Black Diamond Canyon Kitchen: Soil Fertility

Thankfully Rio chose to rest in the leaf mold mound, rather than the chicken poop in the foreground of the 6'x25' compost mixing bed

My biggest challenge in the ever expanding garden is building/encouraging healthy and productive soils. The native soils of Black Diamond Canyon and most of Gallup are heavy clay that's prone to compaction when watered and difficult to work (brick-like) when they dry out. Consequently, I'm constantly adding organic matter, sand, and gypsum for balance. The latter in an attempt to reduce the 'stickiness' of the inevitably high percentage of clay that will always remain in my garden beds. Anyway, the main thing is the organic matter, partly for the nutrients, but mostly for the structure and resilience it adds to the soil. Over the past several years I've added straw (too slow to break down/nutrient poor), sphagnum moss (too expensive at $13/bale), and trailer-loads of brown leaves hard to find/collect-- my favorite leaf producing trees and leaf catching fences in and around Gallup are a closely held secret). I've also added endless bags of $2 mushroom compost from Home De*, organic steer manure from the Holiday Nursery ($4), and chicken manure/kitchen compost from my own coop. And yet, my soil still leaves my wanting.

Dusty but rewarding crap

Luckily, I recently got some advice from Tom and Ella of Connections/CSA. They use manure (horse/cow/anything) gathered from local corrals to improve their soils. The decomposing hay and manure adds desperately needed porosity to the soil, and while the nutrient content may vary with different degrees of freshness/decomposition the slight potential to over or under-feed your plants is more than off-set by the long-term soil structure benefits of tilling manure into your soils.And so, after cleaning out my coop this spring and collecting leaves last fall, I'm on the hunt for sources of manure. Cow Town and M&R Trading Post on 491 have great corrals to empty. The 2 vets in town have corrals, but I avoid them fearing medications in the poop, and then there are an endless list of coworkers with livestock eager for a free barn-hand. There's plenty of manure in and around this town!

The pint-sized powerhead 550

Until I've developed the soils of my dreams, I've used compost tea to deliver nutrients/fertility to my undernourished and compacting soils. Compost tea is made by soaking compost or good soils in aerated water in order to encourage the beneficial bacteria, micro-organisms, fungi, etc (everything good in soil grows better with water and air) to multiply. The compost goes into a pillow case (loose compost will clog any pump/airstone) and the air is usually supplied by an aquarium pump supplying an air stone that diffuses the air into fine bubbles. The problem with that type of air pump is you have to get a pretty big one (expensive to buy and operate) to push any worthwhile amount of bubbles deep into a bucket or barrel, and then the airstones constantly get plugged. I've found a better solution is to use another aquarium tool: the power head. Powerheads are basically a submersible pump that uses the venturi effect to suck air into the out flowing water-stream. I've found they're much more efficient at delivering lots of oxygen to the water and rarely get clogged.