More experiments in building soil life - and these ones worked!

It's been wet here lately.  Not wet like the floods that everyone else seems to be getting hit with, but wet nonetheless.  My local weather site tells me we've 10 rain days this year (it's now day 14), putting at least 15mm into the ground over the last week (rainfall > evapotranspiration by 15mm).

This time last year our front garden beds were barren.  Sure the roses and weeds were doing well, but otherwise the soil was lifeless.  If you dug up a handful of soil, it had no smell.  There was no visible life in it.  No worms. No bugs.  Nothing other than ants baking in the sun and creating a moonscape.

The previous owner had worked really hard on those garden beds.  She'd weeded and put in manure regularly, but when we arrived there was no visible humus at all.  Was it because the plants were heavy feeders?  Were there was too many of them?  Or perhaps because it was baking in the sun without shade or mulch?  Too many chemical remedies perhaps?

We hadn't really decided what to do with that garden bed.  Maybe we were going to plant natives, but probably not vegetables. So we did the obvious - layers of wet newspaper and covered it with some lucerne hay and whatever mulch we could find.  In our case, bags of tee tree mulch because we hadn't got onto a cheap source of good local mulch yet.  This helped slow the decline, but didn't do much to improve the soil.  We figured we'd plant a few things anyway and see what worked, including a few food plants. Nothing prospered, other than the broad bean experiment and the results of that were not immediately apparent.

We figured it was the local climate - nothing grows here we thought.

So imagine our surprise when we paid our local seed saver a visit, and saw his patch growing like crazy.  Same climatic conditions, same microclimate - he's the next village along down from us.  Clearly we were doing something wrong.  And it seemed the answer was the soil.  Time to stop messing around and get focused. 

In the last few weeks we got rid of a heap of the heavy feeders (roses mainly). We spread all the compost in that we'd built up over the last little year or so on top of the tree tree mulch, put in a handful of castings from our worm farm just under the mulch near each food plant, and covered the lot with woodchips from a local tree lopper to keep it moist.  And then it rained and gave everything a really good soak.

This week we have soil life.  Heaps of it!

When putting in a couple of plants from the local nursery, we discovered soil was moist, cool and full of life. Worms, slaters, other bugs. The weeds have gone.  Clover (a great nitrogen fixer) has appeared, and so have small mushrooms which are having a great time eating and breaking down our mulch.  It's starting to look like the complex ecosystem of a rainforest floor with nitrogen fixers and fungi doing all the work for us.  Just the thing for for a damp climate.

Clover and fungi hard at work. They invited themselves to dinner.

And our plants are now starting to grow like crazy.  Tomatoes are about to abound.

Happy days.

Experiments in building soil - chicken / legume guild

Rough site map, rich soil in the SouthEast Corner only

When we bought our place it was high maintenance.  Things needed pruning, mowing, watering, fertilising or weeding weekly and if you didn't stay on top of it, things got out of control.  And it did get out of control for a while.  Mr Jones had to quit his job to find the 2 days a week to maintain the place.  This was way too stressful, too much like hard work and producing too little yield. So we let things go a bit to see what nature would do if you weren't constantly fighting with her.

Some things worked, but some got even more out of control.  The north east part of the site is the driest area with the poorest soil, and is also the animals' favourite area.  They really liked our newly established lawn and decided to dig it up and turn the area into a dust bowl.

Out the front (north side), we ripped out a lot of the high maintenance plants (rambling roses), covered the ground with wet newspaper and tee tree mulch to build up the soil and keep the weeds down.  This helped a lot, and now we've got lots of soil critters improving our soil for us, but with spring setting in, the weeds are back and prolific.

So the big question - how to turn the animal and weed problems into opportunities?

Coming into season

Dad's remedy - broad beans

Legumes are wonderful things.  They take nitrogen out of the air and put it into nodules on their roots while also producing a crop.  When they die off  or are pruned the nitrogen is left behind in the soil.

So in the front yard we planted broad beans and peas.  We've already had a good yield from the snowpeas while they're busily competing with the weeds and fixing our soil  The broad beans have been prolific and are now starting to give us a yield as well.

I was never a fan of broad beans (used to have them thrown at me / shoved down my throat as a kid), but we're giving them a go again (recipes appreciated).  The great thing about broad beans is you can buy a huge bag of seeds from the health food shop for less than two bucks, and they grow like crazy.

Hedgerow, shade, moisture, weed control.

We deliberately over planted the broad beans, and have pulled out a number of the plants once they got to 2-3 feet in height.  These go into the animals favourite area, providing a ground cover to keep the moisture in the soil while the chooks turn them slowly into organic matter.  So for 2 bucks and about 30 minutes of effort over the last couple of months, our dust problem is reduced and our soil is being improved in both plots.

Has bean - white nodules are nitrogen goodness.

Weeds

Our chickens love weeds, particularly when they're starting to  produce seed.  We were putting these into the compost, but if you don't get your compost hot enough then you perpetuate the weed cycle, and our compost area is in an area where the soil is rich anyway which means carting it.  Besides, who really wants to have to turn compost every week?

Again, the solution, pull out the weeds, throw them into the chicken's favourite area and they'll keep the dust down and become food for the chooks.  If a few survive to stabilise the area, and be a pioneer for other plants, then that's just fine with us.

Yum, fresh produce in the dust bowl.

So this method solves a few problems, and gets plants and animals doing more of the work so we can get back in the hammock to hatch more clever plans on how to get nature working on our side

There's always a way to improve the system and make it more productive with less work required.  For us, this was a simple way to tweak the system and turn problems into opportunities with almost no incremental effort.

Change direction and nature starts working for you.