Building Soil Fertility, Load by Load

Here, at Florida Forest Gardens, we are super busy! We are well into our rainy season. I love Florida weather all year, but the rainy season is particularly lovely because everything grows so well.

I am heavily engaged in plant propagation and planting and in researching and applying all I can about soil fertility, particularly following the JADAM and Korean Natural Farming (KNF) methods.

Meanwhile, my son Josiah has been busy supporting my efforts, particularly through his building projects. He converted and upgraded a decades-old shed with a new roof and deck floor, a safe, dry place for storage. He also has built me two carport-style greenhouses. These structures are a long-term, temporary hub  for the majority of our forest gardening projects.

Almost daily, we are receiving truckloads of tree mulch. The picture above, from this morning, shows what we have so far, about seven loads. That’s less than half of what we are planning to receive. The rain will help the mulch break down into fungal dominated soil. That is exactly what we want in a forest garden. Wheelbarrow load, by wheelbarrow load, we will spread that on top of what Josiah spread last year. In doing so, he found some basketball sized clumps of mycelium which he made sure to break apart and place strategically around the property underneath various wheelbarrow loads.

Every truckload of tree mulch translates into many wheelbarrow loads, and that translates into our objective: continuing to build soil fertility, load by load.

This has been a quick update. In future blogs and other writings, I will include more detail about our projects and the development of our business, Florida Forest Gardens, LLC.

Mushroom Farming

With forest gardening, I love the balance between the planned and the unplanned.

As for unplanned, I think of the first time that I ever even knew about hog plums was when a bush spontaneously grew up close to the driveway and every time I passed it, I was captivated by the wonderful aroma of its blossoms. I never planted that bush there. It took some investigating to even figure out what it was. Now, I have several hog plum bushes, each of which grew up spontaneously, probably from seed spread by the gopher tortoises which love my property.

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Florida State Parks — Photograph of Gopher Tortoise eating green vegetation-by Dr. Pamela Jones-Morton

Continue reading “Mushroom Farming”