It’s not exactly the same but worth mentioning compost and woodchip piles once removed nearly always have moisture at the bottom. Nutrient seaking tree roots have grown over to steal nutrients and water from the bottom of my piles. The roots literally are on top of the ground under those piles. Always makes me wonder how the tree knew what something fifty feet away was. Suspect enough compost juice seeps in the ground it’s like blood to sharks just a slower process.
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What methods are you using to improve soil this year? -
I am experimenting with a few things.
Biochar- I have made around 50lbs and inoculated it… i have it sitting in a test bed and have added a few hundred worms from my worm pile. I added probably 100lbs of leaves to the top… I want to see what the inoculated biochar plus the worms do to the leaves.
Worm Test- I have been feeding a pile almost exclusive fruit leftovers. I add in leaves and sand and common dirts. I have found that populations are exploding with decay of fruits…
Roadway ditch theory- On my rural road the state sends crews to clean ditches every few years. Thousands of tons are scraped out and dump trucked and treated as waste…unusable. I have been investigating that these soils must be the thousands of tons of leaves that rot. The soil looks rich… almost a dark black. I plan on getting a 5 gallon bucket sample and doing a few pots of flowers or possibly tomato. To see if dirty ditch line soil is good enough, or possibly great.
I have a place to make my own dirty ditch soil… leaves plus water plus stagnation and biology. I havent factored how much of the dirty ditch soil is erosion… so possibly add poor soil that i know of to the mix.
Compost- I found out that a nearby city has a major compost operation and its free. All the leaf compost and wood chips that i can handle. I paid around $200 shipping to get 50 tons dumped. Its gonna be nice to have my own bank of compost.
Manure- I have access to a horse stable, a cattle farm, and a lady that has 100 chickens. I got about a ton of each last year… all hand shoveled and wheelbarrowed. I am letting most of it rot until i need it.
Leaf mining- I have found that just leaves arent enough to create anything worth noting.
I did a test of shredding fresh leaves and putting in a pile. After 1 year deep down was just dry leaves. Not much biology going on.
The lowest layer of forest floor leaves are full of life. Age approx 3 yrs or more. This lowest layer will decompose new leaves fairly fast when added. So my theory at my location is to inoculate fresh fallen leaves with deep layer soil. Biology happens when this is done.
Birds- I feed my birds… i have discovered that there is a compost operation under where i feed them. Hulls plus bird poop… under the feeders are creating a worm farm. This past spring i shoveled around a wheel barrow full under the feeder. Around 3 inches deep of hulls…but also thousand and thousands of worms. maybe 10s of thousands. So once a year i will harvest those worms and incorporate into my orchard soils. I will start adding grass clippings and leaves under the feeder to let those worms thrive.
So in summary i am only using free, otherwise known as waste or undesirable things to improve my soil.
Always open to new ideas and thoughts.
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Water only fills a void in the soil by gravity flow from the water table. A void in the soil can not fill with water by capillary flow. That’s for any void from worm holes to post holes and bigger. Capillary flow only works well in soils with significant clay content: clay, clay loam, or silty clay loam type soils. Those are the soils that can maintain a moist zone above the water table by capillary flow. Silt is less effective and pure sand soils have almost no capillary flow. The voids in sand are too big to move water by capillary action.
You are telling me what I already believed to be the case and are directly contradicting DBang’s suggestion that his holes are filling up with capillary water, right? I just want to make this completely clear because I think contradiction in the quest for genuine information should be met with gratitude and not taken as some kind of slap in the face, even if it may feel like it at first. If I’m mistaken I absolutely love being corrected.
Yes I’m agreeing with your take.
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I believe (and hope that I’m right, but please correct me if I’m not) that decomposition leads to the release of free water so, I’ve long wondered if it represents enough water release to benefit plants. Probably a bigger plus but one whose extent I cannot quantify (by a search) is all the water that is stored in the rotting wood of a wood chip mulch, which I believe is absorbed by drying soil through capillary pull- functioning as a reservoir that goes beyond merely slowing the evaporation from the soil by covering and insulating it. That might explain the moist soil under mulch piles as much as anything else.
My own anecdotal observation indicates that wood chips keep soil moist longer than a similar depth of straw or hay.
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If you enjoy dense reading you may enjoy this.
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I occasionally perform wetland soil survey work on various job sites. What color is the clay in the holes you refer to? Typically a wetland clay soil will be a range of grey to black, sometimes with mottled iron “streaking” along the interface with roots present. That iron will look like rust (because it is oxidized iron present in the soil).Additionally, part of the process of performing a wetland delineation is digging a hole about a foot deep within the area and leaving it to see if it fills with water, indicating a fairly high water table just below the ground surface. To me it sounds like you have a high water table, at least the time of year you dug these holes. Are these spots low? Is there clay everywhere on the property? I am not sure what your site conditions are, but it is possible that the groundwater in your location has a potentiometric surface higher than the water level you can see, i.e. it is under pressure and the elevation it wants to be at is suppressed by a layer of clay.
We sometimes have to work towards a similar situation with the ponds we construct, plugging holes to prevent groundwater from entering our mine drainage treatment ponds while working in the water table. It’s not a fun challenge to have.
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When I dug these holes it had not rained in a while. I can tell when the water comes from the top or sides or bottom when it happens in minutes of digging the hole. It was definitely coming from the bottom.
Note that I have very dense clay soil where this happens. It does not happen where there is loose soil, the hole remains empty. The land is on a hill and a slope. I can see how high the water table is by looking at my driveway to my shop. There are two cracks at different elevations and water will seep out of these cracks.Years ago, I dug a hole where I lost a fruit tree and have left it unfilled. There is water in there all year, even when there has not been any rain. It is truly very dense clay but great for growing so I need to increase the soil biology to make the minerals usable for the trees.
Here is a simplistic demonstration of capillary rise. Soil Water Movements; Gravitational Movement and Capillary Rise Video | NDSU Agriculture and Extension
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The color is almost yellow but sometimes below that is a dark grey and almost black (neighbor calls it gumbo). I expect the yellow clay would be good for casting into pots.
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The video from NDSU says capillary rise can be as much as 9ft. That’s more than I expected and probably only happens rarely and slowly. Like with a clay soil and over winter. So in the example used above about a pecan on bottomland with a water table at say 10ft, the water could rewet a significant portion of the root zone by capillary rise.
But capillary rise will never fill a hole dug in that soil with water. A hole dug in the soil will only fill as high as the water table.
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Likely unrelated to the phenomenon being discussed, but…
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Hi Kris,
I think you are on an interesting path. Like you I am close to a horse barn where I collect manure each fall- winter to create several giant compost piles. I let them cook over the wet winters here where a lot of anaerobic digestion occurs to create lots of high humus content in the compost. After several springtime tiling’s to kill of any weeds it’s ready to apply to fruit trees and garden. You may be interested in several of the below articles on improving soil fertility!
Dennis
Benefits of soil organisms: Soil Organism - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics
Do earthworms create humus?
Earthworms can eat their weight in organic matter and soil each day to create nutrient rich castings. Earthworms help create humus—a dark brown-black type of soil which holds important nutrients in place for plant growth and use.
How Does Humus Help Plants Live?
Municipal leaf waste nutrient components
Benefits of nitrogen fixing legumes, crimson clover best winter cover crop to plant in spring. Alfalfa, white and red clovers are perennials.
https://www.soils4teachers.org/biology-life-soil
Nutrient availability influence of CEC:
https://www.soilquality.org.au/factsheets/cation-exchange-capacity
How does Organic matter influence CEC of Soil?
It influences the soil’s ability to hold onto essential nutrients and provides a buffer against soil acidification. Soils with a higher clay fraction tend to have a higher CEC. Organic matter has a very high CEC. Sandy soils rely heavily on the high CEC of organic matter for the retention of nutrients in the topsoil.
What is humus and why is it important?
Humus is dark, organic material that forms in soil when plant and animal matter decays. … Humus contains many useful nutrients for healthy soil. One of the most important is nitrogen. Nitrogen is a key nutrient for most plants.
What is humus and how is this beneficial to plant growth?
It’s called humus when it has completely decomposed. It is the thick brown or black matter that remains after the decomposition is complete. Humus contains many nutrient minerals that improves the health and fertility of the soil. Carbon is critical for healthy soil conditions, and humus is roughly 60 percent carbon.
Humus allows soil organisms to feed and reproduce, and is often described as the “life-force” of the soil. The process that converts soil organic matter into humus feeds the population of microorganisms and other creatures in the soil, and thus maintains high and healthy levels of soil life.
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Maybe you can get your soil scientist to weigh in. He might find the conversation interesting. I know I’m very interested in reading what he has to say.
besides chic manure/ worm castings i added only in the 1st 3 years, ive added river silt, rock dust, azomite, gypsum, and coarse D.E. everythings growing well and lush. i only add the chic manure/ worm castings to my compost pile now which is used to add to my vegetable growing raised beds. also to put around any younger trees and bushes i add. never done a soil test yet. guess ive been lucky.
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@DennisD I have heard of studies where after a few years of roll and crimp instead of mow and blow or chop and drop that that reduced irrigation by 1/2 i think. (the theory of longer deeper roots has me thinking that this will increase mycorrhiza)…
I also have seen pictures of an orchard where the owner fills the walkways with woodchips… and no grass is there. No clue if this is better or worse than deep grassy roots.
My local mulch station said that they do tests and everything is top of the top except for sodium… not sure what that means… but its free and it would take me a very long time to do it myself.
I cannot figure out what the smell is of the stuff that they have except that it smells like skoal snuff. I mean like almost exact. What would make it smell like that?
I was told by an old timer that the good leaf compost smells like wet dog. I found that to be true… when my leafs get rank they do smell like wet dog.
My worm experiment started around 3 years ago. I started with about 100 that i found under rocks and logs… then i built them a bin of sorts and kept giving them fruits and vegetables, coffee grounds, dirt…leaves, grass clippings… (waste)… i think i probably have 100000 now. All because i stopped throwing organic matter in the trash can or over the hill…and just fed it to worms. I add worms to new plantings… no clue if it helps or not but i think it does.
As of right now i am done with manure for awhile. I have been peeing in 20 gallon tubs for over a year… as of right now i am at around 40 gallons. I am loading the biochar with pee then inoculating with worm castings, leaf compost and wood chip compost… i figure there is at least a variety of biology in those three things that wanna live in my biochar hotels.
I am going to test a pee and compost tea on some plants this spring… no clue how thats gonna work out but its free nitrogen as far as i can tell.
I forgot about my eggshell additions… i dump around 2 coffee cans a year of ground eggshells into my compost bin in the fall… and by spring they are gone… i think the worms eat them… no clue if it helps or hurts but i keep doing it.
@steveb4 i have never used gypsum but my neighbor did in his greenhouse. His tomato plants were over 12 foot tall and still going. Year 3 his soil was depleted though… and he isnt into any kind of compost or anything…he just keeps adding chemical fertilizers and weeding out everything… it looks like a barren desert now.
I guess the gypsum pulls out the calcium?
I have a local sandy beach bar near a river… i have thought a few times about getting a load and bringing it back… im afraid that it will increase ants. I have also found a clay like sand in my creek… it forms near a bend. I think it would have more minerals than the beachy sand that is barren at the local river??
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The scientist Dr. Bryant Redhawk and I don’t think he does online forums anymore but you can go into permies dot com in the soil forum to see his discussion and his very detailed write ups on soil.
I do know that once the roots get outside of the holes (from post hole digger) I will no longer have any concerns. If it was not so rocky I could use a dibble bar to plant. Of course since have a tractor and a post hole digger and over 100 holes to dig I did the easy way.
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the clay like sand is what i used. the fields near the river flood every year here and are always the heaviest cropping fields these farmers own. the sediment is full of organics washed from the shorelines of these rivers naturally fertilizing them every spring. i just go on the edge of these fields and scoop up the top layer. the skoal smell in the woodchips is the bacteria working on the woodchips where its wettest. if you dig down its all white underneath and steaming hot. i spread the pile of arborist chips i get within a couple days as i worry they could ignite. ive actually watched steam come out of a pile of spruce chips to the point it looked like smoke. the gypsum adds calcium but doesnt affect PH.
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i 2nd Dr. Redhawk. i know no one else that knows soil like he does. i invited him here a few years ago but he said the site he got on was a hack and refused to try again. i think he typed .com instead of .org.
He recently lost his wife and I expect he is now taking it slow and getting closer to his grown kids. He has an amazing history and I like the way he can explain complex topics so almost all can follow.
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