Billy wrote:
songbird wrote:
Billy wrote:
songbird wrote:
Billy wrote:
songbird wrote:
Billy wrote:

....
[for those who want to just get to the
gardening stuff at the end, search for the word
HERE ]

....profits, eating, survival...
....Easter Island...
The island was deforested but a few trees survived. When Europeans
finally arrived they noticed some trees that were about some 10' tall.

Jarod Diamond does an analysis in his book, "Downfall" on page 181 for
the reasons of the lack of fertility of Easter Island's soil (low rain
fall, cooler climate than in other parts of Polynesian, lack of
micronutrients that come from volcanic ash, and continental dust).
Once cut, Easter Island's forest wasn't coming back anytime soon.

sure, but that doesn't mean it won't
recover if replanted and the animals
are kept from destroying the seedlings.
like many things it's a matter of will.


....
one thing that seems to be ignored for topsoil
remediation and reversing erosion is dredging
and putting it back where it came from. sure it
is work, but we are not short of people needing
jobs and if the situation is so bad that we need
every square foot of soil to be producing food or
carbon sources to trap CO2 then the projects
become more important.

ok, yes, contamination and poisons are a problem
with much sediment, but that too should be a
priority to deal with. if you are using sediments
for topsoil and fill as a base for CO2 sequestration
then there isn't quite the problem from poisons
as compared to if you are using it as a base for
a garden or animal fodder. sunshine and time can
do a lot to break down a lot of poisons, and
bacteria and fungi can do a lot more. so i'm not
really discouraged as some might be.

No need to disturb the buried poisons. Top soil can be regenerated. Joel
Salatin is doing it at the rate of 1"/year.
http://www.acresusa.com/magazines/archives/0104saveworld.htm

i've read most of what he's published.

he is not building topsoil, he amends it
heavily with organic materials that he brings
in by the truckload. they get run through
the cow barn, the pigs, chickens, before they
get scattered on the fields.

i don't think he's much wrong in what he
does, but some aspects are not sustainable
in the sense that he is using inputs from
other areas.

i still give him high marks for what he
does compared to many farmers. he at least
does understand the importance of topsoil.

he loses marks in that he could be using
organic corn for his meat chickens (he
complained that his source had too much
chaff/cob in it, well duh, get a different
supplier or grow your own).

his cows are fed from hay grown on his
land, he could change to more bison as the
grazing animals and not have to harvest hay
or have barns.


Everybody knows what has to be done to save the oceans, and feed the
hungry, but it will never happen in a Randian "free market", driven by
maximum profit. We are told that a government must live within its
budget, but who has a "free market" household, where the family members
try to extract the maximum profits from each other?

some families are worse, as instead
of trying they actually force extraction.

You're going to have to explain that to me, unless you mean parents that
force their kids into prostitution.

forced labor on farms and, yes, prostitution.


i think you are stuck in the idea that only
for-profit corporations exist as active
entities in the world. there are non-profit,
individual and governmental entities which
can make a difference. i see a lot of
differences being made from these other
entities, but i also see a lot of difference
happening in the for-profit companies and
individuals.

Would you care to share the sunshine? Who, what, when, and where?

what part do you need expanded?
non-profit, for-profit or government?


The oceans need to be cleaned up. Mono cultures need to be curtailed in
order to feed more. Interplanting leads to higher yields. Real farming
needs to be renacted, instead of chemical farming that pollutes
drinking water and the the oceans, and leads to soil erosion, requiring
more chemicals to maintain yields.

all agreed with.


The government could start a large orchard of chestnuts to introduce the
ground nut as a replacement for wheat, and/or rice flour.

not sure if chestnut flour can replace flour
in baking, but i don't object to reforestation
and sustainable agriculture.

Again, "A Farm for a Future", [a BBC documentary on the precient global
farming and food crisis, filmed in the UK. Featuring Martin Crawford
(Agroforestry Research Trust), Fordhall Farm, Richard Heinberg and
others. Topics covered are the influence of oil on the food production,
peak-oil, food security, carbon emissions, sustainability and
permaculture.] is very worthwhile. It comes in 5 parts. Parts 1 & 2 set
up the problem, and parts 3 - 5 offer solutions.

Again the part on perennial nuts replacing annual grains is found in
part V at about 2:20 minutes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09Ez5ViYKYA

i was able to grab the smallest format for
them (6Mb vs 62Mb) and watched them a bit ago.

some interesting parts in there worth
watching. being a gardener i like the whole
system approach of permaculture.


Terra preta
should be encouraged to invigorate soils, and sequester CO2.

in some areas it is fine, but it is not a universal
answer. remember that albedo plays a role in climate.
if we covered the earth with dark materials soaking up
the sun's radiation we'd bake. so it cannot be used
in areas that are left bare for long periods of time.
once an area is put into perennial or permaculture
then it's a great thing to have.

But anything that grows will have a better chance with
terra preta. What could Joel Salatin do with charcoal
in his soil?

sequester some percentage of carbon for a longer
period than the current method he's using. probably
also increase some of the nutrient cycling because
of the higher bacterial count in the soil. depending
upon how he gets the carbon source would make me rate
it better or worse...


The
chemically induced glut of cereal carbohydrate has made us sick as a
society. We really need to increase fruits, and vegetables in our diets.

not just carbohydrates but also animal protein
could be reduced. the other aspect is that
carbohydrates are much better if they are
complex and not so refined.

You can only eat so much. The more fiber that goes into your diet, the
less carbs, and fat go in.

only one of the many positive aspects of
eating well.


the past 40 years have really been a mess when
it comes to diet and nutrition recommendations
from the scientists. it's not that they've
intentionally gone wrong, they just didn't know...
the longer term view that i like to keep in
mind is to "eat real foods" i.e. those that
don't have a long list of ingredients on the
package.

That's what Michael Pollan says.

yeah, plus he gets points for feral pig
harvesting.


which reminds me to yell about all the stupid
stickers on fruits and vegetables now. like
i want more plastic on my food, yeesh.

See below.


With that in mind financial barriers to education should be dropped, and
agriculture, and cooking should become part of any primary, or secondary
curriculum.

i think we are in a period of transition when
it comes to education. in the longer term i
think much of what currently exists as formal
schools will be removed and more people will
self-learn as needed. much of what i was
forced to learn in college was wasted time and
money.

Well, commodifying education is a mistake, if you care about community.

i'm not talking about commodifying, i'm talking
about self-teaching using freely available materials.
commodities cost something and are easily exchanged.
knowledge doesn't cost anything, but does take
some time to learn.

the community for many people these days is not
local but virtual and distributed. much like this
medium of usenet. unfortunately or fortunately
virtual community still isn't enough for most
people.


If primary, and secondary schools would teach critical thinking, instead
of the rote memorization that is "No Child's Behind Left", they would be
a better place. Present provocative ideas to them, but then let them
study what they want. Even planning a business model for gramming out an
oz. of hash, and its distribution (worst case scenerio) will lead to the
realization that there is 28.35g/oz. The metric system will lead to
history, agriculture, music, and science. History, music, and science
will lead to the rest of the studies of mankind. I'm not suggesting that
everybody should start their own cartel, just that all roads lead up the
mountain. The same could be said for a kid who wants to design clothes.
It's all good. You will still need a teacher to make suggestions, and
critics.
If they decide that they want to be doctors or engineers, they will have
the research skills to seem them through the classes, and tests required
for a license in those professions.

i don't think we disagree about a lot of this,
but education reform is a side tangent i'll leave
alone...


one point in the book that is made (which
i do agree with) is that there will always
be hungry people because we have this capacity
built in to keep on screwing even if the
surrounding countryside is going up in smoke.
in fact the countryside going up in smoke
sometimes sets off rounds of screwing much
the way winter storms in the northlands can
set off mini-baby-booms...

I would have expected you to be more of a romantic than that. A good
orgasm can put that tap back into your toes, but that too comes to a
halt, when people get hungry. A friend was in Berlin when the city fell
to the Allies in WWII, and she found the romantic sub-plot to the movie
"Enemy at the Gates" to be incomprehensible. Her reaction was that no
one is romantic, when they are hungry, no one.

oh sure, beyond a point hunger is going to
shut down reproduction as starvation shuts down
menstruation when it is that severe. i don't
know of any place in the first world that has
suffered such starvation outside of periods of
war. do you?

I was responding to your statement, "we have this capacity
built in to keep on screwing even if the surrounding countryside is
going up in smoke." Procreation is difficult when you are hungry, and
expecting the roof to fall in at any minute.

yeah, but for some reason there seems to be
no shortage of children born in war torn
countries full of starving and displaced
people.


and i don't discount the benefits of a good
sex life. just that we need to make sure in
lands that are marginally able to support
people that they don't keep having more
children than the land can support.

Traditionally, where subsistence farming has been a way of life,
children are the family's work force, and often children die from
disease, so you create replacements.

yes, i know the normal explanations for
why population goes the way it does, but
it isn't the whole story. which is why
i talk about birth control choices, women's
rights, fundamentalism and governmental
stability.


Passion requires ambiance, good food, good wine, or at least a storage
closet, and then it's that ol' "bim-batta-boom", so to speak.

unfortunately in many poor areas it's not a
matter of passion but of rape, failed birth
control, ignorance, societal breakdown or ...

Let's not start blaming the victims.

i'm not, i'm stating facts that are well
known. when it comes down to the final
equation where each calorie is critical
does it matter who eats the one that tips
the balance for another person in another
place to starve? you may never actually
be able to point to any one situation in
that fine a detail, but i think you
understand that the carrying capacity is
a hard limit that once passed is going to
take it's due one way or another.


A better target of your wrath may be where all those people came from,
chemical nitrogen that produced abundant crops, and ad campaigns to get
us to eat "Ding Dongs", and "Ho-Hos". The calories provided by the U.S.
food supply increased from 3,200 per capita in 1970 to 3,900 in the late
1990s, an increase of 700 per day. We eat today for the same reasons we
go to war, "public relations" ( propaganda) as practiced by Edward
Bernays, "manufactured consent" as Walter Lippman called it.

i have a book called _Fat Chance_ on request, but
it will be a while yet before i get to reading it.
sounds pretty interesting and likely speaks of a
lot of these things.

but think of this, without abortion being an
option in the USoA how many more million people
there would be. i think someone said about 30
million abortions.

And how many more of us would there be without contraception?

yep. as exploitive omnivores we are just
too capable and we are also making the mistake
of making plants too capable. if i were a
farmer who was into breeding corn i would be
breeding for a sustainable corn yeild within
the natural soil rate of recovery and not
trying to breed a more productive sucker of
nutrients from the soil as seems to be the
direction of so many others.

the feedback mechanisms outside of human
behavior we have to control the population are
the accumulation of poisons (making reproduction
less likely), environmental degradation making
offspring less likely to survive and general
catastrophes (volcanism, weather, comet strike,
sun getting weaker or going nova), probably
others i can't think of at the moment too, but
those seem to be the biggies.


so it's not just about that much food being
available, but the lack of effective birth
control or the lack of women to even control
their lives in many cultures. really when you
look at much of the radical fundamentalists
what they most hate about western society is
the changes it brings to how women are treated.

I'd call them reactionary fundamentalists. I don't think anyone wants an
abortion, BUT that is the woman's call. If a person can't control their
own body, what are they allowed to control? If the wacko Christian right
really want to get into it, why don't they try to save all the
non-menstrual eggs left in the ovaries, and match them up with all the
single semen that they can find? At the least, they could try to set up
a support system for poor mothers, and their off spring. As it is, the
people who condemn abortion are the same who will call for capital
punishment. I wish they'd make up their minds. Is life sacred, or not?

this is all a far tangent, but yes, i think
that for many they would prefer any situation
than having to get an abortion. for the rest
of it i mostly agree.


....
Then you are going to have to shovel against the tide of "denier" money
from the Koch brothers, Exxon, and the rest of the usual suspects.
http://www.treehugger.com/corporate-...irtiest-tricks
-played-by-foes-of-clean-energy-reform.html

i'm off-line at the moment to take a look at
that, but i'm sure it's going to be a fun read.

i know that big oil isn't going down without
a fight. they have a huge interest in keeping
the status quo. they are however going to have
to change. we simply cannot afford not to
change.

You might find
http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article...3/1070/OPINION
04?Title=Power-to-change-A-few-surprising-facts-found-along-the-road-to-r
enewable-energy&tc=ar
and
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-1...more-aid-than-
clean-energy-iea.html
interesting.

the problem with reality is that it
exists no matter what we might desire
from wishful thinking. deniers to
climate warming and CO2 sequestration
being important are eventually going to
come around or die off. there will be,
in time, enough people who will act
differently that it will no longer
matter what the minority deniers do.
like scientific theories, in time the
people who are unable to adapt will
be replaced and the world will continue.

just that the short term can get
rather messy.


....
right now i'm trying to work through all
the references in books that i've read
recently that strike me as interesting.

the really sad thing is that many links
given in printed material no longer work even
only a few years past when the book was
published. stuff gets moved around on web-sites
or the person leaves the university and their
docs are gone, etc.

I try to save what I think is really important, either on my hard drive,
or in the books in my study.

unfortunately, these are links in books
to on-line resources that are gone stale
or vanished by the time i get the book.
as time goes on i see it getting even
worse.

how can i honestly evaluate an argument
or a theory and results of experiments if
the data is gone? the web just isn't a
scholarly medium as much as it should or
could be.


....
...snip...
...yes, i did actually finally trim something...

A fat lot of good that'll do ;O)

*snickers*


....rant trimmed a bit ...
around. it's stupid. we have all these
chemicals going into the water that have
strange effects and it is so embedded into
everyone's habits that they just dump stuff
and "it goes away and gets dealt with by
someone else" that it makes me sick. and
more and more it just might be really making
others sick too.

it is that kind of mentality that needs to
be changed. we have to think of entire
waste streams. that thinking doesn't happen
if someone gets a free pass to dump (be it
CO2, pig poop or even plant stalks).

Yup, infinite world mentality in a finite world.

to improve things a fair bit would be
to start finding the supports in place
which make such thinking "normal" and
starting to challenge that system and
get reforms in place.

unfortunately i think some of it (maybe
even a fairly large portion) is based in
religious ideas and practices. so it is a
major challenge. we no longer have to
"go forth, be fruitful and multiply and
subdue the earth" that's already been done,
we need to put out a revision of that bit
and people get ****ed when you talk about
revising "The Word".


....
one thing that i don't see mentioned too often
is that all this building we do and all these
houses with all this wood. that is CO2 sequestration
too of a kind. sure houses burn and get destroyed
but each house is a CO2 sink for some time. if
even a fraction of that wood ultimately gets turned
into biochar and buried then that is a step in the
right direction.

By buried I presume you mean spread on the soils of agricultural
regions. If we want to bury CO2, some could be compressed and stored
underground. Increasing the fertility of the soils seems like a better
choice to me.

spread on the surface isn't always the right
answer. agricultural use in areas not already
dark soil types that would decrease albedo. which
for a warm planet is likely not a good thing. for
areas of permiculture or perennial agriculture
where the soil is not exposed to the sun directly
then it could be spread without too much bad
effect.

The charcoal needs to be where the roots are, and plowing the soil isn't
good for it. The charcoal will be covered by the crops, and the
non-harvested part of the crop would cover the charcoal after that.

around here the non-harvested part is not
enough to cover the soil, it's stubble for
the most part. this is where i do like some
other source of production than annual crops.
perennial forms of the same crops would be
an interesting change. in some ways i do
that already via the alfalfa and birdsfoot
trefoil green manure and forage crop, but
it's not quite the same as a blueberry bush
or a beet tree. i'm very interested in what
might eventually happen with genetic
tinkering, but we're a long ways from that
tinkering being really systemically smart.
i'd love to do a Rip Van Winkle for about
500 years...


If
you want to increase the albedo, we could all paint our roofs white.

roads should be made from lighter materials
too especially in southern climates...


i keep seeing studies mentioned of how much
carbon the soil can hold. these studies are
blatantly wrong. they are assuming that the
carbon is only mixed into the top layers and
left to rot. what they do not measure is
how much carbon can be stored in trenches
down deeper. so they miss the fact that the
soil can hold many times the carbon they
state.

You're advocating burying compost (organic material)? Charcoal
effectively takes it out of the carbon cycle, and makes agricultural
land more fertile.

compost is processed organic materials, in
some areas it would sequester a lot of CO2
quickly if any of them were buried without
any composting step at all. like around
here where the water table is fairly high.
burying materials here would be very similar
to how peat is formed, just stack it up down
under the ground where not much air or critters
get to it and it will stay put for a long
time. i have dug down and found trees buried
here only a few feet down. they've been
there for quite a long time as this is old
agricultural land (cleared in the late 1800s) --
those trees have been buried close to two
hundred years.

charcoal is one way of taking carbon out
of the cycle, i do agree with that, but the
added steps of processing is not needed in
some locations -- let's take advantage of
those locations and get a larger percentage
of the material sequestered than would happen
if turned into charcoal. the volatile
compounds trapped in the wood are better
left in there if we don't need them for
any other process.


CO2 pumped under ground is not a
real solution. you think FL would last
very long if they pump CO2 into the ground
there? limestone and carbonic acid... sink
hole heaven...

CO2 pumped under ground is an option that has best talked about, but,
personally, I don't like it. Charcoal is so much more simple.

agreed. for some locations it's an ok
stop-gap measure, but it's not sustainable
IMO.


....
it's not something that gets done by shutting
down extra CO2 production alone. not now. we've
already tipped the scale and the slide is starting.
to stop the slide we gotta put some mojo into it.

Hey, I'm the choir, remember?

yea, i know, i just gotta roll with
it sometimes. like a preacher on a
street corner...


solar furnaces are not really needed as biochar
creates it's own fuel as it is being made.
Without creating more CO2? Solar furnaces offer "zero" CO2 in converting
cellulose to charcoal.

suppose the gases given off during making
biochar are combustable or even yet another
greenhouse gas? last i knew wood gives off
fuel enough to power a car.

What are you using to heat this future charcoal to create the H2, and CO?

no, it starts as celluose when harvested and
as it is harvested it gets heated up by what is
already burning (or a starter fuel like wood
taken from a wood lot). so that forms the base
for the process, the celluose is heated and
gives off wood gas (which is burned immediately
as a fuel to the engine) and the result dropped
out the back is the ashes from some burning, the
charcoal from the wood gas process and a percentage
of unburned organic materials which keep the
soil critters in some alternate food sources.
converting it all to charcoal removes the cover
and structure that the soil needs and the fungi
need the cellulose sources too.

i'm not sure how large such a thing could be
or how it would all work, but for a sustainable
system of harvesting that doesn't need oil it
could be an alternative. or even in combination
with wood as a fuel. as someone who likes
steam engines and trains i just kinda love the
idea of a tractor that actually takes some
fuel right from the plant it is harvesting so
that it doesn't need to be refueled at all or
as often.


How much cellulose would you have to char to heat yourself during winter
with H2?

no, that's a waste as the heat directly from
burning the cellulose would be what you want. not
a loss from another layer of processing. also the
gas given off and condensed if using the cellulose
to produce both heat and charcoal can be stored
and used just like gasoline. no need to turn
anything into H2.


I just think that if we can seriously cut the amount of CO2
that we're putting into the atmosphere, and encourage reforestation, and
the production of charcoal, we have a chance of turning this barge
around. Otherwise, when the methane hydrate that lines the Atlantic
seashore goes of goes off, the tide will roll in to Raliegh, N.C., and
Harrisburg, PA. Of course this will aversely affect the profits of some
major corporations, but so will having New York go under water.

yeah, the hydrates and the methane from thawing
arctic tundra and permafrost are also feedback
additions that we have to worry about and counter.
add more decomposition of carbon compounds in
northern soils as they warm...

there is a possibility that the northern areas
will grow more trees as a result so the feedback
cycle might be very interesting. i still think
we need to reduce CO2 below what we are adding
so the oceans can recover and increase the pH.
corals and shells are important parts of building
shoreline erosion breaks.


it can be a source of fuel for cars/trucks/industry
too. my ideal for a farm combine would be that
it could use a portion of what it harvests (stems,
stalks, cobs) to create the fuel on the fly and
leave a trail of buried biochar behind it as it
goes. add to it a chopper, disk, and cover crop
planting on the same pass and you've almost got
a sustainable industrial agriculture.

Uh, now you've lost me, monoculture, discing the soil?
More food come from interplanting.

it could be a mix of planted species, but
the result is still the same. we get a portion
of buried charcoal from each pass of the
harvester/planter and that adds up over time to
a significant amount of sequestered CO2. if you
have to spread something on the soil wouldn't
it be best if it were done by using fuel derived
right there instead of from fuel transported in?

if we can go perennial plants for cereal
grain production (corn, wheat, rice) and
also perennial legumes (i ain't giving up
my beans bucko ) for adding some nitrogen
that still does not get charcoal into the
ground. there would still have to be some
method of harvesting and spreading the charcoal
and it makes the most sense to me if it were
to happen as a part of the same process be
it from burning the fields once in a while
(bad idea as all that energy is then wasted
where it could otherwise be used as a food
source or a fuel -- not counting the air
pollution aspect).


You got a cite for this?

cite for what aspect? that wood contains
compounds which when released by biochar can
fuel a vehicle? that's already a well known
thing. Mother Earth News had an article a few
issues ago on a wood fuel driven truck. wood
gas could have been the gas we used if cheap
oil hadn't been found.

the combine process would be fun to
work on. but like i've said up above,
biochar is an albedo killer.

Your going to create CO2 to make H2, and CO?

no, i'm going to use cellulose to create
more heat, wood gases (wood alcohols, etc.),
charcoal and probably some ashes too along
with some of the harvested organic material
also going back onto the surface. a mixed
output system driven by a mixed input system.

it has to be buried deeply enough to
smother it. otherwise you'll lose even more
of it to further burning. quenching with
water -- water too heavy. pipe the exhaust
into the trench with the charcoal so that
it helps smother the charcoal, but also the
soil will trap some of that exhaust.


Wheat may be dry when it is harvested, but I can't think of any other
crop that is.
I bury my charcoal under mulch.

corn, rice, soybeans are usually harvested
when the seeds are firm enough (dry enough)
to not be damaged by harvesting and further
processing. i'm pretty sure all the plants
are dry enough to burn, the dust flies during
harvesting around here. if the harvest is
too wet there is a problem with potential rot
so that is an aspect of harvesting that is
watched pretty carefully. i do know that
loads are tested before they are put into the
grain elevator for moisture content.

sometimes there is a wet period during the
harvest where the corn has to be dried further
but this is to prevent troubles with rotting
in the crop, not with how well the stalks and
cobs might burn. might actually work out that
the waste heat from the making of the charcoal
that it could be used to partially dry the
corn if needed too.

once in a while it is too wet too often and
a crop is lost due to spoilage in the field.
that can just be left until it gets freeze
dried and can then be run through a charcoal
machine in the spring during planting. for
warmer and wetter climates it could all be
turned under or left fallow to collapse
naturally. a loss of a crop and a loss of
a chance to sequester some carbon but not
likely to be a regular happening because if
it was then they'd be growing something else
anyways...

consider for a longer term project where
fast growing trees could be planted, then after
a few years (seven or less for some poplars
i've seen grow here) they could be chopped
and left to dry and then chipped and burned
on the fly and the charcoal buried at the
same time. no crop needed to harvest but
there might be a wood gas surplus that could
be stored and then used later as fuel. not
sure about that though as wood chipping might
need a lot more power than dragging a single
blade through the soil and spinning some blades
and a fan.


....infrastructure costs from rising sea-levels...

i think they are points to raise when talking to
governmental officials. especially the points about
how much it will cost to keep FL, Washington DC, LA
and many other cities above flood stage or protected
by levees. Hurricane Sandy shook some branches, but
we gotta keep on shaking the tree or they'll think
that they can go back to doing nothing.

when you consider the feedback from expanding water
as it warms and how we've already primed the pump to
increase water temperatures (less ice at the north
pole for longer periods of time, melting permafrost,

= methane which is 20 times more efficient at trapping solar radiation
than CO2 is. The scary part is the water vapor, which also traps heat,
but also drives storms like Sandy, and Katrina when it releases heat
when it shifts from vapor to liquid.

yeah. Sandy was a wakeup call, but i think the
government is still hitting the snooze button and
likely will continue until we replace the alarm
clock with a rabid porcupine dressed in oil as
a disguise.


etc.). well i just don't see how anyone in government
today can keep a straight face and say we don't have
a huge infrastructure budget coming up already and
that's just if we stop what we've done now. that
doesn't even get to the point of the fact that we're
still making it worse! arg!

Arg, indeed!

*le sigh*

the larger and more long term point is that
i really think that no matter what happens
short term it will get dealt with one way or
another. either Momma Earth will take us out
or we'll learn to live within what we've got.
the only other alternative is to head off to
other places in the universe and in order to
do that we'd have to figure out how to live
in a closed environment for an extremely long
period of time that is even smaller than a
planet. Biosphere II pointed out that we
still have a lot to learn there.


...HERE...
Got about half of my garden beds prepped. Even without digging, it
wore
me out. Good sweat though ;O)

i can still find frozen ground here.
the sun was out most of the day and some
flowers made progress. maybe by Saturday
there will be some blooms.

I always find it odd, that here in California, gardeners can start
earlier, but then comes your longer Midwest summer days, and warmer
nights, and you leave us (me anyway in the dust). I'll be lucky to have
tomatoes by Aug.

our tomatoes won't be ripening until
mid-August if we have anything like a
normal season. we don't start too early
with tomatoes. the end of May is when
the warm weather tender plants get set
out and planted.

I plan to have early, mid, and late ripening tomatoes, mostly early.
Stupice-55 days, Juliets-60 days, Glacier-65 days, Koralik-70 days,
Blondkopfchen-75 days, Marmande-80 days, Stripped German-90 days,
Brandywine Sudduth's-90 days. Mostly one of each, but maybe 2 Stupice,
and 2 Stripped Germans.

that's a lot of tomatoes!

which do you like the best or the
least? do you put them up or freeze
them?

Eyes eats them! It's only about 10 vines in the soil, and 2 in
containers. If I was going to put them up I would be planting romas, or
San Marzanos. Between salads, sandwiches, and gazpacho there won't be
any left over, especially now that I know that I can use green tomatoes
in making salsa verde for enchiladas.

last year for us the Roma tomatoes were ok
for adding to the salsa to give it some more
thickness, but they didn't do much for juice.

we put the green ones in the garage in a
place where the sun didn't fall and they
ripened enough for a while afterwards that
we ate and put some up and made more salsa.
not the best tasting, but better than throwing
them out. some did rot. the worms got those.


first crocuses flowered today. we walked
around the yard/gardens today and checked out
the winter damage. the deer did trim some of
the cedar trees the past few weeks and some
bunny damage too -- nothing extensive enough
i'll worry about.

rhubarb and strawberries still in hiding.

Thanks for reminding me. I need to divide the rhubarb.

glad to be of service.

Oh, and thanks again. I gotta tie a string on my
finger or something.

just don't ask me to pull it...


i'm anxious to see how the transplanted
rhubarb came through and if the oldest
strawberry patch will produce well after
being rearranged a bit last fall. i needed
to thin out the june-bearing plants and
spread out the ever-bearing plants...

I'm hoping to get a descent blueberry harvest, but I did a half-assed
job of dropping the pH on them (Spread sulfur on ground, and then
covered it with newsprint, and alfalfa, as is my wont.)

are they flowering or past flowering?

They are just flowering.

Next time I think I'll use my dibble, and pour the sulfur into the holes.

Steve Peek recently posted to r.g.e or
r.g he's got a fairly large blueberry
plot so might have good advice about this.


that may not work quickly, but it should
make a difference longer term. to change
things quickly is likely to cause a bit
of shock to a plant anyways. so i'd
prefer a more gradual method. how much
did you put down?


...
"Though an old man, I am but a young gardener." - Thomas Jefferson



Seems like I've known Tom since he was a young whipper-snapper ;OP

now you're making me think of Grandpa on
_the Munsters_ or Uncle Fester of the
Addams family...


Addams Family is probably close to the truth.

har!...


Anyway, I woke up this morning with my brown colored glasses on, and I
though I'd give you my view of ocean health.

The World Without Us
by Alan Weisman
http://www.amazon.com/World-Without-...2427905/ref=sr
_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1274206221&sr=1-1
(Available at a library near you.)

read a while ago.



p 152 - 59
....
There is a half a pound of debris on the surface for every 100 square
meters in the 1,000-mile crossing of the gyre some 3 million tons of
plastic. That's more plastic by weight than plankton on the ocean's
surface, six times as much.
....
All this plastic had appeared in barely more than 50 years. Would its
chemical constituents or additives‹for instance, colorants such as
metallic copper‹concentrate as they ascended the food chain, and alter
evolution?

Tokyo University geochemist Hideshige Takada reported that in the sea,
nurdles and other plastic fragments acted both as magnets and as sponges
for resilient poisons like DDT and PCBs.
....
The gyrating Pacific dump is 10 million square miles‹nearly the size of
Africa, and it wasn't the only one: the planet has six other major
tropical oceanic gyres, all of them swirling with ugly debris.

these are harvestable sources of fuels and
materials.


Everyone has seen polyethylene and other plastics turn yellow and
There are two problems. For one, plastic takes much longer to
photodegrade in water. The other hitch is that even though a ghost
fishnet made from photodegradable plastic might disintegrate before it
drowns any dolphins, its chemical nature will not change for hundreds,
perhaps thousands of years.

not sure about this, once it falls apart then
it can become host to bacteria, algae, fungi or
concentrated by a critter which eventually dies
and parts fall to the ocean floor. if we stop
dumping such compounds into the oceans then eventually
they will settle out and then get covered up. in
millions of years they get pushed down under the
continents and heated up to the point they break
down or get turned back into oil.


Polyethylene is not biodegraded in any practical time scale. There is no
mechanism in the marine environment to biodegrade that long a molecule."
Even if photodegradable nets helped marine mammals live, their powdery
residue remains in the sea, where the filter feeders will find it.

if it is large enough to be filtered out
then it is: incorporated in the animal,
excreted or the animal is eaten before it
has done any of the previous two things.

if it is incorporated in the animal
then at some point it settles out and
gets buried. excreted materials are
usually coated with mucous often also
with other stuff like bacteria and
fungi. i.e. also things that tend
to clump and settle.

i'm not worried about particles i'm
worried about molecules that act as
hormones, but as long as we stop
putting so many into the waterways then
eventually they get deactivated or
absorbed and then are settled out. if
enough get absorbed by people and that
causes reproductive problems or more
disease then eventually that will take
care of the problem as the population
will decrease either enough that the
effect goes away or so badly that we go
away. sure i don't want people to go
away completely, i just want moderation
and respect for other species.

i think the planet has a vast amount
of ability to heal and cleanse things if
we don't overload it. right now the
world is telling us in clear ways that
we are overloading it.


G'day

ditto!


songbird