Natural Sequence Farming

DEPAOLIANNA

Do EXACTLY as you suggest in the above post....you will see the results quickly, if you get a rain event sometime after you have done the above.

You need to raise the fertility levels, keep the animals OFF and encourage diversity (plants.....anykind, and recycle them at the end of their life cycles so you can rebuild your soil C levels.

Over to you.....

I can gaurantee you that increasing the fertility will only increase the ampount of lovegrass you have. The assumpstion everybody makes is that it is a weed, like thistle or dock. Its a non native grass, like phalaris, if you encourage it, it will dominate. It just happens that the ten years of drought we've had has suited it and we have suffered for it.

The proof that it only grows better if you increase the fertility can be seen at Bruce Davidson's down in Candelo he uses it to feed and finish Saler Steers. He uses a mixture of worm juice and biodynamics to increase the nutrient level of the grass. He decided because he had so much of it and he couldn't get rid of it he'd use it best he can.

Of course there are a couple of down sides, it's totally dormant in our cold,dry winters on the Monaro, it's course and cattle can have it form balls intheir stomach and die from impacted bowl and it wears down the cattles teeth reducing their life span.

In Brazil, another country that has the same problem as us, they found it could only be beaten by a combination of strategic grazing and competition with more vigourous native species.

A link to some trials on sugar.

http://www.csu.edu.au/herbarium/woodlan ... _weeds.htm

Some interesting trials with sugar. Doses are not refined and mollasses is a cheaper alternative. I have seen the results of these trails and although it did not increase native grasses, it did not harm them but the annual weeds were completely removed. Seeding of preferred grasses could increase the biomass. Improving soil conditions is the key and I believe that without the right calcium levels the plant roots cannot access any of the other nutrients in the soil.

http://stapperonsoil.blogspot.com/

above is th link to some information about the very clever Maarten Stapper on improving your soils