[Terrapreta] Fwd: Praire is natures way of making terra preta.

[David Yarrow]

the soil you describe is so fine textured and completely mineralized, with 
no organic matter or living biomass, it is too densely packed and tight to 
allow roots, water or organic matter to penetrate.  it probably can't even 
breathe, much less allow adequate water or root penetration.  even 
earthworms likely have trouble penetrating the tight packed soil particles.

how to loosen it up and improve its physical structure is a real challenge. 
just spreading compost on the surface likely won't get the carbon into 
deeper soil layers very rapidly without some physical process like chisel 
plowing to fracture the tight soil structure.

my best advice is to start treating the soil with compost teas.  the teas 
will more rapidly begin moving microbial populations into this constricted 
soil's tiny pores, and the microbial activity will accelerate the movement 
of water and organic matter such as compost or char into the deeper layers. 
another similar technique is spraying EM (effective micro-organisms or 
efficient microbes).

David Yarrow
"If yer not forest, yer against us."
Turtle EyeLand Sanctuary
44 Gilligan Road, East Greenbush, NY 12061
dyarrow at nycap.rr.com
www.championtrees.org
www.OnondagaLakePeaceFestival.org
www.citizenre.com/dyarrow/
www.farmandfood.org
www.SeaAgri.com

"Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times,
if one only remembers to turn on the light."
-Albus Dumbledore

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "code suidae" <codesuidae at gmail.com>
To: <terrapreta at bioenergylists.org>
Sent: Wednesday, September 12, 2007 2:56 PM
Subject: [Terrapreta] Fwd: Praire is natures way of making terra preta.


> On 9/1/07, joe ferguson <jferguson at nc.rr.com> wrote:
>>      I recall from somewhere in my ancient education that many areas of 
>> the
>> US Midwest have deep loess soils accreted from windblown particles eroded
>> from the mountains to the west (upwind.)
>
> I'm in Omaha, and I believe that the soil I'm working in is loess. The
> builder razed the lot my house is built on, then dropped thin sod on
> top to create a yard. For this year I simply uncovered about 60 square
> feet of the soil, loosened it up to about 8 inches, terraced it to
> hold the rain and then planted. There is essentially no organic matter
> in the soil and not much sand. As part of a cob-making project I did a
> water separation test to determine relative proportions of sand, clay
> and slit. As near as I can tell it's 1 part sand and 3 parts silt.
>
> The plants do OK in it (except carrots, which are large, but fat with
> many roots), but for next year I'll be adding plenty of compost and
> char in an attempt to make it better.
>
> --
> "Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know." -
> M. King Hubbert
>
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