well, melissa, are you talking about 'trash-planting' - a way of leaving everything to simply rot down, not digging or turning in and not really bothering to compost either. I do this with all my weeds around the harvested fruit trees and any areas of the allotment which I don't mind looking a bit of a sight (that's most of it then) I found I was pulling barrows and barrows of weeds, spent veg haulms and grass which took at least a year to get really good compost, even with monthly turning. I started just leaving stuff where it lay and wandering off to do something else. Some days/weeks later, the pile of rubbish had shrunk down and once I had trodden it a few times, I could pretend it was some special organic mulch instead of flung rubbish. So, although my head insists that stuff which comes out of the soil needs to be replenished, it is a battle with aesthetics but once everywhere becomes a bit of a tip anyway, it simply doesn't register - I am hoping this will make my life easier and stop me ranting about my useless slack non-weeding or planting neighbours - I was tempted to fling it on their plot but some residual good behaviour prevented me and now, it might even be a good thing.

This is the book that turned me off of spraying pesticides and brewing and spraying compost tea instead. There were other reasons--an influx of destructive insects, a drastic decrease of beneficial insects and my sweet Splash (dog) got a malignant tumor on her belly. Splash is fine after surgery.

I do believe my garden is healthier now. This is the first year I have started to see an improvement in the roses. I still have rose midge, but (it may be my imagination) there appears to be less.

As to composting, I have started to leave a few cuttings from my perennials on the ground sorta out of site. I compost, but I don't have the time or energy to turn, aerate, turn,etc.

I've been living the life of compost tea for 3 years now. So far, so good.

Barbara

It looks like you found the right book! It's great for the soil, I'm shore. If it works and your roses are healthy and growing there's nothing to worry about. A theory that fits in with your ideas and approach in general is ideal :-)

There are different viewpoints on this, and some experts put a great emphasis on composting the material before its used as soil amendment. Two things to keep in mind is that the microbes can spend more nitrogen than they are freeing and that can make the roses suffer and become a bit anemic. Well composted material doesn't have this affect. The other thing is that well composted material are suppose to have a healthier micro flora than fresh wood chips and bark, it can promonte fungus diseases.

If you have good clay of the mineral rich kind your kind of mulching might be all you need. If your soil is lacking in minerals it might need something that contain these in addition. You probably already know this very well.

I don't dare use fresh wood chips or fiber cloth under the mulch because of the fungus diseases. I live in an area with lots of rain all summer, and that might why I have such a bad experience with this. With fresh grass clippings havent noticed anything worse or better when it comes to the fungus problem.

I'm all for these organic methods, and I also like the idea of green manures, plants than build and improve soil by just growing there.

I am not familiar with the book, but from my experience it really depends with what soil you start. If it is some ex-farm field that was cultivated before, sure, it may work just fine. However, my old garden was a swamp converted into a land, very acidic and with typical marsh plants all over the place, which would not have been amended with such method alone - well, at least not in my lifetime.

Also, not always grassland turns into a forest, sometimes it just stays wasteland, there are many factors involved into that process. If the meadow is in the mature forest, eventually it will get overgrown, but if it is somewhere where there are no plants to provide seeds or conditions are not right for trees to start, it will stay something else. Also it takes years before that cycle is well under way - near my old garden some pasture got abandoned and the forest was taking it over slowly, but in 10 years tiny pines got barely higher than I am - it will be another 100 before they significantly impact the soil there.

My soil is very heavy clay that in its unamended form struggles to support life, so it doesn't generate enough weeds to make unsightly piles. If pulled or pruned plant bits look too ugly, they get tossed into the strip of brushy woods or in a low spot where nothing much is growing, because ALL, absolutely ALL our ground needs organic matter. We do compost, but there are problems with it. We have no way to chip larger branches, and with our steep ground moving anything is quite difficult, so it's simply a lot easier to chop up prunings with my secateurs and leave them in the beds. "Steep" means too steep to use a wheelbarrow.
I've never had our soil tested, but with sufficient (endless) organic amendment it seems to be pretty good: I don't see symptoms of nutritional deficiency, and it doesn't seem to be strongly alkaline, and certainly not acidic. We have dry summers, and perhaps that helps avoid problems with out-of-control microbial growth.
I agree with your comments, elemire. Actually, the book talks about how to amend powerfully acidic soil, among other things. There are a lot of abandoned fields and pastures in the area where I live, also many slide zones, and having lived here eight years I've had time to see what happens to fields that are left to themselves. Pastures do go to brush and then to trees; slide zones, that have lost all their topsoil, are often much slower to regenerate. But all this will depend on the character of the soil and other environmental conditions.
What I'm trying to do in my garden is get to the point of having colonizing shrubs--for example roses--and scattered trees, with some meadow--the wide paths--and then more or less arresting the progression. That process is called weeding. I've had a chance to see how, once there are shrubs and a litter of organic matter, trees begin seeding all over the place. I'm forever pulling up oak seedlings, always with a pang, but there never used to be any when the garden was just a weedy field.
Barbara, my gardening is an ongoing, uncontrolled experiment (yes, I know, if it's uncontrolled it's not a scientific experiment) in seeing what happens when I grow a garden without any "-cides" and with just plant organic amendments. I've been gardening this way for over twenty years, and while my garden's not perfect I've never been tempted to change my basic method. And I've never had a disastrous infestation of insect or microbe, if that means anything--maybe it doesn't. I've been fortunate not to have to deal with Japanese beetles, for example, or eastern U.S. black spot. (We do have beetle problems and last year a nasty cane borer). Anyway, the experiment continues until further notice. It's good to hear from a person who has changed to this method and finds it workable. I hope your dog, and you, enjoy continued good health!
Melissa

Melissa, glad to year you're enjoying this book. It is a favorite of mine. I read it in a gulp and ought to go back and savor it more slowly. It changed some of my ideas about how to garden, too. One thing it did (by extrapolation; the book does not state this directly) was to lend weight my suspicion that spray irrigation may be better for the health of soil than drip, since you want the soil to be hydrated enough for the microbes to be active, not just supply water to the plants in isolated spots.

Rosefolly

Well don't keep us guessing - what book is it? Or have I somehow missed the info (Long day, hard at work, animal vaccinations in morning, gardening all afternoon with maddening woodwork issues, missed lunch, brain now sludge)
Cheers, Suzy

Suzy, it's a book called "Teaming with Microbes." It's a book on the soil food web and the kinds of microbes that live in the soil. One thing it states is that chemical fertilizers kill portions of the soil web because the salts in it destroy many of the microbes by sucking out the water in them, like a slug is killed by pouring salt on it. The death of the microbes affects the other organisms in the soil as well; earthworms, for example, leave.

The book says that different kinds of plants require different types of nitrogen, either nitrates or ammonium based, and that soils are either fungally or bacterially dominated depending on what kinds of plants live there. Or the kinds of plants that live in a soil depend on the kinds of microbes that live in the soil. Either or/both and, I guess.

That's the part they're talking about above, the succession of plants that are annuals or weeds with soils that are bacterially dominated, to a soil that is fungally dominated that will support shrubs (roses), trees.

The way that soils are changed, then, from a soil that is bacterially dominated and that will only naturally support annuals (weeds) to one that will support trees and shrubs, is to encourage the development of the soil food web by composting and allowing microbes themselves to reuse the rotting composted material. They will produce the kinds of nitrogen the plants need so the soil will support other kinds of plants.

The book goes on to talk about using AACT, actively aerated compost tea, to spray on your plants to increase the amount of microbial activity. That's what Barbara has been doing the last couple of years to try to increase the health of her plants and to get rid of her rose midge plague.

There's also a large amount of interplay between roots and various kinds of microbes that goes on. I just think of it all as some kind of drama that's taking place outside my home that I don't hear or see. Kind of like the drama that's going on with the insects and birds that I scarcely understand at all.

I think that Vintage Roses changed to AACT as their way of dealing with disease a couple of years ago. There are a couple of old threads that discuss his change and this book; whether they're still around, I don't know.

The way this book impacted me is a much increased awareness of soil science and the activity in the soil. As to whether the book is completely true, I don't know. I garden with manure and alfalfa, I have a used chipper shredder that I use to make mulch out of garden stuff. I sometimes use a chemical booster, especially to help the mulch compost w/o killing the surrounding plants.

Here's a link to the book. It's interesting reading, and I notice it's been revised since I bought it. Makes me wonder what's been added. FWIW. If I said something wrong about the book, please correct me. Gean

Here is a link that might be useful: Teaming with Microbes

It's a very interesting read and thanks for the book tip. Around our family cottage there was originally very wet swamp almost, pure peat moss about 3-4 foot deep in some places, and bare moutain sticking up here and there. The things that grew there were mostly pine, a peatmoss "lawn", heather and myrtiles. After the garden area was drained and ground lime stone was applied generously the soil changed within a couple of years. Now grass grow, clovers, and all kinds of flowering wild plants. The moss is still there, but I'm not fighting it. It's a pretty flat area by the sea, and fertilizing with chicken pellets, ground up seaweed, and organics in the beds are pretty easy. We have to carry it by hand (or on our back) for a few meters, but not too much. Wheel barrow is almost pracital in some places. Every other year I have trown sand on top of the ground and it sinks in with out additional effort. Winter, worms and the elements seem to blend and turn the soil over more than I imagened when I started. My plan now is to trow out some chicken pellets early in spring when frost nights loose their grip, and then not much more the rest of the season. For the flower beds I use seaweed and composts in addition. This seem to work pretty well. Here chicken pellets are the most economic stuff to buy and easy to work with, and it has lots of action on the soil. I imagine it would work well on clay too. Real clay is pretty rare around here, but there is a belt of blue grey clay that some gardeners have had to struggle with, but their gardens are green and fertile without too much work. It looks like some clay soils are easier to work with that others?

I imagen chicken pellets on top of the mulch would speed things up, it migh be worth trying in an area?

Oh Hey, Gean, thanks terrifically. AACT - how fab - my oldest boy, Rowan, also a gardener, has just this week brought me round a pump, some molasses and a bag of his housing co-op's compost. He bought me some Bocking 14 comfrey too (a good lad) as he is much more up to scratch on soil fertility research than I am. I have been using myccorhizae (sp?) for a few years now and believe fruit bushes and roses have benefitted but it is expensive to buy while AACT is easily produced without the panoply of ecological disasters incurred by so many commercial products - packaging, transport, provenance, toxic processes or by-products ....and so on. yippee. A new adventure.

Harborrose, that was a great summary of the book. I had forgotten most of the details. I found it interesting that the authors recommend keeping two compost piles-one for lawn (mostly bacterial) and one for garden beds (mostly fungal). They even tell you what to compost to obtain the desired balance.

As for me, I cannot maintain one compost pile, much less two. Maybe after retirement if I still have the strength to garden. LOL

Thanks, Melissa, for your good wishes. Yes, my garden seems to go further without as much fertilizer (Espoma and alfalfa). Things are looking pretty good in spite of a July drought and horrible heat wave that is on-going.

Barbara

Gean,
Thanks for the summary; it looks accurate to me.
The book has set me to thinking. I don't believe compost piles are feasible in my case, but I asked my husband if he could load some big empty sacks in the car and go up to the mountains in search of forest compost, which is in short supply at the farm. I want to mulch our trees with this stuff, in addition to the hay we use; and we could collect it again in the fall to help start oak sprouting. I intend to plant a lot of acorns, and think a handful of forest compost mixed with sand would help them get off to a good start. And I'm interested in the microrrhyzae (sp?) for roots of trees in particular. It's obvious that our garden in its current state is hostile to trees, and I would love to speed up the process of getting them to grow, somewhere other than in the middle of the rose and shrub beds, of course.
Melissa

Melissa, below is a link to to the mycorrhizae that I use. And here's a link to a list of mycorrhizal plants. http://www.mycorrhizae.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Plant-List-11-08.pdf

Sherry

Here is a link that might be useful: Rooter's Mycorrhizae

The natural model is coarse organic matter falling onto the top of the soil, which then gets processed by fungi and bacteria - nobody double digs the woods or starts new plants off there with amended planting holes.

I wouldn't bring forest litter in from the mountains as you may come home with a pest or pathogen you don't want.

Melissa,

I buy the compost tea kits from KISS. With Black Walnut trees all around my garden, it is difficult to know if my compost is healthy. Anyway, it is early yet. I won't be able to judge until the growing season is over. BUT, for now my roses are healthy. I believe, except for one, they would pass muster from even Olga, who's criteria for healthy roses is much more strict than mine. This is the first year I have been able to say that. Even Marie Pavie is still healthy and blooming.

The one that is not healthy and is defoliated is a shovel prune candidate-Golden Wings. The remainder have truly amazed me. I haven't even fertilized since spring. Because of the heat I don't have many blooms and of course I still have rose midge. But black spot appears to have left for places unknown.

Yes, still early. I'll let everyone know what's what in late fall when the garden shuts down. But, this time last year was when black spot hit hard. Last year was cooler than this.
Barbara

Barbara, that is truly awesome about your garden turning around. Will love to read your report about your garden later this fall. Gean

Thanks, Gean. Let's not be too hasty though. Like I said, there is still a lot of growing season left. I'll know more after this weekend. It has been too hot even to stroll in the evening. I made myself sick last Sat. working only until noon. Very hot, very humid here!

Barbara