An introduction to soil organic matter, the soil food web and how microorganisms metabolize organic matter. 

AdAgrA 2018: Something Better

<p>An introduction to soil organic matter, the soil food web and how microorganisms metabolize organic matter. </p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Session 2

Pamela Dysinger

Children Growing Up in the Garden

Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for the opportunity and the privilege to come together and to talk about gardening and the role that it plays in family and the blessing it is to children to be raised in a garden.

And Lord, I just pray that as I share, that you would speak through me, that you would put the words in my mouth that would be a blessing to the hearers.

I wished that when I was in Caroline or Sherry's shoes with little ones, that I had had a bigger vision of the blessings of growing children in the garden.

And so I stand before you as someone who has grown children in the garden and didn't always see it as a huge blessing.

I always knew it was a blessing, but I didn't have the full picture as much as I do today.

And so, that's just a little bit about me.

Here's mostly the children that I grew in the garden.

Our family is comprised of myself and my husband John.

We have 1 daughter, she looks like the youngest but she's actually the oldest.

She's married to Nick Connect standing behind her and then we have Jonathan who's next to me and next to him, Jonathan has Farmer's Friend, which is a wonderful business supporting farmers today.

In fact, right now he's doing all our winter production.

And in front is our caboose, Caleb, who is 14, and he's a lover of the out of doors and a lover of woodworking.

And as it would appear, our family is growing and isn't it nice?

There's a few extra girls that are appearing in the pictures.

So Joshua on the right is going to be marrying Kelly Connect on June 10, who is sister to my son-in-law.

So the family's not spreading that much and Jonathan also has a special friend.

Fathers and mothers let your children learn from the flowers.

Take them with you into the garden and field and under the leafy tree and teach them to read in nature the message of God's love.

Let thoughts of him be linked with bird and flower and tree.

Lead the children to see in every pleasant and beautiful thing an expression of God's love for them.

Recommend your religion to them by its pleasantness.

So, the part I want you to take note of is teach them to read in nature the message of God's love.

Now, just want to encourage those who are coming in if you would come to the center part.

So how many of you when you're in nature have disciplined your mind to actually see the messages of God's love?

When I'm in the garden, I'm a pretty driven person and I'm a pretty focused person and I'm a very task-oriented person.

So when I'm in the garden, I'm a pretty driven person and I'm a pretty focused person and I'm a very task-oriented person.

So when I'm in the garden, I'm thinking, we're here to weed.

And that's what I see and that's what, you know, how fast can we get to the end of the row?

So, for me, it has taken a little bit of discipline to train the mind to read in nature the message of God's love.

So now I'm going to give you a little bit of an opportunity.

Okay, I want to ask you what message of love do you see in that picture?

White says, on every spire of grass, we can learn something about God's love for us.

So I wanna, I'll just repeat, but any brave soul who could throw out an idea of what we could learn as a message from God.

So in this picture of a weed that is really about ready to cast all of those weed seeds, she's thinking of it as, huh, wow, that's how God's love is transferred.

Now, that would be a wonderful thing to teach your children in the garden, But most of us look at that and think, oh no, this thing is going to go to seed and do you know what all these seeds, you know what there's a saying in farming, 1 year's seeding is 7 years weeding.

1 year seeding is 7 years, I mean, 1 year seeding is 7 years weeding.

So we can look at that, and for those of us who, like, grow things for a living, we can look at that weed and be very quick to see the seeding part of it and not the God's love spreading.

When I look at this, it's really hard to express what I see.

It's God's tenderness, love, and little fine fuzzy.

Okay, so The picture has a, it's, I don't know what kind of weed it is, but it's just a weed, and it has all these little seeds, all these little hairs, and because it's backlit, those hairs are looking very golden and beautiful, aren't they?

Which is a representation of the fine beauty of God's character.

We're going to skip through because we're not going to have time for all of them, but I have a couple that I want to...

It's, I think that it's a kind of arugula, but I'm not positive actually.

I'm a seeder, but I'm not always the brains behind it.

But I thought that was an interesting picture.

What could we take away about God's love from that leaf that has these veins of red?

If we don't have Christ's blood flowing through the veins in our body, we can never produce any good fruit for the kingdom.

I could do this all day because to me this is just where it's at.

Paul Dysinger

Natasha Dysinger

Patio Gardening

So my name is Paul Dysinger, this is my wife Natasha.

We're excited to be talking with you about patio gardening.

This, yet last year, has been an adventure for us with patio gardening.

We'll tell you a little bit more about our story and how we ended up here and what we've been doing in this presentation.

But real quick, just to give you a vision of what's possible, Mother Earth News had this article not too long ago.

A lady was sharing about how she grew $700 worth of food in 100 square feet in her backyard.

And says, Americans would realize astonishing savings on their grocery bill if they set aside a small amount of land for edible landscaping instead of growing so much grass.

So our session here is titled patio gardening and we're going to talk a lot about growing on a patio and in containers but we're also recognizing that this is more than just patio gardening, it's growing in a small space.

So maybe you want to grow in a flower bed or you know to tear up just a raised bed or to tear up a little bit of your lawn.

We're talking about how you can grow in abundance in a very small space.

Why don't we pray real quick before we get started?

Heavenly Father, we invite your presence to come and be in this room as we talk about growing food, even if we're in tight spaces.

And pray that your angels would be with us and guide us in Jesus name.

Amen Amen So a quick little overview of what we're going to be talking about today.

We're gonna start out talking about planting your garden planting your garden maintaining your garden and then harvest All in the context of growing in a small space, because it is different than growing in larger spaces, as we've learned from experience.

So, after we got married in the beginning of 2016, I moved to the farm in Tennessee with Paul.

And we were living in our tiny house on a lot of land.

And so we had a portion of that that was in crops.

Paul's parents were also market gardening that year, so they were growing down in front of our house, And then we were growing down in front of our house.

And then there was just this large amount of grass beyond that, and then beyond that, the fields.

So it was just this tiny house and a lot of land.

And then last March, we moved up to Virginia for a temporary.

We still have our home in Tennessee, but we temporarily moved up to Virginia to work in the Finley's Evangelism Training School.

And up there we are living, OK, up there we are living in a basement apartment of a large house on a very, very small amount of land.

So it's kind of from 1 extreme, the tiny house, a lot of land, to a large house and a tiny amount of land.

It's just a little postage stamp of land.

And so when we moved up there, we were like, Okay, readjust here.

We go from having all this land and a hoop house to having just basically lawn and we're not the homeowners, we're just living in the basement apartment.

And so we can't tear up the grass, right?

Cause it's not our lawn to put in some crops and there's some flower beds, but they want them landscaped, so they don't want us planting in the flower beds, so that took that option.

And so basically, what we had, they were very generous and they were okay with us growing on their back patio.

So that left us with the patio and some steps going down into our basement apartment.

And that's what we had as options for growing.

But we live in, when you're growing indoors you have to do lighting and we're going to talk about that a little bit later.

But you know we live in a basement so anything that we grow down there you're gonna be having to do artificial lighting, right?

So we had to readjust the way we thought about growing and we did and we grew an amazing amount and we loved it.

We learned so much in the process and I'm going to tell you what if you have a very small space If you have just a back patio or even if you live in an apartment and you're gonna have to only grow inside There are options don't give up go for it, and you will not be sorry yeah As we go through this we're gonna be sharing with you our successes and our failures.

Because we learned things over this last year.

Like Natasha said, growing in a patio is a lot different than growing on a farm or growing in a large garden.

And so there were things that we learned and we could have had a much larger harvest than we did if we knew some of the things at the beginning.

So we'll take you through the whole process and share with you those things.

But it was really neat because forcing us to grow in our patio garden opened up a whole new world.

Natasha and I run an online garden training school where we teach people through step by step how to grow their own food.

And prior to this, most of our experience was doing large gardens.

But we realized that a lot of people, like many of you in here probably, have small areas that you're trying to grow in.

And so getting the experience ourselves enables us to be able to share with you some of those tips and ideas from our garden.

So starting out with planning your garden.

The first thing that you want to do when you're dealing with a small space, or 1 of the first things that you want to do, is start looking at what locations do you have available to you.

And this, so you want to start looking around your house, your growing area, And 1 thing that you'll want to do is try look for places that get the most sunlight.

If you were just in our recent class you know some of the same principles apply For a large garden or a small 1 look for a place that gets the most sunlight thankfully for us in this situation This back.

This is a picture of our back patio And our garden growing and we'll tell you a little bit more about it But thankfully in our situation this back patio this side of the house was the southern facing side of the house, which gets the most sunlight.

And so it was really the perfect ideal location to put our garden, which was a real blessing because I don't know if they would have wanted all of the plants on the front side of the house.

But Han, what kinds of places would you be looking for?

So you would be looking for potentially flower beds.

You'd be looking for any deck space, porch space, although the advantage for porches for humans is that they're shaded.

The disadvantage for porches for plants is that they're shaded.

So porch space, deck space, any patios, even steps.

You'd be surprised how much you can grow on steps.

So even steps, and maybe if you're in an apartment and you have absolutely 0 outdoor space, then you'd be looking at what location inside your apartment could you maybe have a little stand where you'd be growing something and have some grow lights.

The, you know, the tinier your space the more creative you need to be.

Even little windowsills or anything like that.

If you do have a little yard, maybe you can think about, you know, the lady in the news clip from Mother Earth News where she grew, you know, it's just 10 by 10, that's not very big, but she was able to grow a lot of produce in that.

So just think about your space, think creatively.

What little locations can I tuck some plants, preferably the more sunshine the better, or do I need to be thinking about alternative light for my plants?

And then the other thing is when you're dealing with a small location, another thing to keep in mind, speaking about creatively, is can I start growing vertically versus on the ground?

And so in our situation, we did that specifically with the tower that you see in the middle there.

It's called a tower garden, and we'll tell you a little bit more about it, but it really was a game changer in our patio garden with what we were growing.

It gave the opportunity to grow a lot more food in the square footage that was right there by growing vertically versus just in regular containers.

Another thing is to take advantage of the microclimates, like Natasha was just sharing.

When you're looking around the different locations, I'll give you 1 example of this here.

This, well a couple, this is the southern facing side of the house so we get the most sunlight here.

So we've got our tomato plants here And they really like a lot of sun.

All right, you know, they want 8 to 10 hours of sun a day.

We've got our pepper plants and a couple eggplants over here.

And then here we've got some basil and a bunch of greens.

Now, what we did when we first, this is actually our second planting on our tower garden, our first planting on our tower garden we had some squash down below and what we did is we put the cold, cooler weather crops on the back side of the tower where they would get more shade and we put the crops that like more sun like the basil and the squash on the front side of the tower, they would get more sun.

So you're starting to think about microclimates.

What are small different, small tweaks that you can do to maximize your space.

Now the nice thing about the Sour Garden is it can spin.

Michael Trevizo

What is Soil?

So this morning I titled this lecture, Jesus the First Soil Scientist.

And the reason why I said Jesus the First Soil Scientist is because some of you may be familiar with some of the visions that Ellen White received from, essentially from Jesus explaining to her how she should plant fruit trees, and explaining to her what soils were best for vegetable production.

And some of the things that a lot of us in the agricultural community still don't understand is how the mineralogy in soils really dictates the nutrient capacity of the crops that are going to be grown in that soil.

There is an industry that understands this very well and the industry that understands this is the vineyard industries, unfortunately.

It's the industries that take those fruits that are so delicious and convert them into alcohols through fermentation and sell it to you at $40 a bottle.

Those industries make a lot of money and in those industries is where the most talent in the agricultural industry goes, unfortunately.

But you can turn to, I believe it's Ministry of Healing, and read some statements concerning some of the work that Satan would really seek to do in the last days and taking the fruit and the other things in the land and actually fermenting it and increasing the consumption of alcoholic and intoxicating beverages in the world in the last days.

So I believe a lot of those things but I want to really focus on what is soil.

So to start, I'd like to show you this slide right here.

And this is not something that I made up.

This is something that was shared to me at the university.

And what this is, is that today we have over 7 billion, we're rapidly approaching 8 billion souls on this planet.

There's a lot of mouths to feed, there's a lot of hungry people everywhere.

There's going to be a 30% increase in water demand by 2030.

So we're expected to have an increase in water supply.

We have a 50% increase in food demand by 2030.

And where does the majority of our energy come from?

So again, when we start considering soils, we see that the majority of our consumption and our use comes from soil.

So we've got to ask the question, what is soil?

Before I start, I wanted to show a few things here.

First off, this is 1500s, roughly, over 500 years ago.

Leonardo da Vinci made a quote, we know more about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil underfoot.

Here we are 500 years later and that statement remains the same.

With over 99% of the microbiology in soils has yet to be studied in any way scientifically.

We've only studied less than half a percent.

All our antibiotics came from organisms in the soil.

Another man you may know, Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940's during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression made this statement, a nation that destroys its soils, destroys itself.

This is very interesting because we have almost entirely destroyed the land of milk and honey that the Lord has given to those who were seeking the persecution, to avoid persecution.

Another statement by Louis Brumfield, some of you may know who he is, he was a man that was very instrumental in starting the organic movement.

He said, soil is the fundamental and ultimate basis of wealth of every nation.

When we look at gross domestic product of nations, what makes nations most profitable is its agricultural production.

So taking that into consideration, we're going to start with what is soil?

We're going to start with master horizons.

A lot of folks don't know when I say horizons what that means.

So when we look at horizons, you have multiple horizons.

Not every soil has every single 1 of these horizons, but the first horizon that you would see is mostly is the O horizon.

This is the surface horizon made of organic matter.

And this horizon is usually only attributed to jungles and forests, where you have a lot of litter decay on the surface of the soil.

In agro ecosystems you will not usually find this with the exception of some of your mulches and things you would throw on top but we don't usually call that the O horizon because that is actually due to human enrichment.

This is essentially what most people call topsoil.

This surface horizon is a mixture of the minerals that are the parent material that has mineralized in that soil and also the organic matter.

It's usually high in organic matter but not all soils are high, have an A horizon that is high in organic matter.

And usually when you see that, what you're essentially saying is that you don't have an A horizon.

So in the Midwest, where the Corn Belt is, this was an area of the country that had very high organic matter.

It's referred to as a mollic epipedon or a mollisol because that means it's high in organic matter.

We have, with over the last 100 to 150 years, we have taken our topsoil from about 3 feet or so down to about a foot in some places.

We have eroded significantly that topsoil and that land is never going to produce the way it used to produce.

That's rather unfortunate because that's where some of our highest production used to come from.

Then we have the E horizon, which is the subsurface horizon.

What this is, is a horizon that usually is associated with leaching of nutrients from the upper horizons down to the lower horizons.

And this is usually seen in areas of high precipitation.

So if you're in deserts and other arid climates, you won't see this.

But you sometimes see this in the southeast, particularly where high rainfalls in the tropical regions.

And of course, this is represented as white in the screen because you usually see this white coloration to soils when you start digging a pit and looking at that.

This is where you often times find clay accumulation.

It moves through the soil horizons and it goes down to the lower horizons and this is referred to as clay accumulation or alluviational processes.

And then beneath that is the substratum, which is the least weathered and deepest of all the soil horizons, and this is usually made up of fractured parent material, which is, in other words, fractured bedrock.

So usually this is pretty deep, but in some cases it's not, depending on soils.

Some soils are very weathered and you won't experience that.

This is a cutaway image of what that would look like.

Not again, not every soil has all 5 horizons.

Series

Session 2

What is Soil?

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Attachments

Intensive: Gardening 101

3. Gardening 101: Steps to Productive Soil

1h 2m

Intensive: The Life of the Plants Is in the Sap

The Life of the Plants Is in the Sap- Part 2

58m

Intensive: The Life of the Plants Is in the Sap

The Life of the Plants Is in the Sap- Part 1

54m

Soil Fertility

Chemistry

47m

Soil Fertility

Getting the Model Right- Part 2

56m

Level 1 Homesteading and Home Gardening

Soil 101

1h

Soil Fertility Advanced

Soil: Carbon Fertility

1h

Soil Fertility Advanced

Soil: Insect, Diseases, and Weeds

53m

Soil Health

2- The Three Legged Stool Part 1, Chemistry

54m

Home Gardening

Soil Health for the Home Gardener Part 1

55m

Sound Doctrine