Re: fertilizer on Med plants

Hi there Med gardeners,

 

Re soil and fertilising. I don't use any chemical fertilisers and I do mulch almost all the stuff that comes from our own garden prunings etc except for tree branches and heavy wood. All the light stuff is cut up roughly as I work my way through the garden cleaning up and tidying. It stays where it falls and makes a coarse mulch, That is a rough approximation of what would happen in the wild - as I imagine it does anyway. However, I realise that my garden is more intensively planted than would be natural in the garrigue, maquis, phyrgana etc so I ocassionally give animal manures as a mulch to closley planted things that have stopped flowering for want of food esp bulbs, mostly only bulbs, as we have a lot of them and they need to flower to be worth a place in the garden. Intensively cultivated veg patch gets chicken poo and pea straw mulch (high nitrogen) every time I plant a new crop o/w production of tomatoes, chillies etc is way down and not worth the water and other costs.

Our soil is not real flash. The top layer of loam was bulldozed off by a former owner and sold into the city so people down there could have blue hydrangeas. What we inherited from him was a very thin layer of loam to none at all, with underlying shale, irron stone nodules, quartz lumps and yellow clay-ish dirt. After 30yrs we can see how we have improved the top layer; it is black with humus and composted mulch, but it is still only a few cms deep.

Like the Med farmer-peasants knew growing stuff is a long term commitment to continuous soil care and judicious natural mulching and feeding.

cheers

trevor n.





On Thu 28/01/10 7:45 AM , "Paul Reid" pkssreid@comcast.net sent:

My thought is that it depends heavily on your underlying soil and
preparation before planting, as well as the composition of your annual
compost or mulch application. I do not think there is a one-size fits all
formula, and as you mentioned, some plants loathe it while others might
benefit from some form of soil additive, though I would shy away from pure
NPK on anything except pots with a loose medium.

Karrie Reid


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