Inspector Cliff

The original recipe Steve Solomon gave me to replace the minerals in my poor soil was: 4 quarts cottonseed meal 1 quart garden lime (better to use 2/3 quart garden lime and 1/3 quart dolomite) 2 cups pelletized gypsum 3.5 cups bonemeal 2/3 cup potassium sulfate 1.5 tbsp borax 2 tbsp manganese sulfate 2 tbsp zinc sulfate 2 tsp copper sulfate 1 quart kelp meal 1/8 tsp sodium molybdate I have now added these additions to my mix for extra minerals: 1 Cup Azomite 1 Cup Sea90 1 Cup Greensand 1 Cup Magnesium Sulfate Along with this mix, I sometimes also add a quart or so of Bentonite (via unscented clumping kitty litter) to make my soil stickier. David The Good

  To till or not to till Posted on   April 29, 2015   by   AdBarefootmin To till or not to till, that is the question. The no-tillsystem works well if the ground is well-tilled, otherwise it is best to till. Tilling works best the less you till, A rototiller  tills too much, destroying soil tilth although it appears to make it look like good tilth. Tillonly until you can no-till, then no-till until you need to till. If I could insert your hands in a fertile, clay humus complex, and your fingers wiggled around deep into the soil, I could dispense with distracting dogmatic phrases like till and no-till and you would just know. An imagination of happy expanding roots intertwined with exploding microbe populations probably brings truth closer to light than is possible with words. Let’s picture what’s going on in the dark places underneath the soils covers. Earthworms are way better at tilling than humans. The no-till system would be better named the “earthworm-till ...

 Barefoot Gardener Advice: In  April  we plant onion, potato, lettuce, carrot, beet, and swiss chard. In  May  we plant beans, corn, squash, and cucumbers.  Later  in May we plant tomato, pepper, sweet potato, melon, and okra. In  June  we’ll replant the early  May  vegetables for later harvest. By the end of  July , as potatoes and onions come out, we plant fall veggies. These include cabbage, broccoli, bok choy, and then in  August  as other stuff comes out we plant kale, turnips, mustard, etc. Premier fencing offers a catalog with lots of electrical fencing information and products. Books on the subject include  Salad Bar Beef  by Joel Salatin,  Holistic Management  by Alan Savory,  Ranching Full Time on 3 Hours a Day  by Cody Holmes,  No Risk Ranching  by Greg Judy, and works by Allen Nation, whose magazine is called “Stockman Grass Farmer”. Acres, USA has many of these book...