[Scpg] Sandy soils

[Permacltur at aol.com]

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 at 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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