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Everything will be alright doesn't jive with me either. The climate change is normal and fluctuations are natural camp doesn't have many survivors these days. And the god will look after us camp was abandoned long ago. CO2 levels need to fall and emissions get increasing and vegetation clearing continues unabated.
I have a chocolate business so I grow cacao. But I also grow pataxte, cupuasu, and other theobromas and herranias. I like them all. But chocolate is a good business and I eat some chocolate as well. The rest of them are nice to have but it’s not a business. If you have plenty of money and don’t need to make a profit with your farm. …
Peter
So you have found the traditional method of cleaning Pataxte seeds with sand works best?
Thanks for the feedback.
La Nina will soon be here. Hotter seas means more water in the atmosphere and it all about where it falls. ENSO is the main one to look at but the southern annula mode, Indian Dipole and a few others are worth looking at due to global implications.
La Nina coming-maybe. The latest NOAA statement gives it a 62% of developing by June-August.
With this past seasons' El Nino, the odds of a more active hurricane season for Hawaii were heightened. In fact, tropical storm activity turned out to be quiet.
Weather disasters are on the increase in the US and elsewhere, so I take exception to the notion that "everything will be alright". Indeed, that's not true for the past, present or future!
florida natural farming[/url] (fnf) doesn't water any of his trees, are his mango roots deeper than the roots of mangoes that are regularly watered?Fnf either doesn't know what he's talking about or has deceived himself.
fnf is on a mission to plant bananas next to all his mangoes. the bananas trade, via fungi, their surplus potassium for the mangoes' surplus resources. potassium provides greater tolerance to cold stress among other things. an interesting tidbit from the fig article is that figs have more potassium per ounce than bananas.
It's also common for the soil at the spodic layer and even below to remain saturated, and anearobic, through much of the rainy season. Tap roots of almost all fruiting trees cannot survive in anaerobic conditions. Anybody who tells you that mango or almost any other fruit trees have deep tap roots in spodosols is not living in reality.
This fellow goes into a backhoe cut then shows and explains very well how it works. He also explains how seemingly good looking trees perish in Florida dry season when the shallow rooted trees haven't enough to keep them going.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlZwb4dGbGM
As for bananas trading potassium, I'd enjoy seeing some research documenting that. But I do know that banana accumulates potassium, even in the pseudostems. Since banana stems are disposable annually at harvest, that biomass production contains the potassium and can be used as chop/drop around the fruiting trees. Ive done that continuously but eventually trees crowd out bananas in most cases. A quicker source of cheap potassium is wood ash of any type, even washings from biochar production is good.
We are much drier than normal as well. Here it seems to me as if the dry season is kind of typical but we don’t get a proper rainy season. So, it makes it hard to plant but our production has been great. We just finished a very good cacao harvest I’m getting lots of black pepper, our Mamey, canistel, and sapodilla have been pumping. Just waiting for the durian and mangosteen flowering now.
When I say dry I mean that we are getting about 80” of yearly rain with distribution through the year. It’s dry for us but grass is still green where you don’t water. It’s the same in Panama, the canal is having big problems. We used to get an average of 150” sometimes going up to 220” per year.
It’s also hotter with less rain.
Peter
I've read that El niño is typically associated with less rain in the Amazon basin. Maybe the active hurricane season can somehow produce more rain for us at the extreme western end of the basin during what would typically be our dry season?I am quite curious to see how the hurricane season stacks up in the Atlantic
with such warm water conditions this year, apparently will be a doozy.
2024 Atlantic Hurricane Season Could Be One Of Most Active On Record, CSU Outlook Says
https://weather.com/storms/hurricane/news/2024-04-04-hurricane-season-outlook-april
The various online news reporting entities are predicting a more active Atlantic hurricane
season for 2024, with:
named storms 23
hurricanes 11
major hurricanes 5
It is of course unknown at present how many could make landfall in the US or in other
areas. Fingers X-ed that the fewest of these possible storms affect us rather than many.
Paul M.
==
No question that mycorrhizae and symbiotic root fungi is vitally important for nutrient uptake and there a many species and specialist associations. My scepticism was regarding the ability of systems and specific plants to unlock meaningful volumes of plant nutrients in existing minerals and even rock flour it its added. You need to be careful with fodder plants which are frequently serious weeds. Buffel, Brachiara and leucaena are bad news in many areas. Mowing once a year? I have to strain the mower through 12 inch wet shagpile like dense grass every fortnight.
Epiphyte, thank you for the info on germination and the offer of seeds, maybe I'll take you up on it one day.
Satya, watched your video. Thank you for sharing, I've been off the forum for awhile, but will be updating posts on my projects soon. My favorite posts on the forum are when people share how and what they are growing and especially when I get to see photos of all the different growing spaces and plants. So want to contribute to the forum in that way as well.
I consider wood chip or chop and drop mulch and living mulch both important in how I grow.
Mulch is beneficial for a number of reasons that we are all familiar with like protecting the soil and holding in moisture.
Living plants used as a living mulch may even be more beneficial if you have the right plants for your growing conditions. Not only does it provide ground cover and protection holding moisture, it's the root exudates on growing plants that feed the soil microorganisms in the rhizosphere buffering pH and turning minerals into a usable form by plant roots. Plants capture carbon and contribute to the hydrologic cycle. It seems counterintuitive but I've found that plants in groups hold moisture longer and grow better together. There are exceptions of course, finding the right plants that don't dominate.
The science of soil microbiology is evolving rapidly. What seemed like settled science just a few years ago are being challenged. There's a lot of fascinating stuff happening beneath our feet. Many are aware now how important mycorrhizal fungi are. There are also studies finding that roots exude light underground, why are they sending out light waves in the darkness of the earth? The more people that start growing in a way that protects and supports our soil, the closer we get to growing to our potential.
Janet
Most of the fruit trees we grow want sun so in those cases you would keep the Inga back. Keeping in mind that to successfully shape fruit trees it’s important that the sun hits the sides of those trees as well as the top.
So, we might be planting small fruit trees of less than a meter high with a spacing of perhaps 8-10m between them. If your main problem is aggressive grass it would be ideal to shade this area between the fruit trees and maybe even tackle the grass with geo textile. If the grass is manageable it would be nice to grow other stuff like bananas, pineapples, passion fruit, and many other intercrops to use the space between the small trees up until they are able to dominate it.
To get back to your question, the thing is that we are talking about Inga because it produces a dense shade. Cacao can grow, up to a point, in this shade. Some garcinias, but I really prefer a lighter shade for these shade tolerant fruit trees. I suspect that you would need a combination of shade trees that Inga could be a part of. We use Brownea, glircidium, and erithrina, which are also nitrogen fixers but the shade is less intense than Inga. Every option has its advantages and I think that the Inga is not something to completely cover any fruit tree but to be there in a managed context.
Peter
It wouldn't work real well here at my location in Hawaii. The horrible Guinea grass would spread, vines would climb to smother the fruit orchard and eventually giant albizia weed trees would take root, some day shading out everything. Of course it would take several years to actually kill off the fruit trees. The big ones such as artocarpus and durian would probably survive.
That said, I just let the grass grow over the Spring/Summer then cut it back in the fall.
Have you look into converting it to biochar? I’m sure there is specs on the them temp needed to do it with rice husk. You can then “activate” it (make it a nutrient resevoir) by running bokashi leachate through it. Bokashi is basically fermented organic waste. The easiest way to make it is using lactobacillus (kombucha bacteria) to convert the sugars from fruit waste into a moderately acidic potassium rich solid waste which is easily composted. The liquid runoff is super acidic and the possum ions will bind to the carbon rich char and the acidity will neutralize any alkaline ash.
There is some potential/theoretical risk with producing poly aromatic hydrocarbons but these are also made by some natural wood decomposition.
I am a bit sceptical about soil biota and additives being able to release nutrients locked up in mineral form.
• Soil solution Pi: resin Pi, capturing phosphate anions in the soil solution.
• Labile Pi: available Pi, or Olsen soil test available phosphorus (bicarb Pi). When another soil test is more effective in a region, such as Mehlich or Bray, it can be used instead. This is why I call this fraction labile and not bicarb.
• Active Po: labile Po. Clearly, this is because it contributes directly to plant available phosphorus by rapid mineralization.
• Sorbed Pi: The NaOH-extractable Pi fraction, phosphorus sorbed on the surfaces of iron and aluminum oxides (Garcia-Montiel et al. 2000).
• Slow Po: NaOH-extractable Po.
• Primary weatherable phosphorus minerals: sonic Pi.
• Passive Po: sonic Po + residual Po: extracted with hot, concentrated HCl (Tiessen and Moir 1993) if measured.
• Calcium-bonded Pi (Ca-Pi): dilute HCl-extractable Pi. May reflect the phosphorus fertilizer that has not reacted, as well as any apatite present.
• Residual phosphorus: H2SO4-extractable Pi: Mostly occluded and reductant soluble Pi
Mycorrhizal associations with roots are extremely
important for most tropical plants and increase the effective
root area from 2 to over 800 times. Mycorrhizal plants take
up not only the soil solution Pi and labile Pi and Po pools but
are also able to access sorbed (NaOH) Pi.
Plant roots continually exude complex mixtures of carbon
compounds into the rhizosphere. This includes organic
acids such as citric, malic, acetic, lactic, oxalic, piscidic
acids, and others. These acids dissolve solid fractions of
inorganic and organic phosphorus, bringing it into the labile
and soil solution phosphorus.
Some acids can be quite specific. Ae et al. (1990) found
that piscidic acid exudates by pigeon pea dissolved some of
the iron-bound phosphorus in a red Alfisol but did not react
with calcium-bonded phosphorus in an adjacent black Vertisol in Patancheru, India. In a phosphorus-deficient (2 mg/
kg Olsen P) Oxisol of western Kenya, George et al. (2002)
found that the phosphorus-accumulating shrub Tithonia
diversifolia slightly acidified the rhizosphere, lowering the
pH from 4.8 to 4.5, causing a significant decrease in the soil
solution Pi, sorbed Pi and the slow Po fractions up to about
6 mm distance, suggesting that part of these fractions were
taken up by the plant. In contrast, the legume Tephrosia
vogelii increased the rhizosphere pH from 4.8 to 5.4, which
decreased the slow Po fraction. While such research cannot
establish quantitative effects, or whether it is the effect of
organic acid exudation or of a proton balance, George et al.’s
data imply that these two very different agroforestry species
may be able to tap sorbed Pi and the slow organic Po fraction.
It is interesting that the labile Pi and active Po fractions were
not affected.
Roots can secrete acid phosphatase ectoenzymes, which
they do faster and in larger quantities when phosphorus
deficiency occurs, breaking down some organic phosphorus
pools. Rao et al. (1999) also suggested that species tolerant to
low available phosphorus levels, such as Stylosanthes guianensis and Brachiaria decumbens secrete phytase, the enzyme that
breaks down inositol hexaphosphate (the main constituent
of organic phosphorus) in these phosphorus-deficient soils.
The rhizosphere processes are an evolving science, with few
hard data at the field level.
I thought Costa Rica was a lot more progressive than Peru. Don't they pay farmers there to preserve forest? Things are pretty out of hand here. As much money as the government takes from the citizens, you'd think they'd actually do their jobs. If someone is clearcutting (and burning) a tract of land zoned as forest, you'd think it would be as simple as calling the police and the people being arrested within the hour. Instead, the Peruvian government opts for a much more bureaucratic process that inadvertently gives the offenders up to another month and a half to keep destroying more forest before the gov't forestry agency is obligated to visit the site.
It only is progressive in tourist areas and in media. the amount of money they pay for reforestation is enough to pay your yearly property taxes, not more than that. Laws here are very poorly imposed. after someone stole our electric meter, police itself tells us to put up a high fence, a camera, get a couple of guard dogs and some loud geese 😩. Their investigation ends at taking a report and photos of the "crime scene". Even violent criminals (caught during an organized robbery, for example) let go after 48 hours in many cases. and everyone burns plastic garbage though it's illegal, and does controlled fires of fields, though it's illegal, too. organic certification here is a joke, you basically just need to keep a journal and tick mark things you do, and tell the inspector "yes" or "no" for him/her to tick mark a form. The local organic association guy lives 15 meters from Delmonte fields and sells his produce in the farmers market as organic, and teaches others how to farm organically.
Many nasty chemicals that are prohibited in Europe and even in the US find their way here; common people think that Glyphosate is organic and that "soil doesn't have enough nutrients so we have to put in fertilizers" (direct quote, I'm not kidding....) no one ever using protection while spraying; lots of education is needed to prevent locals from ending up like in Madagascar, because Delmonte and Chiquita (the biggest ag players here) are doing their quick and dirty job of destroying the biodiversity and soil, and the local culture makes it too easy to use chemicals to make everything look "clean" and "neat", just burn all the grasses with glyphosate "only once", and you will have no problem with pasto - that's what our neighbor keeps telling us every time he passes by... he did it, and now he has a perfectly manicured soccer field that no one ever plays in.
I wonder how it is on Peter's side, because here in Perez it's very hard.
Agroventuresperu,
There are several good lectures by Dr. Christine Jones and Dr. Elaine Ingham online if you search their names and soil health.
I agree John Kempf's Regenerative Agriculture Podcast is my favorite. Some of my favorites from his podcasts and webinars:
Redox: The driver of soil microbial interactions with Olivier Husson
How healthy plants create healthy soil
How to diagnose hidden hunger and mineral imbalances
Plant Health Pyramid
Managing Nutrition at Critical Points of Influence
The more I read and learn, the more I realize that what I think is best isn't necessarily right for everyone and I try not to make too many judgements about what other people are doing. I experiment a lot and do what works best for me but what's best is continuously evolving. What I think is most helpful is for as many of us to share our experiences so that we may learn from each other.
I think in general most people are doing the best they can under their circumstances and with the information they have. My livelihood doesn't depend on crops not being destroyed by pests or diseases, so it's an easy choice for me to not use pesticides.
Janet
I think that when the trees are young it is important to do good quality maintenance. Grass will compete with superficial roots. You want to have the root feeding area covered with mulch and keep the grass and aggressive weeds out.
However an older grove is different. Under my large mangosteen trees practically no maintenance is necessary. We need to keep the surrounding forest back somewhat but that is not monthly weed whacking.
So the shade is what is making the difference. If open areas between young fruit trees were planted with inga, for instance, that would cut down on surface maintenance as well and provide more mulching material.
Peter
Any studies on accumulation of toxic metals? I went through the same process looking up birch ash. I think for rice leaf cadmium etc may be of concern for bioaccumulation.
It would also be interesting to see what typical leaf brix readings are for plants in tropical rain forests since he asserts these are all healthy. Anyone out there in the tropics have a refractometer handy?
