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

From: Tim Kiphart <kiphart_at_ev1.net>
Date: Fri, 2 Jan 2004 18:40:28 -0600

I believe Fukuoka has gone way beyond theory. Maybe his followers have not
been able to attain the results (has this been proven, are we certain???)
but my understanding is Fukuoka attained exactly what he set out to do....a
self sustaining, highly diverse landscape that serves needs beyond just food
production.

Tim
 ---Original Message-----
From: Robert Monie [mailto:bobm20001_at_yahoo.com]
Sent: Friday, January 02, 2004 11:59 AM
To: compost_tea_at_yahoogroups.com
Subject: [compost_tea] How Healthy and Self-Sufficient Can a Garden Get?


  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 - 19:58:07 EST

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