New Rule For Blog Posts The new rule is that if I start a blog post I have to finish it. That means I can’t save it as a draft and come back to it later. It has to be published at the first sitting. It’s 1:40 pm, let’s see how long it takes. I am a keen fan of natural gardening and am just starting to learn how to use the different forms or organic gardening. There are quite a few different “religions” in garening from biodynamic to subtle energies. They all need to be investigated and not just pooh poohed. That is the province for conventional gardening or chemical gardening. Looking at it simply, we find that the earth’s atmosphere is made up of nearly 80{cd07be7979728a86b172d4c3c193ee8254293b2598ced4c874c66a7b3dbba444} Nitrogen. Does it seem illogical that we need to apply nitrogen to the soil to make crops grow when there is so much available? To me it does. The topsoil on this earth is made up of weathered volcanic rock and over time, due in part to man’s poor stewardship of the soil, it has been eroded and mistreated so that there is little of the original mineral content left. These logical assumptions have led me to want to know more about the use of rockdust in growing crops. I have applied them before but was unsure whether they did anything to help. Looking back to when I grew in glasshouses, I have the feeling, but no real proof, that the rock dust, gypsum and lime I applied helped with the growth, taste and shelf life of the tomatoes and capsicums I grew. The Pot Test
Four containers before and after planting and watering
Using my favourite containers, two litre former ice cream containers I have created a small test for seeing if crusher dust is beneficial to the root growth of seedlings. There are four containers.
- Container 1 – control contains three cups of soil from my worm farm.
- Container 2 – three cups of soil and one cup crusher dust
- Container 3 – three cups of soil and two cups crusher dust
- Container 4 – three cups of soil and three cups crusher dust
Five radish seeds were planted in each container
Five radish seeds were planted in each container after mixing the soil and crusher dust well. The containers were then watered with a watering can. It is a rough experiment so I didn’t bother measuring the amount of water for each container, just tried to get it about the same for each. Ok that’s about it for this post. The time is 2:40 pm. Without taking account of the time taken for the photographs, this post took me 60 minutes.