I'm a long time hoe user, after caring for large areas of soil and plants. But also a small fork etc.
In general a hoe - depending on its size, is going to be able to descend down 3 or 4 inches, and if used with precision (you'd hardly be using it randomly, without looking at what you're uprooting etc). It will uproot many s within soil that is frequently ed: unless we're talking triffids that send down 100ft roots per hour.
A fork, on the other hand, could excavate to a deeper extent, if you were progressively removing more and more soil and /root. It's a more laborious process, per square metre but potentially suitable for s that are established to a deeper level.
As for soil aeration: are you just using implements for taking s out, or just to aerate soil? If a major point of their use is to aerate soil, I wouldn't largely use either tool for aeration.
And if you're only aerating the superficial soil level, where roots were probably growing independently to plant roots, the aeration isn't going to have much of an impact on the cultivated plants, which you'd expect to be growing at a deeper level. It would partly depend on the plants that are being cultivated of course. Some perennials would have much deeper roots, reflective of the years that they've been in situ. Some shorter lived plants, such as annuals, would likely have shallower roots that are fibrous, rather than larger tap root like structures.
OK, many growers do grow annual vegetables and flowers, particularly during the summer period. It's fairly established practice to water deeply and less frequently, in order to encourage plants to send their roots deeper into the soil, rather than stay much closer to the top few inches, which are more prone to drying out.
How much aeration occurs from just fiddling about with the top couple of inches, and does it permeate downwards, into a supposedly oxygen needy soil, at a deeper level? I have no figures from research evidence but in general the amount of aeration should be proportionate to the overall quality of the soil, beneficial organisms and processes within it, as well as what's been happening to the soil.
By chopping around the soil whilst plants are growing, it's obviously easy to damage the crops that are there, such as damaging some of their roots. Is it better to risk damaging your plants, in the hope that more soil aeration at the top could permeate downwards? In my opinion, the answer is no. Damaging a plant's roots means that it is less able to support more above ground growth and will also have to expend energy into regrowing new roots, to replace those that are lost - and that's just to catch up on the losses.
There are arguments and research that illustrate that good healthy soils can largely look after themselves. The nutrient and organic materials will be stabilised and replaced with careful land management. You'd supplement with organic mulches etc, which will decompose, enable the soil to better retain moisture and be more efficiently aerated. Beneficial fungi will also interact with almost all plants, via symbiotic mycorrhizal/plant root infections that are beneficial to the roots and above ground plant growth.
As an experienced plant cultivator, I think it's important to interfere as little as possible with our soil, unless it is to improve its overall viability and sustenance of natural soil organisms. Soil has been around for millions of years, as have the components of this healthy ecosystem. The less that we interfere with it, the better.
If the job is to , then removing the and its roots is largely the most important element of the job. It's much quicker to hoe than it is to use something like a hand fork, but I think its effect upon overall aeration in the region that the cultivated plants roots are growing is minimal - and at the expense of potentially damaging the cultivated plant's roots. So, I'd only hoe if I had a huge plot of land to work upon.
If a soil is so needy for aeration that hoeing needs to take place, then I'd expect an alternative course of remedial action to be put in place to counter this. And I wouldn't want to interfere too much in disrupting the many healthy processes underway in the soil, unless something had adversely affected it. |
Mr ddc
