guildfordcycads

This is my first garden. It used to be my uncle’s and he already tilled a few years back. Do I need to till now? I know it’s not the best for the environment and I’m sure it’s not cheap to rent a rototiller. If I don’t till, what do I do then? There’s too much information online. Why can’t I just dig a hole and plant? Why do I have to add cardboard or mulch or compost? Where am I going to get all that stuff? What is the point of putting wet cardboard and newspapers into of the earth and dump mulch or compost on top of it?

“We’re dealing with so much abundance this year guys”

Yeah thanks bro. This is the 74th time you’ve said that word. If I drank some of my homemade mead every time you said it I would have to be hospitalized.

As per my understanding, these two systems discourage external inputs like fertilisers and encourage use of stuff like compost that has been sourced from the farm itself.

There is also a notion that food yield would be higher in these cases.

What I am not able to wrap my head around is that the numbers just don’t make sense when it comes to minerals in the soil.

Take potassium for example.

Let’s say, the available potassium in the soil is around 50 Kg per acre. Now, assume growing 2 ton of banana and 2 ton of potato per acre and harvesting it. Both use up about 3kg of potassium per ton, so you are extracting about 12Kg of the 50Kg potassium available.

It feels fairly impossible to be able to replace that amount of potassium back through compost or any means other than synthetic fertilisers.

Given the notional higher yeild than monoculture, you would also end up extracting more minerals from the ground. Also, more of it will be locked up in plant bodies themselves for extended periods of time as there are just more plants in the system

What am I missing here? Feels like the claims don’t match up for yeilds at all. They probably match up for stuff like erosion control, pest reduction, etc. but not for yeilds

It will be several months before I get a system running to pump water from my pond for irrigation. How harmful is using tap water? I’m worried the chlorine will kill a lot of the beneficial organisms. Do the rv water filters really help much?