guildfordcycads

Hey everyone,

We’re working on building healthy soil for a small piece of land where we plan to grow fruit trees and other plants. We’re especially focused on providing the right macro-nutrients (Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium – NPK) and would prefer to do it without relying on livestock.

Here’s what we’ve come up with so far based on research:

• Nitrogen: Growing legumes to fix nitrogen in the soil.
• Potassium: Using wood ash or banana peels (we have a lot of banana waste).
• Phosphorus: Adding vegetable compost.

We’d love to hear if you have other suggestions for building soil fertility sustainably, especially if you’ve had experience with methods that don’t involve animals!

On a side note, my BF and I have pretty different approaches to tackling things. He’s very systematic and data-driven (total engineering mindset), while I’m more of a “let’s dive in and figure it out as we go” kind of person. For instance, we were recently discussing water requirements for our fruit trees. His process was like this: “On average, a fruit tree needs 30 liters of water per week. Based on our location, we get 34 dry weeks, so we’d need storage for 34 weeks. That’s roughly (30 × 34) = 1,020 liters per tree. If we have 50 trees, we’d need 50,000 liters—or 50 cubic meters—so we’d need a pond that’s approximately 5m x 5m x 2m.” Meanwhile, I was like, “Let’s just start building something—if we miss this monsoon, we’ll have no water this year! We can always adjust the size later.”

How do you balance these two approaches when planning and working on a project? We’ve found that his thoroughness often pays off in the long run but can slow things down, whereas my spontaneity keeps things moving but risks missing important details. I’d love to hear your stories or strategies for navigating this kind of dynamic!

My wife and I are coming up on our first growing season in our first house, and we were looking into no-till gardening. It’s especially attractive to us because she’s pregnant, and the less work the better for us.

However, no till seems fairly expensive. To get enough compost for even a three inch layer on a 50ft x 50ft area, I’d need about 24 cubic yards of material. That’s already prohibitively expensive, not to mention wood chips on top of that.

I’m rethinking now about just tilling the soil, amending it with fertilizer, compost, coir to keep it from compacting. Then planting and covering in mulch.

It’s not ideal, and yes I know I’ll be battling weeds, but it seems like the cost to rent a tiller will still be far less than all that compost. Plus, we live on a hill so there’s no driveway to do a chip drop at. Even worse, I’ll have to carry all of the compost up a flight of stairs just to get to ground level.

Does anyone have any advice? I’m in southern connecticut, zone 6b. Thanks in advance!

Hello! Do you know if it’s possible to “dig back out” what used to be a river running through our land? It was annihilated during the soviet “land improvements” to optimise agriculture. (We’re zone 6a, Europe) Even if it won’t be a proper river, maybe a creek or even just a pond to diversify the property and thereby the ecosystem. I’m new here and I don’t see how to add a pic to the post, so I’ll just add it in the comments. Right now a farmer is using our land to grow beans for animal feed. The beans grow over the ex-river territory too. He is using pesticides, ofc… That’s another thing, but I saw some good suggestions here about de-pesticising.