The List of Creation Farmers Grows - Joel Salatin

Joel Salatin moves his cows, chickens, and pigs to balance
the food input and the fertilizer output.
The video below goes into great
detail about his methods, based on God's Creation.

Queen Elizabeth's private gardens use no
man-made toxins. They are productive and teeming with
wildlife of all kinds.

The Salatin Farm - Polyface

 The Salatins have historic ties to Bob Jones University,
where Joel graduated, but now they attract a lot of the new
generation's interest in pure food and honest farming practices.

The Polyface Story

In 1961, William and Lucille Salatin moved their young family to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, purchasing the most worn-out, eroded, abused farm in the area near Staunton. Using nature as a pattern, they and their children began the healing and innovation that now supports three generations.
Disregarding conventional wisdom, the Salatins planted trees, built huge compost piles, dug ponds, moved cows daily with portable electric fencing, and invented portable sheltering systems to produce all their animals on perennial prairie polycultures. 

Today the farm arguably represents America’s premier non-industrial food production oasis. Believing that the Creator’s design is still the best pattern for the biological world, the Salatin family invites like-minded folks to join in the farm’s mission: to develop emotionally, economically, environmentally enhancing agricultural enterprises and facilitate their duplication throughout the world.

Where have the butterflies gone?
We kill them to get rid of mosquitoes,
but the mosquitoes never go away.
Painting by Norma Boeckler

Building the Soil

When I began serious gardening in the 1980s, in Midland, I had the run of the Midland Public Library, which included the Rodale Books on organic gardening. I also read the scientific books on agriculture, decomposition, and soil structure. Nothing is quite so complex and interesting as the various soils of the United States and how they formed.

Everyone seems to know that the fertility of the Great Plains came from the perennial prairie grasses enriching the soil and the enormous herds of bison moving across them and fertilizing them. However, modern farming has been depleting the soil built up with grasses and mobile grazing.

Joel Salatin farms the way I garden, aiming at Every Day Low Costs, EDLC, a watchword at Walmart. Sam Walton believed in pushing the price down to draw in more customers, to increase volume and lower prices even more.

If I can buy a two-year bare root rose for $6, then why pay $24 for something similar? If I can renew the soil from the leaves thrown away by my neighbors, why should I buy the chemical fertilizer they seem so anxious to use.

One of the best weed suppressors is Buckwheat. A five-pound bag goes a long way and costs what a bag of herbicide would cost, or better yet (sic) - a bag of chemical fertilizer plus weed killer. Buckwheat removes weeds by competition, but it also improves the soil and attracts pollinators. 

Salatin uses chickens to eat his pests, and I use the local birds, beneficial bugs, and toads.

Birds eat Beautyberries late in the season,
but the plant decorates the garden all summer.

Here are some upcoming chores:

1. I am digging up the remains of a once-productive KnockOut rose and replacing it with a Beautyberry plant from the backyard. This introduces more variety in the rose garden, especially with plants that are unusual and fun to show off.
2. The latest thunderstorm gave me rainwater to distribute for special plants and those that need a little boost, such as the Crepe Myrtle twigs.
3. Piles of grass and clover from the lawnmower will be tucked around the Butterfly Bush for extra food energy.
4. A bird planted a Boston Ivy vine by sitting on one of my stumps. Transplanting it to the Wild Garden will give that area a vine that grows well in the shade because it reaches for sunlight. Planted in sunlight, it barely moves.

Crepe Myrtles are weed-like in their growth,
but remain ugly without pruning, watering, and feeding.
The Mother of All Myrtles gets a little pruning all the time,
extra water, and plenty of organic food at the base.

Some recent insights to implement:

• Every living root adds energy to the soil and represents 75% of the organic matter that will go into the soil. Therefore, land without plants is not improving as much as it could with some kind of cover crop.
• The rose garden will be more productive and friendly to beneficial insects with the mulch supporting Buckwheat rather than low-growing weeds like Bermuda grass. Mulch is like a vacuum - something will fill the emptiness.
• Dutch White Clover and Wild Strawberries are good companion plants for the roses too, because they are low-growing, invasive, and beneficial. 
• Water infiltration is far more important than the amount of rainfall. Deeply rooted plants will take the rainfall downward for storage in the soil. 

Creation Gardening Ironic Humor

1. Chemical gardeners save eggshells for their calcium, which do not decompose, and kill Dandelions, which pull up calcium from the soil. Chemical fertilizers, weed killers, and pesticides kill earthworms, which are the only creature able to manufacture usable calcium for the soil.
2. Crazy people gather free autumn leaves from their neighbors. Wise recyclers buy leaf bags from Walmart, spend hours raking up leaves, so they can get rid of a major source of carbon for their soil.
3. Neat landscapers get rid of all yard trash, including overwintering stalks, leaves, and brush-piles. Creation Gardeners listen as the neatnicks marvel over perfect roses that were never fertilized by man, sprayed for fungi, or gassed with pesticides.
4. Gardeners will push their massive mowers back into the garage after the latest breakdown, wondering why their quirky neighbor only spends a few dollars on a rake and some mulch. 
5. Every yard boasts 90-100% lawn, which demands water and all kinds of treatments to match the cover of the Scotts Lawn and Garden catalog covers. But nobody gives a clump of sod for Mother's Day or a bag of grass, newly cut, to a friend. They spend $50 a bunch for roses, as little as $10 at Walmart, but those roses dry up faster than a Phoenix clothesline.

Our Rose Ministry
We have a problem. Mrs. Ichabod and I love to watch roses bloom, so that means pruning them almost daily, sometimes watering them. They need little care beyond that. Pruning makes them grow even more fruitful, John 15:1-10.

To solve the pruning problem, I cut the best roses for the altar, for neighbors, for all the doctors we visit, for the entire block on Mother's Day, for the cancer support group, for anyone who has an interest in enjoying them. Hinting broadly that we had more roses than vases, we obtained a long shelf full of vases, from the smallest to the largest needed. Besides that drink cups serve well.

Our neighbor visits the cemetery almost every day, because he recently lost his mother and his step-father. He and his brother took care of them until the end. They love having roses to leave at the cemetery, so I drop off a cup-vase full of them any time.

Many are bowled over by the roses, and several of our doctors are confessing Christians, not afraid to name the Name. So we give away Creation Gardening all the time. In fact, there is a waiting line for the next shipment of 10 full-color booklets. LI sees the same diabetic specialist and said, "I was there just after you two were, and she was seriously disturbed by the quality of your roses."

 Creation Gardening - By Him Were All Things Made.
Amazon and Kindle.

Birds and Squirrels Love Cracked Corn - Hydroscopic Water

I bought cracked corn at the hardware store, a better buy than a bag of field corn ears. All the birds and the squirrels love cracked corn. I saw cardinals and blue jays on the ground for corn, so I decided to get that instead of sunflower seeds.

This time I added food to the wheelbarrow, as well as the filing cabinet folly and the ground near the trees.

The energy of the sun and the wealth of the soil
are given back to God's creatures in the yard.

I am not up with the birds. I am up before the birds. They seem to take their time to warm up and get breakfast. We had a light frost, and that may affect their need to eat. Why not stay warm in bed until the sun is really up?

I was grading essays before this. At 8:30 AM I am posting and drinking fresh coffee. I open the window to hear the birds burbling as they enjoy their food. The starlings are hanging from the suet and eating most of the day. Nothing lasts so long as suet in a mesh bag.

I looked out to see a chickadee grab a sunflower seed from the bird feeder. Doves and the squirrel are eating the cracked corn. The cold weather includes groups of male cardinals eating together. Later they will woo a mate and pair off for nests and territories. Then the male cardinals will get very jealous of the males they see in reflections here and there.

Blue jays eat from bird feeders on a pole, but they are happy to eat corn from the ground, too.

Later Today - Extending the Soaker Aqueduct
All my soaker hoses on the dead tree were damaged on the end, so I bought an extension for the aqueduct on the fence.

I will run the next 50 feet of soaker hose on the ground, to water the sunflower seeds I just planted and the Butterfly Bushes waiting to break dormancy. Watering settles the soil around newly planted seed and increases the rate of decomposition for the mulch.

I have never found dry mulch on top of the soil. It must be the way mulch captures and holds the moisture bound up in the soil. Each soil particle has a film of hydroscopic water around it. Only baking the soil will make the water go away. That adds up to a lot of water, and a good reason the soil creatures can thrive in an ocean of "dry" ingredients like sand and clay. The soil particles are not dry at all but coated to provide channels for transportation and food. Bacteria and slugs travel on slime, so that water matters especially to them. Humus, soil creatures, and earthworm casts also contribute to soil moisture.

Over 60,000 kinds of protozoa are known and, contrary to any residual youthful hope you may have that they only live in pond water, a majority of them live in the soil; however, all do require moisture to lead an active life . 

Lewis, Wayne; Lowenfels, Jeff;  (2010-09-10). Teaming with Microbes: The Organic Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web, Revised Edition (Kindle Locations 1123-1125). Timber Press. Kindle Edition. 

Protozoa need moisture to live, travel, and reproduce, and hydroscopic water— that thin film of water left on the surfaces of soil particles and aggregates— provides it, under normal soil conditions. If things dry up, however, most protozoa stop feeding and dividing and go dormant, encasing themselves in a cyst.


Lewis, Wayne; Lowenfels, Jeff; (2010-09-10). Teaming with Microbes: The Organic Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web, Revised Edition (Kindle Locations 1169-1171). Timber Press. Kindle Edition. 

As I mentioned before, a few days of sun and wind dried out a row of newspapers and sent them flying around the yard. We used wood mulch to pin them down again, since the backyard leaves abandoned their post and frolicked in the wind. Where the leaves are wet and packed, a bit slimy, they weigh down newspapers and promote soil creature population growth.

Newspapers are thin sponges that hold and give up moisture easily; the newspapers breathe and do not promote bad decay in the soil. That is why plastic "weed barriers" are terrible and never work well. Weeds pop through them and get tangled up in the mess.

Hydroscopic water is a thinner film of water, only a few molecules thick, which, like capillary water, is attached to extremely small soil particles by virtue of electrical properties . This film is so thin that the bonds between water molecules and soil particles are concentrated and extremely hard to break. 

Roots cannot absorb it, therefore, but this film of water is critical to the ability of many microbes to live and travel. Even when conditions are dry, the soil particulate surface holds some hydroscopic water; it is impossible to remove it from soil without applying lots of heat and actually boiling it off. Just about half the pore spaces in good soil are filled with water. The other half are filled with air. 

Water movement pushes stale air out and sucks in air from the surface, so adding water means an exchange of air occurs, which is important . If a healthy soil food web is in place, the metabolic activity of soil organisms uses the oxygen and creates carbon dioxide.

Lewis, Wayne;  Lowenfels, Jeff; (2010-09-10). Teaming with Microbes: The Organic Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web, Revised Edition (Kindle Locations 374-381). Timber Press. Kindle Edition. 

Therefore, if God had not designed soil to hold this film of water--or water to cling to soil particles-- most of the life in soil would suffer and die back, with plants suffering with them. Water obeys the conditions placed upon it at Creation, and those rules provide for the entire population of life, from the smallest microbes to man, the epitome of everything on earth.

Fungi Are Smarter Than People - I Read That in a Book

This fungus is smarter than you and I put together.

Fungi produce special structures— for example, mushrooms above ground or truffles below— to disperse spores. Since fungi grow in all sorts of environments, they have devised some elaborate methods to achieve spore dispersal, including attractive scents, triggers, springs, and jet propulsion systems. To ensure survival, fungal spores can develop tough membranes that allow them to go dormant for years if the conditions are not right for immediate germination. 
Jeff; Lowenfels, Jeff (2010-09-10). Teaming with Microbes: The Organic Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web, Revised Edition (Kindle Locations 860-861). Timber Press. Kindle Edition.

As one scientist observed, evolution gets increasingly difficult to promote at the microscopic level. Man-made devices, like the Swiss watch, look crude under a scanning microscope. God's Creation is a marvel of engineering. The author--an evolutionist and global warmist--has to use unusual language to explain how simple fungi can serve as the primary decomposition agents in the soil.

It is perfectly clear to the author - fungi have devised elaborate methods to achieve success! Likewise, desert plants have figured out that waxy leaves will ensure survival in the blazing sun. There must have been conferences of fungi and cacti, because both groups have many different strategies for dealing with the same issues in their environments.

That Chemical Factory in Our Plants
Intricate chemical systems created by God are used by bacteria and fungi to decay matter and hold nutrients in the soil to feed to plant roots. Harvesting some beans and tomatoes made me think about the more elaborate chemistry of plant cells turning solar energy and basic chemicals from the roots to fashion:

• Sunflowers - loaded with minerals, protein, and oil.
• Corn - sugar that turns to starch after harvesting, oil.
• Beans - carbohydrates.
• Spinach - fiber and iron.
• Potatoes - comfort food and a vitamin pill.
• Squash family - B vitamins in abundance.
• Cabbage family - cold weather plants with great nutrition.
• Carrots - sweet when raw, sweeter after a frost, like candy when cooked.

Lacking the ocean of life in the soil, the plants would never grow. And yet the plants also feed the soil. Most gardening books seem to think of compost as returning the organic matter to the soil, but more is involved than that. Although we eat the fruit, seed, roots, and tubers of these plants, we have a big plus when returning the garden trash to the soil.

1. The roots have penetrated the soil and established fellowship with fungi and bacteria.
2. Tap roots have mined the minerals from below.
3. Plants have formed cellulose, lignin, and carbohydrates for soil creatures to break down and store in the soil.
4. Rotting roots have fed soil life and left channels for rain and air to penetrate. The soil actually breathes when it rains.

Simply knowing the mutual dependencies of Creation can make us gifted gardeners who are the envy of the rototiller fan club.

Rototilling; spraying with herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, and miticides; compacting soil; removing organic material from lawns and under trees —all these human practices affect the soil food webs in your yard and gardens. Once a niche is destroyed, the soil food web starts to work imperfectly. Once a member of a niche is gone, the same thing happens. In both instances, the gardener must step in to fill the gap, or the system completely fails. Rather than working against nature [GJ - Creation?], the gardener had better cooperate with it; and this, as we shall see, does not require a lot of hard labor— not if the gardener understands and teams up with the soil food web, letting its members do the work.
Lowenfels, Jeff (2010-09-10). Teaming with Microbes: The Organic Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web, Revised Edition (Kindle Locations 1517-1520). Timber Press. Kindle Edition.

To get this Knockout rose bloom, I dug a hole in the lawn, put the plant in it,
mulched it, and added red wiggler earthworms.

Digging and Hauling Soil - Overrated. Sassy Picks a Wheelbarrow

Sassy caught the ball for a professional pet photographer.

I had a pile of seed packets burning a hole in my pocket. I wanted them in the ground and growing - spinach, lettuce, kale, and egg plants.

Our helper semi-prepared an area for me to finish, in the future corn patch. Earlier I put some sunflowers in, near the house, because I wanted the other rows for vegetables in the sun. Yesterday, the ground was very tough and not easy to break up for planting.

Sassy and I took off for Lowe's for mushroom compost and a tiny wheelbarrow. I wanted something inexpensive to haul bags, and I needed more mushroom soil for my newest scheme. The Internet says  not to plant in pure compost, but this was more of an experiment than the ultimate vegetable garden.

Lowe's welcomes dogs, as Sassy and I learned earlier, so we went in together to get our wheelbarrow, mushroom compost ($2 bag) and mulch. The wheelbarrow fit in the trunk of the Town Car, with room for half of the cypress mulch. Try that in your sissy Prius.

A contractor buying supplies thought my new wheelbarrow was too tiny. I said, "Hauling soil is overrated. So is digging soil." He laughed, because he was going to be putting in drainage for yards that were becoming ponds in the rainstorms.

The woman who fussed over Sassy in the flowers area helped with the mulch and compost, calling Sassy by name. We got everything into the car, and we headed home. Sometimes we sing songs in the car. I can get Sassy joining the chorus of the Cattle Dog Blues.

Once at home, I covered the grassy rows in mushroom compost. I planted all the rest of the seed by sowing on top, tamping down the soil, and covering it lightly with another layer, then tamping down that layer.

Our helper covered some new areas with newspaper and mulch, and we Photoshopped the rose garden by adding some newspaper and mulch where needed.

The backyard got another facelift as we pruned away more of the low branches. This project has opened up the yard to a lot more sunlight while keeping the central area shaded.

Grow a little birdhouse for your birds -
the birdhouse gourd.

Birds Love Me
God's Creation established certain rules, which when understood, make gardening much easier. One is that all the creatures work in balance with each other and tend the natural world better than we can. All we have to do is enhance their growth and they labor 24/7 on our behalf.

Birds twittered long before Twitter. They murmur with pleasure when good things are going to happen. A gardener who feeds, waters, and shelters birds will be popular with the avian population. I hear the noise level go up when I go outside. The common birds will hunt insects, dig up grubs, and devour weed seeds. Their population grows with the amount and variety of food, shelter, and water.

I have a 100 foot stretch of soaker hose, most of it suspended from the chain link fence. When I go outside to check on the plants, the birds scatter a bit. I caught some using the newspaper mulch for nest material. I am sure the wood mulch also gets carried away, too. They pay me back in the work I do, so I enjoy improving their living space and giving the water.

When I turn on the soaker hose, the birds have a large area where they can bath, drink, and preen - on top of the fence and on the ground. They like some space, so this is ideal for getting more birds involved and happy. They love the sound of dripping water, a safe place to bathe and drink, and perches for preening their feathers.