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the999bbq · June 7, 2007

I must do some replies on this thread.

Be careful to till straw in your soil. If you remember the composting process, composting is a balance between brown (P) and green (N) materials. When you put straw in the soil it will take the N in the soil to decompose and you just took fertilisers and green manures (like peas, lupines,...) to fix N in the ground, so no brown (raw) materials in the ground. Compost them first and put this 'on top' of the soil or mix very superficial.

We small backyard gardeners have an influece on our groundwaters and the environment in general. If you are watering 100L with chemicals 3 times a week, and your neighbours do, and their neighbours as well, the collective is putting lots of chemicals in the groundwater.
I can see that the commercial grower cannot brew nettle tea to feed hundreds of acres of crops so they use animal manure or chemicals, but we can with equal results so without moral judgement as usual : try it... ok my girlfriend is not always happy when some of the nettle tea odour or even the dried chicken/cow/horse manure odours follow me to the shower
,something that would not have been the case when I would have used the multicoloured sterile chemical pellets but she's even happier when I come and sit next to her after the shower ;-)

if you can find some extra time in your planning try to turn the compost heap every few weeks and add some extra greens to fire up the compost heat - active/heat composting gives you better (cleaner no unwanted seeds and even diseases) compost quicker, odourless and that beats that stinking rotting cold pile in some backyards that after some years will give something that looks like compost as well. It really isn't that much work actually... not dirtier than normal gardening

about the tilling than; I roughly dig up my clay garden into winterbeds before winter so that the freezing temperatures can brake down the soil-lumps and that gives me a crumblier soil already, it really works. Let the lumps be as they are don't try to make asparaguslike heaps - just raw lumps
the best time to apply the compost is before winter too, leaving it to cover the soil, the worms will do the rest.
There are some reasons not to till and mine are : air and compacting. Tilling with the same heavy material on the same depth can give you a compacted layer that influences the way water can go away. The top layer contains aerobic organisms that you till into anaerobic conditions and vice versa anaerobic organisms living deeper down don't like all the oxygen when they arrive in the top layer - they all die and you need life in your soil...you just roughly brake up the soil don't try to make a homogenous paste, you are not cooking you are gardening ;-)
Compost and not walking on the soil gives you fluffy soil, naturally...

June 7, 2007	#22
the999bbq Tomatovillian™ Join Date: May 2007 Location: Belgium Posts: 191	I must do some replies on this thread. Be careful to till straw in your soil. If you remember the composting process, composting is a balance between brown (P) and green (N) materials. When you put straw in the soil it will take the N in the soil to decompose and you just took fertilisers and green manures (like peas, lupines,...) to fix N in the ground, so no brown (raw) materials in the ground. Compost them first and put this 'on top' of the soil or mix very superficial. We small backyard gardeners have an influece on our groundwaters and the environment in general. If you are watering 100L with chemicals 3 times a week, and your neighbours do, and their neighbours as well, the collective is putting lots of chemicals in the groundwater. I can see that the commercial grower cannot brew nettle tea to feed hundreds of acres of crops so they use animal manure or chemicals, but we can with equal results so without moral judgement as usual : try it... ok my girlfriend is not always happy when some of the nettle tea odour or even the dried chicken/cow/horse manure odours follow me to the shower ,something that would not have been the case when I would have used the multicoloured sterile chemical pellets but she's even happier when I come and sit next to her after the shower ;-) if you can find some extra time in your planning try to turn the compost heap every few weeks and add some extra greens to fire up the compost heat - active/heat composting gives you better (cleaner no unwanted seeds and even diseases) compost quicker, odourless and that beats that stinking rotting cold pile in some backyards that after some years will give something that looks like compost as well. It really isn't that much work actually... not dirtier than normal gardening about the tilling than; I roughly dig up my clay garden into winterbeds before winter so that the freezing temperatures can brake down the soil-lumps and that gives me a crumblier soil already, it really works. Let the lumps be as they are don't try to make asparaguslike heaps - just raw lumps the best time to apply the compost is before winter too, leaving it to cover the soil, the worms will do the rest. There are some reasons not to till and mine are : air and compacting. Tilling with the same heavy material on the same depth can give you a compacted layer that influences the way water can go away. The top layer contains aerobic organisms that you till into anaerobic conditions and vice versa anaerobic organisms living deeper down don't like all the oxygen when they arrive in the top layer - they all die and you need life in your soil...you just roughly brake up the soil don't try to make a homogenous paste, you are not cooking you are gardening ;-) Compost and not walking on the soil gives you fluffy soil, naturally... Last edited by the999bbq; June 7, 2007 at 05:54 AM.