My favourite topic! Garden trials. I'm a small home gardener who grows a variety of veggies in raised beds. Most of my beds are 4 square feet with several others of varying, smaller sizes. When I first started gardening, I tried all kinds of different gardening methods and practices but at one point, my wife asked me, "How do you know all of that stuff works?" That simple question had a huge impact on my gardening practices. I decided to go back to basics: simply, grow in compost only. And I vowed to change nothing unless I could prove something else works for me. And I did this by doing my own limited number of trials each season. That was many years ago and I still run one or two trials each season. I've tested all kinds of things - rock dust/azomite, biochar, various forms of compost teas and biochar, germination mediums (that one is easy, cheap and relatively quick) and no-dig. I've probably forgotten a few others. After all these years of testing, I'm still using compost only. My most significant and pleasant surprise showed me that "no-dig" actually works for me. It's not that I get necessarily better crops but that if I simply lay compost on my beds at the end of each season, that's all I have to do. No more digging. Another interesting (but less dramatic) thing I found relates to germination. I won't go into details, but my findings were that anything works (at least for me). So, the cheapest, most available material or method is the one I now use. Your advice is spot on! You can do simple, inexpensive trials in your garden (or your fields, for that matter) and your findings will probably save you time, labour and expense. Well worth the effort. Cheers.
Shorty has a wealth of insight gleaned from some years now of making all land-related decisions from the frame of working WITH Nature rather than trying to manipulate and control Nature. When you arm-wrestle Nature, you lose. What you learn working WITH Nature is that the more you support her the more you get. You’ve set up a virtuous spiral where everything gets better and easier over decades. Farmers get to play as they learn what the new paradigm means to each micro-choice. This clip shows Shorty, playing.
