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[Lickey]

Im agreeing with you Loong, last June many of the Tamarind trees were pruned, the labour just left big heaps of branches all over the orchard, so i dragged loads onto the salad eds and had many fires for several days, then spread the ash out and let the rain water it in, I didnt do all the beds, but the ones i did do produced significantly better red tomatoes than the other beds, and these were planted after the overdose of herbicide, they had no mulch,[ sorry, Mr Poo put some rice straw round them,which started to grow rice!!] but no real mulch, so i believe ash/charcoal is a good additive to the soil,
Mealy Bugs, the bain of my farming life here, try to keep the ant population down, mix some garlic,oinion,ginger in a blender with a small bottle of lo-cal [cheap thai whiskey] put 2 teaspoons of this in a .5 ltr spray dispenser and give the plants/root area a spray, it should deter the ants and bugs very quick,
                  Good Luck, Cheers, Lickey..

[loong]

Lickey, on 2009-05-19 03:37:03, said:

Im agreeing with you Loong, last June many of the Tamarind trees were pruned, the labour just left big heaps of branches all over the orchard, so i dragged loads onto the salad eds and had many fires for several days, then spread the ash out and let the rain water it in, I didnt do all the beds, but the ones i did do produced significantly better red tomatoes than the other beds, and these were planted after the overdose of herbicide, they had no mulch,[ sorry, Mr Poo put some rice straw round them,which started to grow rice!!] but no real mulch, so i believe ash/charcoal is a good additive to the soil,
Mealy Bugs, the bain of my farming life here, try to keep the ant population down, mix some garlic,oinion,ginger in a blender with a small bottle of lo-cal [cheap thai whiskey] put 2 teaspoons of this in a .5 ltr spray dispenser and give the plants/root area a spray, it should deter the ants and bugs very quick,
                  Good Luck, Cheers, Lickey..

Hello Lickey,
long time no posts in this thread.
As you may realise from other threads, I've been growing black mung beans as nitrogen fixers and as green compost. I've had to move little bits of soil from one place to another as the nitrogen fixing nodules were not evident all over the garden, so had to transplant some of the necessary enzymes.
The disadvantage of trying to grow mung beans? - immediately infested with blackfly!
Advantage - the ants seem to prefer farming blackfly to mealy bug.
I've continuously planted mung beans between rows and keep cutting them back. When they are crawling with ants and blackfly, I cut them off at soil level to leave the roots and nodules and bury the stems. It really works for me.
Since I've been doing this, the eggplants have done so much better and we will see how thye tomatoes will do. But certainly, I have nowhere near as many problems with mealy bug compared to before

[loong]

I'm feeling a little guilty now as I was extolling the virtues of using charcoal dust as a soil additive. There is no doubt that it is a good additive, but if using dust, it should be used sparingly.
The dust is so fine that it actually fills the gaps and so oxygen cannot easily penetrate into the soil. So it is beneficial and detrimental at the same time. If you are adding charcoal dust, you need to add something like charred rice husks or sharp sand to keep the soil open.
Of the various experiments that I have tried, by far the best has been charcoal ground to a gritty consistency. Closely followed by charred rice husks.

[jandtaa]

Hi Folks

Yesterday had my first go at carbonising some rice husks  . quickly knocked together a firebox out of an old biscuit tin with some nail holes punched in it and some corrugated sheet wired up for a chimney (just stuff I had lying about), crude looking but did what it said on the tin !! I used four large sacks of hulls and the process took about 7 hours. worked out really nicely with full carbonisation and very little ash. A couple of things I'd suggest is a mask when raking up the husks in the final stages of carbonisation as I found this last stage did create quite a bit of fine ash as the very outside of the pile is exposed to oxygen and an ample supply of water, it was really quite surprising the amount required to completely arrest combustion, in the end I removed the firebox and raked the husks out whilst playing the hose on them.

So now for some experiments, going to add about 10% to my potting mix, use some in making bokashi for fermenting kitchen waste and the rest I'm going to add to compost piles and also try my hand at some slow release organic fertiliser to work into the raised beds. 

 

Cheers for now J

[loong]

Nice one Jandtaa

[madjaristan]

Hi guys,
  I recently acquired a couple of rai outside Chiang Mai. The soil seem  like very hard and dry laterite with savanna like grass cover. There's  no shortage in water (there's a big waterhole right next to us) but I'm  wondering how to make hard laterite fertile. As far as I know tea,  coffee, citrus, coconut and eucalyptus tolerate well this kind of soil.  The only tree people grow around us is teak with a lot of  added soil.
  I'd appreciate any advice on laterite.
  thanks,
  gabor

[loong]

madjaristan, on 2010-03-06 18:42:08, said:

Hi guys,
  I recently acquired a couple of rai outside Chiang Mai. The soil seem  like very hard and dry laterite with savanna like grass cover. There's  no shortage in water (there's a big waterhole right next to us) but I'm  wondering how to make hard laterite fertile. As far as I know tea,  coffee, citrus, coconut and eucalyptus tolerate well this kind of soil.  The only tree people grow around us is teak with a lot of  added soil.
  I'd appreciate any advice on laterite.
  thanks,
  gabor

Hello gabor,

The term laterite can be applied to many different soils and rock, I think.
Possibly you mean the same type that I have here. When it's dry it is hard like rock, but when wet, very squishy and slippery. Here, I think that it is a very fine clay type soil, orangy in appearance, but when I wash my dirty feet and shoes, the water turns reddish brown (Iron?). Before they improved the water supply here, the water used to be red!
With this soil type, I don't believe that fertility is so much the problem as i believe that it is very fertile. The problem is that when it rains or you water, the very fine particles settle and compact, roots cannot penetrate and further rain/watering tends to run off instead of percolating down. It's the plants difficulty in forming roots that means it is unable to absorb the nutrients. I think that the excess of iron coupled with the lack of calcium in the soil inhibits the plants take up of NPK.
Apparently transplanted rice does not grow well in this type of soil and should be direct seeded. Even then, yields are not particularly good.
The lack of rice fields in this area and the abundance of sugar cane would suggest to me that sugar cane will grow in this soil type - but I am only guessing here.
Look at Jandtaa's corbonised rice husks - this would be a good additive. You will probably need to add plenty of compost and composted manure, also maybe lime or something to increase calcium levels. It may be a good idea to get the soil tested and take advice from a soil scientist.

[IsaanAussie]

I wish I read read this thread months ago as it would have saved me a lot of research. I have posted some similar stuff on the Farming page. I have two pyrolysis burners like the one Jandtaa's photos show and burn 10 to 15 bags of rice hulls per setup on each one. The yield is about 50% of the original volume and a burn takes 4 hours. I am using the CRH as conditioner and also as a carbon source in composting pig manure. It soaks up moisture and traps ammonia so there is little smell even from fresh manure. I am lucky to have an endless supply of hulls and hope an endless supply of patience from the neighbours when burning the hulls.

With wood charcoal, part of the initial flush of growth that has been reported here is probably coming from the sulphur released with the charcoal gets wet. Ever noticed the yellow stain from new charcoal in water? For composters, if you heap does good anerobic then dust it with CRH then turn that in, keep adding CRH until the smell is gone.

I noticed a comment about adding rice hulls into poor soil. The hulls take a long time to break down as the lignen content is high. The more microbic activity in your soil the faster the hulls will be gone.

Hopefully testing a new compost tea brewer today. Plan is to use it for soil drenches and foliar sprays.

Isaan Aussie

Added: The compost I make is highly fungal, the fungus makes a great starter for the bokashi system, with some rice bran or cooked rice as the growth media. In a closed container and a dark warm spot and bingo 2 to 3 days later. If you want to store it then use bran and dry it out after the fungus infests the bran. So start a small manure based compost heap and collect the fungus.

Edited by IsaanAussie, 2010-11-14 07:10:11.