5 Common Gardening Practices That Can Kill Your Soil
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 15 มิ.ย. 2024
- This video talks about 5 things that can go wrong in your garden and how you can keep them from going wrong. These common practices are pretty much all things I do in my garden, but taken to excess, or done without thought, they can have unfortunate consequences for the soil.
0:27 Overwatering
1:52 Too much sneaky salt
4:37 Reliance on Synthetic Fertilizers
6:30 Excessive Tillage
8:42 Over-mulching
I say that there's science supporting barrier mulches degrading soil life. You don't have to take my word for it! Here are some links to articles:
Article: Plastic mulching in agriculture. Trading short-term agronomic benefits for long-term soil degradation?
www.sciencedirect.com/science...
Article: Biodegradable Plastic Mulch Films: Impacts on Soil Microbial Communities and Ecosystem Functions
www.frontiersin.org/journals/...
I used some images from creative commons, so here are those attributions:
Adventitious corn roots. NY State IPM Program at Cornell University. CC BY 2.0
Red junglefowl, www.flickr.com/people/7949285...
creativecommons.org/licenses/...
Oryctolagus cuniculus European rabbit (Feral Tasmanian specimen)
JJ Harrison (www.jjharrison.com.au/) - Own work
creativecommons.org/licenses/...
www.flickr.com/photos/8331234...
creativecommons.org/licenses/...
American Bird Grasshopper
www.birdphotos.com - Own work
creativecommons.org/licenses/...
#gardening #mulching #soilregeneration - แนวปฏิบัติและการใช้ชีวิต
I laughed at your "male-dominated audience" joke, and figured I'd show you some love on your channel! Didn't expect to learn about rabbit poop today, but here we are. You have a very calm presence about you and I enjoy gardening as well. Good stuff! 🌻
Thank you so much! I was worried you might take my joke the wrong way and I'm glad it didn't misfire. :)
@@casualgardeningwithdustin Not at all! I share your humor. I've also been on TH-cam long enough to understand the power of discernment. lol🙂
I have a feeling this is about to become a very popular channel
I hope you're right! But regardless of what the future holds, I appreciate your sentiment. :)
👍 and subbed. I garden in zone 7b and had been a long term deep tiller, past couple year I have changed. I now use a spading fork to loosen the soil and till only the top 2-3” of the beds. I am a heavy mulcher, leaves in the fall & grass clippings in the summer, weeds are near nonexistent. The mulch has greatly reduced the amount of water required.
I have peas sprouting as of Easter morning!
Oh, man, I dearly miss gardening in zone 7! This mountain valley is beautiful, but spring is an emotional roller coaster. Awesome to hear from another low-till gardener! It makes me so happy that I can be lazy and benefit from it. :)
Still waiting on my peas here, but that's no shock as I'm a full zone and a half colder than you.
I was zone 7b in South Carolina, but the new zoning (I think ‘23) now I’m considered 8a.
@@danielz4111 I was very disappointed when the new zoning maps didn't change a thing for me.
Thanks for all the great advice and insight. The compost/salt issue was surprisingly helpful.❤
That's so great to hear! I was a bit surprised to learn about it in my Master Gardener courses- I never would have thought that compost could be a source of added soil salinity otherwise.
10:56 Thank you so much for this message! I get so easily filled with despair for some reason lol
The nice thing about messing up as often as I have is that I've learned some nice things to say to myself afterward. ;)
But also it's true! Our gardens may be life-or-death for the vegetables, but for most of us gardening is a very survivable hobby.
I agree with you; there is nothing wrong with tillage. Both ends of that spectrum (yearly tillage and no-till) are just crazy. If you have degraded ground that needs to be broken, absolutely put a plow to it. If you have decent ground, simply put a cover on it and put some plants in the ground.
THANKS FOR THIS INFORMATION 👍
I'm glad you found it helpful! :)
Nice explanation 👌 😊
Thank you 🙂
Good to know. After the new draft . I'll need easy foods to cook. While every 15-28 person is off being equal on the front lines
Well explained in the beginning.
Hi from Germany and I have just subscribed.
Some people fear that phoshorus in fertilizers outcompetes mineralizing soil microorganisms such as mycorrhiza.
I thought your comment was very interesting, so I burnt some morning minutes looking up papers on the subject. I did find a paper published in Nature which didn't demonstrate a difference in arbuscular mycorrhizal abundance with differing concentrations of phosphorus: www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-30128-7
It wasn't what they were looking for, but they observed it even so.
It looks like mycorrhizae may help increase bioavailability of extant soil phosphorus in many cases, and that's really good news for my soil which is naturally high in phosphorus, but the phosphorus is only sparingly bioavailable.
I think I read somewhere that improving efficiency of phosphorous use could significantly decrease our dependency on mined phosphorus in agriculture, but I'd prefer that you consider this claim apocryphal from me because I've already looked at a few papers this morning and don't want to fact-check myself on this claim.
@@casualgardeningwithdustin As a biologist I spent 4 years of my life researching microbial exoenzymes (phosphatases, sulfatases, dehydrogenases) released into the soil. The highest activities were in the plot without fertilization and without weed management in a sugar beet plot. There was a variant with mechanical weed management and without any weed management. No agrochemicals used in both varieties.
@@katipohl2431 mad respect for your soil science! Do you believe that the decreased exoenzymes were due to a population decline or due to an increased nutrient abundance? Microbes are thrifty creatures, and I could totally see them conserving energy when nutrient availability spiked- just as applying the right (or wrong?) amount of fertilizer to a carnivorous plant can decrease trap formation without killing the plant.
@@casualgardeningwithdustin Soil microbial activity was the highest in the soil with the biggest rhizosphere and without soil disturbance. That vibrant rhizosphere fed the soil microorganisms with root exudates and stimulated the production of microbial exoenzymes. Human activities did not increase nutrient abundance in the undisturbed plot but they decreased enzyme activities and decreased release of root exudates in the plot with mechanical weeding.
The weeds grew very high and even deers and rare hamsters lived in that variety. The beets were of high quality with good sugar content but so small that they couldn't be harvested by a machine.
@@katipohl2431 thank you so much for answering! I hope you keep commenting and correcting me when I mess up.
I imagine that these richer rhizospheres tend to result more from perennial gardening- or from the sorts of hybrid situations popularized in permaculture- than from annual garden beds. It might be fun to try if I didn't so value the ease with which annual garden beds can be managed. Hopefully my low-disturbance methods will allow me to reap some of those benefits you observed. But I think I will continue to exclude the deer from my garden. Their droppings can make their way into the beds via my compost pile. :)
thanks.briiiant.balance view.
Glad it was helpful!
10:02 How ultimately would soil recover if a garden had been covered by weed membrane for years? (Like 15+ years...) If the membrane is all taken off, would the soil be able to bounce back on its own, would that take many many years?
Soil is a complicated thing, and how rapidly it can recover from stress will depend on a lot of factors- some of which are beyond our control. Soil with high organic content, low salinity, and moderate moisture content with good drainage will recover a lot faster than soil that lacks one or more of those factors.
Most of the less mobile organisms tend to be abundantly present as spores and cysts, ready to spring into action as soon as conditions are good again. But those spores and cysts can't survive indefinitely, so the longer the membrane was in place the longer we should expect it to take for the soil to recover.
I'm sorry I don't have a more satisfying answer for you, but thanks for the awesome question!
@@casualgardeningwithdustin Thank you! It’s very interesting, I’d like to learn more about how soil works, it is almost like an organism unto itself in a way by the sounds of it.
Unfortunately my family have the front garden mostly under weed membrane with pebbles in top and it’s been that way for years. Kills me to think of the soil that is just suffocated under there. I’m the only one who wants to free it though unfortunately as the whole aesthetic of the garden is this pebbles and paving slabs Mediterranean look, which is nice but I come to realise there is actually so much life that could be happening and instead it’s smothered.
Try not to feel too much despair about it, though. In nature there are always areas that are buried by earth and water and will die off while other areas become exposed and colonized by life.
Letting soil dry out forces roots to grow deeper to find water...
Up to a point you're absolutely correct. But I'd say that's more true for some plants than for others. Vegetables that produce primarily leaves or stems for eating, or which have fruits that are prone to cracking from water stress, will tend to be better off with consistent water application.
The goji berries I've just started from seed probably needn't be watered at all once they're established- even in my relatively arid climate.
So I hope we can agree that our watering practices should be informed by the specific plants.
manure is like cooking . Salt to taste is safest
But also please don't taste your manure.
I bury fish and chicken carcasses in my garden with remarkable results . I mulch in the summer , disc the mess in the fall , plant a rye cover crop in the winter and disc again the spring . I have to furrow because of heavy rains in the US south . My garden is 4000 square feet so the work is done with a tractor and a tiller . I’m so tired of bull crap garden clips of postage sized gardens by people that basically haven’t a clue .
Everyone's garden, and everyone's soil, is different. I'm sorry to hear that my methods aren't right for you, and I wish you luck in your garden!
I just noticed this channel while I was bopping around the TH-cam gardenverse and he looks like he might be more your speed in terms of garden size and methods. You should check him out!
th-cam.com/video/8ztXpfNAzUY/w-d-xo.html&ab_channel=LazyDogFarm
all you expert gardeners should get together and the net result would be noone would say anything as the amount of dont and dos would cancel each other out, and the phrase " I'm not saying " actually means that you are saying that ,, dooohhhh 😂😂😖😖😂😂🤔🤔😂😂
First, thanks for calling me an expert! I've been trying to gather information about gardening and that's incredibly validating for you to say. :)
Second, I completely understand your frustration. It would be so much easier to find and use gardening advice if there weren't at least as many exceptions as there are rules. My advice would be to try to find channels who are not on the sensationalist end of the spectrum and whose garden has a similar climate to yours. They'll have the best advice for your specific conditions.
I also like to watch gardeners who are working in wildly different conditions than mine, and I can still learn from them, but mostly it's for fun. For example: It feels good, living in an arid place, to watch Charles Dowding struggling with desirable crops that grow easily here. Serves him right, barely having to irrigate his garden. ;) My lettuce may never look as amazing as his, but at least I can grow peppers and tomatoes outside my greenhouse!
Thought it was going to be a good video until you said synthetic
I'm curious: What do you believe I meant by "synthetic?" Because I did use it in the conventional sense- to denote materials that have been refined or manufactured by humans rather than occurring naturally. The nitrogen compounds found in modern synthetic fertilizer are almost entirely synthesized using the Born-Haber process.
[Correction: It's the Haber-Bosch process. As far as names go, I was half right, but as far as chemical reactions go, I was completely wrong. I'm grateful to have been corrected, and I'm inserting the correction here so that I don't mislead anyone.]
@@casualgardeningwithdustin Haber-Bosch process is how we call it here in Germany and the plants take up nitrogen in ionic chemical substances such as ammonium or nitrate.
@@katipohl2431 thank you for the correction! They are two different processes and I stated the wrong one. The Haber-Bosch process is the one I had in mind, and it was developed in Germany to convert atmospheric nitrogen to ammonia with hydrogen.
I think currently it uses hydrogen from natural gas primarily, which is why fertilizer prices spiked when Russia invaded Ukraine. It could just as easily use hydrogen from electrolysis, but .... well, let's not get me started on fossil fuels.
That's what I get for typing garbage without checking my facts. ;)