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March: urban soil, rotting, & subculture reflections
🗓️ This month on Soil is Sexy:
Soil Regeneration Without Livestock - this was a deep dive into some key benefits of animal impact and how we can replicate them in lieu of livestock i.e. for contexts like sub/urban sites, public parks, or farms that aren’t able to accommodate animals.
What is Compost? - a look at how “facilitated rotting” is different than waste management, why compost is, more than anything, an action, and a simple way consumers can let soil yards know we’re interested in the biodiversity of their compost products.
Reflections: a trip to Oklahoma - a personal reflection on how stepping out of my subculture made me very aware of my subculture, and the importance of those experiences.
🧐 Did you know?
All of the posts on Soil is Sexy are organized into categories: Practical Guides, General Soil Health, General Compost Concepts, Deep Dives, and Philosophical. You can search archived posts by category by going to the Soil is Sexy home page and scrolling down to find the bold-faced labels.
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Could you use a thought partner for anything you’re working on right now? 👇
Nothing is too big or too small to post about, I want to hear from those with a potted plant or apartment composting query as much as those with farms. I don’t promise to always have the answers, but try me!
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Hi, Andie!
I've adopted a local neighborhood park in Cedar Park that has endured years of extreme mowing; it also has a few wooded areas, one of which is very "natural" but is overrun with thickets of ligustrum and nandina. Adopting the park started, for me, with really wanting to remove those invasive species from the woods, but it's grown into my attempting to survey the shockingly diverse native species present, convincing the parks department to stop mowing in a drainage area to help with water infiltration and runoff in what seems to be an area with high groundwater and a natural seep, and creating a low-mow wildflower area. In addition to the bluebonnets my neighbor and co-conspirator has been seeding there for years, I've started attempting to increase diversity in the area by seeding with local ecotype wildflower seeds that friends, myself, or native plant rescue have collected. It's all pretty exciting!
I somewhat impulsively applied for a gift garden for the park, and won! So now I'm also going to create a more deliberately landscaped butterfly garden area around the park sign, which is really fun and exciting and will be a beautiful public face for the project. Unfortunately, this spot is probably one of the most damaged in terms of its soil health--it has been consistently mowed down to about one inch tall, the soil is compacted, and they recently dug up and installed piping for a water fountain in the area.
I'm trying to think through how best to speed up succession and quickly rehabilitate the soil in this area so that native perennials and milkweeds can thrive. I'm not sure whether there's bermuda grass--I certainly hope not. I'm also doing this on a shoestring budget. I don't have a johnson-su bioreactor, but I do have a chipdrop pile that has been quietly rotting under some oak trees for about a year and a half. Do you think that would make a suitable bio-inoculant, mixed with fungal foods like seaweed, humic acid, and rotted woodchips/leaf mold from my own yard to tuck the new plants in? I also have access to biochar, which I could charge and spread over the area to try to really pack the microbes in. If only the city would let me burn the area! Or if someone could lend me a bison or two... I don't want to sheet mulch, which is what I've done in my own yard when creating pocket prairies and gardens, both because I want to preserve some of the existing species and I'm not sure whether there's bermuda grass.
Anyway! Short version of question: how would you quickly rehabilitate the soil in a roughly 10x20 foot area in a public park that has been mown within an inch of its life to favor native perennials over weeds and bermuda grass?
It is my sincere hope that animals, matching their particular skill sets to our food waste system will be upgraded from dependents and 'food bots' to certified "Municipal organic waste diverters".
Honestly, we need critters more than ever to help digest our excess nutrients, compose ingredients faster, and spread soil microbes better.