In the weeks coming up to early Spring, most of our plans are made and in place. We know pretty much what we are going to grow and where it will all go, before actually starting to put stuff into the ground. And, as we have in all previous years, we fail in enacting a large part of our plans for many reasons. Weather is the ecstatic part of our plan. Nature will do what it does and nothing we plan can change things. Planning is a static thing. We spend time learning new things, looking for pieces of a puzzle aimed at making the Farm produce stuff people will buy. Every year brings a new opportunity to do what we came to do when we bought this place and took up the work. The Farm has it's own schedule, if we fought this idea we'd lose. Despite all of this, every year I try to come up with ideas on how to get the job done. The New Year's Resolution habit has been something I've done for decades. I would pick one thing to learn, one thing to do, and learn to do it; the list of stuff I've learned is pretty overwhelming (you'd think one of them might have made money). Two years ago I spent my spare time looking at Compost stuff. Last year it was all about Pest Control. This year I'm hip deep in soil science. My focus is on improving the soil below the surface, without actually going down into the dirt to get there.
Last year's no-till effort was all about attracting the right sort of animals, worms, and discouraging the wrong sort, beetles. My brother remarked that he had left a straw bail on our soil for a week and when he opened it there were literally hundreds of Compost Worms trying to eat an entire Straw Bail,this tells me the Compost Worms are abundant and happy. The questions of improving worms is the Earthworm population that actually lives in the soil, not Compost Worms live in stuff above the soil surface, like piles of leaves and this prepares the compost for being made into Soil Organic Matter (SOM). But Earthworms take in the clay, sand, and Soil Organic Matter and pass the mix through their digestive system. It comes out behind the worms in clumps which are covered over in digestive microbes.
These microbes release the nutrients they find pre-digested in these clumps. The microbes eat the clumps, they accumulate nutrients in their little bodies, and when they die the nutrition is released into the soil ready for plants to use. Clumping soil is also better because it has space for roots to grow where they will find water and ready nutrients ready for plants to use. But there's one more peice of the puzzle to think about and it takes a bit of learning.
Fungus is among us. For our purposes I won't go into how fungi are everywhere, on everything, in the air we breath . . . The truth is Fungus is everywhere. But this is about garden soil fungus and there are a few basic types. The first are the Mushroomy sort of fungi that live on rotting wood. This sort of fungus s helpful to farming because it breaks down large wood that worms cannot eat. Permaculture farming is often based on putting logs under the dirt and eventually this leads into some really nutrient heavy soils which don't require much water. There are fungus that break down animal and vegetable matter and these are the things I am writing about today. Fungus processes dead things so once the microbes I wrote of earlier die off this makes room for fungus to come and break their little bodies into their useful parts. Once particular sort of fungi, the mycorrhizal (literally "fungal root") type, live on the surface of living root systems. There are two basic types of mycorrhizal fungi I am spending time learning this year. Both do basically the same job so I'll treat them the same.
Endo and Ecto Mycorrhizae live on plant roots and connect the roots to the soil in a broad web. The fungi finds loose bits of nutrition and water, carries it to the surface of plant root systems, and trades it for stuff the plants make, like sugars. These fungi extend the effective size of a plant's roots, so less root is needed to support more plant, more fruiting. Endo Mycorrhizae does this best for annual plants, like Summer vegetables and flowers that live through the Winter in seeds. Ecto Mycorrhizae does this too, but with perennial plants that live through the Winter in the roots of plants. Both of these types of fungi do much the same job, and just like other fungi they are literally everywhere, but the difference between a good garden and a really great garden is in making the conditions right for these two types of fungi to thrive in the soil all of the time. There's competition to think about.
There are a lot of fungal types, most do something of the same job, breaking down the dead into parts that life can use. These two types specialize in carrying this stuff down to plants in a symbiotic relationship, but the size of the fungal colony waxes and wains, depending on what is being grown. The right conditions are not always present to maintain a huge colony of Endo or Ecto types the whole year around, so colonies have to be re-established and those colonies have to re-grow into a useful size to support great plant growth. So the question becomes: If the soils is right, the worms are there, the microbes are dying in their millions . . . How do we encourage the right sorts of fungi so that our plants can develop into living their best lives? So my experiment this year is to do a few things and see what happens.
The first thing I will do has already started. The first things we did were to build a great soil mix so that the worms would come. part of this is to be really aware of soil compaction so that our worms weren't driving around harder soils, part of this was to establish a no-till system that didn't chew our worms up. The worms brought the right sorts of microbes. Not mixing air into the soil encourages the right sorts of microbes and discourages the wrong sorts. Too much air encourages microbes that eat plant matter very quickly, so it isn't there to hold water or clump behind worms. Too little air ar the microbes we get work very slowly and give off methane gasses. The right sort carefully breaks down plant matter. These steps are already working today.
The second thing we need to do, the part of this year's plan where we make the change, is to put a bit of these Mycorrhizae type into the soil when we plant starts and seeds. Then maintain the soil with an eye toward encouraging the fungi to remain alive and healthy all the year around, so when we plant our veggies and flowers, there is already a thriving fungal community in place with stuff to offer the plants. This ought to encourage rapid plant development and make our short -bottom of a narrow valley- growing season to produce more and produce it more quickly.
Our no-till system puts worm food on top, keeping our worms happy. Keeping our feet off the planting spaces and using soil watering systems keep our worm habitat happy. The worms spread the microbes, making the microbes happy. Feeding the worms and protecting the soil makes the microbial growth environment happy. If we put some of the Endo and Ecto Mycorrhizae directly on the roots of plants, or in places where seeds will sprout roots, our fungal colonies won't need to find roots to work with, making the fungi happy. And, finally, if the fungi become well entrenched in soils where things grow all of the time, the environment for plants will be completely happy. Then we might be happy with the increase in produce that we can sell and spend the money on stuff that will make our farm happier.
