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Entry Date
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Location
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Sunday, February 09, 2025
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Little Ketchup
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Grittyville, WA
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Entry 38 of 56 |
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Some roots have made it to the glass so I can now begin to observe them in their natural environment.
Just some ideas here, this is not intended to help anyone, just gonna brainstorm some stuff here.
First, one of the high yield corn growers I was listening to mentioned ripping the soil in a way that did not mix the rich top layer of soil down into the poorer mineral soil deeper down. He speculated that this might be wasteful/ inefficient. I guess because, if he wants the young plants to get a good start, then it might make sense to keep the best soil right where they are at rather than diluting it downwards? He was no longer in favor of moldboard plowing. But it seems to me that moldboard plowing doesnt really threaten that much soil mixing. I guess he figured the deeper ripping was worthwhile but the moldboard plowing just wasnt providing enough benefits. Other top corn growers are doing no till or a surface scratch or strip till??
Anyhow the light went on in my head and I thought, duh, I could leave the mineral soil and pumice down below and keep the organic soil at the surface but still loosen the whole soil profile a bit, and that might help.
If I could just get really good at growing corn and potatoes... then everything else should be relatively easy.
The irony is that corn and potatoes are notoriously easy to grow. To be clear, I'm not talking about growing them in a normal or average way, I'm talking about getting to the level of a fully optimized crop/yield.
For pumpkins, I can get really good results if I just leave things alone. I could add some calcium, chelate it a bit with some humic stuff, and maybe throw in a bit of zinc, boron, copper, phosphorus. I could try cobalt selenium zinc nickel and more silicates, but I'd need a more expensive soil test before I monkeyed with those. My monkey brain is intimidated by all the extra research it would take to try to get these things perfectly "right". I went out on a limb and tried adding molybdenum the past couple years and I think this helped, albeit in a small way.
Something to consider is, maybe the crop doesnt need much of a certain micronutrient, but maybe the soil biology does? When the government studied "what chemicals do plants need to grow" they may have done so in a sterile laboratory setting. Perhaps without UV light. Maybe in the real world, plants (and their symbiotic soil biology) need a different range of minerals than they do in a laboratory. A lot of our science is based on 50's or 60's research that wasn't very wise. It was the same era as lobotomies and male doctors telling women how to give birth.
Anyhow, I think agronomists may have been obtuse and overbearing as well, in how they viewed and studied crop production. With maybe the exception of nuclear weapons, I think we ought to refigure all the conclusions of that "scientific" era?
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