How does gardening affect succession

How bio-intensive gardening fall under the framework of sustainable agriculture? How did the geography affect the agriculture of the Aztecs? What is the importance of gardening urban gardening? What is the professional name of a gardening guy? How bioterrorism affects agriculture?

What are the technological advancements in agriculture? What is succession affected by? What is succession is affected by? Meaning of the word agriculture and its branches of agriculture? How does gardening affect the environment? What is the banefit of technology in agriculture? What is agricurture? Do lions affect agriculture? Does subsistence agriculture use machinery? Would Goleads provide me knowledge over agriculture or my area so called gardening since I am interested only with gardening not in growing fields or keeping farms?

How does location affect commercial agriculture? What can affect succession after the process has begun? How does ecological succession affect ecosystems? Factors affecting agriculture?

How does vertical zonation affect agriculture? What has the author William Horace Clark written? Study Guides. Trending Questions. Which algebraic expression represents this word description: the quotients of four and the sum of a number and three?

Which of the following happens when a cell divides by mitosis? Still have questions? Find more answers. Previously Viewed.

Unanswered Questions. Do you have to place in all round to be eligible to compete on individual events? For example, melons cannot be planted out before Memorial Day unless you have elaborate frost-protection , so that leaves several weeks between snow-go and melon-planting, weeks when frost is likely but cold-hardy crops can make use of that space.

Instead of direct seeding the lettuce, we might set out pre-started seedings of the very hardiest varieties. We might even give slight protection with row cover the seedlings will still get chilled but not as severely. Then if we start the melons in peat pots in early May, we might delay setting them out until mid-June without retarding the crop especially since the delay may be more than made up for by warmer soil. Or we can plant the melons after threat of frost and let the two crops grow together for a while until the melons start to run and demand all the space for themselves.

In addition to lengthening the season with early succession crops, we can do the same at the other end of the season. For example when cold tender crops like tomatoes or peppers get wiped out by the first fall frost, we often assume the season is over for that space. However if we have lettuce, kale, scallions or other seedlings of cold-hardy crops available, we can put that newly released ground into fall production. Of course all this succession planting requires a lot of already-started seedlings.

I seed it very thickly to the succession crop, much more densely than I would for a growing crop. When any space opens up I just take what I need from those tiny beds. And by the way, I have a trick to avoid transplant shock: before replanting the seedlings in their new home I pinch off a lower leaf of each to balance the top with the disturbed roots. My transplants experience little or no wilting. Succession planting can also require more seed than usual, which can get rather pricey unless you have I said this before?

To that end I keep a small nursery bed in the perennial garden to ensure a steady supply of bulbils. Shell, snap and snow peas need to be succession-planted to provide steady yields throughout the summer although one can get some of the same effect by using varieties with different maturity dates.

Since most pea varieties have a wider window of maturity compared to, say, radishes , planting every two or three weeks should suffice. A problem there is that with the arrival of hot, dry mid-summer weather, early-sown peas will languish while summer-sown peas may fail altogether though there are some varieties like Wando which tolerate heat well.

On the other hand, peas, especially snow peas, when planted in mid to late July in succession to early peas or other early crops will be coming into their own just when heat stress is lower and shortening days allow the crop to stand better. Ecosystems, because of the internal species dynamics and external forces mentioned above, are in a constant process of change and re-structuring. To appreciate how ecological succession affects humans and also to begin to appreciate the incredible time and monetary cost of ecological succession, one only has to visualize a freshly tilled garden plot.

Clearing the land for the garden and preparing the soil for planting represents a major external event that radically re-structures and disrupts a previously stabilized ecosystem. The disturbed ecosystem will immediately begin a process of ecological succession. Plant species adapted to the sunny conditions and the broken soil will rapidly invade the site and will become quickly and densely established.

These invading plants are what we call "weeds". Now "weeds" have very important ecological roles and functions see, for example, the "Winter Birds" discussion , but weeds also compete with the garden plants for nutrients, water and physical space.

If left unattended, a garden will quickly become a weed patch in which the weakly competitive garden plants are choked out and destroyed by the robustly productive weeds. A gardener's only course of action is to spend a great deal of time and energy weeding the garden.

This energy input is directly proportional to the "energy" inherent in the force of ecological succession. If you extrapolate this very small scale scenario to all of the agricultural fields and systems on Earth and visualize all of the activities of all of the farmers and gardeners who are growing our foods, you begin to get an idea of the immense cost in terms of time, fuel, herbicides and pesticides that humans pay every growing season because of the force of ecological succession.

There is a concept in ecological succession called the "climax" community. The climax community represents a stable end product of the successional sequence. An established Oak-Poplar Forest will maintain itself for a very long period of time. Its apparent species structure and composition will not appreciably change over observable time. To this degree, we could say that ecological succession has "stopped". We must recognize, however, that any ecosystem, no matter how inherently stable and persistent, could be subject to massive external disruptive forces like fires and storms that could re-set and re-trigger the successional process.

As long as these random and potentially catastrophic events are possible, it is not absolutely accurate to say that succession has stopped. Also, over long periods of time "geological time" the climate conditions and other fundamental aspects of an ecosystem change. These geological time scale changes are not observable in our "ecological" time, but their fundamental existence and historical reality cannot be disputed.

No ecosystem, then, has existed or will exist unchanged or unchanging over a geological time scale. This site is licensed under a Creative Commons License.