[compost_tea] How Healthy and Self-Sufficient Can a Garden Get?

From: Robert Monie <bobm20001_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Fri, 2 Jan 2004 09:59:10 -0800 (PST)

Hi Everybody,
 
Certainly everyone on this list believes that gardening/farming has become too chemicalized, destroying the soil web that nature took millennia to evolve. Not using chemical fertilizers and herbicides and trying to provide mulch and green cover crops to restore the natural balance are steps few would argue with.
 
But I wonder theoretically how healthy can agricultural systems (gardens, farms) become and how nearly can they approximate closed system, perpetual motion webs? This question has been asked by scientists working in the Biosphere and NASA CLESS programs, which require growing environments essentially sealed off from Earth's normal atmosphere, but it seems more interesting when applied to systems on the surface of the Earth (like yours and mine). John Jeavons, for example speculated that one could acheive a relatively closed system by allocating substantial amounts of land for compost and using just that compost to fertilize the crop section. Masanobu Fukuoka in his famous "One Straw Revolution" went even futher to claim that a self-sustaining system could be made by seeding crops directly into a thick perpetual or self-seeding ground cover of short white clover, aided by nitrogen fixing trees and shrubs (mimosa or acacia, for example).
 
I'm not sure any followers of Jeavons or Fukuoka have achieved the self-sufficiency these authors proposed, but the ideal remains an interesting one, and a fit subject for both back-yard tinkerers and serious scientific experimentors.
 
My bottom-line questions are 1) could a natural garden be acheived in which the balance of microbial life and plant health were so good that compost tea would not be necessary except rarely and briefy in extraordinary circumstances, and 2) how sustainable and self-sufficient can a growing system be? Were the hopes of Jeavons and Fukuoka unrealistic or are they theoretically attainable.
 
I hope this question is not too far from the concerns of this list. I use and apporve of aerobic compost tea myself. We often talk about the chemically bad systems that we have to try to improve. For a moment, at least, we might look at the other extreme and ask, how good can an unchemicalized system get?
 
Bob Monie


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Received on Fri Jan 02 2004 - 14:21:49 EST

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