a video (their videos, as well as their large-scale gardening tools are excellent!) a while back on no-till. Their conclusion was that for the type of plants grown in a typical garden, it just doesn't work. They conceded that it might work in a different part of the country such as the Pacific Northwest. I'm all for experimenting with different methods though, but only on small test plots. If it's successful there, then it can be expanded to the main garden area. Here's a post on one such experiment:
http://www.southernagrarian.com/wasteland-to-garden/

This plot is currently growing a nice stand of dent corn that will be ground into corn meal and/or used to feed the chickens. I'll do another post on it later this year. When the corn has been picked, I'll use the flail mower to shred the corn stalks, and then I'll till it under so that it will decompose faster. That's pretty much a gotta-do-it tilling. I might do one more before planting the next crop, but I'll probably plant Seminole Pumpkin immediately after, so there will be no need to till.

[Rockhopper]

Plants on drugs. That's what fertilizer is; a drug for plants. Sure it works great as long as you have it. That's the problem with our system, too many chemical additives and the energy required to create them and move them around. From a prepper point of view I guess you could stock up on fertilizer, insecticides, herbicides, etc,  but why not just buy food instead and store it?

Quote:
"RE: the wood chip compost
If you haven't already done so, you might want to add a high Nitrogen fertilizer to wherever you're using it. While it's great for adding organic matter, the decomposition process (especially for wood chips) uses Nitrogen, so you could end up with Nitrogen depletion. Chicken manure works well for that."

Yes, it's true that younger wood chips will steal nitrogen from soil and normally it's a valid point. That's why we let the chips season for years before putting them on our gardens. Actually I stated my wood chips had decomposed entirely, and I dug up the compost. Sorry the picture wasn't more clear though. So no I won't be putting any nitrogen on my soil. I'm sure the plants would like it though; they usually do. You see I'm not growing commercially; I'm growing sustainably so that when Lowe's isn't open to buy 30-15-10 then I won't need it anyway.

I took the time to read the article in Stephen's last post, and while it's not all wrong it's not what Gabe Brown talks about in his video nor is it what Joel Saladin does either. Saladin started out on a 500 acre farm in Virginia with wasteland dirt in which decades of corn had been extracted from the land. The soil was dead. It took him years to build it up. While adding organic matter certainly builds soil, Saladin uses tricks to mimic natural systems. For instance, he puts cows on pasture using portable electric fencing allowing them to graze an area. Then he moves them to a new area, and exactly 3 days later he puts his chickens in the area again using portable electric fencing. Why? Because he's timed the life cycles of the fly pupae which emerge from the cow patties and uses that as chicken feed. He says his chickens get 30% of their protein right there and it doesn't cost him a dime. In fact it cuts down on insects. This is but one mechanism he uses but has others with hogs and even rabbits.

While the above method, and those mentioned by Gabe Brown (addressing North Carolina) in the attached video, escape most who are too busy to put down the NFL draft, the fact remains that humanity has really grown by information sources since the beginning of the printing press, and video is just a new level.

[Stephen]

Question: when the native indians planted a fish at the base of corn plants, were they also using drugs on plants? I get it that using fertilizer is a weak link, but plants gotta eat. I asked my dad what they did on the farm before cheap fertilizer was available. He said they planted velvet beans among the corn to add Nitrogen to the soil. Miserable to work with, but that's all they had. I've grown velvet beans with my corn also. I haven't tried it over enough years to say one way or another. In the mean time, I'm going to do anything I can to grow what I can and then return it to the soil to build up organic matter.

Maybe the soil in your area is such that 1) you don't need to add any fertilizer, and/or 2) you have an on-site supply of enough natural materials to make enough compost to keep things going indefinitely on a large enough scale to actually provide your family with more than just a few fresh vegetables once in a while. Unfortunately, I'm not in that situation - and I don't know anyone else who is either. It all works great for the first few years, but if you keep taking out in the form of fruit and vegetables, and don't put enough back in, something's got to give.

Here's a blog post I wrote titled "Our Precarious Agriculture System" - it is much of what you're saying, but if you've got a solution, I'd sure like to hear it. I haven't seen anything even remotely realistic as an answer to this problem.

http://www.southernagrarian.com/our-precarious-agriculture-system/

[Rockhopper]

I hope to save some seeds from this years garden. It would be really helpful to have a seed exchange where members could trade, buy, and sell seeds which have already been acclimated to their regions. I ran across a guy once at the prepper/gun show that SEPN used to gather at who sold seeds acclimated to the region since it was what he grew and harvested.

I read Stephen's blog post he shared and agreed with it entirely; it's a good post and we are on common ground with what he said. What I did notice was no mention of some of the more influential farmers and their techniques in his post. By skipping over the achievements of people like Joel Saladin and Gabe Brown then we are short changing ourselves regardless of the seeds we use. Stephen is right about healthy soil, and I thought we were on the same page when he mentioned tilling destroying beneficial soil microorganisms (mycorrhizal fungi) which is why I chimed in thinking we had common ground, and we do to a large extent. However, I can tell by his questions and posts he seems to have never heard of Joel Saladin, nor will he watch the video by Gabe Brown which would answer his questions. Unfortunately I can not say it as eloquently as these talented farmers can so I will not Cliff note the video here.

[Stephen]

Well said, Rockhopper.

One thing that keeps amazing me is that, after thousands of years of man growing food, we are still having to relearn it all over again. That just goes to show how deep the subject of growing our food really is. I really have to laugh at that idiot politician in New York who said farming is something any dummy can do - nothing to it - just stick a seed in a hole and cover it up. With people like that in control, it's no wonder we're in such bad shape.

[Starlady]

I tried to have gardens in the various places I lived Daytona Beach and New Smyrna.  Stephen, you have my sympathy.   Manure just disappears in that sand - and the soil is very sandy in most of FL, even 40 miles from the beaches.  Here in northwest Georgia, it's cement - well, clay that becomes very, very hard when dry.

With chickens and ducks, and their pine flake waste, it's taken me 7 years to build up my garden soil but it's still not deep enough to grow carrots. A 4' high compost pile degrades down into about 18" of usable soil in 2 years without turning.  I had to use Miracle Gro and other chemical fertilizers along with purchased garden soil the 1st 2 years in my gardens, which I began by taking 3 months to start the Back to Eden (or lasagna) method.   I now have earthworms aplenty.  Those permaculture guys are looking long term and that's fine if you are younger, or jumped on Joel's bandwagon 20 years ago, or have a ready supply of good compost to be brought in by the dump truck load to get you started but you still need the livestock to keep it up AND the ability to feed THEM, too AND a decent sized family or employees to help with all the labor in growing, harvesting and preserving.  To have employees you need a source of income.  So, I have to agree with Stephen that large scale farming naturally is not practical.

I agree we are being stupid in relying only on Big Ag but kids left the farms for a reason, it's a lot of work in every kind of weather and you CAN'T take a day off without making provisions for livestock care.   But I also agree that you'll never have any kind of sustainable garden without looking to your soil and seed saving itself is another whole subject to learn.

We have to take what works in our area & circumstances from each of those guys and leave the rest.

[ProGeek]

The soil in North GA is usually hard packed clay. I've used a shovel to loosen it, add Black Kow, and you can get things to grow, but its really hard labor. I've been struggling with this for years. My solution is to till/disk/plow the ground up then add tons of compost and till/disk/plow it in. I also added lime to the mix. I plan to do this for a couple of years to build up organic matter to get about a foot of good topsoil. This gives you a jump start on improving the soil that would take years to build up. I wish I could find decomposed wood chips, but I can't. I can only get compost from grocery produce mixed with wood chips and sand. It's $40/yard. Last year I filled 3 deep 20" raised beds and things grow very good in the beds but they are too small to grow a lot of food. Also, I signed up to get chips for free from tree cutters. It's good mulch, but takes years to decompose.

[Stephen]

I think the key point here - the thing that we all keep coming back to - is that growing a garden on any scale involves a whole lot more than the urban-idiot idea that you just stick a seed in the ground and then you pick all the nice fresh vegetables you can eat. Reality is that agriculture is all about not "letting nature take its course", but optimizing and improving on what we have. That requires external inputs such as irrigation, organic matter, and fertilizer in some form. It requires weeding. It requires pest control. It requires just plain old planning and learning.

I go back to that blog post that I mentioned previously - our food supply is a very precarious thing. It is totally dependent upon a very complex system of supply chains, massive amounts of fuel, and a functioning economy to allow the pieces to work together. If that system collapses, then death from starvation would result on a huge scale all over the world. America produces a whole lot of food, but it is entirely dependent on a complex system to support it. Without that, food panic and starvation quickly follow.

Grow your own garden. Raise your own chickens. Just understand that, even with all that, without external input such as fertilizer and chicken feed, something's going to break. We do the best we can, but also understand the limitations of self-sufficiency.

[Abigayle]

If you have a pond, in summer, you can skim off the alge and use it on the garden.  It mades a great fertilizer.  Also, all parts of the year, when you have some of your garden sitting dormant, put your compost right on top.  You can cover it with cardboard.  No geese or meat...Veggie scraps, coffee, eggshells. A lot can be put back into the soil in six months.  Chicken wood chips are wonderful! I like seaweed fertilizer  and black cow, myself