Hi everyone!
My last post was about growing soil; nice new, healthy rich humus, to sequester carbon and to work against the trend regular farming has of losing 83 billion tonnes of arable soil per year.
This week, I’ve been reading more Bill Mollison (bedtime book) in the form of Permaculture One. Here are a couple of his thoughts on soil:
Soils are the subject of much discussion, research and dogma. Their improvement, creation and destruction has been instrumental in the rise and fall of cultures throughout the world.’ p72
Being part of the biosphere, soils are complex ecologies, rather than non-living systems.‘ p72
Of course, tilling or ploughing the soil weakens it, and upsets the ecology of it, equaling a more and more impoverished soil, far more prone to erosion. In just the same way, pesticides and herbicides wipe-out the living element in the soil: this is akin to ripping the engine out of a car – leaving you going no-where.
The life forms in the soil do all the soil-making work. For example, worm mucus binds particles of soil, adds enzymes and holds water. As they move along, eating, the passages they leave allow roots to zoom along behind them, and let oxygen into the soil.
You can find out great stuff about the ecology of soil in the Growing Power Youtube videos and on Dr. Caroline Jone’s Amazing Carbon site, to start you off. If you have information you’d like to share, please tell us in the comments!
Some more Mollison on site and soil (this was heartening to me, considering the impoverished, shaley, rocky, sandy soil of soil we have on our Cygnet mountainside),
In site planning, it is necessary to understand the characteristics of the soils. However, soils are not considered to be the limiting factor that many people seem to think. Although the physical character of soils may be a reasonably long-term aspect of the land, the soil ecology which supports plant life is readily changed and improved.’ p61
At Growing Power, they import 80,000 kilos of food waste a WEEK: it includes scraps from local restaurants and offices, fruit and veg in boxes never sold at markets, the cardboard boxes from anything and everything, brewery waste, mildewed hay, coffee grounds from local cafes, eggshells, and woodchips to name a few. This they compost in massive piles, or in windrows, or in large wormeries. Worms are the key to making this otherwise ‘landfill’ into rich, valuable soil. First and foremost the CEO Will Allen says, Growing Power is in the business of growing soil (and that’s Will below on one of his compost mountains!)
Allen says:
The simple truth is that it all starts with the soil. Without good soil, crops don’t get enough of the nutrients they need to survive and when plants are stressed, they are more prone to disease and pest problems. That’s why we grow our own compost and vermicompost – 6 million tons of it a year. That compost goes onto every growing bed we raise crops on. Because we know what goes in to the compost, we aren’t worried that the soil is contaminated with lead or other chemicals that humans just shouldn’t eat.’
A vermiculture business in Australia adds animal manures (cow, sheep, chicken) as well as animal parts from the slaughter business. They compost this with hundreds of thousands of kilos of spoiled hay, all manner of vegetable farm ‘waste’ (like straw, rotted crops, brewery hops, coconut husks, cocoa shells etc etc). Yuk, you might think, about the animal parts – but we’ve all used ‘blood and bone’ and this is just a ground-up, dried, refined granule form of the same thing – animal bodies. To compost the remains seems better than any alternative (where their bodies are incinerated and wasted).
So, all the ‘waste’ we produce can be turned, by worms and bacteria and enzymes (a workforce of billions who ask no wage) back into top quality, life-giving soil. Bring it on! Give us a little time to get to OzEarth HQ and we will be doing a similar collection of any local goodies we can get our hands on in the Huon Valley, in Tassie, and turning it into the black gold! (We have a tractor and a 10 tonne truck already, which helps!)
OK, I shall stop waxing lyrical about the planet-saving characteristics of growing soil and bid you a great day!
Love
C
Ps. You can click on the ‘links’ and the pictures, to take you to the pages they were pinched from!! oxoxo
