HOW TO KNF—SOIL GROUNDWORK
If you’ve been following this series on “How to KNF” for beginners, you can see that we’ve established that we need to do some groundwork in order to grow food in ways that mimic Nature. That’s what Natural Farming is.
To practice the KNF form of Natural Farming, we do a few specific things. The most important thing is to install IMO, Indigenous Micro-Organisms. This is the primary action in practicing KNF.
SOIL GROUNDWORK SUMMARY
Do not plow
Mulch to build habitat for soil microbes (don’t use vinyl mulch)
Let weeds fight it out (be the referee, and use cover crops)
Install IMO with mulch and Soil Treatment Solution (SOS)
GOALS
1. Soil Preparation
2. SOS Formulation
3. IMO Installation
1. SOIL PREP
Start Small
Like learning anything with farming, gardening, or homesteading, it’s best to start small, learn, make small mistakes, and then scale up. Start KNF with a small garden bed, a garden row, a small field, or a corner of a field, depending on what size of land you are working with.
Perhaps the size plot you choose to start with would be the amount you can cover with your first batch of IMO-4. One reason to do this is that, while IMO can be stored as IMO-3 or IMO-4, it is best saved in the dormant stage of IMO-2.
However, if you have animals, you will want to set aside enough IMO-4 to inoculate their bedding and set up an Inoculated Deep Litter System, IDLS. The animal bedding only needs to be inoculated once.
Additionally, you will want to save enough to add some IMO-4 to their feed. Once you have an IDLS set up, it is possible to get IMO for their feed from the bedding system. I explain this in detail when I cover animal care for KNF.
No-Till
Our goal in Natural Farming is to avoid plowing and tilling. We want to keep the soil as intact as possible to protect microbes and develop a mycorrhizal network. This creates tilth in the soil and promotes the production of topsoil.
Off-gassing of nutrients like nitrogen and carbon is a negative consequence of plowing and tilling.
Contrary to the present paradigm, tilling to create soft soil does not help plants. It makes them lazy. Tilling is done for the ease of the farmer, not the crop.
Many people use tilling to get rid of weeds, a noble cause. However, besides destroying the mycorrhizal habitat, this does two bad things. It will uncover weed seeds that were buried so they can germinate and grow, and some weeds can regrow from the smallest piece of tissue, stem, or root.
This means that weeds can actually get worse from tilling in some cases. Many grasses are notorious for this ability.
Mulches
One method for killing weeds is to solarize the area by covering with a clear plastic and letting the heat and solar radiation kill the weeds. While this can kill weeds, it will also kill your soil biology. Vinyl mulch, killing with heat and blocking the sun, has similar issues.
What are some Natural-Farming-friendly ways of killing weeds before planting?
Seeds will not be able to germinate if they are buried deep enough, so adding a thick layer of mulch will kill weeds and weed seeds. This also adds organic matter to the soil, which is highly beneficial. However, this takes time and can disrupt the pH of soil. The pH is neutralized with microbes, so the effect is temporary.
Mulching can work if that is what you have to work with. Mulching is best done several months before planting, for example, in the late summer or fall, for planting the next spring.
I have used a couple of alternatives to mulching that are faster. The quickest one I’ve used is a flash flame, and the other is a method I learned from Master Cho using corn.
Master Cho used his corn method to turn solid lava rock into planting soil. I have used it to overcome weeds and turn overgrown pasture/lawn into planting beds. The method requires corn, IMO, and some time. Corn is used because it is one of the fastest growing plants in the world, it out-competes weeds and other grasses, and can grow without needing deep soil for roots.
CLAIM PLANTING AREA WITH CORN
Corn is used because it is fast-growing and will out-compete weeds and other grasses. Sunn hemp (Crotalaria juncea) is a good alternative. Tropic Sun is a good variety. (It’s also a good animal feed.)
Mark out the area you want to claim. Cut the weeds and grasses, letting the organic matter remain. Add some IMO-4 crumbles and thickly broadcast corn seed.
Let the corn get high enough to build organic matter (tassel stage), but don’t let any ears of corn form.
Cut the corn stalks and let the stalks remain.
Add a little more IMO-4 and thickly broadcast corn again.
Repeat this cycle three times, or until you have turned the area into planting soil and outcompeted the weeds.
When Master Cho did this for the lava field in Kona, Hawaii, the process took three years. The lava where he did this was so solid that the only way local coffee growers could plant coffee trees was to blast a hole using dynamite. He used corn and IMO to turn solid lava rock into soft, plantable soil in three years.
I used it to overcome Wainaku grass using three rounds of corn. Wainaku grass is the worst grass I have ever worked with. It makes poor animal feed, and grazing animals will avoid it unless there is nothing else to eat.
Any piece of stem or root, no matter how small, will regrow. The rhizomes can burrow several feet deep, and can travel underground for over a hundred feet to reach a new area to emerge. It grows very quickly to waist height or taller. It took only three rounds of corn to outcompete this devil grass using this method.
Master Cho’s corn method can still take several months or longer to work for your problem areas. It will take longer in a cold climate.
The quickest method I found to eliminate weeds and prepare for planting without tilling or plowing was using a flash flame.
Flash Flame
I have watched indigenous farmers in the South Pacific use fire to clear areas for planting. They use a method of burn and slash, burning first and then clearing. This not only clears areas for planting, it prevents wildfires from being able to spread since they deplete the fuel regularly.
They start fires every year at the beginning of the dry season. Because they do it often, the fires never spread, which I found amazing. These fires build quickly, move quickly, and burn themselves out quickly.
I was relieved they didn’t spread because I live in a thatched house which would easily burn, and some of those fires came uncomfortably very close.
Setting a controlled brush fire may be dangerous where you are and possibly illegal. You need to be extremely careful, and I cannot recommend it. The safer way to use flame to clear land is using a small flame torch that attaches to a small propane tank. I use this method to clear areas that are a quarter acre or less at a time.
The best time to use this method is just after a rain. If it hasn’t rained, then the area should be watered beforehand. You want the plants to be plump with water. The flame is passed quickly over the weeds and grasses, similar to the controlled bushfires in the South Pacific islands.
The idea is not to burn the plants. You simply want to heat the water in the plants, which turns to steam, which causes the cells to burst, killing the plants. The weeds and grasses should look brown and dead within a day or two, but might not look dead immediately.
This will cause some death of microbes in the soil but is not nearly as destructive as using plastic
mulch to kill weeds, because the heat moves by very fast.
Animals
Another way to prepare land for planting is to use Nature, in other words, animals. Pigs will eat some weeds but are best known for their propensity to root in the dirt, looking for worms and other soil animals to eat. They also install manure as they work.
Pigs are a good way to naturally till the soil. However, if there are too many pigs or they are left in too long, they will cause destruction and erosion.
Chickens don’t root, but they peck and scratch. They will eat some vegetation and will scratch the dirt looking for insects and other small animals to eat. They also install manure. Both pigs and chickens can remove unwanted vegetation with their soil disturbance beyond what they are willing to eat.
Grazing animals can also be used to remove unwanted vegetation, but only what they want to eat. They, too, install manure. They are not going to disturb the soil, however, like pigs and chickens will do.
Be mindful that if you let animals in an area where you want to grow food, the animals will think of that area as a place to forage. If you do not want them eating your gardens, you need to be able to keep them out physically when the garden is growing.
Animals are capable of breaching barriers beyond what you think is possible when they want to get to food. You have been warned.
We are covering “How to KNF” for beginners, and we are on Level 2—Groundwork, and we are on the first step of this level, Soil Groundwork. Our goals for Soil Groundwork are:
1. Soil Preparation
2. SOS Formulation
3. IMO Installation
We have just covered the basics of Soil Preparation. The next article will cover the basics of boxes for collecting IMO.
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