With the news report that Vladimir Putin had banned further exports from Russia of cereal grains like wheat and barley it comes to my mind again today how fragile the food system is in the United States and how the industrialization of growing, processing, and delivering food creates a weak system not to mention one lacking in basic nutrition. Having reconnected with many people in the Los Angeles area recently I began to imagine what would happen to the tens of millions of people in that area, many of them trapped in valleys surrounded by mountains, with little water, and almost no usable land in which to grow food if any one of the known and expected natural or manmade catastrophes were to occur. Being completely dependent on a remote food supply isn’t a situation I would willingly put my family in.
Aside from the creeper disasters like drought that slowly erode an area’s ability to produce food, we have the super volcano in Yosemite ready to go off at any time, an eight foot bulge at a plate convergence running 100 miles up the coastline of Oregon, and wildly variable weather like that which caused late blight to reappear this week again in New York. We will have to wait to see if it creates the kind of destruction to whole fields of crops like it did last year. Too much rain might fall drowning fields or making it impossible to collect a usable crop. Many combinations of all of these and our dependence on the Interstate Highway System that won’t work if people are attempting to flee an area create a multitude of potential crises, some of which might make the atomic bombs I was drilled repeatedly to protect myself from in grade school by hiding under a piece of wood look like a welcome scenario.
Maybe it was this aspect of growing up in the United States that has lulled us into a state of euphoric bliss and denial that anything could ever go wrong. After all, we survived the atomic bomb, the Nazis and Soviet Union, the Korean and Cold War and at the same time were fed the same kind of propaganda that every dictator uses “we are the best country”-meaning that everyone else is second class, “people envy us for our freedom”-the rest of the world exists in oppressed slavery, and “God bless America”-yes we really are that much better than everybody else. With that kind of one-two punch why would anybody ever take off their party shoes?
I remember how unhappy my daughter was once when a family decision was made not to bring certain types of entertainment into the house. My wife and I could not understand what the fuss was about but our thinking is much more like the generation that lived through the dust bowl and Great Depression whereas my daughter is like most people today, needing to be entertained and not understanding the limits we put on spending for consumer goods. Her generation has forgotten the happiness of a long drink of cool clean water after a hard day’s work or what it is like to eat after not having had food for a while. For the most part we take cool clean air and protection from the weather for granted and most of us would be terribly unprepared if we had to live outside without these things.
I am sure that it seems implausible to many people that we should prepare for a disaster on the magnitude of the ones discussed here and reported widely elsewhere. It would make sense to think about our food systems, though, for other reasons. Many people believe that we shouldn’t be eating as much cereal grain as we do. No animal on the planet evolved to live on as much cereal or corn as we eat or feed cows and hogs to fatten them up. We feed them to animals to fatten them up the last few weeks of their life and we eat them because they are cheap to grow and lend themselves to mechanized industrialized processes, not because they have the nutrition we need and despite the fact that they are hard to digest and cause a multitude of health problems.
Cereals and corn make us feel good because they release energy quickly and we have associated that sugar rush and addiction with good health. Sometimes feeling good isn’t so good for you, like the skin rush you get when snorting brown heroin, one of the hazards I was exposed to during my time in the U. S. Army. I survived that and lived to tell the tale so I imagine anyone could decide to make any change they want, if they are strong enough, have the right kind of friends, and realize that in order to be a friend first you have to be strong and true to your real needs and self.
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Friday, May 28, 2010
2010 Poultry Report
I mix most of my feed except for chick starter. These animals grow so fast that it doesn’t make sense to me to not give them the best start possible. I buy bulk whole grains from Concentrates NW and Azure Standard. I make my own modified mix for my adult birds that contains a combination of rolled and cracked grains, peas, supplements, and grit. I don’t use corn or soy. You can also buy an organic corn/soy free mix, Cascade Poultry Mix (chick, starter, and layer) from Azure Standard and the Urban Farm Store. It wouldn't hurt to consider adding a vitamin supplement to put in water like “Broiler Booster” or similar additives that contain probiotics, vitamins, and biotin which is recommended when raising fast growing birds like Cornish X Rocks.
Sprouted grains are a part of the daily ration. The chickens come running when they see that coming. Sprouted grains don’t change the amount of or quality of protein, but in trials done sprouting a portion of the ration birds showed a higher weight gain, in other words-better utilization, without feeding enzymes as an additive to the feed. Sprouting grains deactivates anti-nutrients like phytates that are present in the bran in all grains. It also activates enzymes and by turning a relatively inert grain into a vegetable it becomes more digestible as well. Phytates can also be neutralized by fermenting cereal grains. Phytates bind our ability to absorb metallic nutrients like calcium, magnesium, and phosphorous. Fermenting or sprouting grains neutralizes phytates found in bran but not soy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytic_acid
Here is a article about soy and anti-nutrients http://www.westonaprice.org/soy-alert/1854-why-babies-should-not-be-fed-soy.html. Soy is being oversold in this country because it is cheap to grow and extremely profitable but there are some very compelling reasons not to eat it in any form or feed it to your animals. If you are going to feed soy and you are starting out with raw untreated grain then find and use directions for preparing it for use. Soy should be roasted before feeding it to animals. In China and Japan, where soy comes from, it is a very, very, small part of the diet.
According to Harvey Ussery, barley and oats should not be more than 15% of the diet because of digestive problems caused by high levels of saponins. Other sources said that saponins were helpful. As I understand it, they aren’t harmful but may be a limiting factor and reduce the feed conversion efficiency. If you are making your own feed for pullets one way to give a nutritional balance of vitamins and hard to come by nutrients like methionone is to use a product like Fertrell Poultry Nutri-Balancer. This contains calcium, phosphorous, vitamins, salt, and probiotics, and methionone.
One of the essential amino acids, methionone is sulfur based. It is often fed as an additive and is only found in meat, fish, eggs, and dairy products. Amino acids are considered essential if animals cannot manufacture it for their own use, it must be fed. Several amino acids like cysteine and taurine, and enzymes like ATP and SAMe are derived from methionone. A lack of methionone is another limiting factor in the growth and feed conversion of poultry, although some articles appeared recently that suggested growing meat birds more slowly in a free range setting without feeding additional methionone. For more information about amino acids in different feed stocks a good book to have in your library, especially if you are vegetarian, is "Diet for a Small Planet".
If you are eating vegetarian eggs then they are probably feeding the chickens artificial methionone, although if you are eating truly free range eggs they are probably getting it from bugs and other things they are finding in the field which raises the question “Can I eat bugs and be vegetarian?” A recent survey of our flock was inconclusive on their feelings on this subject. Some people set up grub stations to feed their birds by attracting black soldier fly grubs. During the warm weather you can supplement the diets of ducks and provide hours of entertainment for them by leaving a light bulb just out of reach in their pen because they are excellent at snapping up flying insects.
Instead of salt I use SEA-90 http://www.seaagri.com/. We have also replaced salt in our house with SEA-90. For table use I bake it which turns it into chocolate brown chunks that are easier to grind with a small spice grinder. When making things like garlic salt I just whiz it for a few seconds in a small coffee mill to get super fine flakes. Most of the hand harvested salt we buy is collected by taking the mostly purified crystals that form by capillary action at the top of large windrows inside salt lagoons or ponds. SEA-90 is made by taking the entire windrow so it includes massive amounts of micro-nutrients, all of the minerals that were in the sea water, not just the salt. Since it only costs about forty cents a pound I have to laugh every time I go into Whole Foods and see the stuff they are selling there for ten to twenty times that.
From what I understand, except for some special situations, you are not going to hurt your birds if they don’t have completely balanced feed every day. An exception would be something like raising meat birds. You need to be on top of vitamins and supplements from day one to make sure that you don’t induce structural defects like splayed leg. My layer pullets get at least half of their feed from different portions of my yard inside a moving 625 sq ft poultry net enclosure that can be electrified if needed. We usually don’t electrify it and sometimes one of the birds will find itself on the other side of the fence, mostly because our birds are still young and smaller. After the first couple of times being herded back into the fence they tend to avoid that. Every time we move we need to watch them for a couple of days to make sure they are staying put. So far it has worked really well. You can see more about movable fencing at Premier1.
The meat bird that several people in our area are trying this year is the Freedom Ranger. This is a bird that was bred for pasture and is slower growing than the Cornish X Rock. Word is that this is a superior bird in every way. Cheaper to raise, healthier, better tasting, excellent forager, etc.
Sprouted grains are a part of the daily ration. The chickens come running when they see that coming. Sprouted grains don’t change the amount of or quality of protein, but in trials done sprouting a portion of the ration birds showed a higher weight gain, in other words-better utilization, without feeding enzymes as an additive to the feed. Sprouting grains deactivates anti-nutrients like phytates that are present in the bran in all grains. It also activates enzymes and by turning a relatively inert grain into a vegetable it becomes more digestible as well. Phytates can also be neutralized by fermenting cereal grains. Phytates bind our ability to absorb metallic nutrients like calcium, magnesium, and phosphorous. Fermenting or sprouting grains neutralizes phytates found in bran but not soy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytic_acid
Here is a article about soy and anti-nutrients http://www.westonaprice.org/soy-alert/1854-why-babies-should-not-be-fed-soy.html. Soy is being oversold in this country because it is cheap to grow and extremely profitable but there are some very compelling reasons not to eat it in any form or feed it to your animals. If you are going to feed soy and you are starting out with raw untreated grain then find and use directions for preparing it for use. Soy should be roasted before feeding it to animals. In China and Japan, where soy comes from, it is a very, very, small part of the diet.
According to Harvey Ussery, barley and oats should not be more than 15% of the diet because of digestive problems caused by high levels of saponins. Other sources said that saponins were helpful. As I understand it, they aren’t harmful but may be a limiting factor and reduce the feed conversion efficiency. If you are making your own feed for pullets one way to give a nutritional balance of vitamins and hard to come by nutrients like methionone is to use a product like Fertrell Poultry Nutri-Balancer. This contains calcium, phosphorous, vitamins, salt, and probiotics, and methionone.
One of the essential amino acids, methionone is sulfur based. It is often fed as an additive and is only found in meat, fish, eggs, and dairy products. Amino acids are considered essential if animals cannot manufacture it for their own use, it must be fed. Several amino acids like cysteine and taurine, and enzymes like ATP and SAMe are derived from methionone. A lack of methionone is another limiting factor in the growth and feed conversion of poultry, although some articles appeared recently that suggested growing meat birds more slowly in a free range setting without feeding additional methionone. For more information about amino acids in different feed stocks a good book to have in your library, especially if you are vegetarian, is "Diet for a Small Planet".
If you are eating vegetarian eggs then they are probably feeding the chickens artificial methionone, although if you are eating truly free range eggs they are probably getting it from bugs and other things they are finding in the field which raises the question “Can I eat bugs and be vegetarian?” A recent survey of our flock was inconclusive on their feelings on this subject. Some people set up grub stations to feed their birds by attracting black soldier fly grubs. During the warm weather you can supplement the diets of ducks and provide hours of entertainment for them by leaving a light bulb just out of reach in their pen because they are excellent at snapping up flying insects.
Instead of salt I use SEA-90 http://www.seaagri.com/. We have also replaced salt in our house with SEA-90. For table use I bake it which turns it into chocolate brown chunks that are easier to grind with a small spice grinder. When making things like garlic salt I just whiz it for a few seconds in a small coffee mill to get super fine flakes. Most of the hand harvested salt we buy is collected by taking the mostly purified crystals that form by capillary action at the top of large windrows inside salt lagoons or ponds. SEA-90 is made by taking the entire windrow so it includes massive amounts of micro-nutrients, all of the minerals that were in the sea water, not just the salt. Since it only costs about forty cents a pound I have to laugh every time I go into Whole Foods and see the stuff they are selling there for ten to twenty times that.
From what I understand, except for some special situations, you are not going to hurt your birds if they don’t have completely balanced feed every day. An exception would be something like raising meat birds. You need to be on top of vitamins and supplements from day one to make sure that you don’t induce structural defects like splayed leg. My layer pullets get at least half of their feed from different portions of my yard inside a moving 625 sq ft poultry net enclosure that can be electrified if needed. We usually don’t electrify it and sometimes one of the birds will find itself on the other side of the fence, mostly because our birds are still young and smaller. After the first couple of times being herded back into the fence they tend to avoid that. Every time we move we need to watch them for a couple of days to make sure they are staying put. So far it has worked really well. You can see more about movable fencing at Premier1.
The meat bird that several people in our area are trying this year is the Freedom Ranger. This is a bird that was bred for pasture and is slower growing than the Cornish X Rock. Word is that this is a superior bird in every way. Cheaper to raise, healthier, better tasting, excellent forager, etc.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Feeding the New Ducks
Just found some interesting information about ducks that is different than chickens. I thought someone told me that they need vitamin B12 but Storey's Guide to Raising Ducks says it is Niacin, vitamin B3. Ducklings need 35 mg per pound of feed from 0-2 weeks, and 30mg weeks 3-10. Ducks can be permanently crippled if not fed enough Niacin.
You can add it directly to their water by crushing 100-150 mg worth of tablets per gallon of water or 2-3 cups of commercial grade brewers yeast per 10 pounds of feed. There is a lot of new information in this book that isn't covered in the chicken books. I recommend getting or reading this book before you get ducks. Bad me. It also has a lot of recipes in the back for make your own duck food including variations that allow you to choose wheat or corn as the base ingredient. Another recommendation was to stick with pellets instead of ground mash to keep the duck's bills and water cleaner since they are constantly washing and eating with wet beaks. That can get very messy. Now, where can I find that home pelleting machine............ It may be time to get a mill that makes rolled grains. Many birds will eat whole grains but the feed conversion isn't as good.
You can add it directly to their water by crushing 100-150 mg worth of tablets per gallon of water or 2-3 cups of commercial grade brewers yeast per 10 pounds of feed. There is a lot of new information in this book that isn't covered in the chicken books. I recommend getting or reading this book before you get ducks. Bad me. It also has a lot of recipes in the back for make your own duck food including variations that allow you to choose wheat or corn as the base ingredient. Another recommendation was to stick with pellets instead of ground mash to keep the duck's bills and water cleaner since they are constantly washing and eating with wet beaks. That can get very messy. Now, where can I find that home pelleting machine............ It may be time to get a mill that makes rolled grains. Many birds will eat whole grains but the feed conversion isn't as good.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Turning Grass into Soil
I have had discussions with a number of people in the last couple of months that are starting to put in new vegetable gardens. These are often people that are looking to replace their lawn and many of them asked me what I did to replace my lawn. I used sheet mulch, a permaculture technique that starts by placing cardboard or up to 40 sheets thick of newspaper on top of the ground followed by 12-18 inches of mulch. I was able to get several truck loads of wood chips and trimmings combined, about 70 cubic yards of material, delivered to me for free from the people that trim trees away from power lines. The chips are steaming hot from composting just a few hours after the chipper blows them into the back of the truck. I followed that later with manure and other materials to start turning the chips into soil. As the sheet mulch decomposed in the seasons that followed I started digging down with a garden fork and working and lifting the soil layers below that into the decomposing chips by pushing a digging fork as deep as it would go and just pulling back on the handle to make the soil deeper and the compacted layer disappear. Now when I dig where we had chips I cannot find a distinct soil layer no matter how deep I dig in with a fork.
If you are killing grass then how much material you use depends on what kind of grass you have. If it is grass that has a rhizome that runs under the ground then 6 layers of paper and some compost will just make it grow and spread even faster. Deep mulch and thick layers of paper are effective at killing almost anything as long as the paper is put down overlapping, the mulch on top is heavy enough, you protect your edges from invasive runners, and enough time has been allowed for the rhizomes to die and rot away. This takes at least six months to destroy perennial root systems but maybe longer. As long as you don’t dig through the paper layer you should be good. Even if your weed survives that, it will be much easier to remove because your soil will be soft enough to make it very easy to work. I still have a few stray roots but I can pull foot long pieces of grass root at a time without tearing them now.
The quality of the implementation is certainly more important than the quantity if you have a challenging situation like invasive weeds that are difficult to control. Just about the only thing that I consider to be a weed is lawn grass but I would also include things like the non-fruiting passion flower that has crept its way into several adjoining flower and vegetable beds. Try doing a manageable section at a time and keep the margins clean of any running root systems. Start small and see if you think you can manage another section after you have proven the concept of your implementation six or more months later. Cover it with mulch or compostable material, not finished compost or nursery soil mixes and make it deep. I have done 12-18 inches of just wood chips that I got for free.
Be prepared to wait. There is an obsession in the U. S. for instant results and instant gratification. Your choice generally speaking is this-naturally nutrient rich, deep, highly organic soil that you will take 9-18 months to build using mostly raw materials, or a poor to mediocre product that you bought and installed in an afternoon or a few days. You will be able to plant into mulch beds within 3-6 months with my method, just in time for a winter garden which should be planted starting in August.
I tried the recent fad of container gardening, square foot gardening, etc. some years ago and found that it created more problems than it solves. Containers require a large initial investment, break up the yard into illogical and more difficult to manage units, lower productivity, create inefficiencies to maintain, water, fertilize, harvest, and weed, and creates habitat for a lot of different pests. This might be a good method in some parts of the country but I strongly advise against it in the Pacific Northwest. It also falls into the category of trying to solve a problem by buying a manufactured product, a grossly inferior product to growing healthy soil with an active soil food web. In my opinion in this area, container gardening of any type should be a method of last resort for people that have no access to soil. If you are interested in nutritionally dense organic vegetables in a sustainable manner, then growing vegetables in containers can’t get you there. It is far harder to maintain container mixes than it is soil, requires continuous outside inputs to keep it going, and soil mix will never be a part of an active living soil community which can contribute to make organically grown vegetables have the highest potential quality without constant additional inputs. Soil mix will never become a humic soil which is what I consider the gold standard for soils. For the price of maintaining any kind of container garden, it is probably cheaper to give people money to go to Whole Foods market to buy food there than it is to grow it in a container. I consider this to be a method that should only be used by hobby gardeners or as an amusement, not a serious or economical way to provide needed nutrition.
If what I am suggesting above seems unattainable or lacking in detail, as an alternative to growing in boxes or containers I recommend picking up a copy of "Lasagna Gardening" by Patricia Lanza if you want to colonize your front yard with a vegetable garden and start growing this year. She has a really good, low work method for colonizing lawns and turning them into highly productive gardens by putting layers of mulch down and goes through all of the stages of how to make that productive in as short a time as possible. This is derivative of sheet mulching and goes into some detail about materials you can use, how to use different plants with this method and a lot of tips and time savers you might find useful. This is also a good way to manage a seasonally fallow bed that you want to prepare for next year or the next season. You should be able to find this book in your library. I also have a link to it on the side bar if you want your own copy.
Regardless of your soil type, the best thing you can do for poor soil is to add lots of organic matter, not finished compost or soil mix that is based on finished compost. Finished compost is useful as a quick fertilizer. You can also use it as a temporary building material if applied thickly enough because it packs and become anaerobic so can last up to a couple of years on top of the soil. It disappears quickly when mixed in soils but doesn't help the soil structure. Over time, soil mixes have a tendency to become heavy, anaerobic, and drain poorly unless it incorporates a long fiber organic material like peat. It is also possible to have too much organic matter in soil and not enough of a mineral component which is why deep mulch methods are most productive once you start mixing underlying soil with your mulch or plants have the ability to reach down and start interacting with more of the soil/mulch complex.
That is one of the reasons manure can be so valuable. It has a mixed texture with lots of woody material that takes a while to break down. It contains a wide array of micronutrients and expands the number of types of micro-organisms in the soil that contribute to higher available fertility, tie up nitrates and carbon then slowly releases it back to plants through the soil food web. The PAN, plant available nitrogen, of manure (except chicken manure) is only about 10% of total nitrogen after 60 days according to Oregon State University. So putting enough manure down to meet your nitrogen needs might mean that you are putting down too much phosphorous which could tie up other nutrients. Manure can also contain hormones and antibiotics unless it comes from an organic operation or someone you know that hasn’t used such things. Even when doing something as seemingly innocuous as building your soil you can’t be too careful about where you source your material from. The thought process that it is safe and reliable to buy everything you need is something that should be approached with some caution.
I prefer material like tree chips to colonize new areas because it usually has a low cost-free, is unlikely to have weed seeds, pests, or disease that affect vegetables because it is made from completely different plant types, and it just went through a chipper. I don't think there are any insects that can survive that. Other sources of compost could be rotten hay bales or other feed stocks that can’t be fed to animals that are often seen at the edge of fields. One of the reasons to develop a system that is self reliant, besides avoiding an ongoing expense of purchasing stuff to make it work, is that the more dependent you are on outside resources the higher the chances are that you will get some exotic pest or disease that will become a lifelong companion. I think it is OK to take some extraordinary steps to get a yard established but you should develop a plan and implement it as soon as possible how you are going to make this a closed system with the lowest need possible for outside inputs. This will save you money, lower your exposure to industrial chemicals and pest problems, and hopefully result in soil and produce that you know is superior in many ways that might not be obvious to a casual observer.
Tom Gibson
www.camaspermaculture.org
If you are killing grass then how much material you use depends on what kind of grass you have. If it is grass that has a rhizome that runs under the ground then 6 layers of paper and some compost will just make it grow and spread even faster. Deep mulch and thick layers of paper are effective at killing almost anything as long as the paper is put down overlapping, the mulch on top is heavy enough, you protect your edges from invasive runners, and enough time has been allowed for the rhizomes to die and rot away. This takes at least six months to destroy perennial root systems but maybe longer. As long as you don’t dig through the paper layer you should be good. Even if your weed survives that, it will be much easier to remove because your soil will be soft enough to make it very easy to work. I still have a few stray roots but I can pull foot long pieces of grass root at a time without tearing them now.
The quality of the implementation is certainly more important than the quantity if you have a challenging situation like invasive weeds that are difficult to control. Just about the only thing that I consider to be a weed is lawn grass but I would also include things like the non-fruiting passion flower that has crept its way into several adjoining flower and vegetable beds. Try doing a manageable section at a time and keep the margins clean of any running root systems. Start small and see if you think you can manage another section after you have proven the concept of your implementation six or more months later. Cover it with mulch or compostable material, not finished compost or nursery soil mixes and make it deep. I have done 12-18 inches of just wood chips that I got for free.
Be prepared to wait. There is an obsession in the U. S. for instant results and instant gratification. Your choice generally speaking is this-naturally nutrient rich, deep, highly organic soil that you will take 9-18 months to build using mostly raw materials, or a poor to mediocre product that you bought and installed in an afternoon or a few days. You will be able to plant into mulch beds within 3-6 months with my method, just in time for a winter garden which should be planted starting in August.
I tried the recent fad of container gardening, square foot gardening, etc. some years ago and found that it created more problems than it solves. Containers require a large initial investment, break up the yard into illogical and more difficult to manage units, lower productivity, create inefficiencies to maintain, water, fertilize, harvest, and weed, and creates habitat for a lot of different pests. This might be a good method in some parts of the country but I strongly advise against it in the Pacific Northwest. It also falls into the category of trying to solve a problem by buying a manufactured product, a grossly inferior product to growing healthy soil with an active soil food web. In my opinion in this area, container gardening of any type should be a method of last resort for people that have no access to soil. If you are interested in nutritionally dense organic vegetables in a sustainable manner, then growing vegetables in containers can’t get you there. It is far harder to maintain container mixes than it is soil, requires continuous outside inputs to keep it going, and soil mix will never be a part of an active living soil community which can contribute to make organically grown vegetables have the highest potential quality without constant additional inputs. Soil mix will never become a humic soil which is what I consider the gold standard for soils. For the price of maintaining any kind of container garden, it is probably cheaper to give people money to go to Whole Foods market to buy food there than it is to grow it in a container. I consider this to be a method that should only be used by hobby gardeners or as an amusement, not a serious or economical way to provide needed nutrition.
If what I am suggesting above seems unattainable or lacking in detail, as an alternative to growing in boxes or containers I recommend picking up a copy of "Lasagna Gardening" by Patricia Lanza if you want to colonize your front yard with a vegetable garden and start growing this year. She has a really good, low work method for colonizing lawns and turning them into highly productive gardens by putting layers of mulch down and goes through all of the stages of how to make that productive in as short a time as possible. This is derivative of sheet mulching and goes into some detail about materials you can use, how to use different plants with this method and a lot of tips and time savers you might find useful. This is also a good way to manage a seasonally fallow bed that you want to prepare for next year or the next season. You should be able to find this book in your library. I also have a link to it on the side bar if you want your own copy.
Regardless of your soil type, the best thing you can do for poor soil is to add lots of organic matter, not finished compost or soil mix that is based on finished compost. Finished compost is useful as a quick fertilizer. You can also use it as a temporary building material if applied thickly enough because it packs and become anaerobic so can last up to a couple of years on top of the soil. It disappears quickly when mixed in soils but doesn't help the soil structure. Over time, soil mixes have a tendency to become heavy, anaerobic, and drain poorly unless it incorporates a long fiber organic material like peat. It is also possible to have too much organic matter in soil and not enough of a mineral component which is why deep mulch methods are most productive once you start mixing underlying soil with your mulch or plants have the ability to reach down and start interacting with more of the soil/mulch complex.
That is one of the reasons manure can be so valuable. It has a mixed texture with lots of woody material that takes a while to break down. It contains a wide array of micronutrients and expands the number of types of micro-organisms in the soil that contribute to higher available fertility, tie up nitrates and carbon then slowly releases it back to plants through the soil food web. The PAN, plant available nitrogen, of manure (except chicken manure) is only about 10% of total nitrogen after 60 days according to Oregon State University. So putting enough manure down to meet your nitrogen needs might mean that you are putting down too much phosphorous which could tie up other nutrients. Manure can also contain hormones and antibiotics unless it comes from an organic operation or someone you know that hasn’t used such things. Even when doing something as seemingly innocuous as building your soil you can’t be too careful about where you source your material from. The thought process that it is safe and reliable to buy everything you need is something that should be approached with some caution.
I prefer material like tree chips to colonize new areas because it usually has a low cost-free, is unlikely to have weed seeds, pests, or disease that affect vegetables because it is made from completely different plant types, and it just went through a chipper. I don't think there are any insects that can survive that. Other sources of compost could be rotten hay bales or other feed stocks that can’t be fed to animals that are often seen at the edge of fields. One of the reasons to develop a system that is self reliant, besides avoiding an ongoing expense of purchasing stuff to make it work, is that the more dependent you are on outside resources the higher the chances are that you will get some exotic pest or disease that will become a lifelong companion. I think it is OK to take some extraordinary steps to get a yard established but you should develop a plan and implement it as soon as possible how you are going to make this a closed system with the lowest need possible for outside inputs. This will save you money, lower your exposure to industrial chemicals and pest problems, and hopefully result in soil and produce that you know is superior in many ways that might not be obvious to a casual observer.
Tom Gibson
www.camaspermaculture.org
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