Hi All
My Husband and I purchased a 1Ha block in Bombay in June, and have planted a whole bunch of fruit trees and a few veg gardens prior to building our home there.
In order to make the soil better (although it is incredible in it's natural state) we are going to build a big compost pile that we can start using in about 6-8 months time. I attended a brilliant day course on Saturday last week at the Steiner School in Tauranga, led by Peter Proctor, and am all encouraged about this whole compost pile thingy - never considered building a compost pile as big as he did, and was dreading making a series of smaller ones...
My biggest dilema now is to find the straw necessary to build up the brown layer, and of course, organic cow poop! We are surrounded by dairy farms, but all are on a commercial scale, and I dread to think what those poor beasts are ingesting to increase their yeild and keep them going...
Sooooooooooooooooooooo... I'm on the scrounge for anyone who can either provide or point me in the right direction to find the straw and poop before Labour weekend.
Any ideas??
Cheers
Tara
Replies
Too late for labour weekend, but a thought that the main thing you neighbours are going to be feeding cows, especially at this time of year, is just grass. So my thoughts are go and ask if you can have some cowpats. A good way to meet the neighbours I say ;) At the very least they will have a chuckle and say good on ya. In good weather, if you have a flat shovel and they have a concrete race (track down the farm) you can just collect the dry matter from the track and transport it away quite easily.
For straw, you might not be in luck at this time of year getting it cheap as it would be more readily available in autumn after harvest time. That is, if there is any cropping done locally and not just dairying. If there are farms around that look like they do crops you could always approach them for purchasing off them in autumn next year. This is slower than you were wanting I know, but building networks locally might be of use for later on, even if you have do do something else in the short term.
I'd love to meet the neighbours with the cows - however they seem to be invisible... Honestly we NEVER see them - although we do see their cows...lol
I did build a small compost pile this weekend without cow pats, lots of green and brown waste, and bore water from the water trough. I sprinkled a little molasses mixed with water, and bokashi juice on it today -not too much, just a sprinkle as it was very warm out there.
Soon we'll be able to use the garden waste and other bits from the land itself to close the circle, but for now we have to look outside our wee paddock...
In saying that I've planted a lot of comfrey and other herbal ley plants around my trees, not to mention the shelter belt which is about 130 metres of native trees - about half the fruit trees have been mulched around too, so it's all good things happening.
Getting back to the compost - I'll be creating about 4 - 6 small compost piles as we go along - first one was created this weekend - it's only about 3m long and about a metre wide - so not huge, but easily turned in 6 weeks... If I create a new one about that size every two weeks I shojld have a good supply of compost for my veg and trees in less than a year - till then it's simply growing everything in Godzone soil and getting the gardens established.
If anyone has any other pointers however, I'd love to hear them
This year we are short on space and soil so I've tried a combination of mustard, radishes, and dandelions. I eat some of the tops and feed them to the chooks. I also get a crop from the radishes and dandelions which we've been eating (or in the case of the radishes preserving by pickling). All the rest gets cut and left on the garden as an instant mulch.
Yes, I'm very interested in getting the soil as rich and fertile as possible - not that it's bad soil to start with, but if you can make it better, why not? Better soil makes better fruit and veg... Better fruit and veg taste better and make our neighbours jealous...lol Now... how to dissuade the bunnies...
Putting first things first, have you had a lab test done on your soil to see what nutrients it has and what it is deficient in? That should determine what you might need as external inputs.
The idea of rushing out to get external inputs (even organic ones) seems to jar with the concept of self-sufficiency. Maybe a slower approach is called for. There are, of course, almost as many compost recipes as people you ask, but I know several people who will say you cannot get good compost in less than a year. That is to say, grow your own straw this summer!
For more self-sufficient compost you might consider approaches like biointensive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biointensive) - At a short course with Jodi Roebuck we built a compost heap from 45% dry material (oat crop grown on the land) 45% green material and 10% soil for the inoculation role. (Unlike the double-dig diagram on the Wikipedia article, the soil volume increased enough that the A1 block of soil was set aside.
On our new block, we also won't be living there for a year or more, so will focus on low-maintenance soil-building crops - probably some cereals (if there is anything that will stand that much rain) and legumes, with small experimental plots to see what will grow. Like Jodi, we will be starting out with a fairly thin layer of topsoil over volcanic ash, which will need some work to unlock its nutrients. I don't think we will practice biointensive - double-digging is a young man's game! We will utilise the noxious plants (gorse, blackberry) from our boundaries by brewing teas in rain barrels.