Billy wrote:
....
All brain farts, and not one citation. Good luck with that.

you quote the whole thing for a one
line reply?

oh, ok, Billy, i see your comprehension
is down, read again where i said i composted
my reply off-line.

i have a very slow connection, i do
not watch tv or load audio via internet
unless it's the rare thing i want to wait
hours to accomplish, usually i cannot
tie up the phone line for that length of
time.

i'm mostly here to converse and
read about gardening, i'll try to have
fun in the process. most of what
you write in reply i am aware of and
actually agree with in some parts, if
you'd read it you'd see. yet there
are large gaps even in that time will
show. poking at them is just the
way i am.

now can you tell me what happened
to the art of general shooting the shit?
it sure isn't about quoting links back
and forth.

good day,


songbird

David Hare-Scott wrote:
songbird wrote:
David Hare-Scott wrote:
You have some interesting things to say and you have clearly thought
about them but you do yourself a disservice in your presentation.

your attention is appreciated,
your responses read if i'm still
alive to press the key or click the
mouse, but i'm unlikely to change
my writing style to your satisfaction.


I am not the one who should be satisfied with what you type. I only
point out the problems I see in case you didn't realise they were
there. If you know already and don't care there is nothing I can do
about it.

well i do care, but it is hard to change.
and i do know my pinkies are much
happier with few caps.


considering much is wandering
OT of r.g.e. i'm quite happy to
drop much of it.


Your postings are often made up of very long one-sentence paragraphs
all in lower case.

grammar takes a backseat
and howls to the music of
wurlds colliding.


Your grammar is fine, it's the layout that is the issue.

her knickers about her
sneeze her shoes in a
bundle and (to be true
to this group) a rhubarb
pie on the dash.

...

more seriously, words and ideas
first, am i clear enough that you
understand what i'm aiming at?

Yes you are clear. If you can achieve clarity why not ease as well?

ease is defined too many
ways. for me ease means
lower case most of the time.
the short length i can read
the entire chunk at a glance.


or if i am confusing, you can ask
questions and we can have a
conversation (instead of throwing
links back and forth as seems to
be what is happening to usenet
these days).

paragraphs are for formal
writing, this isn't that kind of
writing.

Sorry no, paragraphs are for readability as is sentence length or
having discernible sentences at all. The way the words appear on
the page determines how easily they are read because (except for very
slow readers) we read in chunks of words.

yes, i read chunks at a time too.


i'm here to have fun
and talk, not write papers for
publication. some of my aim
is to be entertaining and playful
while also being challenging.


Good. Why does that exclude ease of reading?

i read things just fine, i find capital letters
jarring.


You may think that messy old usenet doesn't
require your finger to ever hit the full stop or the shift key but
we will read more and skip less if you employ them.

i like being little. i am keeping my
ego on a leash, don't encourage me
to get all formalic like the big ants in
the amazon do. they scare the shit
outta me, always marching, always
eating, and oy veh the smell!


May I also suggest
that you adjust the line length of your newsreader as it wraps lines
rather short, which is hardly good for your text but it mangles the
quotes because they are then chopped twice.

oh, ok, i didn't notice i'd chopped at 65 instead of 72,
i've now adjusted it upwards. i'm still testing out my
linux side setup for slrn so as soon as i get that working
the way i like it i will be switching newsreaders... at
this rate it will be a few months yet. i'm in the middle
of too many projects and gardening season is on.

peace and good evening to all,


songbird

And goodnight to you.

we have wandered far afield,
but i'm going to return and ask
about the two calorie output vs
one Billy pulled out of ?

and the other question for
Billy is how does organic
gardening sequester carbon
dioxide? improving soil is
good, mixing organic stuff in
and making all the various
critters happy is great, but
that is nutrient cycling not
carbon sequestration... we
need carbon sequestration
at this point. can we get
that via organic gardening
methods at present?

i really need to study
charcoal production methods...
perhaps a solar oven could
do it... gotta go look now.


songbird

In article ,
"songbird" wrote:

David Hare-Scott wrote:
songbird wrote:
David Hare-Scott wrote:
You have some interesting things to say and you have clearly thought
about them but you do yourself a disservice in your presentation.

your attention is appreciated,
your responses read if i'm still
alive to press the key or click the
mouse, but i'm unlikely to change
my writing style to your satisfaction.


I am not the one who should be satisfied with what you type. I only
point out the problems I see in case you didn't realise they were
there. If you know already and don't care there is nothing I can do
about it.

well i do care, but it is hard to change.
and i do know my pinkies are much
happier with few caps.


considering much is wandering
OT of r.g.e. i'm quite happy to
drop much of it.


Your postings are often made up of very long one-sentence paragraphs
all in lower case.

grammar takes a backseat
and howls to the music of
wurlds colliding.


Your grammar is fine, it's the layout that is the issue.

her knickers about her
sneeze her shoes in a
bundle and (to be true
to this group) a rhubarb
pie on the dash.

...

more seriously, words and ideas
first, am i clear enough that you
understand what i'm aiming at?

Yes you are clear. If you can achieve clarity why not ease as well?

ease is defined too many
ways. for me ease means
lower case most of the time.
the short length i can read
the entire chunk at a glance.


or if i am confusing, you can ask
questions and we can have a
conversation (instead of throwing
links back and forth as seems to
be what is happening to usenet
these days).

paragraphs are for formal
writing, this isn't that kind of
writing.

Sorry no, paragraphs are for readability as is sentence length or
having discernible sentences at all. The way the words appear on
the page determines how easily they are read because (except for very
slow readers) we read in chunks of words.

yes, i read chunks at a time too.


i'm here to have fun
and talk, not write papers for
publication. some of my aim
is to be entertaining and playful
while also being challenging.


Good. Why does that exclude ease of reading?

i read things just fine, i find capital letters
jarring.


You may think that messy old usenet doesn't
require your finger to ever hit the full stop or the shift key but
we will read more and skip less if you employ them.

i like being little. i am keeping my
ego on a leash, don't encourage me
to get all formalic like the big ants in
the amazon do. they scare the shit
outta me, always marching, always
eating, and oy veh the smell!


May I also suggest
that you adjust the line length of your newsreader as it wraps lines
rather short, which is hardly good for your text but it mangles the
quotes because they are then chopped twice.

oh, ok, i didn't notice i'd chopped at 65 instead of 72,
i've now adjusted it upwards. i'm still testing out my
linux side setup for slrn so as soon as i get that working
the way i like it i will be switching newsreaders... at
this rate it will be a few months yet. i'm in the middle
of too many projects and gardening season is on.

peace and good evening to all,


songbird

And goodnight to you.

we have wandered far afield,
but i'm going to return and ask
about the two calorie output vs
one Billy pulled out of ?


This is called "Modeling Behavior".

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
p.45 - 46
http://www.amazon.com/Omnivores-Dile...ls/dp/01430385
83/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206815576&sr=1-1

The reason Greene County is no longer green for half the year is because
the farmer who can buy synthetic fertility no longer needs cover crops
to capture a whole year's worth of sunlight he has plugged himself into
a new source of energy. When you add together the natural gas in the
fertilizer to the fossil fuels it takes to make the pesticides, drive
the tractors, and harvest, dry, and transport the corn, you find that
every bushel of industrial corn requires the equivalent of between a
quarter and a third of a gallon of oil to grow it‹or around fifty
gallons of oil per acre of corn. (Some estimates are much higher.) Put
another way, it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to
produce a calorie of food; before the advent of chemical fertilizer the
Naylor farm produced more than two calories of food energy for every
calorie of energy invested.

From the standpoint of industrial efficiency, it's too bad we can't
simply drink the petroleum directly.

and the other question for
Billy is how does organic
gardening sequester carbon
dioxide? improving soil is
good, mixing organic stuff in
and making all the various
critters happy is great, but
that is nutrient cycling not
carbon sequestration... we
need carbon sequestration
at this point. can we get
that via organic gardening
methods at present?

Only in terms of bio-mass, unless you include "terra preta", and its
charcoal.

Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web
Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis
Ch.1, second paragraph.
http://www.amazon.com/Teaming-Microb.../dp/0881927775
/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206815176&sr= 1-1

In addition to all the living organisms you can see in garden soils (for
example, there are up to 50 earthworms in a square foot [0.09 square
meters] of good soil), there is a whole world of soil organisms that you
cannot see unless you use sophisticated and expensive optics. Only then
do the tiny, microscopic organisms‹bacteria, fungi, protozoa,
nematodes‹appear, and in numbers that are nothing less than staggering.
A mere teaspoon of good garden soil, as measured by microbial
geneticists, contains a billion invisible bacteria, several yards of
equally invisible fungal hyphae, several thousand protozoa, and a few
dozen nematodes.
----

Gaia's Garden, Second Edition: A Guide To Home-Scale Permaculture
(Paperback)
by Toby Hemenway
p.78
http://www.amazon.com/Gaias-Garden-S...ulture/dp/1603
580298/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1271266976&sr=1-1

Like most living things, leaves are made primarily of carbon-containing
compounds: sugars, proteins, starches, and many other organic molecules.
When soil creatures eat these compounds, some of the carbon becomes part
of the consumer, as cell membrane, wing case, eyeball, or the like. And
some of the carbon is released as a gas: carbon dioxide, or CO, (our
breath contains carbon dioxide for the same reason). Soil organisms
consume the other elements that make up the leaf, too, such as nitrogen,
calcium, phosphorus, and all the rest, but most of those are
reincorporated into solid matter‹organism or bug manure‹and remain
earthbound. A substantial portion of the carbon, however, puffs into the
atmosphere as carbon dioxide. This means that, in decomposing matter,
the ratio of carbon to the other elements is decreasing; carbon drifts
into the air, but most nitrogen, for example, stays behind. The
carbon-to-nitrogen ratio decreases. (Compost enthusiasts will recognize
this C:N ratio as a critical element of a good compost pile.) In
decomposition, carbon levels drop quickly, while the amounts of the
other elements in our decomposing leaf stay roughly the same.



1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus : Charles C. Mann
http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelatio...mbus/dp/140003
2059/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269536235&sr=1-1

According to a recent study led by Dirse Kern, of the Museu Goeldi in
Belem, terra preta is "not associated with a particular parent soil type
or environmental condition," suggesting that it was not produced by
natural processes. Another clue to its human origin is the broken
ceramics with which it is usually mixed. "They practiced agriculture
here for centuries," Glaser told me. "But instead of destroying the
soil, they improved it, and that is something we don't know how to do
today" in tropical soils.
As a rule, terra preta has more "plant-available" phosphorus, calcium,
sulfur, and nitrogen than is common in the rain forest; it also has much
more organic matter, better retains moisture and nutrients, and is not
rapidly exhausted by agricultural use when managed well. The key to
terra preta's long-term fertility, Glaser says, is charcoal: terra preta
contains up to sixty-four times more of it than surrounding red earth.
Organic matter "sticks" to charcoal, rather than being washed away or
attaching to other, nonavailable compounds. "Over time, it

p.346

partly oxidizes, which keeps providing sites for nutrients to bind to."
But simply mixing charcoal into the ground is not enough to create terra
preta. Because charcoal contains few nutrients, Glaser argued,
"high-nutrient inputs‹excrement and waste such as turtle, fish, and
animal bones‹are necessary." Special soil microorganisms are also likely
to play a role in its persistent fertility, in the view of Janice Thies,
a soil ecologist who is part of a Cornell University team studying terra
preta. "There are indications that microbial biomass is higher in terra
preta than in other forest soils," she told me, which raises the
possibility that scientists might be able to create a "package" of
charcoal, nutrients, and microfauna that could be used to transform bad
tropical soil into terra preta.

Despite the charcoal, terra preta is not a by-product of slash-and-burn
agriculture. To begin with, slash-and-burn simply does not produce
enough charcoal to make terra preta‹the carbon mostly goes into the air
in the form of carbon dioxide. Instead, Indians apparently made terra
preta by a process that Christoph Steiner, a University of Bayreuth soil
scientist, has dubbed "slash-and-char." Instead of completely burning
organic matter to ash, ancient farmers burned it incompletely to make
charcoal, then stirred the charcoal into the soil. In addition to its
benefits to the soil, slash-and-char releases much less carbon into the
air than slash-and-burn, which has large potential implications for
climate change. Trees store vast amounts of carbon in their trunks,
branches, and leaves. When they die or people cut them down, the carbon
is usually released into the atmosphere, driving global warming.
Experiments by Makoto Ogawa of the Kansai Environmental Engineering
Center, near Kyoto, Japan, demonstrated that charcoal retains its carbon
in the soil for up to fifty thousand years.

i really need to study
charcoal production methods...
perhaps a solar oven could
do it... gotta go look now.


songbird
--
- Billy
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arn3lF5XSUg
http://radwisdom.com/essays/this-is-your-brain/

In article ,
"songbird" wrote:

Billy wrote:
...
All brain farts, and not one citation. Good luck with that.

you quote the whole thing for a one
line reply?

oh, ok, Billy, i see your comprehension
is down, read again where i said i composted
my reply off-line.

i have a very slow connection, i do
not watch tv or load audio via internet
unless it's the rare thing i want to wait
hours to accomplish, usually i cannot
tie up the phone line for that length of
time.

i'm mostly here to converse and
read about gardening, i'll try to have
fun in the process. most of what
you write in reply i am aware of and
actually agree with in some parts, if
you'd read it you'd see. yet there
are large gaps even in that time will
show. poking at them is just the
way i am.

now can you tell me what happened
to the art of general shooting the shit?
it sure isn't about quoting links back
and forth.

good day,


songbird

Shooting the shit is fine, but without authority, it is just babbling,
and logic is only as good as its premise.
You quoted links?
Citation please.
--
- Billy
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arn3lF5XSUg
http://radwisdom.com/essays/this-is-your-brain/

In article
,
Billy wrote:

In article ,
"songbird" wrote:

David Hare-Scott wrote:
songbird wrote:
David Hare-Scott wrote:
You have some interesting things to say and you have clearly thought
about them but you do yourself a disservice in your presentation.

your attention is appreciated,
your responses read if i'm still
alive to press the key or click the
mouse, but i'm unlikely to change
my writing style to your satisfaction.


I am not the one who should be satisfied with what you type. I only
point out the problems I see in case you didn't realise they were
there. If you know already and don't care there is nothing I can do
about it.

well i do care, but it is hard to change.
and i do know my pinkies are much
happier with few caps.


considering much is wandering
OT of r.g.e. i'm quite happy to
drop much of it.


Your postings are often made up of very long one-sentence paragraphs
all in lower case.

grammar takes a backseat
and howls to the music of
wurlds colliding.


Your grammar is fine, it's the layout that is the issue.

her knickers about her
sneeze her shoes in a
bundle and (to be true
to this group) a rhubarb
pie on the dash.

...

more seriously, words and ideas
first, am i clear enough that you
understand what i'm aiming at?

Yes you are clear. If you can achieve clarity why not ease as well?

ease is defined too many
ways. for me ease means
lower case most of the time.
the short length i can read
the entire chunk at a glance.


or if i am confusing, you can ask
questions and we can have a
conversation (instead of throwing
links back and forth as seems to
be what is happening to usenet
these days).

paragraphs are for formal
writing, this isn't that kind of
writing.

Sorry no, paragraphs are for readability as is sentence length or
having discernible sentences at all. The way the words appear on
the page determines how easily they are read because (except for very
slow readers) we read in chunks of words.

yes, i read chunks at a time too.


i'm here to have fun
and talk, not write papers for
publication. some of my aim
is to be entertaining and playful
while also being challenging.


Good. Why does that exclude ease of reading?

i read things just fine, i find capital letters
jarring.


You may think that messy old usenet doesn't
require your finger to ever hit the full stop or the shift key but
we will read more and skip less if you employ them.

i like being little. i am keeping my
ego on a leash, don't encourage me
to get all formalic like the big ants in
the amazon do. they scare the shit
outta me, always marching, always
eating, and oy veh the smell!


May I also suggest
that you adjust the line length of your newsreader as it wraps lines
rather short, which is hardly good for your text but it mangles the
quotes because they are then chopped twice.

oh, ok, i didn't notice i'd chopped at 65 instead of 72,
i've now adjusted it upwards. i'm still testing out my
linux side setup for slrn so as soon as i get that working
the way i like it i will be switching newsreaders... at
this rate it will be a few months yet. i'm in the middle
of too many projects and gardening season is on.

peace and good evening to all,


songbird

And goodnight to you.

we have wandered far afield,
but i'm going to return and ask
about the two calorie output vs
one Billy pulled out of ?


This is called "Modeling Behavior".

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
p.45 - 46
http://www.amazon.com/Omnivores-Dile...ls/dp/01430385
83/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206815576&sr=1-1

The reason Greene County is no longer green for half the year is because
the farmer who can buy synthetic fertility no longer needs cover crops
to capture a whole year's worth of sunlight he has plugged himself into
a new source of energy. When you add together the natural gas in the
fertilizer to the fossil fuels it takes to make the pesticides, drive
the tractors, and harvest, dry, and transport the corn, you find that
every bushel of industrial corn requires the equivalent of between a
quarter and a third of a gallon of oil to grow it‹or around fifty
gallons of oil per acre of corn. (Some estimates are much higher.) Put
another way, it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to
produce a calorie of food; before the advent of chemical fertilizer the
Naylor farm produced more than two calories of food energy for every
calorie of energy invested.

From the standpoint of industrial efficiency, it's too bad we can't
simply drink the petroleum directly.

and the other question for
Billy is how does organic
gardening sequester carbon
dioxide? improving soil is
good, mixing organic stuff in
and making all the various
critters happy is great, but
that is nutrient cycling not
carbon sequestration... we
need carbon sequestration
at this point. can we get
that via organic gardening
methods at present?

Only in terms of bio-mass, unless you include "terra preta", and its
charcoal.

Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web
Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis
Ch.1, second paragraph.
http://www.amazon.com/Teaming-Microb.../dp/0881927775
/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206815176&sr= 1-1

In addition to all the living organisms you can see in garden soils (for
example, there are up to 50 earthworms in a square foot [0.09 square
meters] of good soil), there is a whole world of soil organisms that you
cannot see unless you use sophisticated and expensive optics. Only then
do the tiny, microscopic organisms‹bacteria, fungi, protozoa,
nematodes‹appear, and in numbers that are nothing less than staggering.
A mere teaspoon of good garden soil, as measured by microbial
geneticists, contains a billion invisible bacteria, several yards of
equally invisible fungal hyphae, several thousand protozoa, and a few
dozen nematodes.
----

Gaia's Garden, Second Edition: A Guide To Home-Scale Permaculture
(Paperback)
by Toby Hemenway
p.78
http://www.amazon.com/Gaias-Garden-S...ulture/dp/1603
580298/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1271266976&sr=1-1

Like most living things, leaves are made primarily of carbon-containing
compounds: sugars, proteins, starches, and many other organic molecules.
When soil creatures eat these compounds, some of the carbon becomes part
of the consumer, as cell membrane, wing case, eyeball, or the like. And
some of the carbon is released as a gas: carbon dioxide, or CO, (our
breath contains carbon dioxide for the same reason). Soil organisms
consume the other elements that make up the leaf, too, such as nitrogen,
calcium, phosphorus, and all the rest, but most of those are
reincorporated into solid matter‹organism or bug manure‹and remain
earthbound. A substantial portion of the carbon, however, puffs into the
atmosphere as carbon dioxide. This means that, in decomposing matter,
the ratio of carbon to the other elements is decreasing; carbon drifts
into the air, but most nitrogen, for example, stays behind. The
carbon-to-nitrogen ratio decreases. (Compost enthusiasts will recognize
this C:N ratio as a critical element of a good compost pile.) In
decomposition, carbon levels drop quickly, while the amounts of the
other elements in our decomposing leaf stay roughly the same.



1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus : Charles C. Mann
http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelatio...mbus/dp/140003
2059/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269536235&sr=1-1

According to a recent study led by Dirse Kern, of the Museu Goeldi in
Belem, terra preta is "not associated with a particular parent soil type
or environmental condition," suggesting that it was not produced by
natural processes. Another clue to its human origin is the broken
ceramics with which it is usually mixed. "They practiced agriculture
here for centuries," Glaser told me. "But instead of destroying the
soil, they improved it, and that is something we don't know how to do
today" in tropical soils.
As a rule, terra preta has more "plant-available" phosphorus, calcium,
sulfur, and nitrogen than is common in the rain forest; it also has much
more organic matter, better retains moisture and nutrients, and is not
rapidly exhausted by agricultural use when managed well. The key to
terra preta's long-term fertility, Glaser says, is charcoal: terra preta
contains up to sixty-four times more of it than surrounding red earth.
Organic matter "sticks" to charcoal, rather than being washed away or
attaching to other, nonavailable compounds. "Over time, it

p.346

partly oxidizes, which keeps providing sites for nutrients to bind to."
But simply mixing charcoal into the ground is not enough to create terra
preta. Because charcoal contains few nutrients, Glaser argued,
"high-nutrient inputs‹excrement and waste such as turtle, fish, and
animal bones‹are necessary." Special soil microorganisms are also likely
to play a role in its persistent fertility, in the view of Janice Thies,
a soil ecologist who is part of a Cornell University team studying terra
preta. "There are indications that microbial biomass is higher in terra
preta than in other forest soils," she told me, which raises the
possibility that scientists might be able to create a "package" of
charcoal, nutrients, and microfauna that could be used to transform bad
tropical soil into terra preta.

Despite the charcoal, terra preta is not a by-product of slash-and-burn
agriculture. To begin with, slash-and-burn simply does not produce
enough charcoal to make terra preta‹the carbon mostly goes into the air
in the form of carbon dioxide. Instead, Indians apparently made terra
preta by a process that Christoph Steiner, a University of Bayreuth soil
scientist, has dubbed "slash-and-char." Instead of completely burning
organic matter to ash, ancient farmers burned it incompletely to make
charcoal, then stirred the charcoal into the soil. In addition to its
benefits to the soil, slash-and-char releases much less carbon into the
air than slash-and-burn, which has large potential implications for
climate change. Trees store vast amounts of carbon in their trunks,
branches, and leaves. When they die or people cut them down, the carbon
is usually released into the atmosphere, driving global warming.
Experiments by Makoto Ogawa of the Kansai Environmental Engineering
Center, near Kyoto, Japan, demonstrated that charcoal retains its carbon
in the soil for up to fifty thousand years.

i really need to study
charcoal production methods...
perhaps a solar oven could
do it... gotta go look now.


songbird

In a way what Rec.gardens could use is a FAQ update. Too much work
sadly so we must suffer eternal return. Perhaps a FAQ list of books we
could muster long with a few odd items ?
Just outside tearing out some squash suffering from too much shade
just big leaves this in about 95F with a dew point over 70. Yea I know
I can eat the flowers but the light they take takes from some other
valued plants. Whew cool down due in 2 days.

Some music I found that I thought was gone. Warning this from a aging
hippy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7_c9hrbFow

--
Bill S. Jersey USA zone 5 shade garden
What use one more wake up call?

In article ,
Bill who putters wrote:

Just outside tearing out some squash suffering from too much shade
just big leaves this in about 95F with a dew point over 70. Yea I know
I can eat the flowers but the light they take takes from some other
valued plants. Whew cool down due in 2 days.

Nearly 100°F here, yesterday. Not too bad but we haven't acclimated to
the heat yet. It's supposed to cool down through the week and then heat
up again next week. It's not bad here, but we need to go to the Central
Valley, at least once a week, and it gets hot in Sacramento.

I finally got to untangling some Swiss chard that was set to germination
in April. They were suffering in two, small, germination cell 6-packs.
If they all survive, I think I'll be set for Swiss chard for the rest of
my life (29 of them).

I hope one day to figure out the root garden. It seems that everything
is in bloom; radishes, onions, parsnips, celery root, dandelion, borage.
Where are the plants supposed to grow? The beets, and a few assorted
lettuces are being overwhelmed but the flowers are festive;O)

One of my successes for the year is finding a good spot for my lettuce.
Up at the top of the yard, against the ivy covered fence, they get
morning and mid-day sun, but slip into the shadows for the afternoon. I
don't know if this is new to anyone, but I spray the lettuce about 30
min. before I pick it, and it is much crispier.

One flowering parsnip is up to 7' now. It is only behind the sunflower
because it is leaning on a potato cage. The potatoes are about 5' tall.
All in all, not bad for 6 hours of full sun. Yeah, I know, it goeth
before the fall, but if you got it, flaunt it;O)
Seems like it is taking forever to figure out the best way to garden (a
little over 600 sq. ft.) on my little plot of land, on a north facing
slope, under trees. Fortunately, the road is just up the hill from me,
and allows me sunlight.
--
- Billy
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arn3lF5XSUg
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/2...al_crime_scene

songbird wrote:
we have wandered far afield,
but i'm going to return and ask
about the two calorie output vs
one Billy pulled out of ?


I would be interested to see that too.

and the other question for
Billy is how does organic
gardening sequester carbon
dioxide?

I am guessing that in the long term organic horticulture has only a mild
effect in storage. If you have 10% organic material in your soil you are
sequestering more carbon than if you have 1% but it isn't going to be a big
carbon sink. Assuming that you can still feed the numbers required. OTOH
if you don't use all the chemferts that require energy to manufacture then
you are saving some at that end.

improving soil is
good, mixing organic stuff in
and making all the various
critters happy is great, but
that is nutrient cycling not
carbon sequestration... we
need carbon sequestration
at this point. can we get
that via organic gardening
methods at present?


This can only be answered properly by careful numeric modelling but I don't
have a reference for it. My guess is that it won't be so valuable. However
if combined with other methods such as forest re-planting and organic
pasture management we might make some progress. Regarding the latter, I
have seen studies that say that pastures (as opposed to crops) can store
significant carbon. To do this you need to grass-feed your animals instead
of ripping out the pastures to grow corn to feed them in lots.

i really need to study
charcoal production methods...
perhaps a solar oven could
do it... gotta go look now.



I think that this would be possible but the big question is what would be
the energy cost and financial cost to do it.

Regardless of sequestration there is no mid-term solution unless we stop
burning fossil fuel at such a rate. We must decide to do this as a species,
the limits of availability will make the decision for us in respect of oil
quite soon but there is enough coal left to send earth well into the
greenhouse if we keep burning it at an increasing rate. And only one
long-term solution: stop population growth.

David

In article ,
"David Hare-Scott" wrote:

songbird wrote:
we have wandered far afield,

Only to those not paying attention. My point about organic, before you
launched into your unsupported attack on "organic", was the when you get
organic, you get more nutrients into your diet. If the enhanced
nutrition of "organic" kept you from getting sick, then that would be a
good deal wouldn't it? There are an increasing number of studies showing
enhanced levels of vitamins in organic produce. More over vitamins have
only been recognized for about 100 years. Now there appears to be
another class of compounds, flavonols
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flavonoid, which are important to human
health. We wondered from your field to point out that part of the
benefit of growing organic was to eat healthier foods. Cheap food that
lets you get sick isn't such a good deal. Or as they say about
Americans, we are over fed and under nourished.
but i'm going to return and ask
about the two calorie output vs
one Billy pulled out of ?
If you don't have my 9:46 AM post from today, I'll happily repost it for
you.



I would be interested to see that too.

and the other question for
Billy is how does organic
gardening sequester carbon
dioxide?
Also in the 9:46 AM post

I am guessing that in the long term organic horticulture has only a mild
effect in storage. If you have 10% organic material in your soil you are
sequestering more carbon than if you have 1% but it isn't going to be a big
carbon sink. Assuming that you can still feed the numbers required. OTOH
if you don't use all the chemferts that require energy to manufacture then
you are saving some at that end.

Long story short, charcoal can last 50,000 years, and it can have the
added benefit of improving the fertility of the soil.
--
- Billy
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arn3lF5XSUg
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/2...al_crime_scene

On Mon, 28 Jun 2010 18:26:01 -0700, against all advice, something
compelled Billy , to say:

There are an increasing number of studies showing
enhanced levels of vitamins in organic produce.



Cite three.

Thank you.

phorbin wrote:
In article , says...

Assuming that you can still feed the numbers required. OTOH
if you don't use all the chemferts that require energy to
manufacture then you are saving some at that end.

You probably already know that nitrogen production uses natural gas as
its feedstock...

Yes. The Haber process produces greenhouse gases as a by-product and it is
a factor in the overall energy economy as that natural gas could be used
(for example) to generate electric power or to run cars. The process can
also use other hydrocarbons or none at all.

The haber process can be run from hydrogen produced electrolytically which
doesn't generate GHG if you get your electricity from renewable sources but
that would increase the price of fertiliser at current renewable electricity
prices.

David

wrote:
songbird wrote:

but i'm unlikely to change my writing style to your satisfaction.

Will, I for one, am not just "unlikely" but am totally unwilling to
change my reading style to indulge your pretentious self-importance
and read your drivel. What happened to "shooting the shit" is a
preponderance of shit heads. What do you want on your burger?

are you talking to Billy or me?

usually when people talk to me
they include words like sanctimonious,
silly or immature. so you have me
as confused as a church mouse in
a cheese shop.

the usenet has changed a great deal
over the years i have been reading
and writing. lately i think things are
improving...


songbird

In article , says...

Assuming that you can still feed the numbers required. OTOH
if you don't use all the chemferts that require energy to manufacture then
you are saving some at that end.

You probably already know that nitrogen production uses natural gas as
its feedstock...

Billy wrote:
songbird wrote:
....
we have wandered far afield,
but i'm going to return and ask
about the two calorie output vs
one Billy pulled out of ?


This is called "Modeling Behavior".

on the catwalk...
shake it Billy.


The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael
Pollan
p.45 - 46
http://www.amazon.com/Omnivores-Dile...ls/dp/01430385
83/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206815576&sr=1-1

The reason Greene County is no longer green for half the year is
because
the farmer who can buy synthetic fertility no longer needs cover crops
to capture a whole year's worth of sunlight he has plugged himself
into
a new source of energy. When you add together the natural gas in the
fertilizer to the fossil fuels it takes to make the pesticides, drive
the tractors, and harvest, dry, and transport the corn, you find that
every bushel of industrial corn requires the equivalent of between a
quarter and a third of a gallon of oil to grow it gallons of oil
per acre of corn. (Some estimates are much higher.) Put another way,
it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to
produce a calorie of food; before the advent of chemical fertilizer
the
Naylor farm produced more than two calories of food energy for every
calorie of energy invested.

you need to mark the citations quotes
differently from your own words.

i cannot tell if the following remark
is yours or the "authority" you are citing...


From the standpoint of industrial efficiency, it's too bad we can't
simply drink the petroleum directly.

not an EPA approved
use of that material! i am
shocked at you Billywonkanobi. ( )


and the other question for
Billy is how does organic
gardening sequester carbon
dioxide? improving soil is
good, mixing organic stuff in
and making all the various
critters happy is great, but
that is nutrient cycling not
carbon sequestration... we
need carbon sequestration
at this point. can we get
that via organic gardening
methods at present?

Only in terms of bio-mass, unless you include "terra preta", and its
charcoal.

*ding ding!*


Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web
Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis
Ch.1, second paragraph.
http://www.amazon.com/Teaming-Microb.../dp/0881927775
/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206815176&sr= 1-1

In addition to all the living organisms you can see in garden soils
(for
example, there are up to 50 earthworms in a square foot [0.09 square
meters] of good soil), there is a whole world of soil organisms that
you
cannot see unless you use sophisticated and expensive optics. Only
then
do the tiny, microscopic organisms nematodes A mere teaspoon of
good garden soil, as measured by microbial geneticists, contains a
billion invisible bacteria, several yards of
equally invisible fungal hyphae, several thousand protozoa, and a few
dozen nematodes.

do you know that there are
places where earth worms are
not native and they are considered
alien invasive species?

have you studied any forest
floor ecologies?


Gaia's Garden, Second Edition: A Guide To Home-Scale Permaculture
(Paperback)
by Toby Hemenway
p.78
http://www.amazon.com/Gaias-Garden-S...ulture/dp/1603
580298/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1271266976&sr=1-1

Like most living things, leaves are made primarily of
carbon-containing
compounds: sugars, proteins, starches, and many other organic
molecules.
....


1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus : Charles C.
Mann
http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelatio...mbus/dp/140003
2059/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269536235&sr=1-1

....
Trees store vast amounts of carbon in their trunks,
branches, and leaves. When they die or people cut them down, the
carbon
is usually released into the atmosphere, driving global warming.
Experiments by Makoto Ogawa of the Kansai Environmental Engineering
Center, near Kyoto, Japan, demonstrated that charcoal retains its
carbon
in the soil for up to fifty thousand years.

ah yes, that's a helpful
idea and i suspect people
will be amending away.
since it is a lighter
material i may include
some in my tulip bed
topping soil mix.


i really need to study
charcoal production methods...
perhaps a solar oven could
do it... gotta go look now.

still gotta do it. *sigh*
i'm sensitive to smoke though
that it would have to be a
pretty well engineered device.

*mad scientist chuckle*


songbird

Billy wrote:
....
Shooting the shit is fine, but without authority, it is just babbling,

today's authority is sometimes
wrong. i worked for 7 people
who were authorities and they
were a lost cause. and so i
don't trust authorities blindly
and find most popular works
too light on rigor...

because of that i have been
trying to get a hold of more
studious works lately. i was
reading a college level plant
physiology textbook a few
weeks ago and it ignored
so many topics and instead focused
on the pet topics of the various
contributors.

don't get me wrong, it was a
good book for me to read but
it was very incomplete and i was
afraid that many students who had
this as their only plant physiology
book would be missing so much.

now i am looking for other
good reads, so recommend away
and i will line some of them up
and see what they have to offer.


and logic is only as good as its premise.

if it's valid.


You quoted links?

only those you included, but
many i did not follow because
i was offline (as i am now).


Citation please.

tossing citations back and
forth with no personal interpretation
on your part isn't a conversation.

tell me when you cite a
link what it means to you
and how it is lived by you.
otherwise you are a shadow
boxer.

do you garden? how do
you garden? what do you
garden?

or i am here to babble then.


songbird

Billy wrote:
....
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael
Pollan
p.45 - 46
http://www.amazon.com/Omnivores-Dile...ls/dp/01430385
83/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206815576&sr=1-1

The reason Greene County is no longer green for half the year is
because
the farmer who can buy synthetic fertility no longer needs cover crops
to capture a whole year's worth of sunlight he has plugged himself
into
a new source of energy. When you add together the natural gas in the
fertilizer to the fossil fuels it takes to make the pesticides, drive
the tractors, and harvest, dry, and transport the corn, you find that
every bushel of industrial corn requires the equivalent of between a
quarter and a third of a gallon of oil to grow it gallons of oil
per acre of corn. (Some estimates are much higher.) Put another way,
it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to
produce a calorie of food; before the advent of chemical fertilizer
the
Naylor farm produced more than two calories of food energy for every
calorie of energy invested.
....

ok, i see where the 1 calorie amount comes
from, but i see hand waving for the 2 calorie
amount. is that detailed some other place?


songbird