i have gotten too much trash/garbage/broken glass/ plastic wrappers/diapers/etc. in any municipal compost. having to spend a lot of time picking that crap out of the gardens has taught me a lesson so instead i have friends from a nearby small city who bring me their leaves and pieces of wood, bark, sawdust, and ashes from their wood burning stove along with bits of charcoal. in return i give them things from the garden and let them pick strawberries. leaves turn into nice dark humus after buried for a few years. looks like peat moss.
we also sometimes find people doing tree work who will drop a truckload of wood chips off because it saves them a longer trip to someplace else to dump it. we use these to mulch the perennial gardens where they can break down some into very nice humus which than can be added to veggie gardens.
these along with burying any plant debris from the growing season and the worms/pee/poo makes for a gradually improving garden.
right now we're in the middle of the harvest of most things and it's gone well this year.
My pots drain from the bottom into a pan and if there is water in the pan and roots deep than I add no water.
Fertilizer will be needed and I sorta determine how much by how growth is going. Too much all at once might kill the plant. In my opinion some potting soils that contain fertilizer have too much fertilizer to start plants in.
The calcium needed for tomatoes was discovered when I had blossom end rot and calcium cured it.
We've never had a bad batch of compost but we're in a semi-rural county where they probably take more care than in a big city. We also have a three-bin compost system to make home-brew compost, as well.
We had a tree-service fellow drop off a few truckloads of chips a few years back, one of the benefits of having a few acres for spare parts. Still using it up, will probably last my lifetime.
I have seen the wife sprinkle blue fertilizer beads on the *top* of the potted plants, where I think, "what good is it gonna do on top?" but she says it gets deep (I doubt it does so efficiently).
Hence, my plan is to mix the fertilizer throughout the soil. It should be easy to do. I just layer cake a few handfuls of soil plus a spoon of fertilizer, then a few more handfuls of soil and another spoon, and then I mix it all up and then put some more layers in until I can't mix it anymore because the bucket is about half full so I finish the job in a second bucket and then combine the tally.
Wouldn't *that* be better than sprinkling fertilizer on top and hoping it makes it to the bottom some day?
Why not? I guess if there were a huge boulder, the carrot root couldn't get past it; ub what if there were just the small stones that are in my soil pictures. Can't a carrot root just push them aside or wend their way around it?
True. I tried to dig out a baby oak tree, five inches tall, for the grandchild's biome and the first sound of the shovel hitting the soil was that rocky gravely sound of scraping against pavement.
Hmmm.... small stones harbor fungi. I guess that makes sense since the stones probably create little caves and niches like where Neanderthal man lived in a larger set of caves.
I'm agreeing with you that there's probably no organic matter in this soil so if plants need organic matter, then I have to add it.
Interestingly, when I think of "fertilizer" I think only of NPK and not of Carbon-based life - so I'll look up exactly *why* plants seem to want to eat other plants and animals.
What Does Organic Matter Do In Soil?
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Hmmmm... that says the plants don't *eat* the organic matter; it says that the organic matter acts like the *sand* that someone else suggested, which prevents compaction but it also cryptically says the organic matter is a "reservoir" of fertilizer (which is slowly released into the soil).
They make a distinction between organic material (e.g., a dead leaf) and organic matter (i.e., the humus left after most of the leaf has decomposed).
Only 5% is decomposed yearly after the initial decomposition, and, get this... It is the stable organic matter that is analyzed in the soil test!
i worm compost food scraps and any paper or cardboard. for anything else i just bury it and let nature slow compost it.
i could easily use a few large truckloads a season. anything extra we get i can always use to lift up some lower areas that can get flash flooded. later on if i run short of OM i can "mine" it.
with our clay a few inch layer of wood chips over it makes a perfect garden for strawberries. i have several patches and many thousand plants. no shortage of spaces that would use them.
you don't want crooked or reasons for the root to split.
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no, the fungi will extract nutrients from rocks stones if needed. they also can act as transport agents to get nutrients to plants in exchange for sugars and other goodies. soil and the soil community can be complex. there's millions of bacterial species (many which haven't even been classified or studied yet) and fungi, virii, etc.
the more diverse you can make a garden soil the more resilience you have for handling different conditions and a balance between the good kinds and the kinds which can cause diseases.
humus and various compounds of late decomposition are weak acids and large molecules that can hold up well for years if not abused (excess N increases the rate of decomposition).
some types of soil carbon are even more stable and will be around for hundreds or thousands of years. best thought of as a very large surface area for bacteria and fungi. bacteria and fungi are your basic support system for long- term fertility (in combination with your mineral elements). you'll see terms like biochar used too. very useful stuff for poor soil, but it needs to be mixed in compost and aged for a while to give it some nutrients/bacteria/fungi/ etc.
They chip the sudden-oak death trees and the Monterey Pines which die from some kind of bark beetle infestation. You see the pine tree in the background in this picture, all chopped up into blocks by the chippers:
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So there are piles and piles and piles of free wood chips everywhere.
I have a few good-sized piles of wood chips on my yard. They've been there *years*.
It's kind of coffee brown, but, remember, it comes from Franciscan sandstone, which is a red chert that came from the bottom of the ocean thirty million years ago when it was mashed against the continent to depths of tens of thousands of feet.
You could dig through this entire mountain, and you'd hit the same stuff throughout.
It's coffee colored. Here is a picture:
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Lucky you that it's clay, sand, and holds moisture. I'm realizing, slowly, that organics are the elixer of soils, even though they, themselves, don't do anything directly.
The organics seem to have an indirect effect, like toothpaste does.
Wow. I haven't seen that many worms since I lived back east! I saw a worm just a few months ago, but that was the last one in a while.
Your soil seems pretty loose, and grainy, as I can see, in that picture, sand grains. Mine is more uniformly NOT sand. However, I don't see "organics" all that much in either of our soil. Just a stray root here and there, but, I don't see a lot of organics in yours.
I used to live in glacial till, so I know what that's like!
Here, there are no boulders. Just the Franciscan sandstone (aka red chert) for entire mountains. You can dig 3000 feet and it's the same stuff through and through (all mashed up like it was blended in a kitchen blender, which, in effect, it was because the oceans mashed into the continent and schmushed it all together 30 million years ago).
So your soil is stonier than mine. Mine is weathered on the top to what I pictured.
I have been looking up the importance of organics, and, it seems they're a mysterious elixer that pretty much does everything good possible, but the plants don't actually "eat" the organics.
Function of organic matter in soil
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The organics are a *slow* source of N and P. They affect the microbial flora of the soil. And, they act as pH buffers and moisturizers.
It's super complex though ... and it's kinda like toothpaste. It, in and of itself, doesn't do anything directly to the plants but it seems to be a "good thing" overall to what we're trying to accomplish in that it does a bunch of indirect things for the plants.
While this is almost certainly true, getting to that level may or may not be too much for me to handle at this early stage of learning.
But I do agree with you, in that I have waged a genocidal war against scotch broom and spanish broom, where, my research tells me, they're "nitrogen fixers", which, AFAICT, means they sort-of-kind-of make their own nitrogen (so to speak) with help from bacterial friends.
Apparently that ability to colonized nitrogen-poor soils enables them to thrive where other plants can't take root yet. So, it's complex, I agree.
Who knew that plants make their own fertilizer? Not me.
Hmmm... what does that mean? What's a "heavy feeder"? Is it a big fat plant that sucks up nutrients?
How do you know tomatoes are "heavy feeders" and not, say, melons or peppers?
I looked up what the "organics" do, and, apparently, it's complex (like evertyhing else) but we can simplify it by saying the organics aren't "rock" so there are spaces for water and they act as a sloooooooow release of fertilizer (to the tune of about 1% a year of their nutrients).
Why Soil Organic Matter Is So Important
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That article above literally says that soil organics promote fertility, whatever that means, and that the organics make for better compaction, less erosion, more water availability, fewer parasites, less diseases, and fewer insects.
I find it hard to believe that there are "fewer parasites" or "less disease" and "fewer insects" but that's what they say.
So, it seems that organics in soil are the panacea for all ills! :)
I haven't seen a worm in months. We have them. Somewhere. But not many. Maybe once every six months I see a worm. So that's not gonna happen here.
Sun we have plenty of. There is no water from rainfall. None. Zip. Nada. We have to water them daily.
Did I mention my grass is brown in summer and green in winter? The opposite of yours, probably.
I don't get the raised bed thing. What good is the extra height? OK. So I know it's not the height. So what is it?
Can't plants drain water on the ground? (Remember, it never rains here, except in the winter.)
Heh heh .. rain barrels. My neighbor has a 22000 gallon rain catchment basin, and its' dry within a month of the rains stopping. And it won't rain a drop until November.
We are on a mountain so, there is both plenty of wind and plenty of swales to hide from the wind. But basically, there is no wind in the summer and the wind is ferocious in the winter (coming off the Pacific).
There is zero rain. Not a drop. Between something like May and November. Not a single drop.
There is no such thing as a rain date. In fact, when I first moved out here, I asked "when is the rain date?" just in case, and they all looked at me funnily'.
The wife seems to have no problem growing basil up here in northern california but *she* uses potting soil (which isn't the goal here).
Here, for example, is her basil:
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And, heh heh, I threw some leftover pepper seeds from a half-eaten pepper plant into her pot (she's says I am a cuckoo bird who plants seeds in other people's nests for them to take care of)...
yeah. The more I look, the more complex it is, but, it's good to learn this stuff because we only have one soil geology per yard!
I have to agree. Almost no organic matter whatsoever. I might mix in the wood chip residue near the edges of this wood pile to add some "sawdust" so to speak.
The way it works, technically, is that Rock is the big stuff that weathers to stones, which is the small stuff, and, over time, stones weather to "soil" which is a complex layered in-situ environment.
Once you displace that soil, then it becomes dirt. So, dirt is merely soil that is not in situ anymore.
There's an entire concurrent thread on this distinction over here:
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The thread it titled: Dirt is now soil; rock is not stone
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