The Helpful Gardener
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Orchard Earth

Here Sensei speaks to one of the great loves of permaculture; nitrogen fixing trees... of the Morishima acacia he says...
This tree was introduced to Japan from Australia some years ago and grows faster than any tree I have ever seen. It sends out a deep root in just a few months and in six or seven years it stands as tall as a telephone pole. In addition this tree is a nitrogen fixer, so if six to ten trees are planted to the quarter acre, soil improvementcan be carried out in the deep soil strata and there is no need to break your back
hauling logs down the mountain.
Hai Sensei! Better living through nature! Let the tree come to you... 8)

Clover and daikon ain't bad either...

HG

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rainbowgardener
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Does it count as an invasive exotic? In the previous chapter, he speaks against introducing foreign beneficial insects to deal with insect pests.

So how come it's not ok to introduce foreign insects, but it is ok to introduce foreign trees?

I am still, after 9 years, working on clearing my hillside of Japanese honeysuckle shrub. In Japan it was probably a nice shrub... green much of the year, fragrant flowers, berries. Here it out competes everything else and becomes a monster mono-culture, smothers all the natives.

In the meantime, the most interesting part to me went by in one small paragraph with little discussion (this book could easily have been twice as big!): "Next I tried burying wood..."

He is talking about amending his hard clay soil. Since I have the same stuff (except mine is yellow instead of red), I would have liked to hear more about this. I know we have discussed biochar elsewhere.

I have started in a small scale way burying little bits of the wood/charcoal left over when we have fires in the firepit, here and there. But I don't feel like I know very much about what I'm doing (how much wood should I bury, what am I really expecting to happen, etc).

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applestar
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Burying wood -- is that hugelkultur or it's equivalent?

muland
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Burying decomposing tree trunks in the ground is one way to do it. It takes a lot of work but the benefits are really long lasting, especially in improving how much water the soil retains. Hugelculture, as I understand it, is similar but it is done on top of the soil. You can put down a weed barrier, like cardboard or newspaper first but it isn't really necessary. Then pile up the decomposing woody material interlayering with soil or compost or both. The pile can get quite high, say three feet or so. It will sink down over time. If you put a mulch on top of say straw, the bed will stay moist for a long, long time. This is a long lasting raised bed. By long, I mean 10 to 15 years depending on the type of wood you use. Potatoes are often mentioned as a crop that does really well in a bed like this, but all kinds of things will grow in it.

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Hugelkultur can be either subsoil or above in my understanding (shame Paul wasn't here; he is certainly up on this...)

Organic fertility is all about sequestering carbon in the soil; this increases the CEC and allows for the storage of increasing amounts of ionized nutrients. Chemical culture simply adds massive amountw of nitrogen and hopes some sticks, but it ignores tha any finding it's way into the organic chain does so in combination with carbon (EVERYTHING is a carbon based lifeform on Earth).

Bacteria are about as high nitrogen as it gets (and one of the few things survivng regular use of ammonia salts) and they are 5 parts carbon to 1 part nitrogen, plants vary but herbaceous are around 20 to 1, deiduous trees and shrubs vary from 30 to 70 parts, and evergeens from 70 to several hundred parts carbon, so you use the carbon in soil pretty quickly if you do not put it back (chemical culuture continually fails to address this as it does not figure in their thinking; just use more nitrogen).

By contiunually renewing the soil with applications of straw, we add back nitrogen and carbon in decent quantity without tilling or adding compost. We mulch the soil with something that was going to be atmosphjeric carbon pretty quickly anyway. Using trees (especially before their time) means we are using carbon that was basically sequestered already, and could have been left on the hoof until it's time was nigh.

Sensie's right, moving all that wood is energy intensive, therefore not BMP.

HG



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