Tag Archives: vegetables/growing

Observe and Interact – Part Two

The Permaculture Principle Observe and Interact gives me a great excuse to bring out the ‘mad proffessor that seems to direct much of what I do. I love to read about a new technique, or in the case of this post an old technique, and then ‘play with it’. Yesterday I did just that with an experiment in Soil Fertility and burning.

Biochar, Burning Wood and Terra Preta

I have done a lot of reading on Traditional Agricultural practises. One technique that is or has been used all over the world is the burning of wood prior to planting crops. This is normally associated with swidden (slash and burn) agriculture. We have an image of indigenous people destroying forest to grow crops, depleting the soil of nutrients, then moving on. The reality is that this is a sophisticated way of farming that uses a period of building soil fertility under trees, and then using that fertiltiy to grow crops. In many ways it resembles the old English Two field rotation. One year crop, one year fallow. In fact it isn’t that long since the burning of stubble in grain fields was made illegal here. What I’ve also read is that in India the wood was slow burned, or charred, rather than burnt fiercely. This throws up some interesting possibilities to observe and interact .

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Polyculture Update. February 2013

I wanted to write a short post to keep up to date with my vegetable/grain polyculture experiments. The overall aims and objectives are described in my vegetable/grain polyculture design, but the page is really a number of linked projects. This post updates a couple of those polyculture projects.

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Seed Sowing, Soaking Seeds, and Compost Tea

I like to use compost tea to soak seeds, and to water seeds in when planting, especially in modules. At this time of year the temperature is too low to create a decent compost tea, so how do we achieve the same results?

Soaking Seeds

I pre -germinate all of my larger seeds  by soaking them for up to 12 hours, and  then setting them on damp kitchen paper. That allows me to only use seeds that have shown themselves as viable. This saves empty spaces in pots and modules.

soaking seeds

Pre germinating Soy beans by soaking

I prefer to use actively aerated compost tea in the soak water, to get a healthy bunch of soil microbes coating the seed and root prior to planting out. For smaller seeds I tend to use compost tea to water the seeds initially to achieve the same effect.

compost tea for germination

mustard seedlings germinated using compost tea

For a really  basic explanation take a look at the Compost Tea Link. Alternatively there is a lot of information about compost tea in the archives.

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Permaculture: The Prequels

The word Permaculture was originally formed from the words Permanent Agriculture. What may surprise you is that the words Permanent Agriculture appear in the titles of at least three books, and predate ‘Permaculture’ by about sixty years. I am currently reading one of those books for the second time, and thought that it would be interesting to discuss all three in the same post.

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Bamboo Books for Permaculture

bambooSome of my recent posts have had information about Hardy Bamboo in them. Much of the information for those posts have come from two Bamboo books. I thought that I’d post about them too, and do a kind of mini book review, comparing the relative benefits of each.

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