Terra do Milho

Tag: Permaculture

  • Chop and drop in the vegetable garden, how to do it.

    Chop and drop in the vegetable garden, how to do it.

    Chop and drop is a way to create good soil in your garden for growing vegetables. In our vegetable garden I use green manure to chop and drop. It is less work than making compost and when applied right, it can bring the same results.

     

    Masanobu Fukuoka’s way

    The way I use chop and drop is inspired on Masanobu Fukuoka’s way of growing a combination of white clover barley and rice. By closely observing what was happening in his field, he figured out a beautiful non tilling way of growing rice. He used white clover and barley straw to cover and mulch the soil so the rice had a better chance to grow in competition with the weeds. He also used ducks in the field to help, these animals would add manure to his system.

    It is this organic way of carefully observing and consciously playing around with mulching, chop and drop and manure that inspires me. It is the way I love to garden. Observe and play, observe again and continue until a system is working with just a little help.

     

    Forest soils’ secrets

    It is also inspired by the way a tree creates its own soil to grow in. It drops its leaves every fall and year after year the leaves builds up layers of good soil. Mushrooms and fungi help to digest the nutrients in the fallen leaves to food for the tree. It is a beautiful functioning system. I don’t know if you have ever tried forest soil in your garden. We have, it is incredibly potent. Fortunately there is no chop there, but a lot of drop…

     

    Chop and drop inspired on Fukuoka and forest soil

    What comes out of these two incredible systems is that you can use material that is right at hand. Seeding green manure is not such a heavy job, especially when your soil is already tender after having used chop and drop. It surely takes less effort than getting in forest soil or making compost.

    Another thing is both systems work with layers of organic material. Used consequently this approach will lead to a soil that is similar to a forest soil. It will be rich in humus. It will also create the right circumstances for fungi and bacteria that will make nutrients available for plants.

    And last but not least, it is a no till system. This is important. I don’t want to say that tilling is always bad. There are good, non deep, tilling systems in combination with green manure as well. But for this system it is important not to till. By doing so you would destroy this type system.

    What is also an advantage is that the soil is permanently covered. Again this creates the optimal circumstances for organisms like worms, bacteria and fungi to grow because it regulates the soils temperature and prevents the soil to get too dry.

     

    So what do I do with chop and drop in our garden? And why?

    Gardening, for me, is trying to create the right circumstances to grow vegetables. That means the circumstances in the soil have to be optimal for microorganisms and animals that improve the soil. Animals like toads and worms. That is why I am more focused on the condition of the soil than on the plants. I think that when the soil conditions are right and plants are seeded or planted at the right time in the season, they will grow well. Creating good functioning living soil is key to gardening.

    Using compost could be part of this system too. And in our case it is. The only problem is that I do not always have enough compost to use compost alone. It is hard work and time consuming too, to make it. Chop and drop is a bit less heavy work and it also brings humus into the ground when you keep on doing it layer after layer. This means I can sometimes skip the compost. Which means I can use less compost, which than will save me some work.

    When done at the right time you can even add layers of animal manure. You could combine this with the right crop rotation. So plants that can take fresh manure are planted in the plots where you have used fresh manure. This way you could completely skip the compost making. Or just make one yearly compost pile for the weeds.

     

    Covering the soil with the right thing.

    Because there is either plants growing or chop laying on the soil, the soil is always covered. This is also important for the microorganisms that are living in the soil.

    I do not use weeds for chop and drop. Some weeds grow to big and to woody. Others are too invasive. Grass is very competitive to the vegetables that I want to grow so I don’t want these either. Having said this, there are some weeds you can use for chop and drop, like chickweed. You do need to know what you are doing here, just using any weed can produce a lot of work, as I have seen in some veggie gardens.

    In stead of using weeds I chose one of my favourite green manures, like fodder fava beans. These plants grow very lush in our sandy soil garden. They produce a lot of green mass.

    Another reason I chose these fodder fava beans is because it is a nitrogen fixer. It will fix nitrogen in small blobs on the roots. By chopping the fava bean plants I leave the nitrogen blobs with the roots in the soil, so whatever grows after the fava beans can use the nitrogen that is fixed in these blobs.

     

    Seeding in rows.

    I seed the fodder Fava beans in rows. I have 2 reasons for seeding in rows. One is that I do know where they will grow and so I also know where I can do some weeding. I do some weeding in the first weeks when the green manure is growing so it gets a good go ahead of the weeds. At a certain point I stop weeding because the plants get lush and cover the ground and the weeds get no light to grow.

    The second reason I seed the fodder fava beans in rows is that I use drip irrigation. The fava beans are seeded along the line of the irrigation dripping pipes, so I am sure they get enough water.

    I carefully chop the fava beans when they are just flowering. Right above the root on the soil level. You can chop them earlier as well, but make sure you have enough green mass to cover the soil when you drop it. After chopping I organize the greens between the rows so it covers the soil like a mulch.

     

    The next layer of green manure

    It is the end of April now. After having chopped the fodder fava beans, in my summer crop plot, I will seed three rows of buckwheat in the fava bean mulch. This will be a second green manure before the summer crops go in. I do this because I need to keep the earth covered until the bell peppers, courgettes and eggplants are big enough to be planted.

    I will chop and drop the buckwheat where the courgettes, aubergines and bell peppers are going to be planted, the rest of the buckwheat I will leave. When the plants get bigger I will make some more space for the plants by chopping and dropping more buckwheat. My hope is that the buckwheat will flower by the time the summer crops are also flowering. Buckwheat attracts a lot of small insects that are good for pollination and also for pest control. The latter is why I use buckwheat in this case.

     

    Different green manures that you can use.

    Different green manures have different characteristics. Which one you chose depends on the effect you want to achieve.

    I use oats for a better soil structure because it makes a lot of tiny roots. Incarnate clover and fodder fava beans for the nitrogen fixing. Serradella for a good ground cover and buckwheat for attracting useful insects.

    You can use them all for chop and drop. You can also use vegetables like mustard or spinach for chop and drop. There is a german companion planting system that starts with seeding spinach in rows that are 50 cm apart. Between the spinach other crops are sown or planted. Some spinach is consumed, the rest is used for chop and drop between the vegetables.

    I have used it for a while when we were still living in Holland. There it worked very well. Here in the south of Portugal the spinach does not want to grow so well so I use different systems now.

     

    More ways to use chop and drop

    There are more ways to use chop and drop. As we go through the year I will describe some more ways to use this method. In the summer when the sun is battering the soil I use green manure to protect seedlings. When the green manure gets too big and the seedlings are small strong plants, I use the chop and drop as a way of mulching the small plants with the green manure chop. In spring I plant the seedlings directly in the fava bean rows. Keep an eye on my blogs, there will be more information on this topic.

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    Chop and drop

  • Two ways of making compost

    Two ways of making compost

    This blog teaches you two ways of making compost. It gives a detailed description of how to make quick and slow compost.  What you need, how much you need and what type of construction you need.

     

    What you basically need to make a compost heap is three types of organic material: brown material, green material and manure. Brown materials are dried weeds, hay, straw or dried or rotting leaves; green materials are fresh greens, herbs or grass; manure which can be from any animal, even from humans.

    If you want to use humananure (from a compost toilet) for composting make sure it is pre-composted on its own for 9 month. This way you get rid of all the pathogens that can be in human faces, which can make you ill.

    You can also mix your kitchen scabs into the compost heap. They will probably be some kind of mix of the first two, brown and green materials. Other things we mix into the compost are a bit of lime, wood ash and some clay. If your soil has clay, you can also add a bit of soil. I use the special clay from the cat litter box, the one that makes the lumps. I use this because our soil has very little clay. What you exactly use depends on what you have on your site. So have a good look around to find what you have available, you will need quite a bit of everything.

    How much compost do you need for your garden

    If your compost is well made and mature you can not use too much. When you notice that plants in your garden get signs of over fertilisation It usually means the compost was not mature. So you might have to adapt the process.

    Ideal is to put a layer of 2 cm of compost on your garden beds every year. In our 400 m² vegetable garden which is organised in 1.20 m beds and 60 cm paths we need about 11 m³ compost to have this layer of two cm in the whole garden.

    Some things, like potatoes we do not give compost but fresh manure. That saves us making some m³ of  compost. It is worthwhile to keep a compost plan of your garden so you know which part had compost when. It is easy to lose track because usually you can not make all the compost at once, unless you have a small garden.

    Since you might not have all the material at hand for making one heap at once it is not a problem to collect things first in separate heaps. Only the green stuff needs to be fresh, but the collected older green stuff can be used as brown stuff.

    We make two types of compost, one quick compost that takes 5 weeks to be ready and a slow compost that takes 6 month. Here are two ways of making compost described. There are some other ways which I find also interesting. Making compost with chickens is one of them. We do not have this system (yet), but Geoff Lawton did some pretty nice experiments with this method. Here is the video. There is also one method that provides compost in 18 days, interesting, but I find it a lot of turning in a short time. Besides this, you need to stick to a tight schedule which can be problematic in our case, but might not be in yours. Here is an article about this method.

    Quick compost

    Construction and site of the quick composting heap.

    For the quick compost we constructed a frame with two compartments, each one has a volume of a cubic meter. The frame is made of old planks, we brushed on a layer of line seed oil to slow down the rotting of the wood a bit. It will be eaten in the end, we know. That is okay for us, we will make a new one every so many years.

    I did not use branches or bamboo because my fork, I turn the compost with always gets stuck between the branches, this way I ruin the construction very fast. So sheets or planks work better for me. Just use anything you like as a material. Important is that the heap stays together and does not wash or blow away. You will have to make two compartments next to each other so it is easy to scoop the heap from one to the other.

    Around the heap I have some extra space for collecting material that goes into the next heap. I also make some space where I can put things like sunflower and cabbage branches so they can pre compost and become soft before they go into the main heap.

    Building up the compost.

    So I start building a m³ of compost which in the end this will shrink to about ⅓  of a m³ . I build up the composting heap by making layers of brown and green material and manure. I start with a layer of brown material then add a layer of green material and then a layer of manure. These layers are about 8 cm thick.  After that I sprinkle a bit of lime, clay and wood ash on top. I repeat this until the material is finished.

    In total I use 3 full big bags of manure, the 30 kg bags where you buy the animal fodder in. Then I use two equal parts of brown and green material in total.

    What exactly you put in depends on what you have, but what you put in will influence the end result. When you put in nitrogen rich material this will make your compost richer, therefor we like to put in green material that is rich in nitrogen, for instance lupines. I use lupins in the vegetable garden, a nitrogen fixer, as a green manure and when they get too big (not too big, then they become woody) I pull them out and put them in the compost heap.  The same for the brown material, in autumn I like to use the Alder tree leaves, another nitrogen fixer. So you could if you wish, grow stuff in the garden that is good for the compost heap. Comfrey is an example. We do not have it because it does not grow well in our climate zone, but it might grow in yours.

    Balancing the heap.

    The lime that is added balances the pH, it needs just a view hands, not too much. You do not want an alkaline compost heap since most plants will not like that. Cabbages, which do like lime can have some more when you plant it. Potash comes with the wood ash, I think I add about halve a 10 l  bucket of wood ash, again not too much. Another thing you could add is urine, it contains valuable phosphorus. Wee in a bucket dilute it 1 to 8 and you can pour it in and over the compost heap You can also use it to fertilize any plant you like. It is incredibly potent. What the clay does is a bit of a mystery to me, but it really improved the quality of the compost.

    There are also some things that you do not want in your compost heap. When you add grass cuttings be careful to spread them through the heap so they do not form lumps that are not digestible. Make sure all the material is soft. If you put in branches or woody herb or cabbage stems turning the compost heap will be a nightmare. The woody bits intertwine. You want to be able to scoop out the heap little by little and not in big pieces that are to heavy because of the intertwined woody bits.

    Adding water.

    Now comes the crux of the compost making: the amount of water you need to add. This is not easy at all. It is important in order to get the right circumstances for an aerobic digestion in the heap. Too much water will suffocate the microorganisms you want in your heap and favour the once that you do not want. When the the heap is to dry it does not work at all.

    It depends on the weather conditions and on the material you are using and how humid this material is. Grass, dry weeds, hay and straw use quite a bit of water in the composting process.

    The best is to add water while you are building up the heap, to make sure that the water is also in the heap.  Adding the right amount of water is something you will have to find out by practising. And even after a lot of practice it can still go wrong. You simply do not know all the weather conditions ahead. In dry weather you might give it a good go and then the weather changes and the heap turns out too wet….

    This is how I test whether the amount of water was right or not: when the soil sticks together like a cream it was to wet, when there are ants in the heap it was too dry. The end result should be smelling like forest soil. If it does you know the amount of water was good.

    When it rains a lot I cover the heap with some plastic against too much water, when it is too hot I cover it too, so the water doesn’t evaporate. You will have to play around with it for a while to get it right.

    Turning the heap.

    I leave the heap for a week, because I go to the garden once a week. It works good for me and for the compost. After a week I scoop the the layered heap into the other compartment so everything gets mixed. During 5 weeks I repeat this every week and then I sift and use the compost.

    If you want to do this more precise you can do the following. Buy a compost thermometer. This is a 40 cm long thermometer that you can push into the heap to measure the temperature inside the heap. After you have made the layered heap it starts heating up inside. It takes a day or two but then it really goes up. As soon as the temperature hits 55°C you turn the heap. Then wait until the heap warms up again and when it hits 55°C, turn it again until it stops doing that, which should be 3 or 4 times.

    Compost making is all about feeding microorganisms. Because you create an optimal situation for microorganisms to grow, which is what you do. When you build up your heap in layers, you are practically setting the table for them. Once your heap is set up the feast begins, and this creates the heat in the heap, just like a party. But it can also overheat, just like a party. That is why you stop the heap from heating up further by turning it in time. This way you keep the optimal circumstances for the microorganisms to grow.

    The active compost that you are making contains all the ingredients that the soil in the garden will need to feed your plants. It contains many microorganisms that help to transform the minerals and materials in the garden soil  into edible portions for the plants. That is why good compost works so well. You are not just spreading homemade soil, you are spreading live. I think that is amazing.

    Some compost makers think that heating up the heap to 55°C is not enough. It should be at least 60°C they say. At 60°C all the weed seeds that are still alive in the heap will be killed, so you will not spread weeds with your compost. This is hard to achieve if you do not have a professional installation. I think it is questionable too. I Weed my garden any way and I have not noticed an extra amount of weeds because I am spreading my compost. If you want to raise seedlings you can pasteurize the compost before you use it.

    Sifting the compost

    Not everybody sifts the compost since it a quite a bit more work, but I found out that it works much better in the garden. For this I made a sieve from some small square planks and a piece of rabbit wire. I make it so it fits on a wheel barrel, so I can easily bring the sifted compost to the beds. The pieces that do not pass the sieve, I through into the next compost heap I am making.

    Sometimes I make an exception, that is when I see that the earth is fiberless and makes a crust. The fibers stop the crust from forming. v

    Slow compost heap.

    Compared to the quick compost making this is a lot less work, but it takes longer too. It is basically the same thing but you just leave the layered heap untouched for halve a year. This is how we use this method.

    In our goat place we use a system that is called deep litter. We clear out the goat place twice a year. After it has been cleared out, a thick layer of straw is put back on the floor of the goat place, when this layer is starting to soil we put in another layer. We keep the top layer fresh. The layers below the top layer start composting, it is always nice and warm in the goat place.

    When we clear out the goats place we already have the brown material and manure mixed. And it is already pre composted. So we pile the compost heap in layers of stuff from the goat place and with green material. We make sure the composting heap has enough water, this process needs more water than the other, I am not sure why. Maybe because of the straw that is in the heap, but that is just a guess.

    The construction of the slow composting heap.

    We support the pile with a construction as you can see in the picture above. The terras above the heap is used to pour the goats place litter into the construction. The construction is made of concrete reinforcement iron rods hammered in the ground in a semicircle. Then we fix ( with tight ribs) a piece of goat fencing in the inside, and on the inside of the goat fencing we fix a piece of rabbit wire. This way the compost stays inside.

    We make sure the whole thing is fixed to the terrace bank so the chickens will not be able to get into the sides of the heap. If they could they would undermine the whole heap. It is okay if they roam around at the top since the heap is well contained. Again like with the other heap, you can use what you have available, for us this is a cheap well working construction.

    Building up the heap.

    This is how we build up this heap. One person stands in the construction to organise the layers. Two or three people empty the goat place and carry it to the compost heap.

    The amount of water we have to add depends a lot on the weather conditions. But by experience we know it uses a lot. We spray water on almost every second layer, with a garden hose. The layers are thicker then in the quick composting heap, about 10-15 cm. After the heap is build up we leave the heap open since we discovered that works best. In summer we irrigated the compost heap together with the trees around it, without this irrigation it gets too dry.

    After halve a year we use the compost. It works as well as the quick compost. You can also sift this compost before use.

    Finally

    If you want to make your own composting heap you will have to translate what we do to your own circumstances. There is not a site the same. In cold climate zones the whole composting process stops in winter because it is too cold.  In tropical areas the process will be much faster and you might not need to pre compost branches and stems. You might also be better of using bamboo instead of wooden planks since the termites will eat the planks. In climate zone 9, where we are, we can make compost the whole year but we need to water the compost heap in summer. As long as you get the principle idea you can work it out.

     

    I hope you enjoyed my blog. Feel free to send me an email when you have any questions. We would love to help you. If you want to give some feedback be welcome especially when your experience is very different from ours. Making the perfect compost is a big debate after all.

    Would you like to follow our activities on the farm on a more daily basis, please follow our Terra do Milho facebook.

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    Two ways of making compost

  • Using chickens in an orchard as Medfly pest control.

    Using chickens in an orchard as Medfly pest control.

    Using chickens in an orchard as Medfly pest control is an very effective way to get rid of the flies in an organic orchard. Chickens are very useful animals. They provide you with very nutritious eggs without a big effort and chicken meat is also good to eat. Apart from that you can also use them to prepare your vegetable garden; or to keep your orchard free of Mediterranean fruit flies or Medfly.

     

    These little flies breed during the hot month in the area where we live. They lay their eggs in fruit, there the eggs come out and the worm produces a kind of enzyme that destroys the fruit from the inside. It then looks mushy and brown and is not tasting good anymore. It can destroy your whole fruit harvest.

    In latin the small fly is called Ceratitis capitata. Since we are growing organic certified fruit we can and do not use chemical treatments and we have to search for more natural ways of pest control. So we looked into the life cycle of the fly and discovered that after the larvae have grown in the fruit the larva or sometimes the whole fruit drops on the ground, the larva becomes a fly and the fly destroys the next fruit by laying an egg in it.With chickens you can interrupt the cycle from taking place. We have very positive experiences with using chickens.

    The first fruit that is endangered is the St.Antonio plum it ripens around St. Antonio’s day which is the 13th of June. It depends a bit on the weather whether there are just a few or many flies. As soon as the plums start to ripen we put our electric chicken fence around the terrace where the plum trees are, put our portable chicken house under the trees and move some chickens in, mostly 5  or 6. The chickens love to eat the larvae,  they even pick them out of the fallen fruit and prevent the larvae from becoming a fly.

    After the plums the first apples start ripening, so we move the chickens to the apple terrace. By the time the pears are ripening the flies are almost gone. They do not have a chance.

    Last year we had the chickens free ranching and we did not have a single infested fruit. The free ranching of the chickens however can be problematic if you have non walled terraces like we do. The chickens can destroy the terrace banks, so we prefer to fence them in.

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    chickens in an orchard as Medfly pest control

  • Prepare your vegetable garden with chickens.

    Prepare your vegetable garden with chickens.

    Did you know you can prepare your vegetable garden with chickens? Chickens can help you in your garden and orchard in many ways. We use them as our little helpers. One of the things we use chickens for is to prepare the vegetable garden.

     

    A month before we start  the garden, we fence in the area where we want to make the vegetable garden. We use an electric chicken fence with a portable fence charger with a battery feed. It has to be powerful enough to charge the whole grid of the fence. It not only keeps the chickens in but also keeps the animals that want to eat the chickens out.

    The chickens will eat all the weeds and weed seeds that are on the plot. Which will make weed control in the garden very easy at the beginning.

    For 100 m² you will need about 5 chickens for a month to do the job. They will need a small shelter where they can roost and a place where they can lay their eggs, fresh water and some extra food. We made an A-frame chicken house with handles so we could carry it around on our steep land. For the future I will make one from lighter material that can be moved easily.

    On the plots where we have vegetables every year I want to make permanent chicken houses, so we only need to move the chickens. We move the chickens during the night in the dark when they are not so active. We put three chickens in a jute bag, the once that can carry 30 kg of grain. They stay very quiet in the bag and three chickens are easy to carry. If you think that is still to heavy you just put in two chickens. Sometimes we had a group of chickens that would just follow the chicken house wherever it went, but unfortunately this did not work with all the chickens that we had.

    At the end of the month I start bringing some extra compost to the plot. I just make small piles here and there, the chickens will spread it and clear it from weed seeds that survived the compost making process. After that we simply take the fence away and use a rotavator to soften up the earth because the little chicken’s feet make a dense crust at the service of the soil we have here. This might be different with the type of soil you have. Then you can go ahead and start organizing your vegetable garden and start seeding and planting.

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    Prepare your vegetable garden with chickens

  • Our vegetable garden in Monchique

    Our vegetable garden in Monchique

    Garden layout organic garden
    Garden layout

    We live about 6 km from the town of Monchique , which is a pittoresk town in the hinterlands of the Algarve. In the town there are many terraces where people keep their vegetable gardens, mostly from people who live in town.

    Our friends Anna and Carlos, who live in town decided to share  their terraces with people from the Monchique Transition group.  As one of the founders of this group we joint in.

    We use one of the plots that was available, this plot is about 400 m² wide. Our layout is very simple and straight forward since we use a drip irrigation system that only works when laid out straight. There are 8 beds of 21 m  long and 1.20 m wide. Two beds with asparagus, which is a perennial (for 12 years), and 6 beds for crop rotation.  The planting schedule is carefully planed.

    composter
    Composter with compost in its way.

    Compost making is key in an organic garden

    In the garden the vegetables are grown organically. Hence compost making is a key activity in our garden. To make compost we build a composter ourselves. In the composter we build up a compost heap from green manure, weeds without seeds and manure from our goats. We mix the goat manure with straw. Some times we use composted humanure as well. Every week we turn the compost into the other compartment of the compost maker. After five weeks the compost is ready to use in the garden. To read more about making compost check our blog: ‘Two ways of making compost’.

    In the picture below you can see the broad beans growing on the compost, they are doing very well.

    Green manure
    Oats grass as green menure

    Always cover the earth.

    To make sure that the soil is never naked we use oats and lupins as a green manure. Green manure improves the quality of the soil. It covers the soil so it does not dry in the battering sun, as a result micro-organisms and small useful insects have a better chance to survive. The green manure that we removere can be used in the compost heap to make compost. Lupines are nitrogen rich, which will enrich the compost. When you dig in the green manure when it is still young it will ad fibers to the soil that will become humus. This prevents the soil from making a crust and it will keep nutrients in the soil. If you want to stay updated subscribe to our blog news or follow us on Facebook.

     

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    Gardening
    An introduction to our garden. Gardening for starters.
  • Clearing land with goats.

    Clearing land with goats.

    Every year in January and February we walk the goats over our terraced orchard. Yes! Right though our orchard. Clearing land with goats and having fruittrees at the same time is very possible.

    We have about 80 fruittrees on our terraced land. In summer the trees are irrigated and nothing much grows under the trees. But in during the winter month weeds start to grow and by January – February there is a lush layer of weeds growing. Clearing our land with goats saves us quite a bit of work. The secret is that most fruit trees do not have leaves at this time of  the year. That is why the goats are not interested in the trees at all; however, they do love the weeds amongst and under the trees. You still need to watch them because you never know with goats. They can suddenly do crazy things.

    land clearing - goats
    Feeding the goats with cuttings

    Clearing the terraces is important because it helps the fruit trees to grow. It also reduces the risk of wildfires on our land. In this way the goats help us, and we help the goats have a great healthy meal. There is a wide variation of herbs growing under the trees, by eating these the goats will be able to balance their diet. See more about this topic in our blog ‘What do goats eat’.

    When the goats are back in their pasture we also give them the greens from our own clearing activities. They will eat the leaves from the branches, which makes it easier for us to put it in the mulching machine.

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    Clearing with goats
    Clearing your Orchard with goats…