Recreating Terra Preta: Good Soil for Centuries! (Complete Film)

so i grew up in south florida fort lauderdale and down there the soil if you can even call it soil is just a gray fast draining sand that holds almost no organic matter and i would put compost in it year after year after year and after you put the compost in you wait a couple of months and it looks like you did nothing the compost just disappears and i would read these books about building soil and they would say oh you know you add more organic matter over time and your soil gets richer and the worms start to move into it and it and it becomes this amazing loamy rich soil but i tried to do the things that they said and between our high temperatures and rainfall and that terrible sand the stuff would just disappear and it would turn back into a desert basically if you cut down the trees in the bushes in south florida you end up with a patchy sandy wasteland with a few weeds and stickers and stuff it's terrible terrible so i gardened in that for quite a while then i moved to tennessee now tennessee i had good clay it was hard clay but i found that by adding organic matter to it i could do what the garden books said and start to build it up into something that was much more of a decent garden soil after a couple of years of deep mulching i had this amazing rich ground but i moved back to florida and it came back to the same thing now i was in north florida i had kind of a sandy loam but i would do these consultations for people where i looked at their property and looked at their soil and talked about how they wanted to put in food forests or orchards that kind of thing and i would see these these basically sand dune type situations over and over again around the same time i was trying to figure out how much compost it was going to take to actually turn sand into soil and realizing that you could put infinite amounts of compost on it and it probably would still be lousy i was talking to my friend rick and he said have you heard of tara preda terra preda no spanish something spanish well it's the the dark earths of the amazon and he sent me a video and i'd say this was probably about a decade ago so i started looking at this video and going wow this is fascinating it appeared that through a combination of burning and disposing of household wastes and who knows what else the indians of the amazon actually were building up soil to a depth of six to eight feet on ground that is so bad that when the amazon is cleared normally if you cleared a piece like this right here you chopped it and you burned it and you planted on top of it you might get corn out of it for a year or so before the soil is worthless and it's eroding and it's dead you've got this incredible rich rainforest growing on some of the worst soils in the entire world it's this degraded yellow clay that was just dead dead dead stuff but there are all these patches and at first they thought it might have been volcanic activity then they realized later it was anthropogenic soils there are these patches where everything grows really really well and and the soil there has become so valuable and so well known that it's been dug up by people actually going out there and mining it and selling it to gardeners and farmers elsewhere and there's a there's a documentary that the bbc did some years ago showing some of this and how it how it worked and what the soil looks like but there was a there were some strange things about this soil first of all the depth of it is incredible it looks like you know either people were settled there for thousands of years and just continually worked it up and worked it up or they dug really deep trenches and they created this soil somehow so anyone take them on i don't know i think it's too heavy for you wait a minute come to this side i'm gonna grab it wow what so so so so and it seems to be through a combination of burning basically slash and char rather than burning it all the way to ashes they're slashing and charring it and then throwing household wastes and manure and one of the funny things was they found tons and tons of pottery shards like lots and lots of pottery shards so so these pottery shards are mixed in along with the clay and bits of bone and various waste materials to this incredible deep rich black soil and unlike adding compost to the soil this soil has stuck around for centuries because this is ground that was discovered later on and the people that made it were long gone but this soil is still rich and fertile and can grow crops for years without being replenished people have tried it people are growing on it now and they keep growing and growing and growing whereas the native soil just right next door it's dead in a year after you burn and turn it it's it's done it just burns right out so i've been fascinated with this idea and during the time that i was in the caribbean i had rich deep volcanic clay loam and there was really like nothing i could do that soil it was already great but now that i've moved back to the united states and i am here in lower alabama where i have the worst soil that i have ever seen and ever dealt with i've decided i'm going to do the tara preda thing as best as i can with the limited knowledge that i have about it and the reading that i've done on it i'm trying to recreate it so so i'm starting here digging a trench digging a deep trench down in the ground and then stacking a bunch of wood inside of it and burning it and when it's mostly burned down to coals and some ashes covering it over but i have grit in the amazon they have clay so i went out into the river and i mined clay and dug clay out of the banks and then brought it home made a slurry out of it and then that is getting mixed in along with it so i have that combination of clay and char which hopefully helps recreate it some i can't do anything about the fact that i need to dump some of my own grit back in there but it's just what it is i will have clay in it and that clay should bind up with what's there i also know that my soil is very minerally deficient and i have access to things that the amazonians didn't have access to like azomite and green sand which are both sources of micronutrients and as i've become more and more interested in long-term soil as well as the effects of soil on vegetable growth and on health and the need for micronutrients in the ground i decided to just go ahead and add about a quart of both of those right on through the mix as i go i even threw in some rotten eggs these are eggs that did not incubate well have been incubating and the eggs that candled out as spoiled i saved them just to throw in there along with some bones and meat scraps and stuff that my wife left some have said that potentially they were using some seaweed in the mix so i'm adding a few quarts of kelp meal as i go i've got a bunch of material from my compost pile that is getting spread through there in layers and it's about half decayed it's not completely done there are bones in there and eggshells and that's getting layered in as i go and i'm going back and forth between the clay slurries and more biochar which i made this is just charcoal that i made a few weeks ago and i soaked in a bunch of living material including kombucha and urine and um like soup and other stuff that is all going in there in layers and layer layer layer layer layer all the way up i am mixing in manures i have some old dried composted cow manure and i have some fresher chicken manure and both of those are getting mixed in to the mix as i go so layer by layer building up cover build up cover it's possible that the amazonians were using this is one theory using basically clay chamber pots and covering them with charcoal so actually using their own waste and mixing charcoal into it and covering them in pots and then burying these things and them getting smashed up or smashing them into these trenches to use for future fertilizer but we don't really know and if i am growing food to share with friends etc i decided probably using human waste would just sort of be kind of horrible and um we're not doing that we're just using the the chicken and the cow for now okay uh so foreign so foreign so over time what we want to see is does this bed continue to maintain fertility does it stay rich how do things grow on top of it i mean that is super deep there's a ton of materials in there is it going to get compacted and airless is it going to be the best spot in the garden forever there's a lot of mysteries around terra preda we don't exactly know how it was made we don't know what all the original ingredients were how long they took to make it we don't know if they made it in a single day with a gigantic trench and just layer and layer and layer if they made it over months or if they made it over years if they made it over centuries we don't know because there's nobody surviving to tell us what happened so in this experiment i am trying to recreate from the knowledge that i have right now and see if there's a way to maintain long-term soil fertility so instead of something that's just going to burn right out that charcoal that carbon will hold in the soil and not just be completely degraded and burned out by the sun and the rain and the heat in this grit this geology does not lend itself to long-term fertility but this project might actually work out so i'm planting on top of it putting in tomatoes and then putting some broccoli around those tomatoes and we'll watch and see what happens over time and if you guys want to experiment look up terra preda try digging and burning and charring and mixing and do these things in your own garden and maybe one of us is going to figure this secret out i think i might have it but we're just going to have to wait and see and i hope this was an interesting video for you all it's a little longer than i would normally do but this is absolutely fascinating and i wanted you to see exactly how much work went into it and what it looked like all the way down to three feet deep so you can see the entire process from start to finish so thanks for joining me be sure to like and subscribe and stay tuned to see how these results come in the future and until next time may your thumbs always be green i'm buried my rabbit beneath the cherry tree one fine afternoon someday i know that we'll meet on a fruit salad spoon do you throw banana peels in the trash are your coffee grounds also being thrown in the trash do you compost ham are you sick and tired of all the rules about composting do you wish you could compost in a super easy way and stop throwing things in a landfill and stop being a terrible person click on the link below and sign up and get my new composting booklet which shows you how to compost easily and simply with hardly any any work at all it's insane how easy it is because it follows natural principles sign up now quantities are not limited

Channel: David The Good

Views: 526,369

Keywords: gardening, composting, David The Good, tropical gardening

Id: DnTaWiO5Eso

Length: 38min 34sec (2314 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 10 2021