The nature corner that makes you happy

[Swiss_Knight]

Hello,

I see that it talks a little bit about gardening around here, it's pretty cool, suddenly I don't really know if I dare to venture out but at first we will say yes and if I'm not in the good category, please let me know.

I don't have much to say about my way of gardening ... I'm not sure if it's because it finds it difficult to resonate with gardeners whom I would call "conventional" so that everyone can imagine a little the thing and that (far too) rare are my discoveries of people who think like me (...).

So I wouldn't make a whole lot of cheese out of it, well, too bad for those who like fondue or raclette, and to tell the truth it's good, because I don't really like labels, whatever they are, so I simply say that I "" garden "" (I speak abusively of "gardening" when in fact, I only observe relationships being established, unraveled, or watching plants grow - some usually being referred to as vegetable gardens - and ultimately, eat some without a certain pleasure;)) with nature as well as my meager understanding of ecosystems and the functioning of environments that I would describe as "interfaces" (ecotones) which for me are the richest and most interesting than carry our planet Earth ... besides, isn't life also a simple interface between "what comes before" and "what comes after"? In short.


Here are some (my faith more really very recent) photos of this place of a good fifty square meters that I have the immense privilege (it is one for me in any case, the access to the ground is not always very easy in an increasingly urbanized society) to be able to "manage" for three short years now while respecting a certain number of ... uh ... "rules" or "principles" which stem from my skills and my observation:



















That's it, that's all for now, if you have any questions or whatever, don't hesitate, I will try to answer them as far as possible and as far as is technically feasible.

[Earthquake]

Splendid garden, vegetable patch and photos.

The only catch is that you don't seem to be lazy!

[Stef72]

pretty garden! corn and beans is a milpa test? It's nice to see what we can do in a garden when we settle for several years in a row ...

[Swiss_Knight]

Hello,

yes it is a fact, when it was set up it especially asked me for work for the mounds as well as for the harvesting of organic matter.
I needed to let off steam at that time!
If it had to be done again, not sure that the mounds are an option to tell the truth, because, in all objectivity, even if it grows on it, it took a while before returning to the "level before the mounds" on half of them. And I am fortunate to have excellent basic soil.
I was sorely lacking in organic matter, it is a fact. And I still lack some today. It's hard when you're not motorized for that. It melts like snow in the sun finally organic matter, we do not realize that once we try!

For the rest, I am a lazy bastard, it is a fact, and the two years that followed its implementation I did not do much more than plant / harvest and bring a little wood or mo on the surface to feed the soil. For example, I spread my kitchen compost directly on the surface.

From time to time, I also like to bring to the surface an old piece of wood in a very very advanced state of decomposition that I take from the forest. It allows me to bring a little life and diversity. I try to cover it with a little mowed grass or dead leaves to keep it interesting humidity (it's for the critters that live there).



For beans, corn and squash yes we can say it was a milpa test. It worked well, except that my corn took a long time to grow than the beans had taken over (so wooden stakes required for a while).

[Swiss_Knight]

Hello.


At the risk of sounding realistic, I still ask myself a big question with everything I read and observe about all the methods allowing a "better" gardener and with greater respect for ecosystems:

Can we cultivate a surface sustainably?

Under this question hides in fact a lot of things including a horizontal transfer of matter that I mentioned a few weeks ago on the main thread and which underpins a purely mathematical principle: if we want to increase the fertility of a surface to cultivate it, with the hay method (or any other cover of organic matter that said) one inevitably reduces fertility on another.
The real problem is that to provide this cover, this other area must be larger than the area you cultivate on the one hand, and on the other hand than mowing the hay, putting it in bales or bales round and its transport are large consumers of fossil fuels.

So under my interrogation really hides that of knowing if it is possible to do without all of this, to be really sustainable. There is no reason that all the other living species arrive there and not us finally! Damn what!
Because under the guise of highlighting "an improvement in local conditions", "greater respect for biodiversity" or "production without too much effort and intervention" is in fact hiding the substitution of an energy which should be that of our own body by a third energy, in this case fossil today.

From a purely logical point of view, I can't find a way out of this thorny question that pisses me off ... or rather, if, I see two, inseparable, and which are scary because that this is what we (future generations) really expect, I think:
- recycling and return to the earth that fed us with our bodily waste to say things clearly, in order to really complete the nutrient cycles.
- manual work which takes my faith, a lot of time, so much time that it would perhaps fill our days and our lives with it, leaving us little time for "other things", all these things. futile things that fill, what am I saying, drown our daily lives today ... which would bring us back shamefully (personally I would not find it particularly shameful but for many it would be difficult to conceive) on the same level as all the other living species on this planets: to live = to exert oneself to find daily the energy for our own functioning and to ensure the reproduction of the species. Bar point.

[olivier75]

Swiss Knight,
The living soil revolution is underway, Didier's vision, and therefore related posts, is only one way among many others to move forward. By prioritizing the saving of time and effort, horizontal transfer is relatively important. Many times, he, like us, we wonder about minimizing the impact of this transfer. The answers are very local and personal.
A first step and to stop the degradation, even if we have to limit the natural deterioration of other places.
The first virtue to highlight laziness is, for me, to put or put back as many people as possible in gardening, the vegetables harvested are very often at the expense of other very industrial, even not vegetables.
In arable farming, plowing disappears even very quickly, direct seeding techniques and under cover also progress, it should not be forgotten that agriculture is not managed over a year, that the material is not changed so easily, and that it is not yet widely distributed, and that our farmers have limited room for maneuver.
Olivier.

[Ahmed]

I think, a bit like Olivier75, that the question of sustainability arises in two dimensions: an immediate dimension, in which the transfer of fertility is done as best it can, but which constitutes an immense progress with respect to the usual conceptions and practices and a more conceptual dimension and long-term.
In this last issue, I am convinced that it will be possible, in a future where new practices triumph, to greatly limit these transfers, on the one hand by optimizing them locally, on the other hand by perfecting the basic technique ; for example by moving towards an alternation or a mixture of hay / BRF and green manure input.

Note that fertility is never a pure stock, but essentially a flow, therefore something tendentially positive (fortunately for us!). Note also that the transfer of fertility, if properly managed, generates equivalent production (massively speaking) in a smaller space and not pure extractivism which would ruin one place for the benefit of another ...

[Did67]

The starting question is an excellent question.

But it seems to me biased by an unclear "vision" of what fertility is. Moreover, difficult to define, in absolute terms.

In this case, with regard to "horizontal transfers", it is a question of "fertility in non-aerial chemical elements" (therefore excluding C, H, O and N - in part only for the latter) and of transfers of 'energy.

We have indeed mentioned the risk of an excess of certain elements, following an "abusive" use that I make of hay, to cultivate laziness (the absolute non-working of the soil).

In this radical form, in fact, the question of sustainability arises ...

But we should take into account the fact that everywhere, by degradation of the source rocks, a slight fertility is constantly reconstituted. This is why a natural meadow, a mountain pasture, an alpine pasture, is never empty, although animals have grazed there year after year, for centuries and so we extract cheese, meat for centuries...

The reflection therefore seems "truncated" to me by this conception in which we would have a certain finite stock of elements, which we transfer from a place A to a place B ... What we put in B would be lacking in A. ..

The debate, at my level, is less absolute. I repeat myself: as long as some allow themselves to feed 700 leisure horses, at the rate of one round bale per week, I think that we can legitimately be 000 or 2 million to cultivate 3 m² at the rate of round bales per week. an ... The debate would then be a choice of a "political" nature in the sense of city management. Knowing that there is a certain capacity to produce a certain fertility ;, what do we assign it to. To our vegetable gardens or to horses to walk, jump obstacles (since we no longer make war with it!).

And what seemed simple suddenly seems very complicated!

More prosaically, we have in fact considered producing more biomass on site, cultivating under living cover, etc. In an absolutely autonomous system (personally, I am far from it; I like bananas and mangoes too much. and many other things that I do not grow), indeed, the only leak would be faeces and urine. And therefore the need to recycle the "lost" elements via the sewers, the invention of which was the introduction of a leak of elements ... [At home, this is not the case, since I am not not connected. I recycle by the wet way (pit whose water is recycled on what I have left of meadows, which I mow, clippings that I scatter on the garden; it is therefore a system with integral recycling, by wet way, and with breaking cycles; but do not denounce me, it is not, as it stands, legal - I would have to build a micro-lagooning station, finally authorized for a few years - it is in the works!)]

[Did67]

... if you want to increase the fertility of one area to cultivate it, with the hay method (or any other cover of organic matter that said) you inevitably decrease fertility on another.

The real problem is that to provide this cover, this other area must be larger than the area you cultivate on the one hand, and on the other hand than mowing the hay, putting it in bales or bales round and its transport are large consumers of fossil fuels.

There are two "shortcuts" here:

a) there is degradation of the source rocks, which releases the constituent elements of fertility; C, H and O come from the atmosphere (water and CO²): the more we "stimulate" life, the more it fixes it; the limiting factor, on a global scale is ... CO² (the system operates in just-in-time flow, with only a buffer of 0,04% CO² in the atmosphere; no human system operates with such a limited buffer! ); the N may be fixed by "legumes" (today "fabaceae").

So we can transfer elements, which are reconstituted (very exactly, foolish).

b) currently, the energy of mechanization is fossil. But it was animal traction. It could be biomethane (there are tractors running on biogas).

In fact, mowing, swathing, pressing hay is relatively peanuts! Nothing to do with energy chasms like plowing!

It is therefore an argument to be put into perspective in the energy chasm that our modern lives are: heating, traffic (cars, plane). To just denounce myself and give orders of magnitude:

- I would be surprised that my 5 round bales consume more than 5 l of diesel (I did not do the calculation, but it is probably much less)

- for my heating and hot water, I consume 4 tonnes of pellets, the equivalent of 2 l of fuel oil (hot water: CESI supplement)

- our vehicles - me and my wife, I do not count our son who cohabits - (we live outside urban areas, "in the bush" in a way) consume an equivalent of 1 lk (LPG, gasoline combined - 250 km equivalent to 25 l per cent); I forgot my trip to the Canaries in B000 (packed, maybe 5l per hundred, but a few thousand km!) ...

- I have never evaluated the "gray energies" of our consumption; it's probably more ...

It is not the 5 bales of hay from my garden that we must question, but our way of life. Mine in this case.

But who does much better ???? I do not mean that I am exemplary, but that roughly speaking, except to play ostrich, and except "severe decreasing" to live in a tipi and in quasi-autonomy, l he order of magnitude is true for most of us - and there is much worse, because for 10 years, I have been making efforts to decrease (C1, high performance boiler, fine regulation by parts, short circuits, significant self-production, etc ...).

[Swiss_Knight]

This is undoubtedly very fair for the stock of minerals in the parent rock ... it still needs to be possible to dissolve them, but let's put that reality is close.

By cons CO2 for me is not a limiting factor if not why some plants, constant CO2 rate (it is almost impossible to reduce it locally) vegetate and not others on the same plot?
This can only be explained because there are other limiting factors therefore.
Minerals on the one hand (it is enough that a vital metallic element is missing and the plant can no longer synthesize certain enzymatic compounds, therefore stops or significantly slows its growth), and then there are in addition all the external factors (diseases, etc.).



For the rest, your example probably holds water and I certainly do not do any better than you although I pay attention to many things like buying electronic devices only second-hand and only when the previous one no longer works, ban smartphones, tablets, TV, car, etc. etc. And I still have to be far from the account despite all that !!!



In the end it is not so much the quantity of fuel oil necessary for the design of X hay bales that counts but how long would it take us if we had to mow it and bring it by hand? A day ? More ? The amount of energy present in oil is colossal casually ...

If we were to replace this source of energy at the planetary level by the sole strength of our arms and admit, it's true, of a few animals (which should therefore be fed "cultivate" larger areas), we would come back to do the following calculation (at the risk of going into a nasty spin ...):

- how much land (ha) on Earth is cultivable for our annual food energy needs (and those of our 4-legged companions)? 2 billion ha? roughly huh (probably less)
- what food energy value can 1ha produce on average over a year? I don't know damn it, but let's just take a standard 80 kcal potato per 100 g => 800 kcal per kilo => 4184 [Joules / kcal] * 800 [kcal / kg] = 3.35e6 [Joules / kg].
Let’s say that we make 40 tonnes per ha that makes us, pfiou, a lot ...: 40 [t / ha] * 1e3 [kg / t] * 4184 [Joules / kcal] * 800 [kcal / kg] ~ = 1.34e11 [Joules / ha]
=> total Joules that can be produced in the year with only potatoes on Earth: 2e9 [ha] * 1.34e11 [Joules / ha] / 1 [year] ~ = 2.67e20 [Joules / year ]

compare with: annual energy needs (Joules) of 7.5 billion humans (let's assume they are all vegans and eat only potatoes to optimize as much as possible) and put 1 four-legged per 5 people, so 1,5 , 5 billion four-legged (I do not know what it consumes as energy daily a draft animal, but probably 3000x more than us, so we can count as much in 'energy equivalent'). And let's say we work well every day: XNUMX kcal / day / person on average.
=> 7.5e9 * 2 [beings] * 3000 [kcal / day / being] * 4184 [Joules / kcal] * 365 [days / year] = 6.87e19 [Joules / year]



Is the equation soluble and if so what average standard of living would we manage to achieve in the best of cases?

- yes it seems to be, as a first approximation.
The ratio is favorable and is around 4; we can produce 4x more energy than we need to operate our bodies.
But 4x it is not huge and it would be very boring to eat only potatoes, so the production would be less and we can I think quickly fall into a ratio located somewhere between 1 and 2, hardly more.

And with that, we neither fly planes, nor drive cars, nor do we heat anything (by the way, thank you forest wood which would come to support us for that during the winter !!)

The system seems to be in a sort of almost-equilibrium for 20 billion person-equivalents, with a ladle (I simplified to the extreme we agree ...). And that's hopefully all the time.



There are two things that "bother" me, psychologically, let's say;
1) is to know that others before us have known how to do it and that others afterwards we will know (I hope) how to do "without fossil fuels", and that today we are bathed in pseudo-comfort (which is not embarrassing in itself, let's admit it, what's boring is what follows ...) while forgetting at great speed certain ancestral knowledge but oh so vital for the maintenance of our species - in the purely biological sense - on this planet. Knowledge that we absolutely must be able to put forward to transmit it, in case fossil fuels have an end .......... we never know.


I also remain convinced that it is possible to free up time and energy for something other than "energy supply" in a system where fossil fuels no longer exist, thus leaving time for artistic creation. and social exchanges (...). But this saved energy, this time saved over time in the fields, can only be done, in my humble opinion, through cooperation and societal organization, pooling and optimization of knowledge and skills.


2) to note that we waste excessively and absolutely do not know how to complete the cycles that we open, those of the chemical elements important for life in particular. Anything that "goes to the sea" will not be recoverable because it is too diluted. And getting certain chemical elements from the oceans to the interior of the continents is not an easy task (...). A matter that we bequeath on a global scale with incredible generosity, to future generations.

There too, I remain convinced that a better knowledge of ecosystems and how matter flows (major bio-geochemical cycles of the elements) work (...), will be of precious help to us on the one hand to stop destroy them and then promote them.