MamaStories

Happy Summer!

On this hot sunny day what did I do but seek out the two hottest areas of my garden.

First, the compost bins. They looked pretty tame, on the surface. Then I stuck in my fork and woosh, the temperature rise was immediately apparent.  I  persisted, turning, consolidating and sifting out the finished stuff. I do the sifting by hand – wearing heavy-duty gardening gloves – pushing and rubbing the stuff through the wire mesh into the garden cart, then scooping up the bigger bits and throwing them into the next bin. I love the sensation of the heat. I realize this is soil in the making, imagine volcanoes, tectonic shifts, geological eras…

And it smells so good, like my mushroom bed, actually, with a fresh, nutty smell. Could it be mycelia? (UPDATE: See two days later.) It’s a distinctly, wholesome fungal smell. There weren’t many worms in it and was dominated instead by the tiny creatures that collectively look like a white powder.

The compost in the Earth Machines (EM) smells very differently. It’s always too wet and a bit anaerobic, especially at the bottom, giving it a sour, rotteny smell. Still, it’s always loaded with earth worms and other large crawlers. It composts much slower. That might be a function not so much of the enclosure but of the raw materials: kitchen scraps, including meat, fish, oil and dairy, versus pure plant material in the garden bins.

In any case, today was the first time I moved the half-finished, smelly stuff from the EM to the open bins in the garden. Let’s see if the rodents start mining it for half-decomposed bones. I will post our home-made compost bin plans and the pictures of its construction soon, because I am quite happy with it, except for one aspect that we can easily change.

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As if I hadn’t sweated enough, I had to jump into the real sauna. I brought the finished compost, still warm, into the hoop house. It was a whopping 94 F  (34 C) in there. I rigged up a fan to circulate the air a bit. The tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and Chinese Lanterns in there (the latter confined to pots) seem to love it. I weeded, top-dressed each plant with three generous handfuls of compost, then watered it in. A couple of hours later, I swear, they all looked even happier.

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I used the rest of the compost on the berry bushes, then watered that in as well. They tend to get neglected a bit and I haven’t seen much growth since transplanting them. I don’t expect berries from them this year. I do from the strawberries up front, though. They have all had a chance to recuperate from being grazed by the bunnies/chipmunks, thanks to the netting I put over them.

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I hope to have more compost in a matter of days if I turn the new piles once a day.  Then the rest of the garden can partake of the black gold as well. Next up as well: trellising the tomatoes that are outside, as well as the beans.

Thank you again, Freecycle!

A while ago I put up a wanted notice in my local Freeycle group for comfrey plants. My first contact fell through, and then I forgot about it, until yesterday, when a local man contacted me. I went by this morning and� discovered… heaven!

L and S live in a cul-de-sac that is all lawns. Azaleas and arbor vitae abound,� but it’s mostly grass: sloping, cut very short, and sprinkled. Then you get to L and S’s place which… stands out. Their tiny bungalow is hardly noticeable in the dark jungle that is the front yard, darkened by towering pine trees and scraggly, half-bald spruces, all overgrown with vinca. There’s a rusted old car in the driveway, and paint cans. It smells sweet: something is flowering, but you can’t quite see what…

Now follow a side “path” of rotten boards sunk into the mud to enter the backyard and have your mind blown.

It used to be all raised vegetable beds, L tells me, but she could no longer work them, so they decided to let it grow into a raspberry field. And boy, did the raspberries oblige! There is also mint of all kinds gone rampant, and lovage, and wildflowers. Oh, and comfrey. Patches, like islands in a sea of raspberry canes, of two varieties, near to a hundred of them, some as tall as me!

I dug and lifted while chatting with L, hoping she wouldn’t find me greedy, but thinking they might need help clearing the comfrey a bit.� Now I know what they mean by invasive, uncontrollable, and “compost crop”. L says by June these plants will be even bigger, leafier, fatter…

After a good half hour I had hardly made a dent, but it was all I could fit into my station wagon. L also gave me some of each of the four kinds of mint she could find, and some lovage.

Such dear and interesting people. They were the first to know what I was talking about� when I explained the intended permaculture setup at our place. L and S went all the NOFA meetings since they started and saw J.I. Rodale speak. For decades they grew their own vegetables, organically of course, but now they are happy with their 400 pounds of raspberries each year. Only they and their friends are getting on in age and can no longer do all that picking.

I offered my leftover asparagus plants in return for the comfrey and will go and help L clear a patch for them. And they invited me to come and help pick raspberries, and we’ll split the pickings!

I’ll get a picture of the transplants when it stops raining. I am so glad for the rain: my barrels empty out too fast now that all the beds are in operation, and the transplants do well in the rain.

I like my two Earth Machine composters in that they’re contained and so inaccessible to animals, which makes me unafraid to throw in meat, cheese, bones, etc. They’re also, of course, portable, and not too bad to look at. But for those reasons they’re also a pain to turn, and just the two of them won’t give me the quantity of compost I need. I want to add horse manure, grass clippings, more coffee shop coffee grounds and perhaps even some kitchen scraps from neighbors.

So I am in need of something more extensive and easier to turn. Something like the� one at Drumlin Farm. DH helped me make it come true. He made his own design and we put it together, the two of us, over the last couple of days. Here is the almost finished product in situ, off to the side of the veg garden:

It really is huge: 3 boxes 3′ by 3′ by 3′.

It still needs a three-part lid, which we’ll make out of scrap lumber and the old fiberglass roof we ripped off our porch. Time and use will tell if we did well. If it holds up well, I’ll put our plans online.

I’ll still be using my Earth Machines for the kitchen scraps that the wild animals would love to get at, because even with a lid this one is not tight – for one, it has no bottom. So the Earth Machines stay behind the shed, close to the kitchen, and this one will receive their composted and half-composted contents once in a while.

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I also lit my bee smoker for the first time. I gathered a bucket full of dry pine needles, dry rotten wood and old leaves from our garden, stuffed some of that into the smoker, and lit it on fire. It smoked really well for 20 minutes with only a few puffs. Success!

The garden, that is.

DH and I worked on the backyard the entire day: grading it with sifted soil, evening it out, then adding 1 to 2 inches of our composted cow manure. We still have about 1/3 to do, and I’ll try to finish that by my lonesome tomorrow, because DH needs to go into work. Then we sow the grass seed and keep our fingers crossed.

The tomato seedlings are getting too big for my setup in the basement. They still fit under the lamps, but (1) they’re shading each other out and (2) they’re holding up my next big seeding.

Now the reason why we have a (movable) hoop house� is to extend the season. The issue is when to move it to its Summer location, where the tomatoes will grow, among other things. In its present, winter location it is no longer in its right place. Witness all the Winter and Spring veggies that are bolting in the 80-90 F heat:

Honestly, these (Mache, Claytonia and Minutina) would have bolted with or without hoop house, and I’m letting them because I want to save the seed.� The spinach, kale, and lettuces are all loving it in there. But anyway, what’s the holdup?

At first we thought we would redesign it, but budgetary issues and the fact that the way it is will do fine for Summer, made us postpone Hoop House 3.0 till Fall. Now we need 6 well-coordinated people, at least, to move the thing. Those people haven’t shown up yet…

Well, in any case, what to do with the tomato seedlings? The temperatures in the hoop house during the day are great� for them, and the light is diffuse, and a recent study shows that the quality of a tomato depends more on heat than on light. However, NOAA predicted a low of 36F. tonight, and a couple more such nights.� So this was the solution – with a nod to One Straw:

This compost bin (inside the hoop house) is going full steam, and I’m hoping it and a row cover will keep my seedlings warm overnight.� We’ll see. It’s quite nerve-wrecking!

Last but not least we had a well-deserved dinner of rib eye steak on the grill: its first firing of the year. We eat meat about 4 times a month, and then it’s always a feast. With that we had homegrown kale and a homegrown salad, all from the hoop house. That thing may be in the wrong place, but it’s still doing what it was made to do: extending our season.

This weekend we tackled the backyard. We’re installing a small lawn around the new patio and path. There will also be a border for culinary herbs with a herb spiral at the center, lined up with the stone circle, where the wild lilies are now coming up.

The permacultural ideal is to close all the loops and, for instance, to use only on site materials. We’re succeeding in this with the top soil, as we’re reusing the material that was excavated for the patio and path. That soil was of course seeded with stones, which we first need to sieve out. For this we quickly created� a new setup: the sieving table.

We constructed a table for our old soil sieve, which just sits on top of it, high enough so the big wheelbarrow fits underneath it. We just scrape the stones off the sieve with our shovels, into the garden cart. It works great, saves us a lot of time, hassle, and backache.

With regard to the compost, however, we had to have some brought in. I just didn’t make enough of it myself, even with the occasional ten pounds of coffee grounds from the local Starbucks and my neighbors’ pumpkins. Though, really now, I should ramp up my composting operations. But, for now…

I was so disappointed with the stuff we got last year from one of these “landscape depots” – basically semi-composted brush, leaf mulch and wood chips� – that it took me quite a while to decide on this year’s product. I chose Great Brook Farm’s composted cow manure. They’re not far from here (Carlisle) so it was good to get it locally, from a family owned business, and from one source – their 130 Holsteins. It is twice as expensive as the landscape depot stuff ($40 vs. $21 per yard) but, I was assured, also four times as effective. And we won’t have to sift out the stones. And it won’t turn to cement on us…

The farmer brought 12 yards yesterday and the moment he opened the back of his truck I knew we had made the right decision. It’s odorless, crumbly and fluffy. We have it all piled up on the side of our driveway, in our “materials depot,” next to a pile of red oak wood chips for our Oyster mushrooms.

We chatted with the farmer about compost and he made a great observation. He said the compost and loam business is a lot like the drugs business: they cut it and cut it and cut it.

This stuff?

Uncut.

The large 4 x 24 foot bed up front will be for the medicinal perennial herbs. (The culinary and the annual ones will go in the herb bed in the back, near the kitchen door.)

This bed was started last Spring. First we did some deep tilling (with rototiller), then we installed the boards and evened it up. We added a thick layer of compost and loam and sowed two rounds of buckwheat on it. Below is a picture of Amie in the buckwheat, July of last year.

We tilled in the last buckwheat in September (before it went to seed again) and followed it up with a season of winter compost (fava, vetch, wheat and rye).

Yesterday, in 90F weather, I forked in what overwintered of that winter compost mix (a rather pathetic sprinkling of mostly fava), along with a dusting of limestone and some MooDoo. The soil was at least a fork deep and very light and fluffy, and full of critters. Good stuff.� I am so happy I took my time, and gave it time, to build up and mature.

I raked it even and covered it with cardboard. In the picture you see, in the background: the hoop house, the garlic bed (which is so fragrant now – I love “tidying” it up), then the fence, then a pallet. On that pallet the� beehive will sit.

I only mention this area because that’s where all the cardboard was headed on a gust of wind. Run!

Okay, I found an intermediary use for all the big pvc pipes that� will sometime go into the ground for our rain water catchment system. Then I wet the whole thing down and covered it with about an inch of sifted loam, with a little MooDoo mixed in.

That bed looks good enough to take a nap in! Come planting time, in a few weeks, I will cut X-s into the cardboard – if it still hasn’t broken down – and plug in the herb transplants I am growing in the basement.

The idea with the sheet mulch was� (1) to keep the weeds from taking over the bed and (2) the soil from eroding and/or compacting under rain while it sat in its very sparse clothing of fava seedlings. And (3) to give it one last boost of soil building activity by inviting the worms to dig in the cardboard. I want to do this to the five beds (four of them 4′ x 8′ and one 6′ x 8′) that terrace the slope up front, which will become home to strawberries and several more herbs.

tomato seedlings and lovage

I’ve been trying to get hold of comfrey – for compost. Neither Fedco nor Johnny’s carry the seeds, and the seeds I’ve found are expensive: $4 for 10, plus $3 shipping! I don’t think so.

So I put a request for a mature plant on my local Freecycle and within 12 hours had a response. I also put the big Mountain Laurel that’s in the  way of my depots on Freecycle. Within 12 hours had no less than seven responses. I’d rather see this bush get a new home than cutting it down.

In the basement we’re still at full capacity because this crazy weather – in the upper 50s yesterday, melting snow today – has delayed the transplanting of lettuces, kale, chard and spinach. This weekend, hopefully, I can make the room and I start a whole slew of tomatoes and peppers for friends.

The seedlings are all doing well. No signs of damping off, even though I haven’t been generous with the ventilation this year. I just watered all of them and they slurped up about 10 gallons of (filtered) water.

Seed pod still stuck on spinach seed leaves

The seedlings are neglecting their seed leaves. Some have already fallen off.

Irises (probably) in the back yard

While I was spending money anyways I went ahead and ordered, from Burnt Ridge:

1. 2x ANANASNAYA FEMALE HARDY KIWI
2. 1x MALE HARDY KIWI /POLLINATOR
3. 2x  PAW PAW
4. 2x YORK ELDERBERRY (canadensis)
5. 2x SOCHI TEA (Camellia sinensis)
6. 1x BARCELONA HAZELNUT (Corylus avellana)
7. 2x BUSH HAZELNUT (Corylus americana)
8. 1x GAMMA HAZELNUT (Corylus avellana)

I would love to also get a ROSA RUGOSA – a rosehip bush – but the ones I’ve found so far are too expensive… The kiwis will go on trellises near the front balcony and in the vegetable garden, and the paw paws I’ll place on the edge of our “forest” on either side. So these won’t take too much work and won’t be in the way of the big works down up front. The hazelnuts, though, will have to go along the path up front, and the tea plants… I’ll figure it out eventually!

Tomorrow I’m ordering 14 cubic yards of composted cow manure – as much as the truck can hold – from Great Brook Farm in Carlisle, MA. It’s a great deal and it won’t be littered with stones and cement pebbles like the “compost” I got last time.

Mm, came home this evening from our last beekeeping class to a house smelling of pizza homemade by DH. In return I can tell him all about making that mead…

You guessed it: it’s time for another episode in the Calcium in the Soil and Plant series! Take heart: we’re getting close to the end (maybe only one more part to go?). Actually, it took me so long to post on this again because this one took me a long time to figure out. If you want to brush up on the previous parts, check out this page.

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Part 8. Selective Nutrient (and Water) Uptake by Roots

Nutrients arrive at the root surface in three ways:

1. The first of these is root interception. As roots grow, they make direct contact with nutrients. This mechanism is less important because roots come into direct contact with only 1-3 percent of the soil volume exploited by the root mass. Mycorrhizae – fungi that form a symbiotic association with plant roots – can increase the surface area that roots can extract nutrients from. Calcium and magnesium, because they are so abundant, are often intercepted by root contact.
2. The second mechanism is mass flow, wherein plants, sucking up water (through the various pumps and pulls discussed in the previous part), also move the nutrients that are dissolved in it. Especially mobile (free) nutrients are “attracted” in this manner: nitrate-nitrogen, chloride and sulfur, which are never absorbed by the colloid and thus always exist in solution, and calcium and magnesium, which are held only loosely to the colloid. The drier the soil, the less mass flow.
3. The third mechanism is diffusion, by which ions in the soil spontaneously move from a point of higher concentration to a point of lower concentration (like in osmosis). Diffusion happens in the soil because the immediate root area, once it is depleted, has a lower concentration of the nutrient ions. Immobile nutrients like phosphorus and potassium, which have a low solubility, are strongly held by the colloid, and are only present in small concentrations, reach the root through this mechanism. The soil porosity is important here: smaller pores will block diffusion.

The last two mechanisms are the more significant mechanisms of nutrient uptake. Which one is predominant depends on the nutrients, the amount of water in the soil and the physical conditions (e.g., crumb structure) of the soil which dictates the movement of water through it.

Nutrients (especially immobile ones) then need to be wrested from the colloid by an ion exchange – the cation exchange capacity (CEC) talked about on a soil test. As we saw, the positively charged nutrient cations are held to the negatively charged colloid by a small electro-magnetic bond. When the root hairs release hydrogen ions (H+) and these come into contact with the colloid, they take their places on the colloid, breaking or weakening the colloidal-nutrient bond. The nutrients are knocked free and this makes them more available to be taken up by the root hairs.

Once the nutrient has arrived at the plant root surface and has been made available, the root needs to take it in: the nutrient-ion needs to travel from the root’s exterior to its interior.

As we saw in Part 7, the membranes of the cells making up the epidermis and the endodermis of roots are semi-permeable. This means several things. First, roots allow movement in, but not out, which allows osmosis to take place, by which water is taken up by the plant roots (cf. Part 7). Second, they allow only small solutes in, so they are impermeable to the large molecules of organic solutes (more about that in the next part). Third, some small solutes are allowed in, but others are not: plant roots are selective about their food.

It is the last aspect that interests us here. The uptake of the nutrients (as well as sugars and amino acids) by the roots is selective because of two main features:

1. First, the root membrane has channels that are ion-selective: one type of channel will let through only phosophorus ions, another fits only calcium ions, or potassium or nitrate, etc. Think of the toddler’s toy: the box with the star and pentagon and circular shaped holes into which only the star and pentagon and circular blocks fit. The root too is constructed like that.
2. The actual ferrying through these channels is done by ion-selective carriers: so-called coupling proteins that are embedded in the membrane of the root cells and that only react with specific ions, passing them on. Different plants require different amounts of nutrients, and so they will have different types and densities of ion carriers on the surface of their cells. These ion carriers are also most numerous on the surface of root hairs and root tips, which shows that roots are the main conduit for nutrient uptake in plants.

That explains the root’s selection of particular nutrients. Now, how does it select their quantity? How does it say, that’s enough?

As for water, its protein carrier is the aquaporin. Aquaporins are embedded in the cell membrane, forming transmembrane pores that conduct just water molecules. They prevent the passage of ions and other solutes by a filter (the ar/R filter) of amino acids that bind only water molecules and let them in (single file), while excluding all other molecules. When there is a lack or an excess of water, a gating mechanism changes the shape of the aquaporin so that it blocks the pore and stops the water flow. These gates can fail and an excessive amount of water can break the gates, as it were, and “drown” a plant.

Nutrients like calcium ions are taken up by different transmembrane protein carriers, which actively transport them, that is, they require energy to do so, because they have to pull in ions against their concentration gradient. For instance, there’s a good chance the root cells already have a higher concentration of calcium than the soil in the root area, but it might still need more. The energy required comes from a part of the cell (called the ATP, a nucleotide). If the plant has enough of a nutrient, it can simply stop drawing on the energy source. Also this mechanism can fail, and an excess of nutrients can lead to a toxic overdose and kill the plant.

So, however well-equipped roots are to select what the plant is in need of, it is still up to us, gardeners, to know how much of what a certain plant in our care needs and how much of it is present in our soil.

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Next up, nutrients not in mineral but in organic form, and how those can make it into the plants. Yes, the egg shells. Finally!

O, that egg again!

We’ve arrived at Part 6 if this extraordinary saga of how calcium arrives and behaves in the soil (if I’ve occasionally typed “soul” instead of “soil”,  is it really a typo?). Click to catch up on part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4 and part 5.

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6. Soil base saturation and soil pH

The term “soil acidity” expresses the quantity (expressed in meq/100g) of the acidic cations (cf. part 3) that the soil can hold on to. The percent base saturation – another important term on your soil test results – is the percentage of the soil’s cation exchange capacity (CEC) occupied by the basic cations.

This is from our soil test:

This means that calcium occupies 50.6% of the total exchange sites. In other words, in 100g of my soil, 15.6 meq can hold on to cations, both basic and acidic. Of that, 7.9 meq is occupied, or saturated, by calcium, 1.65 meq by magnesium, 0.64 meq by potassium. So, as far as I can learn from the test results (*), 10.19 meq/100g of soil, or 65.3% of the CEC, is saturated by bases. That leaves 35.3% of the CEC (*) for the acidic cations (hydrogen and aluminum).

(*) Sodium (also a base cation) is not listed on my test results, which means its levels are low, so I don’t have a sodic soil (cf. part 5).

Not surprisingly, the greater the percent base saturation, the higher the soil pH. Because calcium is normally the major cation, by virtue of its abundance taking up about half the CEC (as in our soil), we can say that there is less calcium in acid soils and more in alkaline soils.

But if the soil is very alkaline (pH > 7.0), the high levels of calcium may have negative effects. For one, more calcium taking up the CEC very simply means that there is less room on the colloid for everything else. Secondly, an excess of calcium can no longer be adsorbed onto the colloid. This “free” or unadsorbed calcium begins to accumulate in the soil water and goes on to react with what other nutrients are present.

For instance, the free calcium will readily attract soluble boron (B-), which is an an-ion (a negatively charged ion), and form a nearly insoluble compound with it, thus making the boron less available to plants.

Excess calcium will also tie up, or immobilize into insoluble compounds, cations like iron (Fe++), phosphorus (P+++) aluminum (Al+++), zinc (Zn2+), copper (Cu2+), cobalt (Co2+), and manganese (Mn2+), as well as magnesium (Mg ++) and potassium (K+).

Lastly, calcium also increases the pore space in the soil by flocculation, which, as we saw in part 5, is desirable. But when pore space exceeds 50% of the total soil volume, the soil can dry out much easier, like sand.

In short, too much calcium in your soil and many nutrients become insoluble and thus unavailable to plant roots, and the soil structure is damaged to boot.

But, on the other hand, if the soil is very acidic, and thus if there is not enough calcium, many of the other cations can become excessive and thus toxic. Then calcium applications with limestone are called for. The aim when attempting to adjust soil acidity is never so much to neutralize the pH as to replace lost cation nutrients, particularly calcium.

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Next time, I promise, we’ll finally meet the plants, and discover by what magical means they get the calcium out of the soul soil.