Cory:
The optimal solution the world over for highly leached soils is to rely mainly on tree crops, which will also cycle nutrients and can in some cases fix nitrogen. You can also apply the Fukuoka technique using perennial peanut where he used White Dutch clover, both for understory and as a living mulch for annual crops. This will enhance nitrogen and cycle phosphorous, etc. I don't know about K.
The percentage of people in Florida with vegetable gardens is very high compared with other regions I've visited and lived in (speaking of the US only). (And far more people grow fruit trees in their yards--so much so that the University has specialized information for people with 'dooryard' fruit growing.) Chemical fertilizer is used a lot, for good reason, but there are a lot of organic or quasi-organic growers also. You have to understand with high temperature and humidity and heavy leaching, that organic matter does not remain long in the soil. Sheet mulch fares better than material worked into the soil. Maintaining a high organic content in the soil is an endless fight against nature and therefore not permaculture.
You can also find drained marshland with a high muck content that will support growing for a number of years when drained. Florida was not a desert before Europeans invaded.
Bear in mind that although organic matter breaks down rapidly, it also releases nutrients when it does so. Perennials, especially woody plants, that have developed roots systems all the time are able to take this up. You will see mulberry trees heavy with fruit growing in sand that you would think suited only for mixing cement.
There are various techniques suited to specific circumstances, and gardening in the southern part of the state which has high pH soils made of degraded coral are apparently vastly different from other regions. But these are standard techniques used in various ways elsewhere.
Regarding grass, the real difficulty is to kill it when you don't want it.
The gardening problem in Florida is one of people not adapting to the circumstances. Retirees and other emigrants want their broccoli year round and spinach too. This is silly. There are good common vegetables such as pepper, okra, some types of squash, sweet potato, etc., that grow right through the brutal part of the summer. (You are here during the easy gardening part of the year.) People, myself included, come expecting a continual garden season when there are four or five short seasons, sometimes overlapping inconveniently. I find short season varieties from northern seed companies very well suited for parts of the year, because they get out a harvest before conditions change adversely. I'm also doing more and more container gardening because I can control the quality of the soil. (I make it.) There are prolific weeds that are excellent food, such as Spanish needles (Bidens sp.), which most people fight. There are Chenopodium species and tropical leaf crops that do well and in the southern half of the state perennial tropicals such as Malabar spinach, pigeon pea, winged bean, etc., have those year-round roots that catch nutrients as they leach from decomposing organic matter.
A technique that would work well here in the long term would be bio-char which has been written up in quite a few places in the last few years. This would be a great project for someone who likes to build things to make a distillation furnace a la Mollison to reduce wood to charcoal for the soil and harvest volatiles for fuel. The drawback would be finding someone willing to do this ethically, right after a hurricane when one can get paid for wood removal and FEMA wood dumps are overflowing. Otherwise, the temptation would be to cut trees for this purpose. Maybe one could get a contract, though, to remove rampant exotics from Everglades National Park, and convert them to soil building and a gaseous fuel.
Some experimentation would be required to determine the degree of pulverization for different types of soil. Very finely ground charcoal would theoretically be best, but it could fall through the spaces in coarser sands like other organic particles do. So the ideal grind would be slightly coarser than the type of sand for which it is intended. As the organics in drained lands play out, this could be a high demand product.
You can't always come into a new region for a few months and work out how to deal with its peculiarities. That's what culture is for. It would be nice to develop some in this country.
Dan Hemenway
In a message dated 12/10/08 11:53:55 AM, cory8570@yahoo.com writes:
Well, I'm in Florida grappling with incredibly sandy soils. I mean, this is like beach sand, even inland! And they're trying to grow grass lawns here, it's pretty ridiculous. Lots of interesting groundcover weeds grow instead usually. I'm still figuring out which are edible. Most are nitrogen fixing - clover, ornamental peanut, etc.
I'm looking for relatively fast ways to create veggie beds so that the nutrients don't all leach right through the sand.
One person suggested using a barrier of compacted organic material to slow nutrient loss while letting water go through (layers of cardboard/organic stuff - a watered down version of "glee"). Has anybody on this list had experience with very sandy soils and remedying them simply, quickly and relatively inexpensively?
Cory
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