-----Original Message-----
From: Lion Kuntz [lionkuntz@email.com]
Please visit the World Wide Web site:
http://homepages.msn.com/VolunteerSt/lifesaviors/microfarm5
for a better understanding of how to think about nutrient
cycles in micro-farming.
By weight, the largest exports are water, carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen.
Microbial miners and earthworms can provide a lot of soluble plant-ready
minerals from soils where they are currently locked up as insoluble forms
not available for plant intake.
The digestive acids of a rich living soil can etch and dissolve minerals
thousands of times faster than weathering processes. This is a normal
byproduct of a well oxygenated aerobic soil growing substrate prepared
in-situ by vermiculture and other bioconversion processes. Vermiculture can
lose half or more it's nutrient value just by moving it and exposing too
much of it to ultraviolet light and the anaerobic conditions of plastic
bagging for retail marketing. It also loses the wormhole structure when it
is screened. Yet vermicompost has superior growing characteristics even
after this abuse.
Scientific tests at Ohio State University are always conducted with abused,
damage vermicompost transported long distances to their soil testing
laboratory, yet these damaged vermicomposts have still proven of exception
value in comparison to other growing mediums. Tests on in-situ vermicompost
should out-perform the market products, but testing has not ben done on
these.
Sincerely Lion Kuntz
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 11 2000 - 22:02:06 EDT