Wow birdie! I had you pegged at no more than a day over 800 years old. You old Shamanistas are amazing, but ya gotta get out more and see how the real world has developed since you was a young girl. No one going to go back to get you folks left behind, so keep up. "Nothing is... because everything is becoming"
Your objection here (or the pretense) appears to be cost? Is that correct? You do not see the value in a soil test or buying fertilizer when you can get it free, Is that your argument? You do not appear to be pulling a billy trying to use faux google references to falsely "imply" Miracle GroG kills soil. We all know that is a grossly exagerrated lie. Nute salts are the same regardless. Ya just can't change science and really, emperical data is so much more accurate than your ilk's taste test method.
As for being free everything has a cost.
Keep burning that wood birdie, love how that saves the environment!
the real world development i see is to a large part: ignorant, greedy, poisonous or destructive to many creatures.
you'd like me to keep up with that?
there is some hope yet, but it is a long ways to go.
my objection is that the OP stated they were a new gardener. which means very likely that they were using a new space. any long time gardener knows that new soil is often just fine for the first season and needs no additional nutrients added to it. short of obvious signs of deficit (the OP stated none) why add fertilizer? because we've been raised with cereal in the box and milk out of the bottle doesn't mean that nutritional value comes from boxes and bottles.
so instead of saying "yeah, go ahead dump dilute liquid fertilizers on your garden it won't hurt a thing." i recommended the OP do some reading and learn about what they are doing before adding anything to the soil, and i pointed them towards organic methods because they have less chance of being a runoff pollutant problem and a better chance of actually nurturing the soil organisms and maintaining or improving nutrients in the soil and thus the produce grown therein.
is that clear?
you were the one who came up with the "selling something" language and i had to laugh because you were the seller of more products than i.
i do not see the value in getting a soil test if there are no signs of deficit.
instead recommending the OP get some books on gardening and reading up on soil will give them much more for their future efforts than what they can get by dumping gunk out of a bottle.
there are many good descriptions of both fertile soil (and how to evaluate the soil condition) and various deficits. no tests other than observation are needed. relying upon a soil test to tell what the soil is doing is like using butt probe to tell what the brain is doing.
no i do not have to imply that at all if i tell the OP to not dump it at all then i've helped them avoid the problems it can cause.
if by emperical data you mean millions of acres of destroyed top soil then you've got all the evidence you need from dumping "Nute salts" (whatever those are).
i dunno how much more burning i'll be doing, but talking about the carbon cycle from the rotting of organic materials in the compost pile (or buried in the ground) and comparing that to what happens to the carbon when you make charcoal and the various soil nutrition aspects of that is probably a much more scientific process than telling someone "ok, dump that on the soil".
When I lived in Los Angeles metro I saw a peppercorn bush at a farmers market. Even there it was for indoors. You'd need a hot house to grow a clove plant almost anywhere in the temperate zones.
Welcome, to Gunny's world, songbird. No facts, no references, but lots of pronouncements and innuendo. Enjoy it, if you can.
Gunny enjoys arguments. In part he tries to do this by starting as many arguments as possible, and as you nail him down on one, he will ignore it, and attack a different argument (personal experience). Now, you may feel like some light hearted bantering, but, trust me, he will take it as a personal challenge to crush you. Personally, I think he is a "tweaker", but that is an unsubstantiated opinion.
Is there any gardening in the above paragraph? If it was me, I would have told you where you were wrong, and given references to support my position, but not Gunny. Here he mocks, characterizes (without substantiating the characterization), and patronizes you in order to pretend that he is your superior (also no evidence submitted).
Here Gunny questions your motives. Has anyone in this newsgroup, other than Gunny, ever questioned your motives before? More over, he is trying to put words in your mouth, to the effect that your objection to chemferts is based on cost.
Gunny again trying to put words in your mouth, attempting to bring a discussion to the level of an argument.
I'll take this one, songbird.
Gunny, give an example of a faux google reference that I have given, please, or continue to show yourself as an idiot.
Now, as far as implying that chemferts kill soil life, I don't imply, I quote experts.
Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis
(Available at a library near you.)
Chapter 1
What Is the Soil Food Web and Why Should Gardeners Care?
Negative impacts on the soil food web
Chemical fertilizers negatively impact the soil food web by killing off entire portions of it. What gardener hasn't seen what table salt does to a slug? Fertilizers are salts; they suck the water out of the bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and nematodes in the soil. Since these microbes are at the very foundation of the soil food web nutrient system, you have to keep adding fertilizer once you start using it regularly. The microbiology is missing and not there to do its job, feeding the plants.
It makes sense that once the bacteria, fungi, nematodes, and protozoa are gone, other members of the food web disappear as well. Earthworms, for example, lacking food and irritated by the synthetic nitrates in soluble nitrogen fertilizers, move out. Since they are major shredders of organic material, their absence is a great loss. Without the activity and diversity of a healthy food web, you not only impact the nutrient system but all the other things a healthy soil food web brings. Soil structure deteriorates, watering can become problematic," pathogens and pests establish themselves and, worst of all, gardening becomes a lot more work than it needs to be. . .
Plants are in control
Most gardeners think of plants as only taking up nutrients through root systems and feeding the leaves. Few realize that a great deal of the energy that results from photosynthesis in the leaves is actually used by plants to produce chemicals they secrete through their roots. These secretions are known as exudates. A good analogy is perspiration, a human's exudate.
Root exudates are in the form of carbohydrates (including sugars) and proteins. Amazingly, their presence wakes up, attracts, and grows specific beneficial bacteria and fungi living in the soil that subsist on these exudates and the cellular material sloughed off as the plant's root tips grow. All this secretion of exudates and sloughing-off of cells takes place in the rhizosphere, a zone immediately around the roots, extending out about a tenth of an inch, or a couple of millimeters (1 millimeter = 1/25 inch). The rhizosphere, which can look like a jelly or jam under the electron microscope, contains a constantly changing mix of soil organisms, including bacteria, fungi, nematodes, protozoa, and even larger organisms. All this ³life" competes for the exudates in the rhizosphere, or its water or mineral content.
At the bottom of the soil food web are bacteria and fungi, which are attracted to and consume plant root exudates. In turn, they attract and are eaten by bigger microbes, specifically nematodes and protozoa (remember the amoebae, paramecia, flagellates, and ciliates you should have studied in biology?), who eat bacteria and fungi (primarily for carbon) to fuel their metabolic functions. Anything they don't need is excreted as wastes, which plant roots are readily able to absorb as nutrients. How convenient that this production of plant nutrients takes place right in the rhizosphere, the site of root-nutrient absorption.
At the center of any viable soil food web are plants. Plants control the food web for their own benefit, an amazing fact that is too little understood and surely not appreciated by gardeners who are constantly interfering with Nature's system. Studies indicate that individual plants can control the numbers and the different kinds of fungi and bacteria attracted to the rhizosphere by the exudates they produce. During different times of the growing season, populations of rhizosphere bacteria and fungi wax and wane, depending on the nutrient needs of the plant and the exudates it produces.
Soil bacteria and fungi are like small bags of fertilizer, retaining in their bodies nitrogen and other nutrients they gain from root exudates and other organic matter (such as those sloughed-off root-tip cells). Carrying on the analogy, soil protozoa and nematodes act as ³fertilizer spreaders" by releasing , the nutrients locked up in the bacteria and fungi ³fertilizer bags." The nematodes and protozoa in the soil come along and eat the bacteria and fungi in the, rhizosphere. They digest what they need to survive and excrete excess carbon and other nutrients as waste.
Left to their own devices, then, plants produce exudates that attract fungi and bacteria (and, ultimately, nematodes and protozoa); their survival depends on the interplay between these microbes. It is a completely natural system, the very same one that has fueled plants since they evolved. Soil life provides the nutrients needed for plant life, and plants initiate and fuel the cycle by producing exudates. . .
. . . Soil life produces soil nutrients
When any member of a soil food web dies, it becomes fodder for other members of the community. The nutrients in these bodies are passed on to other members of the community. A larger predator may eat them alive, or they may be decayed after they die. One way or the other, fungi and bacteria get involved, be it decaying the organism directly or working on the dung of the successful eater. It makes no difference. Nutrients are preserved and eventually are retained in the bodies of even the smallest fungi and bacteria. When these are in the rhizosphere, they release nutrients in plant-available form when they, in turn, are consumed or die.
Without this system, most important nutrients would drain from soil. Instead, they are retained in the bodies of soil life. Here is the gardener's truth: when you apply a chemical fertilizer, a tiny bit hits the rhizosphere, where it is absorbed, but most of it continues to drain through soil until it hits the water table. Not so with the nutrients locked up inside soil organisms, a state known as immobilization; these nutrients are eventually released as wastes, or mineralized. And when the plants themselves die and are allowed to decay, the nutrients they retained are again immobilized in the fungi and bacteria that consume them.
The nutrient supply in the soil is influenced by soil life in other ways. For example, worms pull organic matter into the soil, where it is shredded by beetles and the larvae of other insects, opening it up for fungal and bacterial decay. This worm activity provides yet more nutrients for the soil community.
Gaia's Garden, Second Edition: A Guide To Home-Scale Permaculture (Paperback) by Toby Hemenway
(Available at a library near you.)
A chemical view of humus, studded with negatively charged oxygen atoms. Positively charged nutrients such as ammonium, potassium, copper, magnesium, calcium, and zinc are adsorbed to the humus. These nutrients can be pulled off the humus and used by plants and microbes.
p.78 ammonium (a nitrogen compound), copper, zinc, manganese, and many others. Under the right conditions (in soil with a pH near 7, that is, neither too acid nor too alkaline), humus can pick up and store enormous quantities of positively charged nutrients.
How do these nutrients move from the humus to plants? Plant roots, as noted, secrete very mild acids which break the bonds that hold the nutrients onto the humus. The nutrients from humus are washed into the soil moisture, creating a rich soup. Bathed in this nutritious broth, the plants can absorb as much calcium, ammonium, or other nutrient as they need. There's evidence to suggest that when plants have supped long enough, they stop the flow of acid to avoid depleting the humus.
That's the direct method plants use to pull nutrients from humus. Just as common in healthy soil is an indirect route, in which microbes are the middlemen. This type of plant feeding involves an exchange. Roots secrete sugars and vitamins that are ideal food for beneficial bacteria and fungi. These microbes thrive in huge numbers close to roots and even attach to them, lapping up the plant-made food and bathing in the film of moisture that surrounds the roots. In return, the microbes produce acids and enzymes that release the humus-bound nutrients and share this food with the plants.
Microbes also excrete food for plants in their waste. One more big plus for plants is that many of the fungi and other microbes secrete antibiotics that protect the plants from disease. All of these mutual exchanges create a truly symbiotic relationship. Many plants have become dependent on particular species of microbial partners and grow poorly without them. Even when the plant-microbe partnership isn't this specific, plants often grow much faster when microbes are present than they do in a sterile or microbe-depleted environment.
p.79 Conventional wisdom has it that plant root are the main imbibers of soil minerals and that plants can only absorb these minerals (fertilizers) if they are in a water-soluble form, but neither premise is true. Roots occupy only a tiny fraction of the soil, so most soil minerals?and most chemical fertilizers?never make direct contact with roots. Unless these isolated, lonely minerals are snapped up by humus or soil organisms, they leach away. It's the humus and the life in the soil that keep the earth fertile by holding on to nutrients that would otherwise wash out of the soil into streams, lakes, and eventually the ocean.
Agricultural chemists have missed the boat with their soluble fertilizers; they're doing things the hard way by using an engineering approach rather than an ecological one. Yes, plants are quite capable of absorbing the water-soluble minerals in chemical fertilizer. But plants often use only 10 percent of the fertilizer that's applied and rarely more than 50 percent. The rest washes into the groundwater, which is why so many wells in our farmlands are polluted with toxic levels of nitrates.
Applying fertilizer the way nature does?tied to organic matter?uses far less fertilizer and also saves the energy consumed in producing, shipping and applying it. It also supports a broad assortment of soil life, which widens the base of our living pyramid and enhances rather than reduces biodiversity. In addition, plants get a balanced diet instead of being force-fed and are healthier. It's well documented that plants grown on soil rich in organic matter are more disease- and insect-resistant than plants in carbon-poor soil.
In short, a properly tuned ecological garden rarely needs soluble fertilizers because plants and soil animals can knock nutrients loose from humus and organic debris (or clay, another nutrient storage source) using secretions of mild acid and enzymes. Most of the nutrients in healthy soil are "insoluble yet available," in the words of soil scientist William Albrecht. These nutrients, bound to organic matter or cycling among fast-living microbes,won't' wash out of the soil yet can be gently coaxed loose ? or traded for sugar secretions? by roots. And the plants take up only what they need. This turns out to be very little, since plants are 85 percent water, and much of the rest is carbon from the air. A fat half-pound tomato, for example, only draws about 50 milligrams of phosphorus and 500 milligrams of potassium from the soil. That's easy to replace in a humus-rich garden that uses mulches, composts, and nutrient-accumulating plants.
State of the World 2011: Innovations That Nourish the Planet: A Worldwatch Institute Report on Progress Toward a Sustainable Society (Paperback - Jan 2011)
(At a library near you, until they close)
p 8 If seeds represent the short-term payoff option, the truly long-term investment with big returns is investing in the soil and water that nourish crops. In Mali and other parts of the African Sahel, soils are severely damaged from overgrazing and drought, but the use of green manure and cover crops can dramatically improve soil fertility without the use of expensive fertilizers. . . . [Roland] Bunch notes that subsidizing chemical fertilizers, which some African nations are doing heavily (by up to 75 percent in Malawi, for example), has generally not been a good long-term strategy and actu- ally reduces farmers' incentive to invest in more agroecological approaches to nourishing soils. When the fertilizer subsidies end, pro- ductivity will drop to virtually nothing. Instead, Bunch maintains that green manure/cover crops are the only sustainable solution to Africa's soil fertility crisis.12
Both well know tropicals. If you have the facilities to grow one you should be able to grow the other. In LA metro even the peppercorn plant needed to be kept in a hothouse. No way anyone in ConUS is going to be able to grow a clove plant anywhere but a hothouse. Possibly in Hawaii but definitely not in any of the continental states.
gotta say it still amazes me that you can tell all that for a internet reading. Psychic card reading and all that that black magic is amazing.
Oh here ya go on that Biochar thingie for you and your little eco group here. You boys can surely twist this one as you like. Your good at pseudo science.
"Ad hominem" is Gunny's middle name. Is English your second language? YOU'RE not very good at it. What is this pseudo science of which you speak, or do you even know?
Your fascination with "escape from nature" hydroponics seems to have blinded you to the eco-system in which your organism lives, just as surely as your lack of attention must be responsible for your not recognizing that songbird is of the feminine persuasion.
You are far too generous, songbird, to refer to this blog as lightweight. Obviously Gunny isn't literate, or he would have noticed that the article claims bio-char is good. The only real question posed in it is how good.
Then the article wanders-off looking for a straw man to bash, and comes up with the red herring of the "emission-free" biomass stove, which should appeal to Gunny, because it is a no-brainer. What isn't addressed is the fact that whatever emissions a biomass stove makes is small in comparison to the amount of carbon sequestered in the char. That the char from a millennia ago can still be found in the Amazon region (where decomposition rates for organic materials is very high) seems to have completely escaped Gunny's fallible powers of observation in his egregiously weak, partisan attack on "organic" farming/gardening (which is the motivating force behind most of his posts).
Lastly, the article that Gunny presents rails against the exploitation of "cap and trade" in carbon credits. Beyond this exploitation is the question of why these CO2 pollution credits are given freely, instead of being sold, to polluters. That money could be used for off-sets, instead of just lining polluters pockets.
Hopefully, the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau established by Elizabeth Warren will help (until corporations co-opt it), but the first line of defense always needs to be self-defense. Caveat emptor.
while i am in tune with my self and have no specific concerns about which gender i appear to be on-line i do find it amusing how people pigeon hole me based upon a name. remember your biological facts and you won't be wrong in guessing.
i wasn't going to critique... not enough time or energy at the moment.
i have no idea what a biomass stove is... i haven't looked it up.
as for sequestering carbon, at this stage i'm glad for any help in getting it done easily at low cost and with as few emissions as possible.
you'd hear "the end of the earth is coming!" rhetoric if the USoA ever actually had a carbon cap and trade system. the USoA has made a lot of progress even without it in the past 20 years. i hope that progress continues.
we shall see. i suspect it will be quickly defanged (if it has any teeth to begin with).
Really,.... Biochar? Well Bird, you need to have an " idea what a biomass stove is... " to understand biochar.
Charcoal, on the other hand? Yah. just burn a bunch of wood, perhaps you will get some benefit somehow, maybe as a fluffly stuff or as a nutrient source of some sort, otherwise you just blowing smoke L&F. Wood ashes contain about 6 per cent potash, plus a good bit of some lime. A good burn of Corn cobs might give you more potash for your particular soil- 20-30 % perhaps. Just don't burn manure plies for the ash. So again, regardless of a soil test or a soil taste, what does the soil type need? A bit more potassium and Lime? Any idea of the pH your plant need? Misuse, as well as overuse is stupid. I think most will agree to that, except maybe billy. It has to be his lazy man, no till, bury it and they will come but you have to endure his political BS enroute
As the man adeptly points out in his "lightweight article" and the reason I gave it. Zealots like billy attempt to BS about it being some sorta panacea mysticism. But that is just pseudoscience version billy pushes. The little pearl of an epiphany that only the devout can see. So you buy into his version? Does "evil chemferts" kill soil?
Really you want to read deeper or R U just posturing for position like billy? If so join in one of the Google Biochar groups like this"
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Please take note, these guys are not the usual Book Writers oft referenced here as subject matter experts. Some of these guys are real serious players and not so theory lite, although your results may vary in your locale. Perhaps you can translate for billy as he & his are still a bit clueless since they read 1491 and this lame attempt to integrate terrre peta into to his great global hope will get some sort of traction.
Still gotta say I am impressed with your Shamanista abilities in analyzing that man's soil solely over the Internet, quite a mystic feat. Indulge me for a moment for curiosity sake, what was the CEC and potassium level of the man's soil?
BTW, still the answer is YES, it is OK to use Miracle Gro, but you know that. The rest is just posturing
blinded you to the eco-system in which your organism lives, just as surely as your lack of attention must be responsible for your not recognizing that songbird is of the feminine persuasion.
Ohh billy! You been played boy and you still don't get it.
Take a bit of your own political advice and go pound yourself in the ass.
Power up that scooter chair billy boy, its a quick fast ride to the future and your already struggling trying to keep up.
My bet is you never been in the tropics or much less spent time in any environment besides sitting your little backyard garden trying to spin your BS.
Admit it billy you never been anywhere nor done anything in your little miserable existence. Your just another Walter Mitty being a legend in your own mind.
Hopefully you will someday know how ignorant your statement above is. but I doubt it.
I assume this ignorance means something to you and your pseudoscience beliefs ? Perhaps when the lithium begins to take effect you will be able recall what it was. Meanwhile, have you ever spent time in nature except in your Walter Mitty mind?
Until then, I believe I called songbird a Shamanista, which is colloquial gringo word play for medicine woman, her being all clairvoyant and such. A word which you later repeat. However, if you insist that she is of the feminine persuasion, who am I to stop ya.
Before you try to tell everyone that you have KF ... again as you always do please send me your shoe size, I'll get ya some peppermint tennis shoes for the many times ya got your foot, or what ever, in your mouth.
Meantime, it seems funny that I can grow plants using water and the evil chemicals you are telling everyone kills soil, plants and people. However you may have a point, my bonsai seems not to have any soil after I use fertilizers. Some even organic. Oh right, ...never mind I didn't put any soil in , opps, my bad.
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