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Green manures are a handy method of soil revitalisation to add to your permaculture repertoire. Here Bruce tells how he used it on the worn out soil of his greenhouse. The winter was not given to us for no purpose. We must thaw its cold with our genialness. We are asked to find out and appropriate all the nutrients it yields. If it is a cold and hard season, its fruit, no doubt, is the more concentrated and nutty. Maybe it’s just that I’m a year older, but this winter seems colder than any I’ve experienced in the twenty-nine years we’ve been at ‘Wirreanda’ in Central Victoria. The firewood supply cut from the woodlot in spring last year is diminishing rapidly, and each time I go down to the greenhouse to collect a barrow load, I’m reminded how wonderful greenhouses really are. I use an end of one of our hoop style poly houses to dry the wood over summer, and then plant crops in the part where the wood was, alternating each year. This gives the soil underneath a chance to rest after the onslaught of the tomato crop from the previous season, but I’ve recently noticed something that catches up with all of us after a few years of planting in intensive areas. The soil is wearing out. It doesn’t get rained on. It gets baked hard in summer. It gets thrashed with close cropping. And it’s starting to say to me “I’d like a rest, or a little bit of food!” The structure is not good. And even with a really good soaking, the worms don’t reappear readily, and they, of course, are the best indicators of soil fertility there is. The obvious solution is to incorporate huge quantities of organic matter, the best of which is compost, but most of us don’t make the large amount necessary to replace what we take out of the soil. We can mulch the prunings from tagasaste or similar living haystacks but it’s a big job to get enough to spread over the whole garden, and you have to own or hire a suitable machine for the purpose. Feed the soil, not the plant
The major advantages of green manure crops are that they:
Some people recommend inoculating legumes before planting your green manure crop, but if you pull up the roots of your broad beans, you may find tiny white nitrogen nodules on the root hairs of plants which have not been inoculated. Really all we want to do is get more organic matter into the soil, and to loosen up the structure. I have used buckwheat as a terrific green crop, but it is very frost tender, and should be planted in late spring, or early summer. Seed can be obtained quite cheaply from health food shops, or the Middle East grocery shops and a little goes a long way. Run a mower over the metre-high growth when the white flowers are out, shredding the stalks into a fine mulch. As the stalks start decomposing, they may initially rob the soil of nitrogen, but I’ve found that if you plant brassicas for winter straight into the mulched area, and water with a nitrogen-rich fertiliser like comfrey manure, they’ll take off! If I’m not feeling that pure, I’ll use a seaweed solution to give some trace elements to the soil. Weeds are suppressed, and the roots of the buckwheat wither away, opening up the soil, allowing worms to do their wonderful work! Worm manure is full of nitrogen, and eventually the soil becomes good enough to eat. Well, almost! Green manure plants Many different plants have been recommended for green manuring. Depending on the season, and your climate, you might choose from mustard, barley, wheat, ryecorn, lucerne, tickbeans, lupins and vetch. Oats are said to release phosphorus the following year. Your local feed merchant will have the seeds, and the cheapest way to start is to grab a kilo of field peas and dig or rotary hoe them into the top five centimeters, and let ‘em fly! That’s what I’ve done in the greenhouse. The disadvantage of all this is, of course, that the land may be growing a crop which will not be harvested for food. Never mind, the soil is benefiting greatly from your inputs. Remember—feed the soil, not the plant. Next year’s crop will be much better. Of course, you’re all growing a comfrey patch, aren’t you? Slashed leaves are a wonderful mulch. I have to warn you though, that placing a tightly packed onion bag of comfrey leaves into a drum of water, and allowing it to rot down for comfrey manure, produces the most foul smelling liquid. Don’t get it on your clothes or hands. You have been warned! Comments to bahedge@bigpond.com Hemp Wool - a Natural For Knitters
Hemp has long been held in high esteem for its qualities including durability, coolness and environmental sustainability. Hemp is the longest and strongest natural plant fibre, can be grown in most climates, requires little or no use of fertilisers, insecticides, fungicides or herbicides and has a deep taproot, raising nutrients to the soil surface. The Nundle Woollen Mill hemp wool blend was made on machinery ranging from 50 to nearly 100-years-old, so the mill team was unsure if or how the hemp would perform. Nundle Woollen Mill proprietor, Judy Howarth, said she was delighted with how the machinery handled blending the fibres, the softness of the yarn (comparable to a wool/linen blend), and how it was knitting up. “One of our Nundle knitters, Mary Little, has hand knitted samples of a cable patterned beanie, scarf and fingerless gloves using hemp wool, while Amanda Ducker of Minx Handknits used hemp wool in a tea cosy, egg warmers, and dolls,” Judy said. “The yarn is working really well across a range of garments and homewares, which shows its versatility for a variety of knitting projects. It will be sold undyed so knitters have the choice of dyeing it themselves, combining it with coloured yarn, or using it in its natural colour, which is a lovely warm earthy tone.” What's Your Problem? Bob Rich answers questions about owner building Loadbearing strawbale walls Hi Bob,
Dear Linda, Shredded paper insulation Hi, Dear Tamara,
Dog Tracks Termites by Bob Rich
Everyone is aware that termites eat houses and their contents. There are house-eating termite species in most places in Australia. Mind you, these little beasties (which are not ants, but members of the cockroach family) are environmentally useful. They convert dead wood into termites, which are the food for a wide range of species. So, they are just recycling contractors for nature. Trouble is, they can't tell the difference between a piece of dead wood on the forest floor and a piece of dead wood that forms part of your house. For that matter, they can't even tell wood from carpet, electrical conduits and even water pipes. So, it's not a good idea to allow termites into your house. The chemical industry's answer for the last 60 years has been to regularly and repeatedly flood under and around your house with very nasty persistent insecticides, JUST IN CASE some termites should happen to pass by. Over the life span of a house, a well-meaning person could pay for thousands of litres of these chemicals, which poison a lot more than the termites that may or may not be there. As well as killing other soil-living organisms like insects, worms and grubs, the chemicals will poison lizards, birds and people. These chemicals cause a horrendous list of health problems to humans, including birth defects, developmental problems in babies, cancer, damage to the liver, the nervous, immune and endocrine systems. They cross the placenta, contaminate breast milk, persist in soil over 20 years, penetrate a house’s air space even through concrete, migrate in ground water, and accumulate in food chains. Research, kept secret by the manufacturers, had demonstrated these facts years ago, and was made public only in a US Government Inquiry in 1989. For 40 years, the manufacturers had encouraged the yearly reapplication of cyclodienes to homes, schools, hospitals. Pest-controllers, building workers, house occupants, and consumers of food were poisoned, to maintain profits.
So, what is the alternative? Monitoring: setting up a suitable system to check if termites are actually there or not. Then, a baiting technique can be applied by a licensed pest controller to kill just this colony of termites, without causing harm to anything or anyone else. Recently, I became aware of a new system of monitoring, which beats all others. Research has shown that dogs can be trained to identify the presence of termites. The relevant experiments have shown a very impressive 89 to 99 percent detection rate, with a negligible occurrence of false positives. So, all you need to do is to invite a nice doggie with his/her handler to sniff around in and around your house. Do this once a year, and you're safe. Should the dog get excited, the handler will determine the likely origin of the termite visitors, and you can organise an environmentally aware pest exterminator to use a baiting technique. One enthusiastic advocate for termite dogs is Justo Montes. Justo is the handler of the dog in the picture, and is keen to visit your home. If you email him, he may be able to point you toward a dog-handler team closer to your home, and if you are a dog person, maybe he can facilitate training for you so you can join the network of people who offer this excellent service. Justo Montes. P.O. Box 242, Montrose, VIC 3765. Mob: 0412 314151. Email: lodge33@aanet.com.au
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The foundation of permaculture is sustainability. One of my early memories was a saying from my grandfather: “Feed the soil, not the plant”. I’ve read that numerous times in many books since, and it is so true. In our permacultures, in addition to the perennial fruit trees, most of us have annual gardens to provide the conventional vegetables we eat every day. There’s something not quite right about bringing in material from outside to continue our quest for food. That’s where the magic bullet of green manure is such an important part of annual gardens. At the beginning, it is necessary to incorporate minerals to correct severe soil deficiencies, and to raise the pH to acceptable levels, but once a satisfactory level is reached, (around pH 5.5–7) continual input of organic matter by the use of green manure crops should keep the garden sweet. Green manure is simply a crop of legumes, grasses, or clover planted to be either dug in, or cut and left to smother weeds on the surface.
