Carbon capture in farm and garden soil
 

Just wanted to start a discussion about carbon capture/ land management practices, as I am looking hard at my own place and thinking about what I should do for best management going forward.
This was the subject of IPCC report released this week:
[URL]https://phys.org/news/2019-08-climate-farming-contribute-world-greenhouse.html[/URL]
More to the point, the general methods, potential and goals of carbon sequester through land management are laid out in this voluntary international initiative called 4 per mille.

[URL]https://www.4p1000.org/[/URL]

Discussion about policy and progress in Canada toward these goals is found here:
[URL]https://capi-icpa.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/2019-02-21-CAPI-land-use-dialogue_Smukler-Paper-WEB-4.pdf[/URL]
I am still mulling that over and will reread to think it through. One thing I see though is that progress is needed in my own region - Central and Atlantic are the areas which need a turnaround.


Meanwhile I invite anyone to talk about or share pics of the things you are doing that capture carbon in your garden or farm. Cover crops, intercrops, tree crops, no till, composting, etc.. I would like to hear about different things that work in different regions, because best practice in this as in everything has to be tailored to the region to some extent.

TIA for helping me to learn more about this. :) And thanks to the members here who are doing inspiring things and telling about it - ColeRobbie and Pure Harvest and Red Baron among others. 8-)

I only have an acre and dont till anymore due to weed invasion and erosion.
I showed the results some time ago and how it worked with great results.
My ground cover is native horseherb.
I live in a forest and dont on purpose grow lawn grass.
My main concern is water and soil conservation and river/lake pollution.
These are my pet projects and what I spread the word on.
I only drive to Austin for work I dont make special trips there on the weekend wasting fuel.
I use glassware and metal flatware not plastic and rarely buy paper plates.
I sharpen my knives by hand with a stone not an electric sharpener.
My can opener has a hand crank not electric.
I dont wash a bath towel after every use.
I wear clothes at home more than one time if not covered in sweat.
I don't take three showers a day like many people do.
My trash can is only about 1/4 full after two weeks of trash.
I rarely eat out and cook my own food in bulk and eat on it for the week.
When I BBQ I cook a lot at one time and don't do it every weekend.
My yard plants are extremely drought friendly.
I use pesticides rarely if at all.
I don't watch TV and it hasn't been on in months using electricity.
The list could go on forever.

I dont think anyone can argue with that no matter what side of the fence they are on.

You have a really nice place, Worth. :) And it sounds like you're in a good place with it, too. My situation is a bit more complicated. My perennial garden is fine and full, no problems there, but I am growing more vegetables now - and frankly we have to do that. There is not enough agriculture in our region, period. So I want to grow more garlic and onions as well, which means I need more beds in rotation and a plan to crop or cover crop in alternate years.
This year I experimented with barley, flax, and triticale (thanks to Nicky swap!) and some peas too of course. I just wanted to see if I could produce seed from any of these to grow it forward, but I don't really know if I will get seeds before it's time to plant the garlic in our super short season. I have another bed in potatoes, but I think there may be better techniques for carbon conservation there too.

Another thing, my raised vegetable beds are pretty much 100% organic matter so that means they are already carbon rich, if I understand correctly there is not much capture capacity in that, compared to the mineral soils which are totally lacking in carbon here. That old red clay could take a lot. So that makes me wonder if I'm doing the right thing. Maybe I should be working to get carbon into the clay instead.:?!?: Or maybe I should be strictly no till in the veggie beds. Still don't know how that will work for garlic. I could try tarp but I have to say the robins will not be pleased! :twisted:

According to what I read, about 10% of emissions is from food waste.
I looked for info on composting and it said that aerobic composting is the way to go, to minimize losses and of course, prepare some carbon rich material to go into the garden. So the old heaps that I make are good. Layers of straw keep the pile aerated.
I have potatoes growing in my piles this year and more from years past. I scraped up the residues from an old pile that had russetts in it a few years ago, to make a small bed. Before I had time to plant anything, they were up. :surprised: They must be really deep in the ground to have turned into perennials. The compost pile from last winter and early spring, I tossed out some fingerlings that had sprouts about two feet long, and covered them over. Sure enough they survived after all. I've been piling them up with weeds or sods and I hope they're making spuds. :)
And now I have reds sprouting out of the current pile since the spring as well. These are maybe too late to make spuds, I hope not. In any case their roots are stabilizing whatever is breaking down I suppose. The reds that I planted were sprouty old supermarket things. Putting food waste to work on carbon capture. :roll:

Bower I love your place and sometimes I wish I could live up there.

Another thing I do is to cook with cast iron most of the time.

My largest Dutch Oven has spent many a time on a charcoal fire frying fish and chicken.
Once it was heated up a few sticks every now and then was all it took to keep up frying temperatures.
This reduces energy use not only outside but inside on a stove.
Unlike thin aluminum and steel kettles that dissipate heat as fast as you can pour it on.

We did this when we didn't have air conditioning in the main house just the bedroom.
I also kept the neighborhood in hot peppers with no till.
About 100 pepper plants all together.
Left clippers on the porch so they could cut the peppers off and not tear up the plants.
Transplanted Cajuns do love their Tabasco peppers. :lol:

Just read an interesting new report about compost. This 19 year study found that compost added carbon at a high rate per year, while cover crops did not. That is in an arid climate, not sure how different it would be for us. :?!?: The key point seems to be that carbon can only be sequestered when the nutrient balance is right for the microbes that do the carbon processing.

[url]https://phys.org/news/2019-08-compost-key-sequestering-carbon-soil.html[/url]

Neat article.

I like their lines "Carbon is like a second crop" and "We'd make more progress by incentivizing compost."

I have an idea that I did not get a chance to try this year.

For hydroponics, the initial cost of the media can be high. I have read of using free sawdust from a sawmill as grow media. Currently there is a crisis of plastic piling up since China stopped buying recyclables. I have read a lot of bad things about where our recycled plastic is ending up, like SE Asia landfills, or even worse, being burned.

When processed, recycled plastic is often made into pellets or shredded plastic that I think has a lot of potential as grow media. I also saw a place selling old vinyl tents for cheap, some of them quite big. I think I could cut a strip of vinyl, sew it into a sock, fill it with plastic pellets, and grow in that. Strawberries are grown in Florida in perlite sacks like that, would be same concept, just drip nutrient solution through them. I would have to test for heavy metals and other contamination. Ideally though, it could be possible to turn trash into food. The cbd hemp I grow makes medicine, so turning trash into medicine wouldn't be so bad, either.

Some elected person dont remember who was touting the greatness of oil and coal and how it would be as carbon neutral as renewable energy.
These people are shameless and the ones that have been in bed with big oil and coal for years fighting renewable energy.
It isn't 'to me, about carbon so much as we will run out of coal and oil.
We need a replacement as soon as possible.
We have been given the chance lets not p!ss it away.

.

@jtjmartin, I've been thinking a lot about your hugelculture approach with clay. I want to diversify the forest here but the soil is not much - just a skim of clay among rocks and boulders. At the same time, there are all these different recommendations about the crops we grow - garlic and alliums they say don't compost it get rid of those tops. So I've been keeping my garlic waste out of the compost by tucking it away in the woods instead - now I'm realizing I need to do a better job of composting that and get serious about building some patches of soil where a different tree might grow. I picked out a spot this spring where I put some stuff from the fire pit, and some branches that I figure will break down pretty easily, and now I'm planning to build a compost using the garlic waste around that. I think coffee grounds and egg shells is what drives my everyday compost. :roll: Unless I have something special like manure or kelp. So I will see what I can get to rot around those branches and make it happen.
I remember discussions about how to dispose of tomato plants too, long while ago. A lot of people thought they should be burned or sent to the dump, but I always composted mine and even the plants that I stuck in the compost pile one year didn't seem to mind their own soil a bit. Tomato plants are a huge producer of biomass in the course of a season. They are worth growing for the compost alone! :lol: 8-)

@Worth, your comments about the iron pans made me think of my old Caprice Classic - I had my routes planned so I could climb one hill on the gas and then coast and travel on momentum alone for the rest of the trip. :lol:
@Cole, I wonder if chemical ferts would react with plastics. :?!?: It really is a shame the recycling progress has been crumbling. :evil: In the end, waste to energy is probably going to be what happens - hopefully with full carbon capture. There really isn't an effective way to clean and separate all the different plastics out there so that they can be reused.

And it's really hard to find alternatives to plastic for certain things. I told myself to cut down on plastic. I think a week went by when I had extra produce and no produce bags. Finally I went out and bought a box. I told a friend how I'd broken down and bought them, and she said, the 8 lb produce bag drives the economy. In other words, they don't have a substitute either, and there is no choice but to continue. Or waste food... oh wait, that's a problem too then. :(

Recycling was a huge argument between my wife and I.
I was and still am against some of it and always will be.
She was all for it.
My point was and is don't buy stuff packaged in plastic like food snacks and so on.
The price is over the top expensive compared to making your own.
Many plastics can only be recycled once.
The blue shop towels can be washed.

Now my comments about the iron pan and observations.

I will compare it to a train.
Heat is energy.
Momentum is energy.
Trains use far less fuel per ton than a truck or car due to momentum.

In a nut shell a heavy pan with more mass has more "momentum" than a light one made of aluminum.

It is also less susceptible/reactive to changes in heat/energy feed fluctuations than an aluminum one.
Just like letting off the throttle on a speed boat will slow it down fast where as an oil tanker takes forever to slow down with the engines ran to full stop.

we need to makeour soils like a cast iron skillet not an aluminum one.
The same with our homes too.

In reality our cars need to have a higher ballistic coefficient

With all the technology they have done much to decrease some pollution and very little to get better mileage.
They have put people in tiny little light weight cars that have one hell of a hard time pushing the air out of the way to keep at speed.

And most of all what I see here is too many people running around in these big 4 wheel drive 4 door giant wheeled Blacktop Queen trucks.
They never get off road and used for joy rides for the most part.

Just to update on my cover crop/ rotation experiments. Rats stole every grain of my barley. :x I was working in town, when I went out one day it was all gone. Triticale was too late. It actually put out heads just when it was time to cut it down, oh well. Didn't get to see if rats or moose would be fond of it. Flax was also on the late side - too late really for a poor year. Not sure if it produced viable seed, there are some pods on it (cut, hanging). Hey even the peas were late but I don't complain about them do I? ;) No indeed. Which means I got most of them.
The worst thing about these beds, they were hard and weedy. I had to pull and compost everything anyway, there was no other option for putting the garlic in. Deep digging to loosen the very compacted soil. But the opposite was true of my potato bed. Lovely and soft, loaded with worms! I trenched the potatoes with comfrey and a handful of chicken pellet, as well as the traditional 'dig up weeds, pile em upsidedown around the potaties' . My goodness there were more worms in that bed than my actual compost pile (which is pretty wormy!).
So... grains in the garden hasn't got a lot of raves for this year. Potatoes the old fashioned way is a soil conditioner I will certainly do again, in any weedy bed.

I read this very interesting article, about the effect of different soil treatments on water infiltration.
[url]https://phys.org/news/2019-09-soil-health-combat-climate-ground.html[/url]
An illustration comparing how various agricultural practices affect water's infiltration of soils, based on a meta-analysis of 89 studies across six continents. Credit: Lana Johnson / PLOS ONE


The most benefit to water retention was obtained where perennials/trees were planted near croplands.

I am trying something different this year for mulching the garlic. Every year, finding mulch is a big project that sends me far afield. Sometimes I don't get enough! Some years I had lots of kelp but that hasn't been the case for several years now, although I have a little. So instead I looked around the perennial garden for something that I could use without filling my beds with seeds.


I found a couple of candidates. Agrimony is very leafy, and the seeds are on tall spires that rise above the plant. So it's easy to clip off the seeds, then use the rest as mulch. One type of goldenrod (a weed at the back of the garden) is quite leafy and also has limited seeding/flowering parts at the top which can be clipped off, then clip the plants for mulching. I also am eyeing the geranium, which is certainly leafy and doesn't produce a lot of seeds.


I'm trying out the agrimony. If it works, I could plant rows to use as mulch for new garlic beds. No more driving around after mulch (okay maybe some kelp treats will still be worth it! ;))

One time visiting youtube I came upon a title that made me go hmmm. 'Chop and Drop'. Sounds like me, I thought. And yes, it was someone in Georgia, I think, who does just as the title says. When I prune things in my shrubby hedges I then cut or chip trimmings with mower and leave it under the plants as mulch. I never ever add any fertilizer and find that what is under the mulch is crumbly worm castings. No weeds either.

Another Sunday morning I heard a horticultural teacher, master gardener, from UBC say that bare soil is dead soil giving me even more incentive to carry on. He said to leave some dead plants for bird nesting material and that why would we assume that mother nature doesn't know what she is doing when plants drop leaves and branches around themselves. That's what I thought, too, after watching it go on for years.



Well:roll::yes::lol:
The birds and insects are happy in the hedges. Neighours who are just beginning their garden adventures at their new place remarked at how much cooler my yard is compared to theirs down the street in the heat of summer and I know that it is warmer on cold days with the harsh winds kept out.


I've always used what is handy to mulch with but I have started to use pine tree beetle killed pine chips for the tomato growing area and even on top of tomato pots last summer. Worked well.

Comments this evening.

@Coastal, too true! The soil under years of leaves at my bro's place is incredible.
The problem I have here is the dominance of spruce and var. Few deciduous trees, anything like those couple of birches in the pic gets blown far and wide, you can't find leaves to rake. I'm starting to have a few leaves in my driveway now, but it wouldn't mulch the area of my garlic beds. And the moose keep browsing down my little deciduous trees and shrubs, leaving nothing to chop and drop. :twisted::evil: So I have to look to the smaller vegetation, which has managed to be successful here and unmowed by moose and hares.

[QUOTE=Worth1;744015]They have put people in tiny little light weight cars that have one hell of a hard time pushing the air out of the way to keep at speed.

And most of all what I see here is too many people running around in these big 4 wheel drive 4 door giant wheeled Blacktop Queen trucks.
They never get off road and used for joy rides for the most part.[/QUOTE]

When a "big 4 wheel drive 4 door giant wheeled Blacktop Queen truck" collides with a "tiny little light weight car".... well, I know which vehicle I'd rather be in.

[QUOTE=bower;743574]Just wanted to start a discussion about carbon capture/ land management practices, as I am looking hard at my own place and thinking about what I should do for best management going forward.[/QUOTE]

Amend your soil with charcoal. It's the ultimate carbon capture and it also improves the soil..... look up 'terra preta'.

[QUOTE=statesman;747882]Amend your soil with charcoal. It's the ultimate carbon capture and it also improves the soil..... look up 'terra preta'.[/QUOTE]
Thanks, but it's not as practical for short season cold north where I am, as it is in the amazon. Very different soil and very different wood here. Very slow nutrient cycling. We can't grow any food by slowing it down in the vegetable bed. And I don't have a surplus of N ferts to "charge" charcoal either, which afaik is absolutely necessary for it to be beneficial in crop land.

Flaming the bottom of your spruce fence posts is a good idea here, to make them last even longer (the spruce is very durable anyway.) I may do that.:)

[QUOTE=statesman;747881]When a "big 4 wheel drive 4 door giant wheeled Blacktop Queen truck" collides with a "tiny little light weight car".... well, I know which vehicle I'd rather be in.[/QUOTE]
I have the mid sized black top queen pick up truck but at least I use it.:lol:

As for the later I sad earlier.
The sticks that fall to the ground in my yard I burn.
They have dropped due to stem girdling beetles.
These sticks have eggs in them.

Many others just get chopped up and left where they may be from the mower.
Leaves are the same thing.
Some get swept up and pushed into a pile for a bed I have at end end of the driveway.

So here's a pic of my roadside allium chaff/tomato plant compost/hugel. There are branches at the bottom and an old log across the back. Garlic tops and trimmings went in earlier with a bag of commercial compost over it. It was not really enough to cover and there's no soil handy here to use. Then finally all the shallot chaff, final garlic trims went in and covered with some weeds and dirt, a bag of the household scraps and my ten chopped down tomato plants and their roots. It still needs more dirt but that will have to wait for opportunity.



I've come to an acceptance that wild animals are a part of action in my forest garden system. Animals are going to eat my compost scraps and turn them into manure. So be it. I would rather that that the animals be squirrels and bunnies and even shrews, little mice or voles. I thought about fencing the compost to keep out rats. I have one like it and am still watching for signs, will I have to change my habits for the winter to discourage the pest. Meanwhile I spotted this brand new mousehole just next to the hugel beginnings. You can't keep nature out of the woods. :roll: As long as they don't come in my house, I accept that they play their role in making me some earth carbon. :|

Those frolicking moose brothers also left manure all over the place after feasting on the herbs and shrubbery. Worst thing about moose they always do it in the path. They will walk through your garden beds leaving them gouged with hoofprints, but never let anything fall unless it is in the road. Unlike hares and even grouse will tend to give it back right where they took it from, convenient to the soil building project. Anyway I must pick up after moose if I don't want to walk in it, so I went around with a bucket and loaded it all into my end of summer compost where it won't go to waste.

Our whitetail deer are inconsiderate like your moose. Birds, on the other hand, are lovely. Perched on the top of the deer fence, or on the tomato cages, they put it right where I want it.

Yes, the birds love a rail to perch on! I built a rail over my Mom's tomato bed to tie them on, and they would sit there and foliar feed em. :lol: I'm sure that's how she got such big tomatoes.
They like my 'moose rails' too. :)
Robins are pretty thrilled about the garlic beds. They spend hours patrolling the rows and it's just wide enough for them to be comfortable on pest patrol down there. 8-) A little bit of well weeded ground is important for them, and they sure are worth it. But they like to work in pairs, so a rail for the lookout is icing on the cake... did I say icing? :twisted: