alt Hacker NewsOh yeah, just top up the compost every year. Where are you getting that compost from? Wood chips you say? You'd have to denude ten acres of forest to make enough compost to Dowding one acre of field.
He's a soil vampire, sucking in fertility from somewhere else to feed his own garden.
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Well...we are hn so we use a website
Tree surgeons/arborists are always trying to get rid of chips
An acre? Charles Dowding is a market Gardner, not a farmer, but he has done it on a scale of a few acres.
His compost is a mixture of
1) homemade. When you are trying to expand a plot growing stuff to compost can help. Grass clippings, waste from the garden etc. This is a minor source of very good compost.
2) woodchip, see above
3) green waste. This is other people's garden waste, normally composted poorly by a local authority. You want it some time before you use it so it can compost more fully
4) farmyard/ horse manure
5) spent mushroom compost. Actually I never saw him use this, but it is very common.
One farmer I saw said the secret of no till is 'other peoples carbon', you are correct. But some people have carbon to get rid of.
In my parents' farm the compost comes from cleaning up the forest around it (trim branches, vegetation, dying trees, etc) mixed with the chicken and goat manure plus whatever else gets mixed in there (food leftovers, ashes, coffee grounds, etc). Of course it's at a small-ish scale (less than 1 hectare) but my parents definitely don't denude 4 hectares to do so.