I can’t believe the difference:
I mean, just look at this:
Compared to this:
I filmed that video a few days ago, then we got some good rain.
When I checked on the bed this morning, the growth was even more remarkable. The tomato stems are thicker and they’re sprawling out of the bed. I have never seen such healthy tomatoes – it’s insane.
It took a lot of work to build but I think we’re on the right track. I’m going to build more for sure. If I rent an excavator for a day, I could dig a set of trenches. Then we’d burn in them, chuck in pottery and manure and char, ashes and rock dust, kitchen scraps and whatever else we could find – and get serious, incredible garden results.
In lousy soil, this is a winner so far. It’s the absolute best spot in all of my gardens.
7 responses to “The Terra Preta experiment is bearing results”
Incredible results! Great video as well.
Nice! Our soil is about like yours– dusty sand :( We are melon- pitting everything, with a shovelful or two of charcoal in each pit, plus whatever kitchen waste and dead animals and carbon mass come our way– so far this spring we’ve entombed two dead birds and a large rat (plastic snap traps make the corpse easy to retrieve!), and the pumpkin vines seem happy ;) Here’s hoping some of that soil improvement lasts!
Impressive!
Would crushed clay pellets used in hydroponic systems work ok as a pottery substitute for terra preta in your opinion?
Thanks
I think that would work quite well.
I am drooling over your terra preta garden bed. My beds look like the one on the left if I don’t fertilize constantly. Our soil has basically no nitrogen at all according to our most recent soil test, and that was after running chickens on it for 2 years.
The nitrogen sure burns out fast.
A few more months have passed now. How well is the spot holding up so far?