[Terrapreta] Terrapreta Digest, Vol 2, Issue 33

[Rhisiart Gwilym]

Siwmae pawb (Hiya all)!

I'm working on a permaculture garden on a friend's mountainside 
tyddyn (smallholding) in Gwynedd, Cymru Gogledd, Britain. I stumbled 
on the terra preta/charcoal amendation/ carbon-resequestration ideas 
just recently, and I have a question and a suggestion:-----

1) The question, to Richard, Peter and Janice, and to anyone else 
with the necessary hands-on experience already, goes like this:

Years back, I was a member of the Henry Doubleday Research 
Association (now known as 'Garden Organic', at Ryton Gardens, Ryton 
on Dunsmore, near Coventry, Britain) when it was a camaraderie of 
backyard gardeners, small-holders, and so on, who did organised 
experimental gardening, to gather knowledge of practical small-scale 
ways to enhance yield, land-health and people-health. This knowledge 
was intended for free distribution to anyone, particularly poor 
subsistence agriculturalists in the poor countries, as the original 
HDRA was an educational charity.

One member had considerable success at growing his food plants not in 
bare soil, nor in heavily mulched ground, but in a permanent sward 
(lawn). The constituent plants of this sward were mainly our local 
couch grass (conventionally thought of as the gardeners' enemy, 
because it's supposed to overwhelm the growth of any useful food 
plant), plus any other volunteer plants which could stand the 
repeated clipping of this method, plus - in particular - a generous 
percentage of white clover plants, which would be re-sown from time 
to time with new seed, as over time the couch grass would begin to 
overhaul the clover in total ground cover.

Food plants can be started in trays and transplanted, or seeded 
directly into the sward. In either case, a plug of turf is cut from 
the sward, filled loosely with compost until it stands a little above 
the level of the sward, and the seedling/seed is set in. I'm also 
just getting going with Fukuoka seed-balls too, both for the garden 
and for the remediation-by-stealth of the huge, still-bare spoil 
stacks of the abandoned slate quarries on the mountainsides near here.

The sward is clipped several times through the growing season, as 
often as local conditions make necessary, to keep it short around the 
food plants. Naturally, the food plants are not clipped. My colleague 
had devised two or three specially adapted hand tools to enable this 
regime - scissor-action clippers with extended, balance-weighted 
handles, and a six-inch wide hand-pushed lawn mower, for example - 
which did the job quickly and easily. In practise, during our Summer 
season, he reckoned he clipped once every ten days to two weeks, and 
that for his whole ground, he needed only a couple of hours work to 
leave the whole sward short, with only the food plants upright in it. 
He reckoned that this was a low-labour garden, as good as no-dig 
methods, and far less work than the regular tending of bare-soil 
methods. It seems also to be an excellent conserver of water and 
nutrients.

His other innovation was to collect worm-casts and mix them with 
water to a thin slurry, and water this onto the ground immediately 
around each food plant, as a spot-fed super plant food. However, the 
main feeding of the soil comes from the release of bacterially-fixed 
nitrates from the clover root-nodules after each clip (the roots seem 
to die back a corresponding amount to the above-ground foliage that's 
clipped down), and from repeated thin broadcastings of compost 
material, manure, seaweed, and so on, directly onto the sward 
surface, for the local - big! - population of resident worms to pull 
down and eat. All sward clippings too are simply left lying, for the 
same processing. Incidentally, scattering plant food in this way 
means that there's no need to do much prior preparation, such as 
composting. Just thin broadcasting of the raw material is fine. The 
composting process is taken care of below the surface, by the soil 
community. Fukuoka reports a similar technique of broadcasting raw, 
unprocessed materials included, for example, poultry manure, which is 
usually supposed to 'burn' plants with its high N content unless 
previously rotted.

As you can imagine, this method leaves the soil undisturbed for 
years, and allows the evolution of a climax soil community of great 
richness. Soil aeration and drainage is left to the worms, moles and 
other natural agents.

Now, being persuaded that there's something very powerful going on in 
terra preta soils, even if Western enquirers are not yet too sure 
what, I'm proposing to begin adding charcoal powder to my sward. (I'm 
really keen too to do anything that any ordinary obscure joe can do 
to begin pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. I've been grieving 
about the dreadful effects of GW since long before it became a 
mainstream concern.) My idea is simply to broadcast char dust 
directly onto the surface of the sward, a thin dressing at a time, 
rake the sward plants lightly, and leave it to migrate down into the 
body of the soil by natural action. (Everything seems to sink slowly 
down into undisturbed soils in this way, over time) I have homemade 
versions of the rocket stoves developed by Larry Winiarski and Ianto 
Evans, which I use for cooking and heating, and which can be run so 
as to generate useful quantities of residual charcoal from whatever 
you feed into them, and at a range of temperatures and - well - 
'cookedness', according to the air-flow through the stove. The tyddyn 
is surrounded by permanent mountainside oak forest, so there's no 
shortage of easily forageable wood. (Information and images of the my 
friend Eric's tyddyn can be seen at www.caemabon.co.uk. No pictures 
of the garden posted yet, though.)

I want to ask if anyone has practical experience which would enhance 
this plan, or avoid pitfalls which I may have overlooked. I don't 
want to dig up the sward, obviously, as I don't want to disrupt the 
accumulated benefits of the permanent cover. Besides, these days hand 
digging seems to me to be a conflation of slave labour - for me - and 
mass murder of my small kindred in the soil. I particularly hate 
cutting up worms. As well as thinly scattering charcoal dust on the 
surface, I could dose the bottom of each plug hole with dust at a 
deeper level, with compost on top, or maybe mix dust into the 
compost. The siting of planting plugs moves from season to season, so 
that would lead eventually to a ground with a layer of top-dressed 
powder left to migrate into the soil by the effects of the 
soil-turning agents, plus quite thickly scattered doses of dust in 
pockets at slightly deeper levels.

So, I want to ask: Any comments drawn from previous experience, please?

2) From the brief sketch of the HDRA given above, do list members 
think that a similar network might be useful to gather knowledge 
about charcoal amendments to soils to produce terra preta? Lawrence 
Hills, who started the HDRA, was passionate about the multitude of 
useful functions of Comfrey, and slanted the association particularly 
towards that research. A great resource of useful information and 
practical methods were archived as a result. Considering the twin 
vital benefits that are promised here - greatly increased food 
production, with long-persisting, apparently self-maintaing 
soil-fertility enhancement, plus substantial re-sequestration of 
atmospheric carbon - the same kind of widespread backyard network 
could have a crucial role in dealing with our current interlinked 
global crises. What's more, this is something that could be 
disseminated widely to millions of small-scale farmers and gardeners 
everywhere, with carbon sequestration massively promoted as a 
necessary by-product of better food-growing: Something that any 
obscure average grower anywhere in the world could do, with a very 
strong personal incentive, without having to wait for the dinosaurs 
of big biz, big gov, and the sacred, holy 'Free' Market (free? oh 
really?) to get their lumbering acts together.

It was a fact, though, that Lawrence himself worked all the time at 
making the association effective. It seems to need one person, at 
least, to be wholly committed to it. He was a lifelong full-time 
professional horticulturalist who never stopped thinking about his 
craft, hence the HDRA.

Cofion gorau i bawb (Best remembrances to all),       Rhisiart Gwilym