#charles-dowding
When generally believed, almost any statement can mutate into an accepted fact: for instance, that you must knead dough to make good bread - everybody knows that! However, the baker and food writer Dan Lepard, with some of his course participants, experimented by making batches of dough with and without kneading, then reported being unable to see a difference in their finished loaves - in fact, if anything, the unkneaded dough rose faster! #pursuit-of-knowledge #truth
You may wonder why some or even much of the advice in this book appears to contradict what you have previously heard - and so do I! I think a lot of confusion arise from the widespread application of good knowledge in the wrong place, and there are several reasons why this has happened, and continues to happen. Advice may have been valid once and then become inappropriate in changed circumstances,; or it is based on a translation of inappropriate methods from farming to gardening, or has simply mutated through language, with words being misunderstood. #relative-correctness
Each ring of onion bulbs comes from one leaf, with larger rings from larger leaves, so fertile soil grows larger onions.
The term "root vegetable" is misleading because it embraces plants of many families, whose "roots" are anything from swollen stems (eg kohlrabi) to tubers (eg potatoes) to swollen food stores above the plant's main rooting system (eg carrots, parsnips etc). These plants are categorised together as root vegetables but, being of different families, they all grow in entirely different ways, with different issues of pest and disease.
Any part of a plant that is exposed to light starts to photosynthesise, and this causes a colour change, as more green - chlorophyll pigment - is added to the existing colour.
Be cautious of any precise numbers in gardening advice, because there are so many variables with growing plants that isolating any one while ignoring all the others often results in the wrong advice.
Allowing trees to sway in the wind encourages the development of stronger stabilising roots, whereas staked trees risk staying dependent on this support.
Forcing of any plant, ie keeping the light off all leaves, usually with pots, makes stems and leaves paler and sweeter to the taste, but it also means that the leaves cannot photosynthesise and so the roots remain unfed for as long as forcing continues. After harvest and removal of the pot, the plant may need a whole year or normal growth to recover.
Since the invention of synthetic fertilisers, the concept of feeding plants has overtaken that of nourishing the soil. An emphasis on plant nutrition means that soil is viewed mainly as a "holding account" for nutrients, which come out of packets and bottles.
However, it avoids confusing the keep the word "manure" for animal excretions mixed with bedding ,"compost" for decomposed organic matter of any kind (including animal manure), and "fertiliser" for synthetic chemicals. Soil can indeed be made more acidic by careless of excessive use of man-made fertilisers, but not from spreading compost or manure.
Soil has managed the seasonal flow of necessary nutrients in ages past, and plants have adapted to the supply system that has evolved around their roots. Trying to improve on this is possible, but requires the use of expensive, weather-dependent and water-soluble nutrient feeds, which sometimes leach into groundwater, and in healthy soil it is not necessary. My own experience or using only compost is that nutrients become available when the correct temperature is reached, which is different for all plants: for example, spinach grows with dark green leaves in the low temperatures of early spring, but sweetcorn is yellow at that time because the nitrogen in the soil is unavailable to it, until warmer soil triggers sweetcorn's roots to interact with soil organisms and access the nutrients. When soil and weather conditions are wrong, applying soluble fertilisers is no help to plants and is a polluting waste; it is simpler and healthier (and cheaper in the long run) to apply compost, whose nutrients are available when needed, with little waste.
Hot compost happens where there is enough aerated "green" and "grown" matter to feed rapidly multiplying bacteria, whose work of decomposition generates heat, often up to 60C, which is sufficient to kill weed seeds and disease pathogens. However, this level of heat can also kill some useful fungi, such that compost from heaps which have been turned regularly by machines to mix ingredients and introduce more air, causing temperatures to rise even higher than 60C, is often black and relatively lifeless compared with mouldering domestic compost.
I am frequently asked whether plants can be "burned", meaning overwhelmed, by an excess of nutrients in compost, but this cannot happen because compost is the result of a process that stabilises nutrient availability.
Soil fauna are less obvious and less discussed than the larger animals and insects around us, but are just as important and repay a gardener's care with healthier growth of plants. A large ingredient of soil fertility is healthy and active soil life - the myriad visible and microscopic soil organisms that are continually moving and eating in the soil, helping to recycle nutrients and maintain and improve the soil structure, all playing a part in maintaining the balance of pests and predators.
Using organic pesticides can put the farmer and gardener in the same dangerous place of wanting to fight problems rather than seeking to manage and minimize them.
#compost