Aaron Perry
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“Pay more attention and do less work.” This is the wisdom coming to us from Helen Atthowe, author of The Ecological Farm: A Minimalist No-Till, No-Spray, Selective-Weeding, Grow-Your-Own-Fertilizer System for Organic Agriculture (a Chelsea Green publication). In the book, Helen shares her key “Principles for Managing Ecological Relationships” which allows the gardener and farmer to achieve the fundamental goal of “dynamic equilibrium” in the ecosystem:
- Create above- and belowground diversity
- Minimize soil disturbances
- Maintain growing roots year-round
- Grow your own carbon
- Add organic residues all season
- Focus on carbon fertilizers
- Recycle rather than import nutrients
- Fertilize selectively
- Weed selectively
- Create habitat in the field
Her book is chock full of beautiful pictures and has a plenitude of easy-to-understand charts, graphs, and data – all with ample and very specific strategies and techniques for raising a variety of healthy foods. With special attention paid to the magical “rhizosphere” – that important zone in the soil where plant roots interact with the soil ecology, essentially the “Grand Central Station” of terrestrial biology, Helen shares a wealth of knowledge and insight about how we can become more effective stewards of agricultural, permacultural, and even back-yard garden ecosystems. She advises us to focus on carbon-based ecological systems instead of the conventional nitrogen-based approach that has given rise to so many health, wellness, and ecological maladies over nearly a century of chemical-intensive and mechanically-disruptive “agribusiness” approaches.
Helen writes in the book: “When you are feeling troubled, fearful, or uncertain, there is a certainty in tending plants and growing your own food. Nurturing the healthy goodness in a field of multicolored kale and lettuces or coaxing so much sweetness from a special peach tree: It all makes me feel I belong, safely, wherever I am.”
About Simple Gardening Wisdom Video Course
Helen Atthowe is one of the featured VIP speakers in the Y on Earth Community’s new “Simple Gardening Wisdom Video Course” (SGWVC) which is currently being offered at a special “Launch Package” discount rate – sign up today to secure your specially discounted spot in the course, and enjoy a full module with Helen Atthowe along with several other special experts and Chelsea Green Publishing authors.
About Chelsea Green Publishing
Founded in 1984, Chelsea Green Publishing is recognized as a leading publisher of books on the politics and practice of sustainable living, publishing authors who bring in-depth, practical knowledge to life, and give readers hands-on information related to organic farming and gardening, permaculture, ecology, the environment, simple living, food, sustainable business and economics, green building, and more. Visit Chelsea Green’s special Y on Earth Community Podcast page to see other episodes with CGP authors. (And, get a 35% discount on all Chelsea Green books and audiobooks using the code: YOE35)
About Helen Atthowe
Helen Atthowe has worked for 35 years to connect farming, food systems, land stewardship, and conservation. She bought a new farm in Montana in 2023, but still consults for and monitors on-going research at Woodleaf Farm in eastern Oregon. She serves as a consultant with farmers across the United States and internationally. Helen and her late husband, Carl Rosato, co-owned and operated a certified organic orchard in California where they pioneered methods for raising apples, peaches, and other tree fruits without the use of any type of pesticides. Her on-farm research includes ecological weed and insect management, organic minimal soil disturbance systems for vegetable and orchard crops, and managing living mulches for soil and habitat building. She is a contributing write to The Organic Gardener’s Handbook of Natural Pest and Disease Control and other books. She has served as a board member for the Organic Farming Research Foundation and adviser for the Wild Farm Alliance. Helen has a master’s degree in horticulture from Rutgers University and has worked in education and research at the University of Arkansas, Rutgers University, and Oregon State University, and served as a horticulture extension agent in Montana, where she annually taught an organic Master Gardener Course.
Resources & Related Episodes
Chelsea Green Publishing (CGP)
Simple Gardening Wisdom Video Course (SGWVC)
Ep 153 – Joy & Eric McEwen, Authors, Raising Resilient Bees (CGP and SGWVC instructors)
Ep 151 – Nicolette Hahn Niman, Author, “Defending Beef” – Regenerative Grazing (CGP)
Ep 146 – Matthew Derr, Executive Director, Chelsea Green Foundation
Ep 142 – Maria Rodale, Author, Love, Nature, Magic (CGP)
Ep 136 – Ben Raskin, Author, The Woodchip Handbook (CGP)
Ep 124 – Nick DiDomenico, Co-Founder, Drylands Agroecology Research (featured SGWVC instructor)
Transcript
(Automatically generated transcript for search engine optimization and reference purposes – grammatical and spelling errors may exist.)
Welcome to the YonEarth Community Podcast. I’m your host, Aaron William Perry. And today
we’re visiting with the author of the ecological farm, Helen Atthowe. Hi Helen. How are you today?
I’m great. Thank you. I’m so happy we have the opportunity to talk with you about your incredible book.
It’s a beautiful and such a robust resource. Thank you. It’s an honor to be here and I appreciate your kind words.
Helen Atthowe has worked for 35 years to connect farming food systems, land stewardship and conservation.
She bought a new farm in Montana in 2023, but still consults foreign monitors ongoing research at Woodley Farm in eastern Oregon.
She serves as a consultant with farmers across the United States and internationally.
Helen and her late husband, Carl Rosado, co-owned and operated a certified organic orchard in California,
where they pioneered methods for raising apples, peaches and other tree fruits without the use of any type of pesticides.
Her on farm research includes ecological weed and insect management, organic minimal soil disturbance systems for vegetable and orchard crops,
and managing living mulches for soil and habitat building.
She is a contributing writer to the organic gardener’s handbook of natural pest and disease control and other books,
and she has served as a board member for the Organic Farming Research Foundation and Advisor for the Wild Farm Alliance.
She has a master’s degree in horticulture for Rutgers University and has worked in education and research at the University of Arkansas, Rutgers University and Oregon State University,
and served as a horticulture extension agent in Montana, where she annually taught an organic master gardener course.
Now, Helen, this book, of course, is published by our good friends at Chelsea Green Publishing,
and I’m holding this up for the camera here for our video audience, and it is such an incredible resource, truly.
An amazing comprehensive and detailed resource, and it is also absolutely beautiful.
It has so many wonderful photos and a variety of other charts and graphics to help us understand some of these complex issues,
and I can grasp this book is so beautiful.
Thank you. Chelsea Green was very patient with me with all the photographs that I’d taken from all three farms that I have owned and operated in Montana and California and Oregon and now back to Montana again.
Full circle, right?
Full circle indeed.
Well, I’d like to kind of dive right in because basically the book you’ve got it organized in two major sections,
and at the beginning of the first section, you describe the principles for managing ecological relationships,
which really helps to frame up, I think, best practices and in the right sort of philosophical, practical approach to taking good care of our gardens and our farms or soil and our plants.
I was hoping to kick us off. You could walk us through the principles, which I’ve got written out here if you want me to enumerate them and you probably have the memorized.
I do, I don’t have the memorized in order anymore. I kind of have the memorized in the ones that I find to be the most vital.
And I do need to tell you that my late husband, Carl and I worked on all of those principles and again came up with them as we did experiments and managed our farms in California and Montana and then in Oregon.
But we did borrow the first three are borrowed from the USDA soil health initiative, which is kind of interesting because it shows that so many of us are thinking about what is vital for soil and farm and garden health, I think, now.
So I think what I might do is touch on the most important of them and how they interact because what what Carl and I realized as we continued farming that we started out, you know, all about yield and trying to get good organic yield and trying to figure out what to do to grow our particular crops as well as we could organically.
And over time we evolved to this realization that it was less about focusing on individual crops and more about all of the ecological function within the farm environment and and all of the interacting and overlapping ecological principles.
So when I talk about these 10 principles, they they all interact. So the first three or four of focus on soil and most vitally as I’m sure your audience is well aware of where we’re preaching to the choir here when we say that above ground and below ground diversity is the key to managing ecological principles.
And we want to have as much plant diversity both above ground and below ground as possible to encourage a healthy and strong microbial community in that magic area, the rises fear, which is where the soil and the microbes and the plant roots are commingled together.
And if there’s one magic place in our garden, it’s the rises fear. So diversity, then the next one is once we have this lovely diversity or as we’re building up plant diversity and microbial diversity, we want to disturb it as little as possible.
And one of the ways to think about that is how can we disturb the soil as little as possible so that we can maintain a living root year round.
That doesn’t necessarily mean a growing root in Montana and when the ground is freezing, we don’t necessarily have growing roots but we have living roots.
And then we move on to get a little more specific and say try and focus on a carbon-based system rather than a fine nitrogen-based system.
We used to as farmers and gardeners say, well, let’s just figure out how to get as much nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium, all the nutrients but particularly nitrogen to the crops as possible.
But over time, we learned and now the soil, microbial and biochemical research is starting to agree and concur or we’re concurring with them that a higher carbon-based system, meaning that there’s more carbon than nitrogen.
So the ratio of carbon to nitrogen in the things that we add to our soils, the fertilizers, the soil amendments, the carbon part is higher than the nitrogen part.
And then as we focus on a carbon-based rather than a super over-nitrogen fertilizer system or soil fertility system, we want to think about where that carbon comes from and can we grow our own carbon or collect our carbon as close to our gardens and farms as possible rather than importing it from somewhere else.
And then we move on to how the things below ground and the soil health of the system interacts with things like, well, some people call them weeds, we’ll call them other vegetation, non-crop vegetation and insects in the system and other microorganisms, the good guys and the ones we aren’t as happy with,
the ones that cause disease. So what we try to do with building the soil system is have it also multi-tack as building a habitat system, a habitat for beneficial soil microorganisms and beneficial insects,
soil our predators and parasites that prey upon pest insects and then also beneficial microorganisms and insects that prey upon disease pathogens and even weed seeds.
So we’re trying to create habitat as we create soil. So we’re choosing a soil fertility system that also maintains a living root in the soil and maintains season-long sequential bloom for especially predators and parasites that require pollen and nectar as their food.
Then we’re trying to fertilize only selectively, weed only selectively and maintain undisturbed habitat in a good portion of the farm or the garden at any one time.
And that kind of brings all of the 10 principles together into the overlapping ecological system but you can just read through the principles one at a time, always remembering that you really can’t take one without the other or others.
Oh, wonderful. That’s perfect. I love it. And yes, if you’re okay with it, I think I’ll go ahead and read the 10 in order as you lay them out in the book because I think it really helps a lot of us kind of get oriented in this kind of complex system.
I’m going to laugh and I’m going to laugh and say that my husband and I never believed in recipes but we came up with these 10 principles because people always wanted recipes.
Absolutely. I’ve given the nerdy big picture of how all the principles interact. Now you give it to us as a recipe.
Yeah, here’s the recipe and on that note, I’ve been able to myself learn some techniques for cooking from some remarkable chefs over the years. And so I rarely use recipes. And of course, for many of us who want to do more gardening and have more success gardening and farming, the recipes can be helpful.
And to that end, I’m thrilled to share and announce that in partnership with Chelsea Green Publishing and others, the wider community is rolling out our simple gardening wisdom video course.
And of course, there’s a module that you’ve provided, Helen, that is so informative and helpful, just helping us all get a bit more comfortable so that perhaps one day many more of us won’t need the recipes any longer.
Absolutely, and I still use them too, but I’m teasing.
Yeah, so here’s how you lay it out in the book. It’s number one. Create above and below ground diversity. Number two, minimize soil disturbances. Number three, maintain growing roots year round.
Number four, grow your own carbon. Number five, add organic residues all season. Number six, focus on carbon fertilizers. Number seven, recycle rather than import nutrients.
Number eight, fertilize selectively. Number nine, weed selectively. And number 10, create habitat in the field, essentially kind of reiterating what you’ve already just articulated.
But I’ve got to say like one of the things I really appreciate about your book is that it is absolutely chock full of very specific methods and strategies to manage all kinds of situations and scenarios that will encounter in our gardens and in our farms.
And orchards and the way you’ve organized the book is makes it so useful and not nearly I think as intimidating as it as it might otherwise be.
And I noted a few specifics that I wanted to share our audience and discuss with you, but before getting to that, I wanted to ask just out of curiosity being an author myself.
You mentioned that Chelsea Green was patient with you. How long did it take you to put this book together because it clearly has many years worth of experience and wisdom in it?
Actually, it’s really about 40 years. So I started doing on farm research in the 1990s on my farm in Montana and in the early 2000s and I got research grants and so I would of course write it all down and do even more monitoring.
So I had all of that detail and then my brilliant husband was doing his own on farm research in California.
And ironically, we were developing similar methods using living mulches for example to to maintain our living root in the soil year round as well as our crops.
And to create habitat as close to our crops as possible. So we used living mulches and then when we met, we had the courage to push ourselves even further on his farm in California where he was of course remember doing perennial crops orchard crops.
And in Montana, I was mainly doing annual crops mainly vegetables. So we did on farm research together and of course we kept all of our notes and that went into the book and then we moved to Oregon and started a farm together and we went crazy.
We really pushed the ecological envelope as far as we could go and we set up some long term experiments to see what could we really get away with in terms of those 10 ecological principles.
How far could we really go to not disturbing the soil? How much no till could we do?
With the orchard, it was easy and we kept good records of that. A little more challenging with the annual vegetable crops and we kept records of that.
So between Carl’s farm and my farm in Montana and then getting together and farming together in California and then in Oregon, it was 40 years.
It took about a year to write the book and do literature searches because I wanted to see what the science was saying about some of these things Carl and I were excited about.
And then Chelsea Green, my wonderful editor at Chelsea Green helped me and was very firm with making it less ecologically complex.
So we maintained the ecological complexity but we wrote about it in a way that wasn’t quite so complex. So thank you for that.
The first section is pretty unusual and then the second section we get into, well okay, we want to talk about managing ecological principles and we want to talk about how to do,
how to practically do all of those things that are in the 10 ecological principles. But okay, so if you’re starting with a low soil fertility system or if you’re starting with a garden or a farm that has particular pest or disease problems, then what do you do?
And the second half of the book is basically all of that but still making sure that we remember that there are ecological impacts to everything we do.
So I present the least ecological impact up to the heavier ecological impact in the second part. And that’s why it took long to write the book.
Yeah, well it’s really such a tremendous resource and I’m excited to dive into a few of the details with you and yeah, we’ll nerd out a little bit.
But I thought with your permission, I would quote you reading the final paragraph of your introduction because it sets such a suite.
And I might even say spiritual tone to the experience you’re sharing with us working with these ecosystems, these organisms, the soil and so forth. And may I read this quoting you?
Absolutely.
Okay, you write, when you are feeling troubled, fearful or uncertain, there is a certainty intending plants and growing your own food, nurturing the healthy goodness in a field of multi-colored kale and lettuces or coaxing so much sweetness from a special peach tree, it all makes me feel I belong safely wherever I am.
The process of creating farms and gardens opens my eyes to awe, tunes my ears to listening and offers the gifts of curiosity, discovery and deep connection.
Being part of this farming revolution, I reap my own personal revolution for free, healthy farming in which nature is invited to participate, grows healthy food that in turn grows healthy humans resistant to disease and stress.
These reconnected healthy farms and gardens are in turn resilient and resistant to plant disease and stress.
And it’s just such a, when I read that, I was stunned. I loved the way in which you speak to the deep solace in sanctuary, so many of us experienced when we’re gardening and farming and kind of leave us with that in the introduction as we start our journey into a whole lot of very, very practical and technical information.
Isn’t it lovely the synergy between human health, farm health, soil health, environmental health and that when we stop and pay attention, I think we can feel and see that synergy.
No doubt about it and perhaps among the many great tasks before us, before humanity, this particular work is core and central.
Yes, good food growing makes good humans. I think you hit the nail on the head.
I absolutely love it. Well, let’s let’s nerd out just a little bit. I was struck. I mean, throughout this book, not only are there many beautiful photographs, there are also many very compelling charts, flow charts, data charts to help us pretty quickly understand the information that you’re conveying and the strategies and methods that you’re sharing.
One that jumped out at me is on page 33, the soil revolution section, and it’s the complex, relatively complex interconnectedness we see going on with the roots, the rhizosphere with nutrients, microbial activity, organic carbon,
luteolin, rhizobia, bacteria, bio-channin, I don’t even know if I’m saying that right, our vascular microrhyse. Can you walk us through what’s going on in this picture?
You’re going to laugh at me, but actually, I simplified that. That’s the rhizosphere that I was talking about in the very beginning. That’s the magic if we have a magic area in farming and gardening.
It’s right there in the rhizosphere because what’s happening is the plant above ground is taking in carbon, it’s taking in sunlight, and then it’s manufacturing compounds, biochemicals, proteins, and the carbon that it harvests from the sun, ends up throughout the plant
and a good portion in the roots. Then it leaks some of that carbon out, or you could say it shares some of that carbon with the microbial community that is associating with the roots.
And then a myriad of things are going on. There are different, not only just carbon is being leaked out of the root, but some of those biochemicals that the plant makes are being leaked out or shared with the microbial community, and they act as signals.
And they signal different microorganisms to associate with the roots. For example, one that probably everybody’s heard about is mycorrhizae.
And mycorrhizae associate and become interconnected with the root because of a biochemical that that plant exudes, and the mycorrhizae, I know you, and that starts the association.
And then the association, that interaction with this particular fungi, the mycorrhizae, then allows other things to go back to the plant.
And in this case with mycorrhizae, it’s recycled phosphorus and nitrogen, and what mycorrhizae do, they’re associated with the plant root, but they basically extend that plant’s root out into the soil farther than the plant root could go on its own because that wonderful mycorrhizae has mycelium that just grows out into the soil.
That’s just one example. There are so many other microorganisms.
You mentioned rhizobium, of course, are the bacteria that associate with a legume root and allow it to fix nitrogen from the atmosphere, and so then it doesn’t need as much from the soil.
But there’s a whole bunch of other things going on. There are antibiotic microorganisms that are helping create a disease-free environment.
There are microorganisms that help plants take up and utilize iron and a micronutrient. And of course, it’s not all just good guys. There are microorganisms that can actually attack the plant, and they too need a signal.
So they need a biochemical coming from the plant, and researchers are finding that plants, we’re going to get back, of course, full circle to those…
There’s plants that have a healthy amount of nutrients,
but not an excess amount of nutrients
like an excess amount of nitrogen, for example.
Plants that are not healthy exude different signals
and then those disease-causing microorganisms say,
oh, oh, I see that.
That’s my signal to move in.
So what’s happening is that half of what’s going on
is that the plant is communicating
with the whole soil community with the biochemicals
that it exudes.
And then the other half is it’s producing nutrients,
what we call liquid carbon, or some soil scientists
called liquid carbon, that the microorganisms need
for their growth and their health.
And so there’s a sharing going on on that side.
And then the microorganisms that are using that carbon
might change things right at that root surface
that makes it easier for other nutrients
to be taken up by the root.
So there’s sharing and communicating
and a complexity of biochemical interactions
that allow nutrient cycling to be very efficient.
I love it.
I’m just smiling here and here right now.
One of the things that has really impacted the work
that we’re doing at the Wiener’s community
is not only literally working with the soil ecology,
but also learning from it, metaphorically speaking,
and thinking about a neural network analogy
for the kind of work that we’re doing
through our ambassador network in communities
and with thought leaders and authors all around the world.
And this sense of connectivity,
this sense of information sharing,
this sense of resource sharing is so inspiring.
And it’s fundamental, obviously,
to terrestrial life on this planet.
And I forget where the quote comes from,
something like we humans owe our existence
to a few inches of living soil
and the fact that it rains or whatever.
And I’m really curious, can you help our audience
get the impression of how awesome these networks are,
especially the high-feed mycelial networks,
like how far they can reach
and how many different plants and trees
and various organisms can connect in
with the network like that?
You know, that’s exactly.
That’s so important on what you said.
It’s just our paradigm, doesn’t it?
When we think in terms of these interconnections
rather than discrete plants with discrete things happening
like taking up fertilizer that we supply.
It’s a whole different perspective, I think.
So yes, good for you.
So, mycorrhizae, I do need to tell you
the wonderful thing about mycorrhizae
is that in native plant systems,
a forest system, for example, they can be,
they are the norm rather than the anomaly.
And not just mycorrhizae, but other fungi,
there’s free living fungi,
meaning that they’re not associated with the roots,
they’re just in the soil,
there’s free living bacteria as well as
the plants associated fungi and bacteria.
Mycorrhizae are make up the greatest biomass
in the soil, but in native plant communities,
they are the canary in the coal mine
when it comes to disturbance and tillage.
So if you till the soil too much,
if you disturb it with cultivation for managing weeds,
and if you over fertilize with higher nitrogen,
higher phosphorus, as opposed to higher arbonne,
which is what the microbial community really needs a lot of,
you will create an environment where there may be no
mycorrhizae, which is very discouraging,
hence why we want to have those living roots in the soil
because remember mycorrhizae have to associate
with the plant and then they’re not free living.
And then they’ll extend those wonderful mycelium
and pythae very, very far,
throughout a system where there are roots there
for them to go from one root to another root to another root.
But if we disserve the soil, we won’t have
certainly the mycorrhizae, the fungi,
in fact are the first ones to go
when we garden or farm in a way that we add a lot
of excessive fertilizer.
And that can even be too much good fertilizer,
too much high nitrogen compost.
We can, there are other bacteria and other fungi
that will dominate and the diversity of microorganisms
will be diminished, if that makes sense.
Yes, quite.
Yes, and my understanding is that in native
healthy ecosystems, we can see
mycorrhizal-hyphal networks extending across
hundreds of square miles, right?
It’s extraordinary if you have roots interconnecting
or not even the roots interconnecting,
although that will happen in a good poly culture
or many species, the roots will actually share space.
But in a forest where you have miles and miles
of interactions, you have a whole diversity
of microorganisms, sharing root space
and utilizing different resources so that they’re not
out competing each other for any one particular resource.
Amazing, yeah, maybe humans learn from this wisdom
and sophistication, yeah?
Yes.
You know, one of the resources that jumped out at me
in the book in the minimizing tillage and growing
your own fertilizer section is a layout of cover crops
for different soil conditions.
And my goodness, this helps us.
If you’ve got low fertility, if you’ve got soil,
low soil organic matter, if you’re dealing with acidic
or if, on the other hand, you’re dealing with alkaline,
you provide here the many different cover crop species
that we can select for those various scenarios.
I mean, this is so, so practical.
And getting back up to the hyphil networks
and soil fungi, one of the best ways
to encourage micro-eyesay is with cover crops.
And especially if you can minimize the tillage
when you incorporate or you add that cover crop residue
to your soil.
But boy, I was just reading an article
looking at comparing high nitrogen fertilizer effects
on the microbial community to lower nitrogen
like different cover crops
and different plant residues.
And the data is very strong
in which one will help encourage micro-eyesay
over systems that don’t encourage micro-eyesay.
And of course, the best is a forest garden
where you always have a living root in the soil
at all times.
Beautiful.
Yeah, and this reminds me of the practice of permaculture,
which, of course, your expert in,
and I got my permaculture design certification,
something like, gosh, almost 30 years ago.
And this whole notion of forest gardens
and the stacked functions
and the various levels of overstory, mid-story,
and so on, allows us to mimic the way natural forests
are arranged, basically, right?
Exactly.
I like to think of our orchard systems
or at least the orchards that my late husband and I did
and that I’m doing now on this new farm
as a forest garden with mainly fruit producing
tree biomass and then other species
to support the trees.
It’s a little harder for me to do a commercial vegetable farm
in that pattern, but I’m learning the subtleties
of different levels of annuals and mixing areas
that have perennials with areas that have just annuals.
So I can have rows if I want them,
but then I have rows of perennials too.
Beautiful.
Absolutely beautiful.
Let me remind our audience.
This is the YonEarth Community podcast.
I’m your host, Aaron William Perry.
And today we’re visiting with Helen Atto,
the author of the ecological farm,
a Chelsea Green publishing book publication.
And I want to make sure to mention that folks can find
many videos, Helen, that you’ve put together
on YouTube at Agrarian Dreams
and can also connect with you on a couple websites.
One is veganicpermiculture.com.
The other is Woodleaf Farm.org.
Of course, we’ll provide the links in our show notes.
Wanted to be sure to thank several sponsors
who make our podcast series possible.
And this includes Chelsea Green publishing.
On the Chelsea Green website,
we have a special YonEarth page
that features interviews we’ve done
with Chelsea Green authors, exclusively.
So check that out.
It’s ChelseaGreen.com slash Y Dash on Dash Earth.
You can use the code Y-O-E-3-5
to get a 35% discount on any of the books
or audio books that Chelsea Green provides.
And also have to mention again,
our very special and exciting
simple gardening wisdom video course
being made available in partnership
with several organizations,
including Earthcoast Productions,
Drylands Agro Ecology Research,
Chelsea Green Publishing, Patagonia,
and Elk Run Farm.
So check out the simple gardening wisdom video course
to learn more of these tools, technique strategies,
tricks and tips.
And there’s a special module available
with Helen exclusively.
So you can check all that out.
Also a very special shout out
and thank you to profitable purpose consulting,
working with B-certified companies
throughout the United States, Europe, and globally.
And then a shout out to Wailing Waters,
biodynamically grown,
hemp-infused, aroma therapy,
soaking salts for your well-being.
Huge thanks to our network of ambassadors
and our monthly supporters.
If you’re not yet a monthly supporter
or an ambassador you’d like to join,
go to the Y-Energy.org,
get all that set up at whatever level
you’d like to join the ambassador network.
And you can also go over to our Patreon,
Y-Energy Community Podcast Patreon
and set things up there.
We’ve got many wonderful offerings
and additional resources available to you there.
Lastly, one very special thing we do for our ambassadors
in particular is provide a vast array
of additional ambassador resources,
including our behind-the-scenes segments
with our podcast guests.
And so after we finish our main interview,
Helen and I will have a behind-the-scenes chat
available to our ambassador network.
And so if you haven’t yet joined and you’d like to,
you can go to Y-Energy.org,
just click on the Becoming Ambassador page
and get your journey started
with our beautiful growing network.
It’s like a mycelial, high-fi network worldwide
of amazing people doing amazing work.
And yeah, you know, Helen, I am just,
I’m so grateful that we’ve gotten connected
and that you have organized so much information
in this book in a way that is so useful and approachable
and navigable.
And I want to ask a few other kind of nerdy questions
because partly I’m curious,
and I imagine many of our audience will be as well.
Can you explain, for example,
what is it, what is it,
cat-ine, cat-ine on exchange capacity?
What does that mean?
Yes, cat-ine exchange capacity.
And that’s one of the chemical components of the soil.
Basically what, I’m gonna start with
is that the soil is kind of like a magnet, okay?
So it’s charged.
The soil particles have a negative charge
like one end of the magnet, right?
And the nutrient,
they’re called nutrient ions,
but let’s think of them as nutrient elements.
They have different charges.
Some of them have positive charges
and some of them have negative charges.
So if the soil is a magnet holding on to the,
the mainly the positive charge
and then the positive charge can hold on to a negative charge,
you begin to see how everything sticks together, so to speak.
So cat ions are positively charged nutrient elements
like potassium, calcium,
magnesium, and hydrogen.
The ones we really think about as farmers and gardeners
are potassium, calcium, and magnesium.
And the cat-ine exchange capacity is the ability of the soil
to hold on to those positively charged nutrient elements.
Nutrient elements.
So if it can hold on to a lot, it’s full.
If it can’t hold on to a lot, it’s a little meager.
So technically the cat-ine exchange capacity,
if it’s higher, shows you that your soil
is naturally a little more fertile
in that it has the ability to hold calcium, magnesium, potassium.
And then if I may just add,
because it’s all interconnected,
that there’s a cat-ine balancing or cat-ine ratio.
So the soil has this cat-ine exchange capacity,
meaning that it can hold on to a lot,
and it can exchange them like you’re in a card game, right?
You’re in a card game and you’re changing this card
for that card.
That’s what the soil does with the exchangeable cat-ines,
but the base saturation or the ratio
of calcium, magnesium, and potassium
can be just as important as the absolute amounts.
In fact, my late husband said he didn’t even care
how much calcium or magnesium the soil had.
He wanted, well, he did care, but he,
more importantly, he wanted to know
the ratio of calcium to magnesium,
and the ratio of potassium to magnesium.
So that’s why we want to know about cat-ine exchange capacity.
It lets us know how good our soil is at holding on to
and exchanging those positively charged nutrients.
And of course, if they can exchange them fast,
they exchange them also with our plant roots.
And that’s why we want to know.
Amazing. So one very simple way to understand this
by analogy is it’s the strength of the magnet.
I like that. Yes. That’s great.
Okay.
I’m gonna use that.
Okay. Okay.
And what is driving or affecting changes
in the strength of the magnet, so to speak?
Well, basically, it’s many biochemical things
and chemical things, but it’s also soil structure
and what my grandfather used to call soil tilt.
So if you have good soil particles with good soil tilt,
they’re going to have more magnet strength.
If you’ve got them all compacted and squished down
and you don’t have a lot of sites available
in a nice big round particle that’s not squished,
then you don’t have quite as much strength.
So the way we add nutrients to our soil,
when we add things like cover crops
can increase the soil organic matter
and increasing the soil organic matter helps
with the cation exchange capacity.
Okay. Oh my gosh.
That helps me understand this so much more.
I love it. Oh, good.
So one of the things that jumped out at me
is not only do you have strategies like cover cropping
and foliar sprays and composting and so on,
but you also have developed your own growing mix
called Helen’s Growing Mix.
Can you tell us about that and when we might want to use that?
Yes, and remember that I call it as an intervention mix.
So if I have everything working with my adding residues,
regularly, not all at once in the spring.
I used to make a lot of compost and add it all at once
in the spring and my soil microbe community
felt a little like we all feel after a huge Thanksgiving dinner.
You’re a little sluggish.
So if you have little amounts of food all the time,
adding residues regularly through the soil,
throughout the season,
that microbial community is a little happier that way.
I got off on a tangent there.
Tell me, remind me exactly what you wanted me to.
Yeah, we’re on the Helen’s Growing Mix.
Like when did you want the recipe and indeed it is there in the book.
So if I’m adding things regularly,
I get to what I think of as a dynamic equilibrium
that the amount going in is being digested
and mineralized made into available forms
for the plant by the soil microbes
and the amount that the plant roots need
is balanced with the amount that’s decomposing
and releasing at any one time.
So there’s my perfect dynamic equilibrium.
Unfortunately, there’s climatic things cold and rainy
and things that make that dynamic equilibrium not always work.
Also, the stakes that I make as a farmer
can upset that dynamic equilibrium as well.
So when things aren’t working as smoothly,
it’s early in the spring, soils are cold.
I’ve had to do some tillage because maybe I’ve had
a perennial weed problem.
So I’ve disrupted my microbial community a little bit
and they don’t like to work if it’s below 45 degrees Fahrenheit there.
They’re going to go on strike.
Then I might have to add what I call my magic mix
or my intervention mix.
And what I do is I make this up in a 30 gallon garbage can
and I mix in things like alfalfa meal
and some of the micronutrients.
And then I mix it all up
and I try to mix it in a warmer area
but I don’t always get that.
And then I apply it as a root drench to my crops as I put them out.
So I give them a little bit of a boost right as they’re going in.
And I also do it if for some reason,
things aren’t moving smoothly.
We’re not getting that natural nutrient cycling and recycling
and my plants start to look a little nutrient deficient.
And then I jump right on it.
I don’t let my plants struggle.
I give them some of the magic mix
so that they can again start cycling nutrients
from the whole soil organic matter system fertility
that I talk about in the book.
And I do have a section because this is part of being curious
and paying attention and listening to your plants.
I do have a section on the book, including photos
of nutrient deficiency so that you can jump right on it.
We tend to over fertilize as farmers and gardeners,
even organic farmers and gardeners.
So if we’re going to cautiously move away from that,
we want to make sure we know the language
that our plants are speaking to us.
We want to know the signs of nutrient deficiency
so we can jump on it fast.
So that’s one of the get out of jail free cards in the book.
That we can try to have this lovely ecological balance.
We can try to work with our microbes,
but if something doesn’t go quite right,
we need to have, we have less actual inputs,
if that makes sense, Aaron,
and more intellectual watching and monitoring
going on in our gardens.
I love that.
It’s like, pay more attention, do less work.
Yes, exactly.
That is so, that is better said than I said it in the book.
Pay attention, do less work.
It is such a joy to have this opportunity to visit
with you today on our podcast,
and I want to encourage our audience
to get a copy of the ecological farm,
a minimalist, no-till, no-spray,
selective, weeding grow your own fertilizer system
for organic agriculture, get it at ChelseaGreen.com,
and Helen want to encourage folks
that they’re interested to check out
our simple gardening wisdom video, of course,
at yhonner.org.
You can get the module that Helen created for us,
and it is such a joy to have this conversation
with you, Helen, and to be able to learn a bit more from you
and about what we can do in our gardens and farms
to collaborate more harmoniously with the natural world.
Thank you for being both a nerd
and wanting all those nerdy discussions
and asking great questions,
and also understanding that it really is vital to collaborate.
Truly, here, here.
Well, thank you so much, Helen.
What a joy.
Thank you, bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
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