Jamie Oliver is a trademarked business and his marketing strategy is succeeding really, really well. Some people even love him naked which can’t be a pretty sight :-).
As charming as he is-I am a big fan of his show too, most Americans are conditioned to act on those feelings as they follow the information through the Internet and other marketing venues by buying stuff instead of using that energy to support something we could be and should be doing anyway in our own homes. He is selling a lot of stuff on his web sites. The emotional appeal to buy items he is selling should not be equated with making a contribution to or helping your community which has problems and problem areas that are as bad off as any town in West Virginia. In some parts of Vancouver, Washington the number of families whose kids that are eligible for free or reduced lunches is way more than fifty percent. Those kids are already at risk because of poverty, higher than average lack of stable family life, frequent home changes, lack of ties to the community and community resources, etc.
You can get a sense of how urgent the need to start taking action, to especially protect those neighborhoods from junk food that is indirectly subsidized by the Federal government, effectively stripping away any choice they have of which food to buy. This drives those families even deeper into poverty because they have far more health problems than people with the means to spend more for their food and it compromises mental and physical development. We have a lot of obstacles to implement the kind of change Oliver’s show talked about in our community.
Take as an example, the Food System Council, a group hosted by the Clark County, Washington “Health Department”. The “Health Department” representative to the FSC recently made this statement: “Public Health is concerned about community health but is not charged with the responsibility to reduce food supply problems or protect individuals from unhealthy food choices. We function to work in a collaborative manner to improve community level wellness. This does mean that we will work with many others who don't always have the same goals and values as we may have but our purpose would be to find common ground and opportunity for change.” I have several problems with that statement. First of all there is no urgency to deal with what I would describe as the largest public health crisis that we have ever seen in this country. The second is the assumption of what free choice is for people living in a market economy with a limited income. For the most part free choice for people of limited income is a myth and one of the most cynical arguments I have ever heard to cover up what is really a lack of choices. Third, is the bit about collaborating to make improvements. This suggests that even one concrete change has has ever even been discussed, let alone acted on by the council except as an abstraction or something it heard it in a report of what someone was doing all on their own anyway. In this abstraction putting ketchup on GMO corn chips fried in CAFO grown beef tallow could be seen as a health food.
Is the “Health Department” at best charged with having meetings to talk about side issues and keeping statistics while they count the germs on food that in many cases has little or no supporting nutrition and would make almost any kind of animal sick? Would a farmer feed the vast majority of goods we see in the supermarkets to animals they wanted to keep healthy? Of course they wouldn’t. Essentially what we have here is a local governmental organization that is giving businesses that trade in poison local, state, and federal resources as legal cover to keep poisoning our population for a profit.
The council works on a “consensus” basis in which no one should ever ask a vested money interest, that are very well represented on the council, a direct question that might expose their part in this train wreck of a food supply. Another example of how this consensus works is that if someone is selling products that are known to be harmful, then in order for the council to recommend any change all the businesses impacted by the change would have to agree to recuse themselves from the consensus or agree to change their business model, something that they can’t do. No recommendation could be made by this community council that is contrary to current business practices. Public corporations, companies that issue stock to investors, are legally obligated to manage their business for the profits of their shareholders, so how this council was formed, who was asked to sit on it, and it’s internal rules of governance were designed by definition to have no impact on the food system that would result in any kind of change.
Because the federal government subsidizes many commodity crops it predisposes people to choose energy and food sources that are the most affordable. It is cheaper to buy junk food that is derived from corn, a low nutrition energy food fed to livestock in the last months of their lives to gain weight and tenderize the meat by fattening them up, than it is to get fresh whole foods that have the nutrition necessary for good health and development of, among other things, the nervous system. The participation in the council of fast food companies, including burger joints and supermarkets whose largest profits are in selling the least nutritious food, has the added affect of virtually guaranteeing them legal immunity to keep on doing business as usual because now a “community standard” has been established by the existence of a council that never recommended a change. This is a combination of Orwellian and Catch-22 logic in which there is no possibility for the long term survival of any of the participants. Our food system is an early death sentence for a growing number of people and life imprisonment for anyone whose choices are limited by it because a person’s ability to grow physically and mentally is directly related to the quality of their nutrition.
Holding hands with snakes while singing campfire songs is not a way to improve our food system. If it can’t do any better, the “Health Department” should be legally required to change it’s name to what it really does, something like “Counting Germs”; or the “Counting the Dead and Dying Department” or something else that tells taxpayers in a more transparent way what they paying for. Jamie Oliver did show that it is possible to change the consensus in a community by encouraging people to demand better of their elected and non-elected community leaders. We need our governmental agencies to take leadership roles and be consensus builders, not consensus followers. Constructing a consensus arrangement in such a way as to sustain the status quo in perpetuity as was done with the FSC is not a public interest or service.
The cost of the Jamie Oliver Food Revolution show is something that didn’t get a lot of press. ABC/Walt Disney pumped a lot of money into this show, at least hundreds of thousands of dollars to make it happen, provided a lot of behind the scenes staff to organize activities, and subsidized a lot of the food and activities in the show. The cost of that in Clark County would be cheap compared to the unfunded liabilities that grow every day we don’t fix our food system. What we saw wasn’t a reality show. It was a made for television fantasy propped up by a huge marketing organization. Making a change in our community will take leadership that won’t have as much capital to invest.
Unfortunately, this discussion in Clark County has been delegated to people that themselves have a vested interest in keeping their own jobs by not offending anyone so their ability and willingness to lead in this environment are limited at best. Call Tricia Mortell 360-397-8000 Ext 7211 or Jonnie Hyde (360) 397-8122 at the “Health Department” and ask them if they can tell you what they are doing to make sure that the generation that we are raising now doesn’t have a shorter lifespan than we and our parents will. Ask why they won’t even ask BurgerVille and Wal-Mart, FSC members, if they would stop selling products contaminated with high fructose corn syrup. Shouldn’t offend anyone to ask, right? Ask them when they are going to start being consensus builders, not consensus followers. You should share these same concerns with all of our elected officials. Ask federal officials why taxpayers subsidize high fructose corn syrup but not fresh vegetables which robs people of the ability to make healthy choices.
Let’s join Michelle Obama and Let's Move! But let’s not wait for someone in Washington D. C. to solve our problems. Let’s have a food system council in our county and every county that represents the people, not businesses that cannot and will not make changes that we need now.
Contact your U. S. Representative and ask that they become a cosponsor of and support:
H.R. 4971: Greening Food Deserts Act
H.R. 4607: Healthy Food for Healthy Schools Act of 2010
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Getting the Most From Fertilizer
I have been looking for a way to band fertilizer in my vegetable beds. I only have about a quarter acre to play on so I work with smaller tools as a rule. Many organic materials are very dusty powders that are difficult to apply, especially if there is any kind of weather going on. Banding means to put a line of fertilizer within a few inches of the roots. Fertigating, a term coined by Steve Solomon-“Water Wise Vegetables”, helps conserve water and fertilizer by providing both where they are most needed.
This also makes it economically viable to add mycorrhizae to the mix in enough concentrations to do some good without spending a lot of money. The rationale is to provide good nutrition to the soil where the plants can get it. It isn’t helpful to put material where it is not usable because of a variety of field limitations that put the material out of reach of the plants. If the plants can’t get to the fertilizer then it either gets locked up in the soil or leached away by rain. Banding should help control fertilizer costs while maximizing your return on your fertilizer investment by accurately putting the fertilizer where it would do the most good. I looked at converting a regular garden drop spreader by masking off areas that I didn’t want to drop material with masking or duct tape but I wasn’t confident that I would get a good even drop because those units are primarily designed to work with material that is more pelletized than powder.
I had a epiphany one day where I had seen the device I was looking for. If you have ever been to a baseball or football game you may have seen someone freshening up the base lines with a “dry line marker”. After doing a bit of research it looks like this may meet all of my fertilizer banding needs. The first one I found was a Stackhouse 25 pound marker for $85 plus shipping that puts down a 2 inch wide chalk line but has no other calibration that I could see. The next unit I looked at, the Alumagoal, for $116.34 with free shipping has a way to calibrate the width of the drop from “Off” to 4 inches wide so a fairly reasonable method of calibrating the tool to drop the intended amount although you might need to make more than one pass to get the right amount down.
To calibrate a tool like this, or any drop spreader or seed drill for that matter, spread a tarp out on level ground and mark off a measured distance. Fill the hopper and set it to a medium drop rate and make 2-4 passes back and forth on the tarp. Make separate passes by not going over the same spot twice so you can see if your tool has any obvious variations in the drop rate on any of the passes. If it looks like you are getting way too much or not enough material adjust the tool and repeat after cleaning up the material that has already been dropped and start over. The more passes you do and the more material you drop the more accurate your calibration will be.
You need to weigh the material and divide the weight by the amount of ground the tool would cover. You should also pay attention to any variations related to the evenness of the drop. For instance, does speed make a difference in how much material per square foot is dropped? Does the applicator drop less at the beginning or end of a pass? Do coarser materials or materials with larger granules drop at a slower or faster rate than dusts? You should calibrate the tool for each blend of fertilizer you use until you have a good handle on how it performs. If you want to cover the hole width of a row then I would look at something like Scotts AccuGreen® 3000 Drop Spreader which is available in most hardware stores.
Banding may not be a good method for putting down all types of fertilizer. If you have a soil test that says you should put down a certain amount of lime to raise the pH then I would spread that evenly over the entire growing area. Other fertilizers, especially ones supplying nitrogen I would get as close where the plants are going to be as possible. A tool like this might not work well in beds that have soft, wet, or very uneven soil.
Baseball Field Dry Line Marker - 25 lbs Capacity
Alumagoal All-Steel Dry Line Marker
Contact your U. S. Representative and ask that they become a cosponsor of and support H.R. 4971: Greening Food Deserts Act.
This also makes it economically viable to add mycorrhizae to the mix in enough concentrations to do some good without spending a lot of money. The rationale is to provide good nutrition to the soil where the plants can get it. It isn’t helpful to put material where it is not usable because of a variety of field limitations that put the material out of reach of the plants. If the plants can’t get to the fertilizer then it either gets locked up in the soil or leached away by rain. Banding should help control fertilizer costs while maximizing your return on your fertilizer investment by accurately putting the fertilizer where it would do the most good. I looked at converting a regular garden drop spreader by masking off areas that I didn’t want to drop material with masking or duct tape but I wasn’t confident that I would get a good even drop because those units are primarily designed to work with material that is more pelletized than powder.
I had a epiphany one day where I had seen the device I was looking for. If you have ever been to a baseball or football game you may have seen someone freshening up the base lines with a “dry line marker”. After doing a bit of research it looks like this may meet all of my fertilizer banding needs. The first one I found was a Stackhouse 25 pound marker for $85 plus shipping that puts down a 2 inch wide chalk line but has no other calibration that I could see. The next unit I looked at, the Alumagoal, for $116.34 with free shipping has a way to calibrate the width of the drop from “Off” to 4 inches wide so a fairly reasonable method of calibrating the tool to drop the intended amount although you might need to make more than one pass to get the right amount down.
To calibrate a tool like this, or any drop spreader or seed drill for that matter, spread a tarp out on level ground and mark off a measured distance. Fill the hopper and set it to a medium drop rate and make 2-4 passes back and forth on the tarp. Make separate passes by not going over the same spot twice so you can see if your tool has any obvious variations in the drop rate on any of the passes. If it looks like you are getting way too much or not enough material adjust the tool and repeat after cleaning up the material that has already been dropped and start over. The more passes you do and the more material you drop the more accurate your calibration will be.
You need to weigh the material and divide the weight by the amount of ground the tool would cover. You should also pay attention to any variations related to the evenness of the drop. For instance, does speed make a difference in how much material per square foot is dropped? Does the applicator drop less at the beginning or end of a pass? Do coarser materials or materials with larger granules drop at a slower or faster rate than dusts? You should calibrate the tool for each blend of fertilizer you use until you have a good handle on how it performs. If you want to cover the hole width of a row then I would look at something like Scotts AccuGreen® 3000 Drop Spreader which is available in most hardware stores.
Banding may not be a good method for putting down all types of fertilizer. If you have a soil test that says you should put down a certain amount of lime to raise the pH then I would spread that evenly over the entire growing area. Other fertilizers, especially ones supplying nitrogen I would get as close where the plants are going to be as possible. A tool like this might not work well in beds that have soft, wet, or very uneven soil.
Baseball Field Dry Line Marker - 25 lbs Capacity
Alumagoal All-Steel Dry Line Marker
Contact your U. S. Representative and ask that they become a cosponsor of and support H.R. 4971: Greening Food Deserts Act.
Friday, April 9, 2010
Fee For Service-What’s Wrong with Capitalism
It occurred to me a few years ago that there was something fundamentally wrong with all forms of ism. Communism, socialism, capitalism all seemed to be different forms of colonialism whose only claim to greatness according to it’s advocates was this decidedly chauvinistic claim that, for instance, Capitalism is good because Socialism is bad. Not much of a recommendation since all any of these did was promote a hierarchy of opportunists that game the system for their personal pleasure to the detriment of the vast majority of the people who like good herd animals willingly follow the latest strong man as long as he is packaged in the appropriate phraseology and images.
One of the latest crazes, a slight improvement over medieval feudalism, is Capitalism, generally an English invention that was spectacularly successful in launching the widespread exploration of the planet on tiny wooden sailing ships and then the industrial revolution. I will lump all forms of ism together with the name of capitalism for the remainder of this discussion since it is the only form of ism that really exists today despite what corporate propagandists would have you believe.
What made capitalism so successful in part was what started out as Lloyd’s of London, a service that sent young boys as runners out to solicit subscribers to invest in different capital projects that would have been impossibly large for the English government to fund at the time. Although there were some short lived examples of large scale enterprises funded directly by the government in other European countries during this same period, it was the direct involvement by the middle class in these investments and direct participation in the rewards of these projects had a much more lasting effect, allowed for much more rapid and enduring growth and in fact those same financial markets have grown, become more complex, and drive the world economy today.
What was a novel way to finance large projects without interfering with traditional ways of feeding, clothing, and attending to the health, education, and welfare of the people has now been applied to every aspect of life much to the detriment of our economy as a whole and the ability to deliver high quality services as the corporate model of cost reduction has been applied to systems that have gotten far too large and complex to be sustainable in this kind of system. Strangely, what made the system so robust has come full circle to not being able to exist without the direct intervention of the government in every economic and public service sector. The economy has gotten to the point where it is no longer sustainable and the situation will continue to deteriorate until there is a paradigm shift into a new system beyond the current era of colonialism whose last and ultimate expression of capitalism is the corporate fascism and it’s addiction to handouts by the government at taxpayer expense.
No system is perfect and people, being the adaptable creatures they are, will always find a way to manipulate the system to their advantage. After taking care of chickens for a few weeks I call this chicken behavior-they are always trying to steal food from each other and if one starts to bleed then the entire group will attack that chicken and peck it to death while they eat it’s flesh. Nothing describes capitalism better than that in which every kind of opportunism is not only expected but encouraged. It took me a long time to come up with something that might replace fee for service capitalism but after discussing cooperative and community life with people from every economic sector I think that cooperatives and guilds are worth reviving and that they would work better than ever before especially with the communications technology available today. Guilds and cooperatives aren’t new. They were a traditional method of doing business before the capitalization of the industrial revolution created a system of people that controlled the ability to create things people wanted and another class of consumers that were subordinated to service them. Described like that I don’t discern any difference of the worst excesses of those two twins Communism and Capitalism.
I define guilds as professional organizations that produce goods or services. People that belong to guilds could negotiate with other guilds and cooperatives to receive compensation, services and goods. This isn’t a radical departure from the way things work now, just more honest about describing the relationships. For instance, doctors currently decide how doctors are going to be trained, how many are trained, and even have a lot of influence over the cost of the training. The doctor industry has a virtual monopoly and have been the driving force in keeping fee for service medicine alive at all costs and preventing any reform for over 100 years that interfered with their ability to charge what they will with complete disregard for the efficacy of treatment or the cost to our economy.
The American Medical Association fought the establishment of Medicare in the 1960’s but, since Medicare institutionalized the fee for service system in medicine, they have reversed course and now fight any attempt to change the way they are compensated preferring to pursue a corporate model of increasing revenues by providing as many goods and services as possible and always charging as much as the market can bear for each and every delivery whether it is a benefit to the receiver or not. In a system that is twice as expensive as the next most expensive country in the world on a per capita basis, that means that we are paying providers over a trillion dollars each year, in other words-more than the entire cost of the Iraq war every year, more than we should be for a high quality health care system. The cost to our economic development in other areas has been enormous. Instead of being the most progressive and well educated country on earth we are the largest debtor nation subject to theatrics and theft by our government with little to show for it.
Cooperatives can be operated by workers, producers, buyers, or even guilds. Typically members of cooperatives are owners. They can negotiate to buy or trade goods and services with others and participate in a democratic and equitable way with the proceeds. There really isn’t any point in talking about all the different types of cooperatives because they are endless. The point of this is that we need to move beyond the quaint and inefficient separating and isolating individuals to promote the counting and accounting of money. The worth of individuals can be based more on their worth to their community, not their ability manipulate and compete with other in a system that disregards the needs of communities. We also need to move beyond this kind of compensation as the sole reason to do things that we all agree need to be done anyway.
People need to have housing, eat, receive healthcare and clothing. In order to maximize production and communication we need to have a robust education system, but not this factory model that is common today where we mostly produce cheap labor for corporations. Not providing those things or not giving everyone access to basic resources actually costs more than providing basic essentials if you assume that society at large will feel the effects of every sickness or disability in one way or another and really unless we are going to start culling what we see as the weak and disadvantaged from our society by various means of mass murder then we will be affected in a negative way for failing to care for everyone. What is happening now is more like a slow death for many people that are simply ignored if they can’t be utilized as a profit center for an investor and we all pay the cost of deferred maintenance either directly or in the increased cost of goods and services.
By identifying the needs of groups of people in a system of guilds and cooperatives it is possible to have a much more honest discussion about how to meet the needs of individuals and to concentrate on the quality of enterprise as opposed to the cost or profit. We waste hundreds of billions of dollars a year regulating enterprise under our current colonial model and the larger the systems get the less able regulation is able to solve problems like the spread of infectious organisms in a highly distributed food supply. These complex systems are not just prone to failure. Failure is predictable and a sure thing as we have seen repeatedly. One of the things that we have learned from the local food movement that applies to all of our enterprises is the importance of knowing your farmer and the source either directly or through someone else that you trust. That lesson goes far beyond a discussion about the food supply. It is a metaphor about how business can be conducted in general.
When there are no community ties or the ties are known to be unreliable, as is the USDA and all of the schemes that Congress has been foisting on us in an attempt to rationalize a system that by it’s nature will always defy any attempt to bring order, then the means does not exist and cannot be artificially created to replace community and personal communication back and forth and up and down the chain to ensure that the system is not only robust but that communication is timely. Trading between guilds and cooperatives limits the size and complexity to make a more open and safer society.
One of the latest crazes, a slight improvement over medieval feudalism, is Capitalism, generally an English invention that was spectacularly successful in launching the widespread exploration of the planet on tiny wooden sailing ships and then the industrial revolution. I will lump all forms of ism together with the name of capitalism for the remainder of this discussion since it is the only form of ism that really exists today despite what corporate propagandists would have you believe.
What made capitalism so successful in part was what started out as Lloyd’s of London, a service that sent young boys as runners out to solicit subscribers to invest in different capital projects that would have been impossibly large for the English government to fund at the time. Although there were some short lived examples of large scale enterprises funded directly by the government in other European countries during this same period, it was the direct involvement by the middle class in these investments and direct participation in the rewards of these projects had a much more lasting effect, allowed for much more rapid and enduring growth and in fact those same financial markets have grown, become more complex, and drive the world economy today.
What was a novel way to finance large projects without interfering with traditional ways of feeding, clothing, and attending to the health, education, and welfare of the people has now been applied to every aspect of life much to the detriment of our economy as a whole and the ability to deliver high quality services as the corporate model of cost reduction has been applied to systems that have gotten far too large and complex to be sustainable in this kind of system. Strangely, what made the system so robust has come full circle to not being able to exist without the direct intervention of the government in every economic and public service sector. The economy has gotten to the point where it is no longer sustainable and the situation will continue to deteriorate until there is a paradigm shift into a new system beyond the current era of colonialism whose last and ultimate expression of capitalism is the corporate fascism and it’s addiction to handouts by the government at taxpayer expense.
No system is perfect and people, being the adaptable creatures they are, will always find a way to manipulate the system to their advantage. After taking care of chickens for a few weeks I call this chicken behavior-they are always trying to steal food from each other and if one starts to bleed then the entire group will attack that chicken and peck it to death while they eat it’s flesh. Nothing describes capitalism better than that in which every kind of opportunism is not only expected but encouraged. It took me a long time to come up with something that might replace fee for service capitalism but after discussing cooperative and community life with people from every economic sector I think that cooperatives and guilds are worth reviving and that they would work better than ever before especially with the communications technology available today. Guilds and cooperatives aren’t new. They were a traditional method of doing business before the capitalization of the industrial revolution created a system of people that controlled the ability to create things people wanted and another class of consumers that were subordinated to service them. Described like that I don’t discern any difference of the worst excesses of those two twins Communism and Capitalism.
I define guilds as professional organizations that produce goods or services. People that belong to guilds could negotiate with other guilds and cooperatives to receive compensation, services and goods. This isn’t a radical departure from the way things work now, just more honest about describing the relationships. For instance, doctors currently decide how doctors are going to be trained, how many are trained, and even have a lot of influence over the cost of the training. The doctor industry has a virtual monopoly and have been the driving force in keeping fee for service medicine alive at all costs and preventing any reform for over 100 years that interfered with their ability to charge what they will with complete disregard for the efficacy of treatment or the cost to our economy.
The American Medical Association fought the establishment of Medicare in the 1960’s but, since Medicare institutionalized the fee for service system in medicine, they have reversed course and now fight any attempt to change the way they are compensated preferring to pursue a corporate model of increasing revenues by providing as many goods and services as possible and always charging as much as the market can bear for each and every delivery whether it is a benefit to the receiver or not. In a system that is twice as expensive as the next most expensive country in the world on a per capita basis, that means that we are paying providers over a trillion dollars each year, in other words-more than the entire cost of the Iraq war every year, more than we should be for a high quality health care system. The cost to our economic development in other areas has been enormous. Instead of being the most progressive and well educated country on earth we are the largest debtor nation subject to theatrics and theft by our government with little to show for it.
Cooperatives can be operated by workers, producers, buyers, or even guilds. Typically members of cooperatives are owners. They can negotiate to buy or trade goods and services with others and participate in a democratic and equitable way with the proceeds. There really isn’t any point in talking about all the different types of cooperatives because they are endless. The point of this is that we need to move beyond the quaint and inefficient separating and isolating individuals to promote the counting and accounting of money. The worth of individuals can be based more on their worth to their community, not their ability manipulate and compete with other in a system that disregards the needs of communities. We also need to move beyond this kind of compensation as the sole reason to do things that we all agree need to be done anyway.
People need to have housing, eat, receive healthcare and clothing. In order to maximize production and communication we need to have a robust education system, but not this factory model that is common today where we mostly produce cheap labor for corporations. Not providing those things or not giving everyone access to basic resources actually costs more than providing basic essentials if you assume that society at large will feel the effects of every sickness or disability in one way or another and really unless we are going to start culling what we see as the weak and disadvantaged from our society by various means of mass murder then we will be affected in a negative way for failing to care for everyone. What is happening now is more like a slow death for many people that are simply ignored if they can’t be utilized as a profit center for an investor and we all pay the cost of deferred maintenance either directly or in the increased cost of goods and services.
By identifying the needs of groups of people in a system of guilds and cooperatives it is possible to have a much more honest discussion about how to meet the needs of individuals and to concentrate on the quality of enterprise as opposed to the cost or profit. We waste hundreds of billions of dollars a year regulating enterprise under our current colonial model and the larger the systems get the less able regulation is able to solve problems like the spread of infectious organisms in a highly distributed food supply. These complex systems are not just prone to failure. Failure is predictable and a sure thing as we have seen repeatedly. One of the things that we have learned from the local food movement that applies to all of our enterprises is the importance of knowing your farmer and the source either directly or through someone else that you trust. That lesson goes far beyond a discussion about the food supply. It is a metaphor about how business can be conducted in general.
When there are no community ties or the ties are known to be unreliable, as is the USDA and all of the schemes that Congress has been foisting on us in an attempt to rationalize a system that by it’s nature will always defy any attempt to bring order, then the means does not exist and cannot be artificially created to replace community and personal communication back and forth and up and down the chain to ensure that the system is not only robust but that communication is timely. Trading between guilds and cooperatives limits the size and complexity to make a more open and safer society.
Monday, March 8, 2010
Spring Training-To Till or Not to Till
I mix batches of COF (complete organic fertilizer) from a list of ingredients including fish meal, seed meals (canola, linseed, alfalfa, etc), lime, dolomite, gypsum, green sand, glacial dust, rock phosphate, azomite, fish bone meal, and kelp meal to use in my garden every time I plant. These ingredients are not usually found in garden centers. I happen to be fortunate to live close to a wholesaler that specializes in supplements for the organics industry. You need 4-6 quarts per 100 sq ft. of bed or 50 feet of 18” wide row with a plant in the middle. Bagged fertilizers don’t have near the mineral and micronutrient content and may contain large amounts of arsenic, especially if it was sourced from commercial poultry operations. I mix two different blends, one for lush green growth and another for fruiting vegetables. Leafy greens like more nitrogen but with tomatoes and other fruiting plants that will just get you a huge plant with little or no fruit. Many soil scientists at land grant colleges like Oregon State University’s chief soil scientist, John Hart, don’t believe anyone should bother with the time and expense to add minerals to their soil and that the only important thing about food is that it should be competitively priced with produce grown by commercial farms in Mexico, Chile, and China. Maybe you understand my unending tirade against the USDA and how land grant colleges are funded (mostly by corporate interests). Since most family farms aren’t a good model for taxation there is no interest at Congress to support them.
For those of you getting your rototillers out, it may be too early to till, especially if you have clay soil. To see if you should be tilling, brush aside the organic matter on the surface to dig out a clump of soil. Squeeze the soil, without any organic matter in it, into a tight ball with both hands. If the ball breaks apart when you drop it on hard ground from waist level then you should be ok to till. If it mostly just goes splat, tilling will compact the soil and join the clay particles together like glue. If there is no soil line visible below the organic matter at the depth you would be tilling, generally 6-8”, then you might not need to till at all. This generally means that your soil is humic and tilling will just kill off most of the living organisms in the soil, the vast majority of which are beneficial to your plants, and you will end up with a net reduction in the amount of organic matter.
Tilling isn’t something that I recommend doing very often and usually only when you are breaking new ground and need to chisel through stuff that hasn’t been maintained well. The one exception is if you are growing green manures that you need to incorporate into the soil. Depending on the green manure you should be doing that at least two weeks ahead of planting and more if you are seeding rows with a row seeder. Once your beds get established and have adequate organic matter, 7-10% by weight, all you want to do is gently aerate the soil every year just before planting. When you till, it generally creates as many problems as it solves.
You might not need to wait weeks or months to be able to get out and till the garden. Sometimes it just means getting a few days in a row of no rain. If you don’t have enough organic matter on the soil or plants to break up the impact of the rain on the ground, then successive rain storms could compact the ground back to the way it was before it was tilled. This might leave you worse off than if you had done nothing because the tiller will break up whatever humus is already in your soil and burn up some of the organic matter by exposing it to oxygen. Even if you have deep organic matter in your soil you should test down as deep as the tiller will go to make sure that you don’t create a hard pan.
It’s best to wait until it is closer to time to plant to till the soil unless you are turning in green manure. That way the soil will still be a nice planting bed. You want to add at least 2” of organic matter to your beds each time you clean off the last crop and that can sit on the ground until you are ready to plant. You can till some organic matter into the soil and then cover it with some more to protect it from the rain. It will feed the soil and increase the biological activity while suppressing weeds. The weeds that do come up will be easier to remove because the organic matter will help loosen the soil. I get compost for $20 a cubic yard which is the capacity of those little $300 trailers you can buy as a kit in most large hardware stores. Instead of buying bags of compost for $3-5 a bag, maybe you know a couple of people that would like to split some yards of compost/soil mix for the same price you would pay if you were buying it by the bag? You would get a lot more bang for your buck and maybe get a little needed exercise will mean that you use less water and have a nicer garden with fewer weeds and you can relax more this summer when it gets really hot.
For those of you getting your rototillers out, it may be too early to till, especially if you have clay soil. To see if you should be tilling, brush aside the organic matter on the surface to dig out a clump of soil. Squeeze the soil, without any organic matter in it, into a tight ball with both hands. If the ball breaks apart when you drop it on hard ground from waist level then you should be ok to till. If it mostly just goes splat, tilling will compact the soil and join the clay particles together like glue. If there is no soil line visible below the organic matter at the depth you would be tilling, generally 6-8”, then you might not need to till at all. This generally means that your soil is humic and tilling will just kill off most of the living organisms in the soil, the vast majority of which are beneficial to your plants, and you will end up with a net reduction in the amount of organic matter.
Tilling isn’t something that I recommend doing very often and usually only when you are breaking new ground and need to chisel through stuff that hasn’t been maintained well. The one exception is if you are growing green manures that you need to incorporate into the soil. Depending on the green manure you should be doing that at least two weeks ahead of planting and more if you are seeding rows with a row seeder. Once your beds get established and have adequate organic matter, 7-10% by weight, all you want to do is gently aerate the soil every year just before planting. When you till, it generally creates as many problems as it solves.
You might not need to wait weeks or months to be able to get out and till the garden. Sometimes it just means getting a few days in a row of no rain. If you don’t have enough organic matter on the soil or plants to break up the impact of the rain on the ground, then successive rain storms could compact the ground back to the way it was before it was tilled. This might leave you worse off than if you had done nothing because the tiller will break up whatever humus is already in your soil and burn up some of the organic matter by exposing it to oxygen. Even if you have deep organic matter in your soil you should test down as deep as the tiller will go to make sure that you don’t create a hard pan.
It’s best to wait until it is closer to time to plant to till the soil unless you are turning in green manure. That way the soil will still be a nice planting bed. You want to add at least 2” of organic matter to your beds each time you clean off the last crop and that can sit on the ground until you are ready to plant. You can till some organic matter into the soil and then cover it with some more to protect it from the rain. It will feed the soil and increase the biological activity while suppressing weeds. The weeds that do come up will be easier to remove because the organic matter will help loosen the soil. I get compost for $20 a cubic yard which is the capacity of those little $300 trailers you can buy as a kit in most large hardware stores. Instead of buying bags of compost for $3-5 a bag, maybe you know a couple of people that would like to split some yards of compost/soil mix for the same price you would pay if you were buying it by the bag? You would get a lot more bang for your buck and maybe get a little needed exercise will mean that you use less water and have a nicer garden with fewer weeds and you can relax more this summer when it gets really hot.
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