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12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)

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Re: 12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)

#121

Post by cucumber3732842 »

pseudohadamard wrote: post #110
cucumber3732842 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did they forget? Or did they know this would happen before dumping the first peel and it simply wasn't worth the money it would take to prove it in the public record? Because what I bet happened is that off the public record who knew their stuff said "this will happen" and then the government rep said "you need to pay some sort of 3rd party with a government license to weigh in on such matters an obscene amount of mo…

From TFA it sounds like they had no idea, given how often they repeat how surprised they were at the outcome. So it sounds like an uncontrolled experiment, let's dump thousands of tons of food waste here and hope for the best. Also, it's a sample size of one. There could be 20 other non-published stories where something similar was tried and it turned the place into a toxic wasteland. It's a great success story but I…

I suspect the people with a million orange peels to dump are also the people who are experts in exactly how the various parts of an orange degrade with time and that when the plan was concocted they did so knowing it would likely work but they didn't write it down and have since left. Basically the same as legacy code. You see this all the time in the physical world. "why did those morons choose X for Y". Well, 20yr ago the product served Z and at the time that industry cleaned their factories with some other chemical than what they use now and therefor X was the right choice.

People who know their industrial project will F-off and create a dump are the ones who go through the process, pay for the bullshit surveys and studies, get the permits and whatnot and document the whole thing fastidiously. Because those are the things you do to ensure that you are not the bag holder at the end of it all.

Re: 12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)

#122

Post by PaulHoule »

pseudohadamard wrote: post #112
PaulHoule wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People sometimes build stuff on top of landfills.

Several schools I know of have part of their playing fields on reclaimed land that's former landfill. You can't build on it because you have no idea what sort of gases and possibly toxins will work their way up from below, but wide open fields with free air movement that aren't round-the-clock occupied are fine. The only downside is that for an initial period you need to re-cap places with soil every few years as the…

This shopping center was built on a landfill

https://www.wskg.org/regional-news/2025-08-08/binghamton-off...

when I first saw it in the 1990s it was kinda on the outs, like K-Mart was already failing (as a business) and the parking lot was visibly wavy because of subsidence. Funny the New York Pizzeria mentioned in that article is run by my relatives.

Re: 12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)

#123

Post by eudamoniac »

krisroadruck wrote: post #120
eudamoniac wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not snark: did you actually improve the soil, or did you just add a bunch of good soil? How is the soil doing 2 or 3 feet down? I'm currently improving my soil via a series of cover crops chosen to fix nitrogen and aerate soil, but it's yet to be seen how well it turns out.

It's not a hard transition between the layer I added up top and the stuff below, so bioturbation is happening - but it's a slow process. I've helped it along a little with broad forking but it will take many more years to impact soil 3 feet below the surface. On the bright side, that matters to me not at all, because nothing I'm growing has a root zone that deep. 12-18 inches of improvement is plenty for gardening an…

I did get a soil test, but not for organic matter; I assume it's zero. My desert neighborhood has caliche under rocky sandy loam, but it also has a lot of very large old trees, so I'm hoping the caliche is permeable and not just that the original builders excavated huge holes. It's so rocky that a soil probe and broadfork is unusable, but as deep as I've tested (2 feet down) I've been able to still dig with a shovel.

This year, since I just moved in, I'm just doing a small 10x10ft testbed. I mixed in a few inches of compost manure, shallowly because the soil is so rocky. My plan is to do a biomass/nitrogen crop mix this spring, which is currently seeded, and then in fall do another similar mix along with deep rooted radish for decompaction. Then hopefully next spring I can plant real things. If I find that after a year of cover cropping the soil is still unusable, then I'll bring out the power tiller and pickaxe for the rest of the yard and get the amendments mixed in deeply. I've read a lot of permaculture books in the last year, and I'd like to garden in that way, but I'm certainly not against buying bulk amendments to get started.

12-18 isn't deep enough for me, since I am going to have large shrubs (need 3ft) and perhaps trees (need 5ft).

Re: 12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)

#124

Post by subscribed »

subscribed wrote: post #83
nomel wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. A potential method of capture is to seed the ocean with more iron [1], to help the algae. I assume that China will be the first to do these sorts of things, since the west will be too hogtied in regulations, lawsuits, and bureaucracy. [1] https://www.hawaii.edu/news/2026/02/17/ocean-iron-fertilizat...

China could definitely do this, to offset the minuscule of the destruction they do with the dark fishing fleets around (and possibly in) protected marine areas.

In retrospect that was a rather stupid comment.

It's not like "the global north"/"the West" wasn't guilty of the enormous ecological damage _everywhere_ already.

Re: 12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)

#125

Post by krisroadruck »

eudamoniac wrote: post #123
krisroadruck wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a hard transition between the layer I added up top and the stuff below, so bioturbation is happening - but it's a slow process. I've helped it along a little with broad forking but it will take many more years to impact soil 3 feet below the surface. On the bright side, that matters to me not at all, because nothing I'm growing has a root zone that deep. 12-18 inches of improvement is plenty for gardening an…

I did get a soil test, but not for organic matter; I assume it's zero. My desert neighborhood has caliche under rocky sandy loam, but it also has a lot of very large old trees, so I'm hoping the caliche is permeable and not just that the original builders excavated huge holes. It's so rocky that a soil probe and broadfork is unusable, but as deep as I've tested (2 feet down) I've been able to still dig with a shovel.…

We are fighting entirely different battles. The main reason I'm focused on those 12-18 inches is drainage. Heavy clay will stay waterlogged for a really long time and basically drown plants. Once it gets really dry it goes hydrophobic and cracks. But down below the first foot or so, roots aren't breathing, they are just collecting nutrients - which clay tends to have in abundance.

If you are dealing mostly with sandy/rocky soil you've got drainage in abundance. It's possible you have a perched water table with the caliche - but if it's 2 feet of permeable substrate in a desert environment I don't think you are going to be dealing with enough water for it to matter, you'll just get lateral drainage. What you need a way to slow down infiltration, and also stop leaching since the cation exchange capacity of sand is hot garbage. Shade + organic matter is probably going to be your go-to tools. Unfortunately I don't think the free arborist chips solution I did will work for you - might be too arid for them to break down in a reasonable time frame. So it's either import it at cost, or plant and wait. Just boils down to your level of patience vs stomach for paying for "dirt" as it turns out good soil isn't actually "dirt cheap".

Something to consider - most of the no-till / permaculture folks admit that a one time tillage up front isn't that bad. The main issue with tillage is you are disrupting an ecosystem. The fungal networks, the worms, all the little critter infiltration tunnels. But that only matters when you aren't dealing with dead compact degraded soil. Right now there is nothing to disrupt, so if you can combine a one time deep tillage of organic matter, or maybe subsoiling to break up some of the caliche to whatever depth you want - now is the time to do it.

Re: 12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)

#127

Post by eudamoniac »

krisroadruck wrote: post #125
eudamoniac wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did get a soil test, but not for organic matter; I assume it's zero. My desert neighborhood has caliche under rocky sandy loam, but it also has a lot of very large old trees, so I'm hoping the caliche is permeable and not just that the original builders excavated huge holes. It's so rocky that a soil probe and broadfork is unusable, but as deep as I've tested (2 feet down) I've been able to still dig with a shovel.…

We are fighting entirely different battles. The main reason I'm focused on those 12-18 inches is drainage. Heavy clay will stay waterlogged for a really long time and basically drown plants. Once it gets really dry it goes hydrophobic and cracks. But down below the first foot or so, roots aren't breathing, they are just collecting nutrients - which clay tends to have in abundance. If you are dealing mostly with sandy…

Yeah I'm totally fine with tilling at first, I was just trying to save money on renting a tiller.

Despite being sandy loam the drainage is really bad just a few inches down. I think the rocks are so densely packed together and in such great quantities that it's long to drain. I'm hoping the roots can get through and help this. If not, I'm going to have to rent a big tiller. One thing I've been doing that has obvious benefits is putting wet cardboard as mulch; the soil under the cardboard stays moist far longer. Unsightly, but definitely improving germination. I'll probably do this throughout the garden underneath landscaping rock since cardboard is essentially free.

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