MGP 116: Talking Soil Problems with Robert Pavlis

[@bobbysmac1009]

Show me the science. That is Dr. Pavlis's mantra. Love listening to him. Wonderful guest.

[@upupandaway5646]

Excellent information thank you 😊

[@aporter701]

GOOD CONTENT!! Not a waste of time. Helps solidify my decision (in my old age) to switch to 'no-till'. All amounts to good common sense.

[@ansabulfone6940]

Very good information! I wish more people would see/listen to it.

[@maritimegardening4887]

You and me both!

[@laurajones3619]

Great content!!! I listened to this podcast driving to and from work this week and purchased a digital copy of the book last night.

[@maritimegardening4887]

Fantastic! That's great to hear :)

[@TraineeHuman]

Great interview - science based testing, not hearsay or folklore - brilliant

[@Kevs2tuff]

I've been waiting for this! Ty

[@gordonreed248]

I bought a 22 acre farm about 30 years ago and after cropping it for 3 or 4 years I planted it to trees at roughly 10x10 foot spacing. Weedy gasses grew up between the rows of trees and after a while the trees started to shade out and kill the grasses. When I bought that ground I had a hard time distinguishing it from the farm field next door. When planting my trees I had to go by the corner post locations to plant in a straight line. Today when I walk my property it is easy to see the boundary. My side of the line is about a foot above my neighbor's farm field. The trees and grasses on my side have been capturing wind blown soils by slowing the wind for the dust to fall out on my side and then holding it to reduce the erosion forces. The planting and tilling on my neighbor's farm have allowed wind and rain erosion to remove some of his soil from his land. I think my point is simply that by allowing the natural build up of plant matter without any tillage on my clay soil I have much better soil today and I am not losing it to erosion much.

[@maritimegardening4887]

Wow - what a difference!

[@Bulldogxx]

Got his book for Christmas. Thanks for introducing him to us. Merry Christmas

[@maritimegardening4887]

Hope you enjoy it!

[@Kevs2tuff]

I'm in zone 5b Northwest Indiana and all of this pertains to me! Again..thank you!

[@maritimegardening4887]

Awesome thanks!

[@lindataylor7718]

As usual you are super informative and have the best guests. I have low raised beds in my garden and I agree there isn’t a lot of bending down. This year I built a small 4 foot high bed so my husband could pick lettuce without bending down. Well the lettuce was a bust so instead a grew a bunch of different varieties of kale. Kale is tough to grow here in Vancouver because of the cabbage moth and it always ends up decimated. But not in the four foot high beds! Amazing! The butterflies were everywhere around the four foot bed but I only had caterpillars in the low beds. My new kale bed!

[@maritimegardening4887]

Interesting - I have the c-moth as well - I wonder why they left them alone in the raised beds

[@lindataylor7718]

Don’t know but I’ll be doing a more controlled experiment next year

[@michaelboom7704]

Funny I cleaned up left overs from someones move...got a full bag of tomato fertilizer which I never used. I will not be looking at it the same way now after hearing Robert talk about that stuff...lol

[@krista1448]

Thank you! This was a really informative and interesting interview. I just purchased Richard Pavlis' book in audiobook format and will listen to it today while I prepare my garden for the winter.

[@maritimegardening4887]

great idea! I didn't know it was available as an audio book.

[@GottabKD777]

Great info.

[@maritimegardening4887]

Thanks for watching!

[@gangofgreenhorns2672]

I recently saw some presentation on here that said the general ratio of bacteria to fungi in soil should be 1:1. Can't remember the video title though. It seemed to be from a college or research extension or something. Was pleasantly surprised though bc the ratio in lawn clippings tends to be 1:1 apparently--and grass definitely has tons of nitrogen in it. I've been thinking of grass as "baby greens hay" lately lol.

[@jeanpauldupuis]

Many years ago I removed all the lawn from my urban property. I recently have reintroduced a small section of lawn, specifically to provide a regular harvest of green clippings. I think it is good (if not necessary) to devote some fraction of your landscape to feeding the whole of your landscape. It is good to have significant fractions of lawn, trees, ornamentals, etc, to sustainably support the fraction of cultivated crops.

[@maritimegardening4887]

That was probably my conversation with Keith Reid

[@gangofgreenhorns2672]

@@maritimegardening4887 Found it, CSUextension. Basically the overall message seems to be that we need cultivate more fungal activity compared to bacterial in our soil, at this time (1:1 being the overall goal): kzbin.info/www/bejne/gHjbhHeeo9uIi8U

[@marilynbook4211]

I had tomato wilt this year. If I move my tomatoes to another part of the garden does this mean it will make no difference? Can I keep them where they were? Also had potato worms and was going to move them as well, will it make no difference?

[@maritimegardening4887]

Good question. I'd move them - It can't make tings worse right :)

[@jeanpauldupuis]

On companion planting: ruling out direct effects does not rule out indirect effects. Ruling out effects in one domain (e.g. repelling pests) does not rule out effects in another domain (e.g. attracting predators). Any companion planting relationship is sure to be multi-spectral, including neutral, cooperative, and competitive interactions. One possible hypothesis could be (I am not arguing this, just conjuring an example): some plant pairings are compatible; polycultures outperform monocultures; any compatible pairing constitutes a polyculture thus is beneficial to both members. I don't know if any part of that is true, but it is an example of an indirect relationship not ruled out by "marigolds don't poison the nematodes" - but possibly supported by the observational science of "for some unexplained reason my tomatoes grew twice as big when I started interplanting marigolds." Maybe the marigolds looked so nice, I spent more time in the tomato bed grooming the plants (a purely indirect relationship not evident in any soil assay). A garden is not a precise stoichiometric chemical reaction in a test tube. A garden is "complex" in the fullest sense of that word. Many or most companion planting relationships may be mysterious and elusive to formal agricultural studies, but may obliquely signal their existence to observant gardeners.

[@maritimegardening4887]

"Many or most companion planting relationships may be mysterious and elusive to formal agricultural studies, but may obliquely signal their existence to observant gardeners." I completely agree - in some cases this is exactly what's going on; at the same time, I'm also fully aware that some claims about companion planting are just made up.

[@jeanpauldupuis]

A few thoughts: - Rock dust could be used, not to replace 'depleted' minerals, but to introduce minerals that were never there in the first place. - A "healthy looking" carrot tells you the carrot has crossed some minimum threshold for viability; It does not tell you the carrot has reached its optimum or that there is no headroom for improvement. - Backyard crop rotation (and for that matter 100-acre rotation) may be useless against flying pests from Mexico, but that was never the reason for it. Different crops impact the soil differently. The same crop in the same soil year after year will bias that soil in some coherent direction: depletion of certain nutrients, accumulation of others, and uninterrupted co-evolution of many generations of soil ecology. Rotation maintains soil composition and ecology of all beds near some 'ambient neutral' state, rather than each bed diverging to some cumulative crop-biased state.

[@theressomelovelyfilthdownh4329]

A guy at my allotments has grown potatoes in the same place for eight years plus. He gets a great crop every year.

[@theressomelovelyfilthdownh4329]

The standard model for crop rotation involves leaving ground fallow for a year to let it rest. These days we normally sow this with some form of cover crop and or a nitrogen fixer. Trying to play plant Tetris with crops and somehow magically gauging how much each individual crop takes from the soil. And what plant is best suited to take what's left, is pretty far-fetched. Alliums get things like rust and pink root, which are a reason to move them around. But once you have something like pink root in the soil, you kinda have it for years. It isn't going to magically go away just because you planted something else in that bed for a season. And given the scale most of us grow on. There's a fair chance, once you have it in one bed, it will be in most of your garden. So moving your onions, let's say to another bed, may do little more than tell you it's in that bed also.