Larry Korn interview with Paul Wheaton

Summary of useful info:

• The ground beneath Fukuoka's citrus orchard was very hard clay when he started it. He sewed cover crop using clay-covered seeds of:
  • mustard to clean the soil
  • daikon and dandelion to spike the soil, increasing water retention and paving the way for other roots
  • white clover as a legume (ie nitrogen fixing)
• Once the ground cover was established, in order to grow vegetables, he cut the ground cover to give the vegetable seeds a chance to grow through them. This aligns with Helen Attowhe's importance in Veganic gardening of mowing the cover crop just before planting.
• Although he preferred to grow from seed, for some species, Fukuoka saw it as necessary to transplant.
  • He transplanted his citrus trees, though he did it with a special arrangement with the grower to not prune the trees at all, which is quite unique; most saplings are apparently already pruned, and most fruit trees have the leader branch pruned, which is essential to retain their natural form (the form Fukuoka says requires the least - sometimes no actual - amount of pruning).
  • He sometimes transplanted "weaker" vegetable saplings (eg tomatoes, peppers, eggplants) because they are not as good at establishing themselves as other vegetables.

Fukuoka said that the "natural form" of a tree is the one it would have if it grew up on its own. It is implied that a tree grown from a seed whose ancestors have been heavily selected by humans will not have a natural form. However, Fukuoka observed in various vegetable species that after allowing them to self-select for a few generations, their taste returned to that of their ancestors. Eggs grown from wild chickens living in his fields evoked a sense of nostalgia from an old man in his village, who said he had not tasted eggs like that since his childhood. This supports Fukuoka's idea of "reverse evolution"; that given the ability to naturally select, species will revert to something like their earlier wild forms (before human selection), which will be the most robust and likely, therefore, both high yielding and resistant to diseases (as opposed to high yielding but likely susceptible to a yet-unborn disease, like the artificially selected ones).

I wonder whether Fukuoka independently deduced findings within phyllotaxy (the study of plant shape) when he studied the natural form of trees. He successfully predicted other findings in ecology, as described in section 3.1 of Techno humus systems and global-change conservation agriculture.