"Composting...is fundamentally useless"
 

Ha, did I get your attention :D

Been working on this for a few years, from my own observation of how things grow here naturally(I am in transitional oak savannah/fir forest, so get to use the best of both worlds), and came along this book--

The Natural Way of Farming, the Theory and Practice of Green Philosophy by Masanobu Fukuoka

BY nature straight neat rows make me uncomfortable. I like it wild and hairy. SO naturally this approach appeals to my personality, whatever, bite me:D

Now for compost. A few notes from the book

THe basic out line is

No Cultivation(no tilling, no plowing, no turning under, ROOTS and worms are the tillerman)
No fertilizer(no chemicals, even no manure--beyond what birds or random animals would drop--which is very little in the scope)
No weeding(no weeding)
No pesticides

Japanese dude sums it up:

"The logic that rejects grassed fields, green manure, and the direct application and plowing under of human wastes and livestock manure changes with time and circumstances. Given the right conditions, these may be affective. But no fertilizer method is absolute. The surest way to solve the problem is to apply a method that adapts to the circumstances and follows nature.
I firmly believe while compost itself is not without value, the composting of organic materials is fundamentally useless"

I'll let you read the book if it makes you mad. :D It's worth a read. His basic premise is that nature left to its devices, grows forests and meadows that feed who it needs to feed, WITHOUT application of extra compost, no extra fertilizer, no tilling.

Last year I added a bunch of native "weeds"(like wild strawberry, fringecup, silverweed, iris, spring beauty, veronica, indian plum, violet, columbine, checkermallow--which is endangered!) into my beds that my veggies grew in amongst. This year I'm shocked by how much LESS sprouting of "bad" weeds (thistles, dock) there are--as in 1-2 per bed. And they easily pull right out.

Been fun :D loads of produce off my plants, no bug problems, awesome taste. Just hand tools. No compost(ha!)

Here's my 2010 garden journal
http://www.facebook.com/wyldthang?re...9&id=616102765

Last year's
http://www.facebook.com/wyldthang?re...5&id=616102765

I would LOVE to do this on more acreage, I have about 4 acres with good sun/wind postition(I have 10+ altogether). But right now it's stalled in negotiation between building a garage/wood splitting area/endurocross fun. So for now I'll see what I can get out of my 30x30, only about half is planted, the rest is grass(healthy grass! ha)

I'll be back with a few pictures.

Sounds like Extreme Non-Composting! :hysterical:

article on Masanobu
http://www.permaculture.com/node/140

the reviews of the book on Amazon are kinda fun to read to(like, did the people who dont' like the book READ the book? :D)

excerpt form the book
http://www.motherearthnews.com/Susta...u-Fukuoka.aspx

cool blog
http://culiblog.org/

Ya know, I think it really depends on location. Where you are, no problem. Where I am now, maybe. Where we just moved from, no. I couldn't compost there anyway because we had NO water, but I kept trying. We lived on the edge of an alkali flat and had to haul our water in. Didn't have enough for gardening and livestock and us, let alone composting, only about 8" a year of precip. I was trying to MAKE dirt. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, grew in the local soil. Every time the wind blew (all the time) we had dust storms. We were there three years and I got one small bed done well. Got a bit of the barn leavings composted and had enough for that one small bed. Even with no water, I could grow a little bit there.

I haven't read the book, obviously, but, again, I really do think it depends on location.

To a degree ...yes. We don't need to do anything and something WILL grow.

But, we are not interested in something. We are interested in specific things and we often (usually?) need to modify our environment in order to grow what we want in the quantities we we want.

LONG LIVE COMPOST!

One of my grandfathers would plant anywhere from ten to a hundred acres each year... straightness mattered not, just volume.

The other one had a half acre garden. He staked it out with string... anything that grew outside of that razor sharp line was culled.

I try my bestest to get my rows straight. Once I'm off the tractor and on the ground, I feel like the semi straight rows are just guides where I ought to be planting.... sorta wild and harry too.

See, now that's where the guy would say "Why Pound Sand". Or the sand dune is meant to be a sand dune.

HIs whole book is about individual application to unique locations. ANyways, the guys point is, in the book(and you can get it from the quote I provided) if the land and your timetable needs an initial dump of compost, do it. It's the ongoing slag piles tilled in ad nauseum that is unneccessary.


COMPOSTING SUCKS

(note I used the verb, ha)

Just trying to get y'all to think, instead of blindly sucking on the sacred cows. :D

I LOVED those books:

Alas, his methods did not do well for me: I think Kansas is too dry. The plants had that look.Here in Kansas the grain seeds MUST be buried.

It DID make me re-think some things: I no longer try to compost I just dump the greenery onto the garden and I let it BE! That part works very well indeed!

Terri, I wonder if once you got the multistoried structure established if it would do better--particularly if you did it in a wadi, like where stuff is more greener naturally, or if you made an artificial wadi environment.

The multi storied thing really works making lower temped air bubbles in the hot. Definately you have winds and water issues to work with, but the multistoried thing really does conserve water.

The author did do work in Africa btw to see if his thoughts would work(working on finding articles about it).

What is a multistoried structure?

I tried a wadi. It is just easier to bury the seeds.

Here in Kansas, a week often passes between rains in the spring, and the very top of the soil bakes in the heat between the rains. I suspect that Japan is either damper or less hot when the seedlings are sprouting.

wild..it is amazing how similar we are in our thinking..i just ordered this book and Gaia's Garden..

I have an area behind my house where in the winter ..because our compost area was so far from the house..i would throw all the scraps in the wintertime..

that would be household scraps like eggshells, banana peels, and whatever..everything..juust threw it out of the back door...into the garden..it never smelled or got ukky..the worms and critters just composted it for me.

this past week i had to dig up some plants in that area..and you would not believe how rich and dark and black and wonderful the soil is in that area..and not any weeds.

I love your FB garden pics, esp. the dried tomato smiley face, and of course the gigantic black and raspberries!

Does Masanobu Fukuoka provide pictures of his garden?

In his book, yes. Though it looks more like a jungle than a garden.

I have some good photos on my laptop which the kids have hostage, I'll post them tomorrow.

Sepp Holzer(not sure I'm spelling that right) is another guy using the same principles. I'll post the link for a ton of his fotos tomorrow. He is in like the Alps somewhere, and his gardens look like Kukuoka's

BTW those tomatos I'm holding were NOT grown with a load of compost.

He was covered in TMEN years ago. History has not been kind to him or his ideas, other than the basic "no till" concept.

Actually for those not as much into Fukuoka's eastern philosophical take, his methods are simular to Edward Faulkner's "Plowmans Folly". I've read both books more than once over the years. Faulkner has more of an American way of explaining it albeit from a 1920's/1930s perspective. He gets some credit for popularizing no-till though his methods like Fukuoka's are far different than the chemical crazed modern ag.

And I think both Fukuoka and Faulkner methods probably more effective in areas with more rain. I used my own variation of Faulkner's method in my sandy soil garden when in Michigan and it worked great. Not so effective here in hotter, drier climate and heavy clay soil of Ozarks.

I read the excerpts and then bought the book from amazon. It appears he is composting. He's just doing it right there on the fields instead of in big piles. I think forerunner and others are using some of his ideas with out knowing. In the composting thread he mentions just letting the piles sit once they have been built. No turning etc. Letting the worms and time do the work.

I've read his book. Good thoughts. I don't grow rice or barley in a semi-tropical environment, and I have to really work with a very fragile soil--which was already worn out thirty years age when I came here.. And I have to compete with the effects of LOTS of Roundup and insect sprays around me to boot. Oh, yes, a very different climate--four distinct, drastic seasons. And different vegetable crops with different soil needs. Hmmmm. Good thoughts, though.

But I read and re-read Louis Bromfield every early Spring.....
geo

'No Till' is a neat idea.

Nice garden by the way.

I had difficulty understanding your first message.

This line I can understand a tiny bit, tho I'm still in a fog of sorts. :)

Front page lifestyle story last year in the local paper. Local group set up an organic garden, offer to give the food to those who need, it's so much better food than the commrcial stuff, blah blah. All natural, and good for the environment too!

Well, he's what they did: They are on a pile of dirt next to the river. The river flooded a while back, badly, and this dirt was used for building dikes. When the river went down, this clay was piled back on the spot. All sandbags & dirt used was called contaminated, because of what was floating by in the river. Bad soil. It was now unstable because it was disturbed, so no one wanted to build on it - hard to put footings into the disturbed soil so close to the river.

So, this is the basis of thier organic, healthy garden.

They put in a garden, and it didn't grow well - the ground was poor clay, and we had a wet year, so it kinda drowned.

The following year they, being civic leaders, got a local bulldozer operator to volineer his time to level the place & make the water run off, and put in drainage. Basically, reworked the entire 3 acres with a dozer to flatten it.

The following year, it was very dry, and the poor clay soil didn't produce much crop, too poor, too dry.

So, the folks got a company 100 miles away to donate 90% of an irrigation system, so they can pump water onto the whole garden now.

And, they got the construction company to again donate time & hauled in many truckloads of real topsoil, with a lot of compose in it. Real good soil imported from somewhere else.

And oh my, the next year they had wonderful harvest of 'all natural' garden produce, very very healthy for people, and with a very susatainable because they used composte & hoes, not chemicals to farm their ground! Oh my, how wonderful!

Now, the basis of their 3 acre garden is pollutied ground, which they totally changed with a bulldozer, and then put in a $50,000 irrigation system with $10,000 worth of topsoil & composte.

And _this_ is the low-footprint, all natural, healthy, type of food we all should be growing & eating.

Me, I'd be thrown in jail if I tried to level out my farmland with a bulldozer, or put in drainage without many permits (I had to visit 3 officies this spring to do the tiling I plan this spring), and irrigation would require many permits & special use of wells - besides here where I live irrigation makes no sense, we've had 3 drought years in the past 100 and they happened to hit one of them - irrigation on this clay soil is a total waste of money & resources, makes no sense.

But - this is the example we should follow. It is how farming really should be done. It was proclaimed as sustainable gardening!

Perhaps examples like this are what make me pretty cynical of the back-to-land movement, and books like you are describing, or the anti-farming movement some folks show.

It seems they have some untried ideas, and some very odd interpitations of 'sustainable' that I either have to laugh or cry about. Your book seems to say don't bother fertilizing or weeding or trying to help the soil - just sit back and watch things grow!!! Oh wow, what a cool concept! I guess the corn & beans and potatoes will just magically appear??? Or it all works fine if you happen to be on the 1% of land that is well balanced, good ground, has no problems - and the rest of people should just starve because their dirt isn't so good....

As always, I'm kindsa pointing out an extreme case to illistrate my point, but - it does seem to fit pretty often.

I have to chuckle at the 'organic, sustainable' garden my city has, and I kinda have to chuckle at your book. It might have some good ideas here & there, but just doesn't sound very practical for most folk.

--->Paul

here where I am we get our rain Nov through June, then very very little July through October(that's why the fire danger is so great in the forests, it gets very dry). So if anything the ground is wet, but we have much LESS summer rainfall than the east coast, the midwest, etc. The exposed (clay)soil dries out and big cracks open up(they close in the winter). If you go into the oak savannah places and dig, the ground is dry 18" down(thought the soil has much better tilth and there are still plenty of green things). So the "dry" excuse doesn't quite hold water. I water deeply once a week at the base of plants, once it starts needing water. The mulch AND the multistoried "foresty" structure preserves a lot of water(and there's composting going on under the mulch).

Working on some photos, back later.

An idea of his which has proven out BIG TIME is the no till/no compaction/native soil idea. Soil is full of mycchorizae(fungal "roots") which interconnect everything and an facillitate nutrient uptake. Cultivate and you destroy that by cutting them and exposing them to air to dry up. This mycchorizal relationship was a huge step forward for forestry here in the PNW(at least), it is just plain how it works. (sorry, mycchorizae is a witch to spell!). Anyways, as I'm reading I'm seeing a lot of his ideas cross referenced in (PNW at least) forestry science.

Kukuoka's environment was temperate (:D)

(I realize the Zen is not for everybody, ha)

Part of what Masanobu Fukuoka SAYS is to grow crops suited to your area, so that you do not have to work so hard. He grows clover on his crop land, cuts it, and lets it lay because where he lives you can get 2 crops a year`and he makes sure one of them is a cover crop, which gets cut and left in the field. The straw from his rice is ALSO scattered in the field. That is where the fertility comes from.

With my shorter seasons, the best I can do is to grow austrian peas in the fall and mow before frost. That part actually worked well enough.

What did NOT work is his seed balls. He combines rice seed with clover and powdered clay and I forget wgat else, and pushes it through a screen to make little pellets. The pellets are rubbed between the hands to firm them up and scattered on the field. That is all he does to seed his land. As I said before this does not work in Kansas: to hot between spring rains? He says it works perfectly well where he lives, but, Japan is not Kansas.

He WAS a commercial farmer, by the way, and the son of a farmer. He just lives under different conditions.

As for the vegetable garden, he let his grow wild and the interns ate the volenteer vegetables as they wanted them. He shows pictures of daikon growing wild in the clover and they look very healthy. Where I live, though, the Johnson grass would quickly kill them. I do have wild asparagus, though!

Different land needs different techniques.

He had an office job during WW2. It is very possible that he has passed on: he was old when the books were published.

No-till works for us also, but ONLY if something is kept growing. Without the roots of the plants, my clay soil gets hard. Austrian peas were good for that, but, I had to till them in to get a good stand!

Actually, just letting the weeds grow will keep the soil nice, but then they go to SEED!

What has worked well for us is what I have heard called sheet composting. I throw lawn clippings and such directly onto the garden. The plants are happier and the weeds are not happier. This works for me. Though I still have to get after the TOUGH weeds like the Johnson grass and such!

Your ground dries out when the plants are large and the roots are established. Here in Kansas, the TOP of the ground often dries out in the spring, when the plants are less than an inch tall. There is damp soil a few inches down, but, that does nothing good for a seedling!

I did try his method out here: the seedlings are not healthy and the loss rate is high. Mr. Fukuoka was farming rice land and he speaks on air circulation and fungus diseases. I think his climate is more humid than ours in Kansas: at least in the spring!

yes he died in 2008

here are a couple foto albums of Sepp Brunner in Austria, farming on a mountainside. Besides being just plain yummy farm photos, I think they show the forest gardening effect the best.
http://picasaweb.google.com/permacul...rLienzAustria#
Sepp Holzer, also in Austria on a mountainside
http://picasaweb.google.com/permacul...iebergAustria#
(awesome awesome house BTW, I'm drooling!)

A few more pix, again the site for my garden is the most abused, driest place on my 10 acres. It was logged 20 years ago, compacted with the heavy machinery then the scraped soil was baked for 10 years. We're on a ridgetop, and being in the oak savannah/fir forest transition it's naturally very dry(lots of rocks in the soil too). Also the knob right next to us is dry, rocky and exposed enough to support rattlesnakes(there are two such places in the Willamette Valley that have rattlers, otherwise rattlers dont' survive here, to cold and wet in winter). The rattlers are gone now(pigs ate them) and the farmers shot them(they were here recent as the 50's or so), but there are lots of little lizards. Anyways, just sayin, yes we get a ton of rain in the winter(80" average rainfall), but summer is quite a different story.

SO here's a few more pix of my garden. When I first made my garden, about 8 years ago(fencing and building the boxes) I tilled, double dug the site then filled the boxes with compost and manure. Stuff was stunted compared to what I grow now(sorry no pix to compare) even though I used fresh compost etc--and this is a reason lots of people give up on gardens up here BTW(they grow meat tho).
http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/b...Home/027-2.jpg
http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/b...Home/016-1.jpg

His point was having the large perennials (fruit trees, berries, herbs) already up/rooted and leafed out to shade the soil(along with the mulching). You tuck the veggies in around that stuff. Having that shade and the breathing leaves provides lower air temps and a it more moisture. If I were to have exposed soil it would dry out just as bad as you. Since my soil stays cold, as well as the top gets baked if I leave it exposed to sprout seeds it's difficult to germinate, so I make it easier all the way around to sprout stuff in little pots and plant when they are a few inches tall. Stuff like tomatoes and beans and squash sprout fine.

But yeah, obviously one adjusts to one's climate--that's what he keeps saying in his book! observe how nature does it and follow suit. I had been frustrated for most of my gardening years with mainstream garden books getting shabby poor producing results till I found out they are written for the midwest/east coast, with very different conditions than me. Finding a book for my land (Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades) also changed my life, ha!

ALso I have to say why should we expect everything to be written to suit us like Goldilocks. In considering something new, understand what the jist of it is and tweak it for your locale. That's what Kukuoka says--it's all about observation and understanding.

Are you on the prairie part of Kansas? how did those grasslands grow before without irrigation? they were a layer of composting thatch which preserved enough moisture and the roots kept the soil worked etc. The baked flyaway soil came with cultivation and removal of the vegetation.

So here's some native blackberries(not himalayan), nature grown, as in I don't touch them other than to pick them, no watering, no composting(other than what nature does), no weeding, no feeding, no tilling, no pesticides. We had an unusually hot summer last year, so it was drier than normal.

I have small hands BTW< wear women's Small gloves.
http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/b...20Home/024.jpg

Indeed it does! Though our 6' tall native grass is tougher than most vegetables.

Did you know that the plains Indians would start fires to keep this land in grass? Grass feeds herding animals far better than trees do. I suppose you could call them the ultimate minimum-labor farmers!

rambler, city management people are generally stupid :D I guess it's a job requirement

The indians here in the Willamette Valley would do fires here too to make it easy to hunt the deer and grow lots of them(as well as the camas and other starchy plants that like to grow in savannah), that's why it is an oak savannah, and why the valley was such a paradise for farmers when they first came here--square miles of grasslands! It's gradually reverting back to fir forests where left alone because obviously there is no burning anymore(except for the grass seed farmers, but that is being banned too).

I think the (big) difference between giant piles and composting in place(by "mulch" I mean leafy slash--grass, stalks, leaves, not stuff like wood chips or newspapers) is that the decomposition process takes place right on the soil itself where stuff grows, just like in nature(which does not make huge piles). No soil compacting by spreading piles(unless you use a wheelbarrow:D). Nutrients leach right down into the soil where stuff grows, and the perennials in place suck those up and shed them back down in their leaves.

Kukuoka is not saying compost itself is "bad", but rather the effort of excessive extra composting beyond what the land does once the natural cycle is established--is unneccessary.

great photos and a great thread.

To grow good crops, we need good soils.

You get whatever you have to start with.

From there, you kinda have to work al ittle bit.

You want good soil ph (add lime if it's low, do drainage & grow the proper crops if it's high).

You want good N, P, K, and micro nutrients available, as to what the soil can hold. Whether that is adding manure, adding commercial fertilizer, or adding compost, it's gonna be where you want to get to.

You want enough organic matter, hard to 'add' unless you steal it from someplace else, but if you are low, preserve what you have, and try to slowly build.

You want enough water for the crops you try to grow. This could mean drainage tile to drain, or a garden hose to add water when needed, in additon to blending the crops you grow to match the conditions you are blessed or cursed with.

Once you get there, then you want to preserve what you have, and try to better it.

If you haul anything away from your garden/field, you are hauling away nutrients. Somehow, these must be replaced. Cover crops or multi-secies will help to averge out soil nutrients, but other than legumes adding N, you will do a net loss on your soils _any_ time you harvest produce.

So, something, somehow, needs to be brought back in.

You can be a 10,000 acre corn/soybean farmer, or a person with a 30 foot by 30 foot garden, and it's really all the same basic principle.

I'm sure farming my land, I use many of the prinicples you mention, in my way. I have too wet, too cold, too high ph, very rich fertile soils in a climate that is too short, slow to warm, and quick to freeze off. I gotta do things that allow me to get seed in the ground earlier than average to get a good crop. My soil is the clay 120 feed deep that the glaciers scraped off of Canada 10,000 years ago, all of it is basically good fertile clay, so soil erosion is really not a big bad concern for me.

For people in a dry area, with very thin soil, they have _far_ different needs and worries than I do. They need to hang on to their topsoil & moisture for dear life. Exact opposite of what concerns me - I need to dry out & heat up the ground.

I suspect we end up doing about the same thing, even if we come from different perspectives. What works for you or me or the fella from Japan is all different, and would be a disaster if we tried to force our ideas onto the other.

The lessons for me:

We can't tell or legislate gardening/farming methods for others to follow, as things are very, very different even 30 miles away....

The idea of studying & learning & improving how one does this farming thing is a good thing.

There are more similarities between a 900 square foot organic gardener and a 10,000 acre crop farmer than differences - tho it seems we often get very hung up on the differences. :)

--->Paul

Great thread!

I'm a firm believer in "Work Smarter, Not Harder" and my gardening style is Controlled Chaos...whatever, where-ever!

Composting by 'piles' in the PNW is almost more work than it's worth...at least here in the hills anyway.
The piles need lots of heat and since it doesn't really warm up here until after the 4th of July, there's not a lot of time to get the heat down into the pile.
We tend to just toss stuff out into the garden (drives the chickens crazy because they can see the 'goodies' but can't get to 'em). We've had potatoes grow from peelings that we've tossed out there. (tomatoes and peppers too).
We are also surrounded by Oaks and Firs and believe me I take advantage of the bizillion oak leaves that fall. If I want to keep weeds out of a bed or if I want to start a new bed I pile the leaves there, (covered with netting to keep my chickens from spreading the pile) come Spring I rake the leaves away and there's a nice new planting spot full of worms and nice plantable soil.
Once I'm over the guilt of my new canner I'll track down that book.

who says I was forcing? just suggesting

my soil is acid, I add ash from the native trees we harvest for firewood, which in the natural cycle on this land would have been deposited as ash in sporadic fires.

How does a forest get nitrogen without cover crops of legumes? it rains lichen and gets it from leaves. There are of course native legumes that grow in the forest, but not near enough to fix all the nitro needed, it's got a varied supply system.

Should a desert grow a forest? is it "designed" to? no, "but" the Sahara used to be forested(ish), the mediterranean used to be forested(cedars of lebanon), Easter Island used to be forested--what is it we rail against in the health of the planet? deforestation.

Just a different way of thinking. And it's always useful to research the historical ecosystem of one's locale before being terraformed by humans.

Actually I just read an article in the paper about vineyards around here companion planting the grapes with other crops and running sheep and chickens in the vines at opportune times. It's working well, it benefits the grapes and provides extra income for the vintner, they can do CSA along with the grapes.

Sorry, did not mean to imply you. There are many groups afoot that would wish to do so, hear from them from time to time.... Even myself, I will say hey, here is a great way to do things! Without thinking, it works 'here' but wouldn't work 'there'. That sort of thing. I didn't mean nothin' by what I said, was just an example of how this thread is a nice way of expressing your 2nd paragraph there. I musta bungled that a bit. :)

--->Paul

It recycles. Trees are very slow growth, and have deep big roots to find nutrients. Leaves fall & decay, recycling the nutrients.

Prairie grass,s ame deal.

But if you graden or farm, you are removing something - typically the higher protien seed, or a stalk with lots of sugars, or other higher nutrient stuff.

When that gets removed, you need to replave those nutients at some point, or the soil loses out.

This makes any form of farming or harvesting not realisticly sustainable in the modern world with cities of people.

That leaves me with my questions & maybe a smirk for your book - but I don't mean that in a bad way. And if we are only thinking about one or 2 people on a small plot of land, then many of those concepts can be useful, if not straight from the book you have, at least adapted to whatever land & crops one has. And frankly that is what much of agriculture has done - adapted what works to the local climate.

You need the right land to try to plant crops under the shade of a tree. 'Here' that is a disaster. It must work for you, where you do it with whatever crops grow for you. That's cool. But it just isn't gonna work around here....

--->Paul

That's ok :D

I agree that how to sustainably farm on a global scale is a horrible question that no one really wants to try to answer. I'm guessing the guy's idea is to start thinking on a personal level, making different choices, then critical mass builds to change things on a global scale. Which I totally agree with--personal responsibility always trumps legislating morality.