Posted by George Oxley on September 15, 2013 in Biodindicator plants : Weeds & Tips, Free tastes better
Herbicides are among the most remanent molecules created. Very difficult to degrade. However we just succeeded to get rid of them in 2 years. Yes it is now possible to depollute the soil from herbicides…
18 hectars of vineyard, 3 ha of orchard, South East of France, Spread with herbicides for more than 20 years, by farmers abused by the common credo of competition of annual herbs with 30m deep vine roots and 4 m deep peach tree roots.
30years of chemicals have sterilised the soil which became a sand beach with the organic matter left with erosion, and chemical nitrogen regularly spread to make halophyle plants grow just like in a saline spray, in the mid of the land! Lime stones have totally lost their structure as we can decipher from the bunches of Ambrosia and Xanthium… plants never lie.
Impossible herbicide molecules, which is confirmed by science as well as by the judgements from the French tribunals on the subject.
Impossible maybe because the soil after so many treatments became too poor to sustain the organisms which can digest and destroy these products …
To depolute the soil and bring it back to life we decide to try to install the beings which are normaly there in a sane soil, at least the ones which are easy to handle and reproduce in a lab : arbuscular Mychorize which are living in symbiosis with the plants of a sane place such as the Great American prairie.
One of the rare place on earth which still holds the entire biodiversity of mychorize… to put all the chance on our side we also added special depollution fungi like trichoderma and some symbiotic bacteria of the myceliums…
But why would we succeed to install them on this soil totally destroyed, when they cant do it naturally? Our experience can just be a disaster. So lets’ find what support they get in nature : what about the plants themselves? Sow plants in herbicide? Very funny ! and even if they escape from the remanent molecules only the ones capable of growing in deserts will succeed !
And NO ! Nature is stronger. we must think symbiosis : the seeds are all going to germinate and because the terrain is hostile they are going to look for the support of a symbiosis with the fungi spores and therefore be able to get enough food to grow.the spores are also going to germinate at the contact of fresh rootlets,which are going to procide the carbon needed to grow and look for water to be able to get enough energy to get the precious carbon from the tough herbicide molecules.
This protocole could be called wishfullthinking… hence all the harsh difficulties on the the soil, we decided to install the balance on top… Always look at the bright side of life like in the famous Monty python movie.
lets’ recap : good mood, a passage of a single plough at 8cm deep in the center of each ranks, a mix of 40 different local wild plants seeds inoculated with spores of 30 different AM fungi and 5 bacterias (grown in lab).
We sow in the furrow and wait for 2 years so that no bioindicator plants show up anymore.