Data: Food forest study and soil analysis

Sara passed me the results from measuring circumference and height of our Food Forest trees.

Overall 49 of the 68 trees included in the study are still alive. But we have to recognise that 20 of these haven’t got through their first year yet.

When trees reach full size it will be important to switch to measuring productivity of fruit, rather than height. Only one tree we planted is productive, and we didn’t collect data on the original 3 olive trees and 4 almond trees – we probably should!

A conclusion is that we should focus on enriching the guilds that are still alive rather than adding new ones, and we can see how things improve when the wind break grows. At the moment.. it’s alive but not growing very much. 

SOIL ANALYSIS

Our wonderful friend and recently qualified soil microbiolgy expert Sam Miller took a sample from the Food Forest and a sample from the Thyme Terrace project. (Search either of those terms on the blog page to find out more)

For the analysis 25 fields of view are considered from a one drop dilution under a microscope slide. At 400X there are over 2000 possible fields of view available to look at, so it is inevitable that it is not 100% accurate without taking hours and hours of work per sample.

For the Nematode analysis, the whole slide is scanned at 100X magnification so I took the opportunity to document some of the organisms that I saw during this part of the analysis. The magnification of the photos should be indicated in the title of each one. Click on the images to get the full sized view and the title.

In summary: Both places have bacteria and nematodes, but the food forest has no fungi and the thyme terrace has some.

This is what I expected as the Food Forest is an attempt to recuperate highly ploughed dead soil, but the Thyme Terrace is a place that has been left alone for over thirty years and has undergone natural succession and regeneration, and has many more bushes and trees.

You can see the spreadsheets for these studies if you want to go deep here and  you’ll find some photos and the latest map in there too!