Closing the farm fertility loop
All of my reveling in off-farm
manure aside, one of
my big goals for the next few years is to close our homestead's
fertility loop. As the heaviest amendment, I'm working on compost
first, although mulch will likely go on my game plan eventually.
To that end, we're being much
more frugal than we have been in the past about making sure every
little bit of nitrogen ends up back in the garden. Urine is definitely
the low-hanging fruit and I'm always thrilled when I see Mark
"nitrogenate the compost pile" (as he calls it).
If you want to learn
more about our fertility sources so far, check out Soil
Amendments for the Organic Garden, which is up for preorder
and will be hitting kindles in three weeks. Enjoy!
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Hi Anna and Mark,
So here is a question: How do you tell you need more 'off farm fertility'? Plants yellow? Low nitrogen?
I like Bill Albrecht's piece about 'the problem of the proteins".
I just added some horse to my test garden. So we will see how that changes the conductivity?
A big thanks to both of you! Always a great read.
John