No till container size ? Help!

tream247 · Oct 3, 2016

Hey folks happy growing! Okay we need some advice from you no till gardeners we are looking to switch over from supersoil to no till we have a perpetual system and flower in a 4x4 we have both 5 and 7 gallon ego pots what size should we start our living soil in ? All and any advice appreciated

Vnsmkr · Oct 3, 2016

tream247 said:
Hey folks happy growing! Okay we need some advice from you no till gardeners we are looking to switch over from supersoil to no till we have a perpetual system and flower in a 4x4 we have both 5 and 7 gallon ego pots what size should we start our living soil in ? All and any advice appreciated

You really need at least 15 gal pots to take advantage of no till though 25's preferred

greasemonkeymann · Oct 3, 2016

tream247 said:
Hey folks happy growing! Okay we need some advice from you no till gardeners we are looking to switch over from supersoil to no till we have a perpetual system and flower in a 4x4 we have both 5 and 7 gallon ego pots what size should we start our living soil in ? All and any advice appreciated

for not tills you are trying to replicate a BED moreso than a container.
past that no-tills tend to run a lil dry in a bout two or three runs
phosphorus and calcium are the most common concerns
you'll want/need a bunch of fresh castings and compost to get it through
remember you are trying to replicate nature in a no-till, so the majority of the reamending is done via topdressing

iHearAll · Oct 10, 2016

so is burying compost in the container between runs considered tilling? consider a rodent burrowing and dying underground. itd ferment in the ground if the tunnel collapsed. huge for instance but its quirks like that that make nature work anyway right?

calliandra · Oct 11, 2016

iHearAll said:
so is burying compost in the container between runs considered tilling? consider a rodent burrowing and dying underground. itd ferment in the ground if the tunnel collapsed. huge for instance but its quirks like that that make nature work anyway right?

Yeah thats that thing about disturbance and succession - in a full forest, things slow down alot - until there is a disturbance, like a tree collapsing. Then a frenzy of renewed life.
Our hesitance to use disturbance consciously IMO has its roots in our conservationist approach to nature - as in we need to protect nature from us. But we now need to take the next step and think more along the lines of cooperation and peaceful coextistence. It's a paradigm shift in a way, but one we'd better get doing (as we are here!) if we want to have a chance at turning our destructions around.

greasemonkeymann said:
for not tills you are trying to replicate a BED moreso than a container.
past that no-tills tend to run a lil dry in a bout two or three runs
phosphorus and calcium are the most common concerns
you'll want/need a bunch of fresh castings and compost to get it through
remember you are trying to replicate nature in a no-till, so the majority of the reamending is done via topdressing

There's this no-till guy who did an experiment over a few years, to see whether crop rotation is actually unnecessary.
While there are some unknowns to his experiment that make his results not quite conclusive to my mind, I thought it interesting - he found that after 3-4 years of planting the same crop on the same spot, yields diminish and crops no longer grow as well.

Seen from a purely soil food web perspective, the logics would be that the same crop does better and better over time, since soil life is finetuned to exactly that plant's needs. In fact, Elaine Ingham expressly proposes this.

May be a question of stepping back for the whole picture to find what other things could be factoring in there...

iHearAll · Oct 11, 2016

calliandra said:
Yeah thats that thing about disturbance and succession - in a full forest, things slow down alot - until there is a disturbance, like a tree collapsing. Then a frenzy of renewed life.
Our hesitance to use disturbance consciously IMO has its roots in our conservationist approach to nature - as in we need to protect nature from us. But we now need to take the next step and think more along the lines of cooperation and peaceful coextistence. It's a paradigm shift in a way, but one we'd better get doing (as we are here!) if we want to have a chance at turning our destructions around.

There's this no-till guy who did an experiment over a few years, to see whether crop rotation is actually unnecessary.
While there are some unknowns to his experiment that make his results not quite conclusive to my mind, I thought it interesting - he found that after 3-4 years of planting the same crop on the same spot, yields diminish and crops no longer grow as well.

Seen from a purely soil food web perspective, the logics would be that the same crop does better and better over time, since soil life is finetuned to exactly that plant's needs. In fact, Elaine Ingham expressly proposes this.

May be a question of stepping back for the whole picture to find what other things could be factoring in there...

there was a member here a few months back that ended up getting nodules formations on their root. they planted in the same spot using the same method for a few year (actualtime??idk). to me that was sign of a fungle infection similar to that which takes down large or old trees

calliandra · Oct 11, 2016

iHearAll said:
there was a member here a few months back that ended up getting nodules formations on their root. they planted in the same spot using the same method for a few year (actualtime??idk). to me that was sign of a fungle infection similar to that which takes down large or old trees

They say the meek shall inherit the Earth

greasemonkeymann · Oct 11, 2016

calliandra said:
There's this no-till guy who did an experiment over a few years, to see whether crop rotation is actually unnecessary.
While there are some unknowns to his experiment that make his results not quite conclusive to my mind, I thought it interesting - he found that after 3-4 years of planting the same crop on the same spot, yields diminish and crops no longer grow as well.

...

and even more so for no-till, I've done no-till grows, and to a degree I still do, but I re-compost every 2nd run
We need to remember that in order for a lot of the nutrients to be used, the roots must grow through them in order to absorb them
otherwise we need to feed with chelated nutrients.
or lots of teas, but even that has it's drawbacks.
it's tricky, but once you get it down, it's not too hard
For me, and I know I sound like a broken record, amended compost is where it's at.
Let all those mix up and proliferate with microbes, age, and be all nice and cycled, and it's like steroids for your plants.
Hydro guys often argue the actual science behind the uptake of nutrients, saying it's the same process, for chemicals as it is for organics, they are indeed correct.
And that why cycled compost works so perfectly, because it's all readily available, in small amounts, that is held with together with the perfect CEC of humus.
it's all a perfect system, which really shouldn't surprise anyone considering that's how forests work.

calliandra · Oct 11, 2016

Ok so I wrote a whole post arguing and ruminating and scratched it haha
I agree and I disagree. The cat is alive and dead :bigjoint:

calliandra · Oct 11, 2016

What about earthworms.
They play an enormous role in micro-tilling the soil, bringing organic material down into the soil where the roots are going to grow through, rejuvenating and fluffing it up.
I wonder how much they contribute to maintaining the soil in no-till?

I just remembered how Herwig Pommeresche, that Norwegian who feeds his garden fresh plant material and harvests 18kg of onions per m². He doesn't till his soil either and has been doing this for I know not how many years. And his soil looks like a wormbin lol

No till container size ? Help!

tream247

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Vnsmkr

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