The Circle of Life is Made of Leaves (and Big Logs)

“I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.”--Willa Cather, O Pioneers (1913)

One of the unfortunate consequences of living in a drought-prone area is the occasional need to cut down dead or dying trees which should have been healthy for many years to come.  We at Myrtle’s place are in the middle of just such a project, with three exceptionally large elm trees all having died during the last couple of summers – had they only been able to hold out one more year, Summer 2014 was especially wet by comparison to the dry blast furnaces of the last couple of years.

Felled logs make excellent garden bed borders

We have undertaken this sad task at precisely the time of year when we are ordinarily thinking a lot about our trees anyway, given that we are on the verge of the autumnal leaf-drop season.  Of course, a lot of leaves drop throughout the year, simply based on the wide variety of species of trees and bushes on our lot, but the largest number of our trees conform to the stereotypical fall foliage festival, and so, we are eagerly anticipating that day (probably in October, but one never knows for sure) when our tallest oaks start looking a little pale, and then overnight turn to gold, and then quickly to red, and then quickly to bare.

The first signs of the coming of fall actually come from our grape vines, which start going all brown and crinkly in late August every year, though they manage to limp along sometimes until cooler weather finally arrives shortly before Halloween.  Every year the timid among Brazos Valley gardeners wonder if they’ve done something wrong, if their muscadine vines are dying… and every year, they come back stronger than before, often because of and not just in spite of the abuse and neglect they received the year before.

We find a lot of surprises when the grape leaves start falling.  Some of these surprises are charming and amusing, like the birds’ nests tucked away in precarious nooks and crannies that are tantalizingly oh-so-close-and-oh-so-far-away from our cat’s reach.  Some are natural and important ecologically, but still give us the willies, like giant nests of wasps going about their business mere inches above our heads on a daily basis with us none the wiser… until the leaf cover falls.

We know, though, that the falling of the grape leaves is the surest sign that we are entering an important part of the leaf cycle of our garden.  Er… life cycle.  Sorry about that.

Chickens in the foreground.  Oaks in the background.
The oaks are the tall ones who don't cluck.

Anyway, as we were saying… we frequently joke that we operate on an oak leaf economic basis.  The bedding for our chickens comes from a three-foot deep layer of oak leaves, for example, and as that stews and composts it becomes the rich hummus which we use to fill our raised planter boxes for our various veggies.  Likewise, while we use cypress mulch for our pathways, when we mulch our herbs and vegetables we use the much cheaper and much more readily available oak leaf mulch – sometimes whether we plan to do so or not, particularly in our herb beds directly beneath the canopy of our largest water oak, which exfoliates so dramatically that there is simply no way we could keep the leaves out of the rosemary even if we wanted to, which, of course, we don’t.

There is almost unanimous support in the composting world for including leaves in any mix of organic matter being broken down for soil nutrition, and there are good reasons for that.  We have mentioned before that the healthiest soils are those which best reflect the natural growing conditions for whichever ecological niche you happen to occupy.  In most of the world, the biggest contributors to the native “compost” will be trees and shrubs, and usually it will be the deciduous varieties of each.

But… apart from their obvious bounty, why?  What makes leaves so important nutritionally for the myriad plants and animals that live on them?

The primary clue comes from the fact that leaves are so important to the plants which grew them in the first place.  Photosynthesis – the conversion of light to food – is the first and foremost function of leaves.  Their green color comes from the chlorophyll which forms the building blocks of their light-conversion-engines, and the spines and veins you can see in a leaf if you hold it up to the light show that they are very much more akin to animal life forms than we typically give them credit for being.  Trees and shrubs have circulatory systems, and it wouldn’t be too far off the mark to credit them with a central nervous system, albeit one that reacts somewhat differently from what you might see in the animal kingdom.

Pretty much everything in our garden is growing in
composted oak leaves, even the stuff in baskets.

The process of leaf loss is technically referred to as abscission, and though it happens every year, it never ceases to amaze us.  In temperate, boreal, and seasonally dry climates, abscission allows the tree to allocate resources properly for the seasonal unavailability of one or more essential components of its usual life-cycle.  Basically, in cooler climates, or in regions far enough north that winter daylight is insufficient for enough photosynthesis to meet usual nutritional needs, or in areas where long monsoon rains are followed by many months of drought-like aridity, trees will shed their leaves and “shut down” – the metabolism of the entire organism slows to as close to nothing as possible, and the plant waits for conditions to become favorable again before sprouting new leaves.

Obviously, given this strategy, the tree or shrub would not want to discard leaves which still had any sort of nutritional value to the organism as a whole, and for that reason alone one might question whether fallen leaves have any organic value, but that would be an oversimplification.  There is still plenty left in the biochemical goodie bag of a fallen leaf, it’s just that it is not in a form readily accessible to the plant “as is”.

It doesn't matter where you are on our property, the
big oaks out front dominate the horizon.  Good.

In addition to creating energy, leaves are often storehouses for energy, as well.  Further, many of the defense mechanisms plants use to fend off foraging animal life – thorns made of tightly arrayed lignins, tannins, other natural poison compounds – are comprised of nutritional components which have been allocated for the purpose of defense, and which are readily broken down in the compost heap (or the natural hummus of a decomposing forest floor), but which would not be easily broken down by the tree itself when getting ready for a long winter’s nap.

It makes sense, then, that the animals which forage on green leaves would ignore fallen browns, reds and yellows, but it also makes sense that a whole new category of creatures would feast on the discard pile.  A wide variety of insects and worms (not to mention microbes), in addition to molds and other miscellany, go to town on the forgotten side of the forest salad bar.  And that’s before even considering the leaves that get hauled off to the chicken coop, where they get mixed in with… ahem! other organic materials.

Even if we didn’t use fallen leaves in our garden or our chicken coop, of course, it still goes without saying that a pile of raked up leaves is just plain fun to jump in.

Happy farming!

It's a Dirty Job, But Somebody's Gotta Do It

Bulding Soils for Better Crops, Fred Magdoff’s and Harold Van Es’s homage to organic matter and its importance to soil health, references several case studies where the addition of readily available cheap or even free soil nutrient sources, such as leaves or wood chips from curbside trash pickup, must eventually be reduced once soil has reached an optimum percentage of organic material – somewhere between 3.5-5% – because further input of rotting material would lead to nutrient leaching after harvest.

At Myrtle’s place, we are used to asking ourselves “Why?”  And we are not at all pleased when we are told “You can’t do that!”

Now, we typically apply these irreverent and anti-authoritarian qualities towards those who suggest ridiculously conformist ideas, like “You can’t grow vegetables without fertilizer and pesticide.”  However, even people who know what they are talking about occasionally say something that makes us go, “What?”

Nutrient leaching is a concept that we simply refuse to accept.  It is real enough, of course; that’s not what we are saying.  Nutrient leaching is the runoff of things like nitrates or phosphorous from your topsoil, and it has serious consequences for groundwater supplies.  We are in no way suggesting that these very real issues are not a concern.

Rather, we don’t believe that high nutrient values in post-harvest soil necessarily have to result in those nutrients running off, at least not in the context of the small farm or garden plot.

Every good thing has its point of diminishing returns, of course, but to date we have seen no literature which suggests it is even possible to reach the level of organic matter in your soil which plants simply cannot take advantage of.  For anyone who has ever gone a week without turning their compost, you can relate to what we are saying.  Having to pull weeds from the compost before turning it shows just exactly how lovey-dovey the relationship is between growing things on the one hand and dead and decaying things on the other.

We are going to experiment this fall with a garden plot design whose intent is to maximize organic matter.  As we have described on numerous occasions, soil in the Brazos Valley is equivalent to the wet clay any potter would be proud to slap on a wheel.  In addition, however, it is also sadly lacking in what Magdoff and Van Es describe as “living, dead and very dead” materials.  Weeds do very well here; everything else has traditionally required a lot of external inputs.

We aim to break that mold on a large scale by doing what we have been doing all along, only in a more concerted way.  We have often talked about the deep bedding method we use with our chickens, wherein we lay down about three feet of composting leaves in the chicken coop.  The chickens then poop on the leaves, and turn the leaves over as they scratch for bugs.  This stirs the compost tea in such a way as to reduce the manure smell to negligible levels, in addition to creating the perfect external input for the garden.

We can’t really add any more chicken poop to the mixture, having maxed out how many chickens we can have in our coop, but we can do something about where the organic mixture gets off to once it’s in the garden.  Runoff from topsoil requires two key elements:  somewhere to run off from, and somewhere to run off to.  The from is still the same – the places in the garden where we apply the compost.  The to, however, is something we can control.

We are going to kill two birds with one stone; we have a lot of useless clay, compacted to the point of almost being adobe brick, which we are removing from the fish pond.  We need some way to stop topsoil from running off from the vegetable plots.

Put two and two together, and you come up with a low berm surrounding the vegetable garden, composed of solid clay.  Any soil eroding from raised mounds or rows in the vegetable garden will simply fill a furrow between the sides of the roughly rectangular berm, and will be a great place to plant the next season’s row of vegetables.  In fact, if we play our cards right, this may be a way to improve the soil tilth when we eventually move to reduce tillage – meaning we may not have to turn over the soil so often, or resort to using a roto-tiller.  Since our garden plot will eventually be comprised almost entirely of the detritus of rotted leaves and chicken poop mixed into the slimy, sludgy soil, the aeration should improve dramatically over what you get with solid Brazos Valley clay.

This would not be a good idea for a large plot, nor for a plot where the prevailing soil type is not compacted clay, like it is here in College Station, because runoff is not the only source of groundwater contamination.  Seepage is another means for high nitrogen or phosphorous content of topsoil to pollute the groundwater supply, and if you were working in a rocky or sandy topsoil, the seepage would be unacceptably high; excess nutrients would therefore be almost as bad a thing as insufficient nutrients in such soils.

In the Brazos Valley, however, if we can minimize the amount of water retention, we can minimize the amount of seepage.  This secondary source of contamination we hope to contain through aggressive planting of sunflowers on the perimeter of the garden.  This solves multiple problems, first as a trap crop keeping birds from harvesting our vegetables, and second as a means of soaking up water and nutrients from deeper in the soils.  Studies in the plains states have indicated that sunflowers do a good job of drying out soils to a surprising depth of 8-10 feet, which is more than sufficient, given how close to the surface our bedrock lay, to prevent excessive seepage from our topsoil.

Since we have a fairly small plot, we will be able to test the soil within the berm, the soil surrounding the berm, and also the mineral content of the nearest source of groundwater (the fish pond!) and get a pretty good idea of whether our theory is correct.

What we expect is that without having the open irrigation so prevalent in large scale operations, where there is simply no preventing rain water from running off the crop land and into the surrounding ecosphere, we should be able to get organic matter percentages in our soil of 10% or more and still have no appreciable impact on the surrounding water supplies.  If this turns out to be true, we suspect that our produce yields should increase geometrically, with no negative consequences to the environment. 

Magdoff and Van Es actually make numerous references to small market produce plots when discussing methods for adding organic matter and for reducing tillage; they point out that some of the unique qualities of this type of business preclude the preferred methods of improving soil, notably the use of cover crops.

This makes perfect sense; if the “growing season” is actually a year-long term, the way it is in most of Texas, then a vegetable gardener is likely to have no true “fallow” season as it is understood by large scale farmers from anywhere else in the country.  However, by essentially containerizing a roughly 1200 square foot vegetable plot, we believe we will be giving ourselves a shot at making the perfect soil.

Fingers and wingtips are crossed!  Shovels are at the ready!

Happy farming!

Use What You've Got, When You've Got It

We plan on buying an electric car at some point.  That preface is necessary, because what I am about to share with you sounds like exactly the sort of nutty, hare-brained-scheme we usually run with, only this time, we're not going to, so I want to make absolutely sure everybody is on the right page before I begin.

You can run a car on chicken poop.

Just a sample:

Harold Bate, chicken farmer and inventor from Devonshire, England says that you can power your motor vehicles with droppings from chickens, pigs or any other animal of your choice... even with your own waste! To prove his statement is no idle boast, Harold has been operating a 1953 Hillman and a five-ton truck on methane gas generated by decomposing pig and chicken manure for years.

 We were looking for some kind of guidance on the science of composting with chicken waste, and we stumbled across this article on Bate's Methane Car.  Which is interesting, I suppose, but is kind of out of the line of what we were hoping to find.

See, every time we mention casually that we deep bed our chickens, and we let their poop mingle with the 2-3 feet deep leaf mixture until the compost tea matures, and we then apply that to our garden beds, we get the same nonsense response from people who think they are being helpful:  "Oh, you can't apply that directly.  It'll burn your plants!"

Yeah.

Because they've tried that very thing so often before, and that's what happened...

Sadly, however, the science of compost is very arcane, and closely held in academic circles.  For practical advice, you'll get "experts" saying useful things like "Put in a lot of organic material".  Really?  Because we had been thinking of trying to compost a bunch of 2 liter plastic coke bottles.  So you're saying leaves and stuff would work better?

The advice we were seeking had to do with:

• What types of leaves work best
• Which specific materials are best suited to adjusting pH levels up or down
• Which specific materials release which specific nutrients, and at what rate, when allowed to rot for certain amounts of time
• Which specific materials work best with each other (Is chicken poop and oak leaf a good combination?  Or should we emphasize pine needles?)

And so on.

We know from experience and from anecdotal evidence that we should use pine needles to mulch our blackberries; the moisture retention properties are just right, and the pine needles tend to acidify the soil to just about the exact level necessary.

Unfortunately, the best available advice and evidence is all anecdotal.  Until we find a good recipe book for compost for the large-scale gardener/small-scale farmer, we'll just keep using old-wives tales, and running across the occasional article about ideas even zanier than our own.

Happy farming!

Happenings in February....

Okay, so, this is Texas, which means that we've either already had our last freeze, or else we're a month away from having our last freeze.

Makes planting something of a mystery.

Anyway, we've put tons and tons of compost (or at least wheelbarrows and wheelbarrows of it) on our 10 raised beds; we've mulched the blackberries, which are beginning to sprout, and we've got plans to buy a cistern for rainwater collection.

And... we started a blog.

More pictures to come soon. I want y'all to be impressed, but without getting the wrong idea. We're amateurs. Ambitious amateurs, but amateurs nonetheless.