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Healthy soil is the hidden ingredient

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Re: Healthy soil is the hidden ingredient

#61

Post by naet »

bgnn wrote: post #28

I started my gardening adventure with vegetables in pots. It was perfect, plants gave amazing yield, but required too detailed care and attention every day (or sometimes 2-3 times a day in a hot dry summer day). When I have moved to planting in soil I was shocked how worse the plants are doing. Same tomatoes giving 10-15 kg per plant yield in pots were under 3kg in soil. They got more disease issues, more pests (slug…

I had the opposite experience. I had rented a house that had an empty patch of dirt and asked the landlord if we could plant some vegetables there (which I didn't have a lot of experience in). My older neighbor saw me and said that we had great soil in our neighborhood but I didn't really think about it. The vegetables grew amazingly well, we had way too many tomatoes and tons of broccoli that kept growing back and more. I barely took any care with it after planting, other than very sporadic watering and harvesting.

The next year we moved from that house to a new place, where we couldn't plant directly in the ground but the landlord was happy for us to use pots and planters. I eagerly planted my broccoli again thinking we'd have the same endless supply... but this time it barely produced anything and looked nothing like the last year. I bought some kind of soil bags from the gardening store after asking an employee which would be good for vegetable pots and planters. Something about the pots or the soil or otherwise made a gigantic difference even though we had moved probably less than a mile distance wise.

I'm a very amateur gardener so I may have made some other mistakes, but I think I treated the plants very similarly both years.

Re: Healthy soil is the hidden ingredient

#62

Post by hinkley »

ralusek wrote: post #10

I'm a gardening and landscaping enjoyer, but I am constantly confused about the bordering magical thinking surrounding dirt, among other aspects of growing things. If you look at hydroponics/aeroponics, plants basically need water, light, and fertilizer (N (nitrogen) P (phosphorous) K (potassium), and a few trace minerals). It can be the most synthetic process you've ever seen, and the plants will grow amazingly well…

The reason chemical fertilizers work is because they provide minerals that a plant might normally trade sugars to fungi to get. So those sugars stay in the plant making larger fruits, nuts, or legumes.

But the problem is you also get water and early/late season sugars exchanged between plants (Simard et al).

So within a generation the soil structure has collapsed, you’re at the whim of every microdrought, and you’re dealing with the Red Queen problem. But like drugs, at first it feels amazing.

> dirt

Dirt isn’t much better than hydroponics. Soil is. Conventional farming has been described by some as “hydroponics in dirt”. That’s why it’s so fertilizer dependent, just like hydro.

There are a few places in the world where there is insufficient phosphorous in the native rock to grow plants without fertilizer. But everywhere else, healthy soil fungi could mine it out of the sand in the soils. If they were left to grow instead of burned to death with herbicides and fertilizers.

Re: Healthy soil is the hidden ingredient

#63

Post by hinkley »

bgnn wrote: post #25
ralusek wrote: post #10

I'm a gardening and landscaping enjoyer, but I am constantly confused about the bordering magical thinking surrounding dirt, among other aspects of growing things. If you look at hydroponics/aeroponics, plants basically need water, light, and fertilizer (N (nitrogen) P (phosphorous) K (potassium), and a few trace minerals). It can be the most synthetic process you've ever seen, and the plants will grow amazingly well…

I think what is forgotten is the organisms other than plants. Hydroponics is amazing for plants but not sure if you can sustain a wineyard in that fashion for long without having some kind of organism starting to cause issues. A well balanced soil doesn't only support the plants but also provides a healthy microbiome. Now, with the use of pesticides, artificial fertilizers, and tilling it's not less synthetic process…

I only succeeded with growing African violets when I also had fish. When the violets started looking droopy or hadn’t flowered in a while I put a cup of fish tank water in the pot and foomp! Full head of flowers within about three weeks.

The tilapia/aquaponics people have a better system.

Re: Healthy soil is the hidden ingredient

#64

Post by hinkley »

thatcat wrote: post #35
ralusek wrote: post #10

I'm a gardening and landscaping enjoyer, but I am constantly confused about the bordering magical thinking surrounding dirt, among other aspects of growing things. If you look at hydroponics/aeroponics, plants basically need water, light, and fertilizer (N (nitrogen) P (phosphorous) K (potassium), and a few trace minerals). It can be the most synthetic process you've ever seen, and the plants will grow amazingly well…

There are also enzymes and secondary metabolites relevant to plant health associated with microbiome and ecological chains in healthy soil that go beyond the regenerative macronutrient cycles. If you try to grow edible fruits you'll notice flavor loss as a result of hydroponic / synthetic methods.

Next door neighbor to this: I read someone who had a theory that dwarfed plants were also part of the nutrient and flavor reductions in modern grocery fare.

The model they presented was that the plant stores nutrients all year, and then when it fruits it dumps those nutrients into the fruit. With dwarfism we’ve reduced the plant size and kept the fruit size with the theory that more photosynthesis goes into the fruit. But there’s also a smaller reservoir for everything else that goes into the fruit.

Re: Healthy soil is the hidden ingredient

#65

Post by elcritch »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #54
tbrownaw wrote: post #9

> project to assess soil erosion and degradation in vineyards using geographical mapping systems and artificial intelligence (AI). ... AI helps me to design and polish the software codes that I use Is this describing use of something like GitHub copilot?

Sometimes I get the feeling you gotta tie your research to AI in some tenuous fashion to get research funding.

It’s not a feeling. Getting grants requires following whatever hype trend is popular at the moment.

Savvy academics know this and respond accordingly. Whether it’s AI (now) or DEI stuff (until recently), they add the required little sections and play the game.

Re: Healthy soil is the hidden ingredient

#66

Post by goeiedaggoeie »

bgnn wrote: post #28

I started my gardening adventure with vegetables in pots. It was perfect, plants gave amazing yield, but required too detailed care and attention every day (or sometimes 2-3 times a day in a hot dry summer day). When I have moved to planting in soil I was shocked how worse the plants are doing. Same tomatoes giving 10-15 kg per plant yield in pots were under 3kg in soil. They got more disease issues, more pests (slug…

We use a Lomi to convert our organic waste into compost I can add to my worm farm

and then from the worm farm, mix with outdoor soil and grow in that. A automated a flood and drain system with our fish and cultivate nitrogen fixing bacteria with that, and water the plants with this water every couple of days.

Using these two approaches I have not had to buy any nutrients in years and our soil is doing well.

https://lomi.com/?srsltid=AfmBOor2uvg1DJ2J1E6rXh-8L3iAqzeSD0...

Re: Healthy soil is the hidden ingredient

#67

Post by pfdietz »

I don't know about the "hidden ingredient", but...

When I lived in upstate NY our house was on property that had been a glacial lakebed. The soil was a bit sandy, if anything too well drained, but adding lots of leaf mold -- we had more than enough maple trees -- made it retain water adequately, and things grew well.

When it came time to move, we sold the house to a pair of doctors who were moving up from Texas. One of them was just so enthusiastic about how good the soil was, and about the big piles of partially decomposed leaves we had, compared to the terrible clay soil they had down there. So if nothing else, good soil can help property values.

Re: Healthy soil is the hidden ingredient

#68

Post by johnisgood »

hinkley wrote: post #58
johnisgood wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you find Aloe Vera frustrating? I mean, it grows quickly and requires very little maintenance. I suppose that could be seen as "frustrating" in the sense that it needs to be divided or thinned out regularly.

Typical problem with aloe is overwatering. And modern potting soil often is loaded with sphagnum, which stays wet too long, and then when it dries it becomes hydrophobic so watering the plant doesn’t wet the entire soil.

I agree. I do not water them and they grow crazy!

Re: Healthy soil is the hidden ingredient

#69

Post by goeiedaggoeie »

hinkley wrote: post #62
ralusek wrote: post #10

I'm a gardening and landscaping enjoyer, but I am constantly confused about the bordering magical thinking surrounding dirt, among other aspects of growing things. If you look at hydroponics/aeroponics, plants basically need water, light, and fertilizer (N (nitrogen) P (phosphorous) K (potassium), and a few trace minerals). It can be the most synthetic process you've ever seen, and the plants will grow amazingly well…

The reason chemical fertilizers work is because they provide minerals that a plant might normally trade sugars to fungi to get. So those sugars stay in the plant making larger fruits, nuts, or legumes. But the problem is you also get water and early/late season sugars exchanged between plants (Simard et al). So within a generation the soil structure has collapsed, you’re at the whim of every microdrought, and you’re…

great post. I posted in this thread above about using a Lomi to convert our organic waste into organic fertilizer (along with a worm farm), a and cultivating nitrogin fixing bacteria with our outdoor fish pond and a flood and drain system. Soil is great to grow in, if you treat it well.

Re: Healthy soil is the hidden ingredient

#70

Post by hinkley »

johnisgood wrote: post #68
hinkley wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typical problem with aloe is overwatering. And modern potting soil often is loaded with sphagnum, which stays wet too long, and then when it dries it becomes hydrophobic so watering the plant doesn’t wet the entire soil.

I agree. I do not water them and they grow crazy!

Only water when the feeling of guilt at not watering them is overwhelming.
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