Water- They’re not making any more of it!

Posted on July 30, 2010 by Robert Dailey

Children of a culture born in a water-rich environment, we have never really learned how important water is to us. We understand it, but we do not respect it.

-William Ashworth, Nor Any Drop to Drink, 1982

We already know that fresh water is, along with air, one of the basic requirements  of life on this planet.

For millennia, we humans have been blessed with an apparent endless supply of fresh water. All that is changing. And not a lot of people seem to be noticing, much less doing something about it.

It’s true. We talk a good game. We rant about the stripping of the Amazonian rainforests, and the factories belching benzene and who-knows-what-else into the air. We appear to be extraordinarily concerned about the damage internal combustion engines are doing to the environment. We’re outraged when we hear of some chemical being dumped into our waterways.

But guess what? As hard as it is to believe, we individuals are, collectively, right up there with agribusiness and industry when it comes to frittering away and polluting our precious environment. Especially our fresh water.

Water covers about 71 percent of the surface of our planet. Approximately 97.5 percent is in our oceans and seas. It is far too salty to be used for human and animal consumption or for production of crops.

Many may not be aware of it, but with all the water on our blue planet, only two and a half percent is fresh and therefore of any use for drinking and irrigation of crops. And 70 percent of that 2.5% is frozen in the world’s polar ice caps and in glaciers. That leaves only 30 percent of that 2.5 percent, or .0075% of all the water on the planet available for the six billion plus humans on this planet to drink, grow crops and water livestock.

There are a little over 6.6 billion people on earth. Each human being needs to ingest about two and a half quarts of water per day to stay alive. That’s a lot of water.  Add an additional 67 gallons of water per person, per day in most of North America, Europe and developed areas of Asia, for things like showering, bathing, brushing teeth,  washing clothes, flushing toilets, and other human needs.

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Types of Soil on the Gulf Coast

Posted on July 30, 2010 by Robert Dailey

Gardeners along the Gulf Coast may encounter soils with a lot of clay, soils with too much sand, or good loamy soil.

Clay Soils

The particles that make up clay are tiny and very fine. Add water to the mixture and it becomes sticky. When it dries clay becomes so hard it resembles concrete.

Clay does retain water well –  perhaps too well. In fact, clay soil has difficulty draining. Air has trouble penetrating heavy clay soils particularly when they are wet.

Clay compacts so readily that plant roots often cannot penetrate it. Clay soils also tend to be alkaline. Although some plants do tolerate alkaline soils, most garden plants, especially vegetables, prefer neutral to slightly acidic soil.   

Clay is high in nutrients that plants need. But if roots can’t get to the nutrients, planting them in clay becomes pointless. That’s where compost comes in. Compost helps break up the clay particles, allowing air and water to penetrate between them. It “fluffs” up the clay particles so roots can move through the soil more easily. It also adds microbes and larger organisms into the mix, further breaking up the tightly-packed particles.

Silt

In ancient civilizations, farmers grew crops along natural waterways. Every year, these waterways overflowed their banks, and then withdrew, leaving a layer of silt on the soil. Farmers depended on these annual floods to enhance the fertility of their soil, and thus increase the yield. Until about a century ago, the Mississippi River spilled over its banks every spring, enriching the land. Silt is one of the most fertile soil types  and drains well.

 Silt particles are still tiny, but  larger (on a relative scale) than clay particles and smaller than sand particles..

Silt soils also tend to have significant amounts of organic matter. Since they are so small though, they generally need sand or other “aggregates” to allow for water and air to penetrate the soil.

Sand

Sand is actually tiny bits of rocks like granite, shale, quartz, limestone and others. It drains well, sometimes too well. It can drain too quickly and dry out, especially during hot, dry months. Heavy irrigation or rains can leach nutrients  away too quickly for plant absorption.

Aggregation

Mix sand and clay or silt and certain things start to happen. These particles tend to collect together in lumps called aggregates.

This aggregation creates spaces through which air and water can flow. If there is too much sand, no aggregates will form and the soil will not be able to hold water. Too much clay  and the soil becomes impermeable. Plants cannot do well in either situation unless they are highly specialized or adapted.      

Using compost adds organic matter to soil and promotes aggregation, thus creating a better soil structure.

Good garden soil has lots of porous spaces between the aggregates. The aggregates themselves are the size of toast crumbs.

Using chemical fertilizers or other chemicals on soil will cause it to lose structure over time. This creates a vicious circle. As the soil loses its structure, more chemicals are required and more water is needed. Organisms in the soil begin to die. The final outcome is a sterile soil, devoid of any minerals, living organisms and decaying plant matter.

The answer to amending soil – and having beautiful plants – is to continue adding organic material to soil.

A good fertile soil is made up of about 45% mineral, 25% water, 25% air and 5% organic matter.

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The Father of Our Country Composted!

Posted on July 3, 2010 by Robert Dailey

George Washington, that great leader of the American Revolution, first president of the U.S., and one of the pre-eminent farmers in the country, was also the first and greatest proponent of composting in this country. 

While he was leading the army during the war, while president and while away, Washington wrote detailed instructions to his farm foreman and left many papers relating to the soil-enriching methods of composting. He constructed an unusual building (which was called a “dung repository” or “stercorary”) to help in the decomposing of organic matter. He also advocated placing manure and other organic materials in pits for “curing.”

As George Washington converted his major cash crop from tobacco to wheat, his use of organic compost helped increase crop yield. Interestingly, he wasn’t only thinking of himself.  In 1788, he wrote this:

“ Every improvement in husbandry should be gratefully received and  peculiarly fostered in this Country, not only as promoting the interest and lessening the labor of the  farmer, but as advancing our respectability in a national point of view; for, in the present state of America, our welfare and prosperity depend upon the cultivation of our lands and turning the produce of them to the best advantage.”

Washington’s writings include numerous references to the creation of compost, as well as directions to his foreman on how to make the best compost.

Thomas Jefferson was also aware of the value of composting. He and Washington exchanged letters documenting their experiences in the science.

Walt Whitman

American poet Walt Whitman, in his poem “This Compost,” wrote:

“Behold this compost! behold it well! …                                          

Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless
successions of diseas’d corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings
from them at last.

Around the beginning of the 20th Century, with the development of artificial fertilizers, the making and use of compost declined, along with widespread knowledge about how to make compost. Still, compost held its own in rural communities, where vegetable gardens were still the rule.

As soils, heavily treated with chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, began to lose structure and as the microbes and macrobes that gave the soil its life began to die, gardens began seeking for alternatives.

Thus man decided to recycle the idea of compost. In 1960, Rodale Press published “Rodale’s Complete Book of Composting.” It was an imposing tome and almost revolutionary for its time. Subsequent updates have been published and the latest, “The Rodale Book of Composting,” was first published in 1992.

Modern composters understand a lot more about the nature of decomposition, the roles that fungi, bacteria, earthworms and insects and the proper mixture of elements like carbon and nitrogen play in the breakdown of organic material that helps enrich the soil and produce beautiful and bountiful gardens.

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Intimations of Hurricane Alex

Posted on July 2, 2010 by Robert Dailey

Rain comes down in plops, large drops falling willy-nilly in the garden. The filtered light along with the nitrogen-laced raindrops enhance the emerald green of the yard, making it resemble an Ozian landscape.

The wetness, just a hint of the 100-mile-an-hour scrapper that’s pounding the Mexican and south Texas coasts, is ours for another seven days, the forecasters say, although who knows what tomorrow will bring.

The rain is certainly a relief from the dry spell. May and June surprised us. The summer came hissing into reality far too soon for most of us. We were already five inches below average for this time of year and some were fearing that the horrible drought of last summer was upon us earlier than usual.

Finally, though, Alex decided to come of age in the Gulf, sweeping his (her?) right arm wide, a wild punch aimed at nothing in particular. The fist didn’t connect, but we feel the “whoosh,” as rain, propelled from the storm’s high cumuli, pelts the land.

Alex’s knuckles did whip up the Gulf waters though, and workers scrambled onshore from high waves. The waves churned the oil escaping by the hundreds of thousands of barrels from the bungled Deepwater Horizon well, and swept the  muck onto Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida beaches.

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The History of Composting

Posted on June 28, 2010 by Robert Dailey

 The composting process is as old as organic matter itself. It is part of the natural cycle of life: organisms living, eating, secreting, having offspring and dying, adding their bodies to the earth and beginning the cycle once more.

Compost made by humans is, as mankind goes, very ancient process. How ancient? We know that the Akkadians practiced composting in ancient Mesopotamia 1,000 years before Moses was born.

Composting was certainly a common gardening practice in ancient China. Inscriptions on bone and shells from very early Far Eastern archeological sites describe rudimentary composting. Written records from the Han dynasty make note of composting, and several texts from around 500 BC include detailed instructions on how to make it.

TheTalmud

References to composting exist in the Talmud, in the Old Testament and in the Bagavad Vita. In several places in the Bible, there are references to “dung piles.” Some researchers now believe that these “dung piles” were actually compost heaps.

The Greeks and their neighbors practiced composting, taking straw from animal stalls and burying it in cultivated fields, and there are records indicating that Mayans composted.

Marcus Cato 

 A retired Roman general, Marcus Porcius Cato, who lived from 234 BC to 149 BC, wrote a book  titled “De Agri Cultura” (Concerning the Culture of the Fields) in which he described composting.

Although Cato’s descriptions of composting may seem simplistic to us now, for the time it was a revolutionary piece, and influenced farming operations in Europe until well after the fall of the Roman Empire

In the tenth and eleventh centuries AD, Arab and Christian writers described the process.

In his book, Five Hundred Pointes of Good Husbandrie (1580), Thomas Tussler wrote:

If a garden require it, now trench it ye may,
          one trench not a yard, from another go lay;
          Which being well filled with muck by and by,
          to cover with mould, for a season to lie.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Shakespeare made several references to compost. The best known reference is from Hamlet. In the play, Hamlet tells his mother:

           Confess yourself to heaven,
          Repent what’s past, avoid what is to come,
          And do not spread the compost on the weeds
          To make them ranker.

Sir Francis Bacon

Sir Francis Bacon mentions the concept of composting several times, although he uses the word “muck” to refer to it.

“Money is like muck, not good unless it be spread.” – Sir Francis Bacon, Essays: Of Seditions and Troubles (1597-1625)

In the early settlement of North America, both Native Americans and early European settlers used compost methods to increase crop yields. Many farmers used fish and “muck”, turned on a regular basis until the fish disintegrated.

Next: George Washington was a composter too.

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Harvesting vegetables at the right time

Posted on June 20, 2010 by Robert Dailey

With the hot summers of the Gulf Coast sometimes reaching up into the 100’s, gardeners know that picking vegetables at the right time means the difference between a good harvest and a lot of spoiled veggies heading to the compost.

Picked too early or too late, garden vegetables won’t be as tasty and may be fibrous or woody. They may taste too strong or may dry out or become weather-damaged.

Here is a list of vegetables, the best time to pick them and symptoms of having picked them too early or too late:

Cantaloupes (Cucumis melo)

  • Best time to pick: When the fruit breaks away from the stem when pulled.
  • Picking too early: The stem won’t separate easily. The fruit will not be ripe.
  • Picking too late: The rind will be soft, the melon will be yellow and the pulp too sweet and mushy.

Collard Greens (cultivar of Brassica oleracea)

  • Best time to pick: When the plants are bright green and the leaves have a small midrib
  • Picking too early: The leaves are too small and will not provide enough nutrition.
  • Picking too late: The midrib becomes large and fibrous.

Cucumbers (Cucumis sativus)

  • Best time to pick: When the skin is dark green and the seeds sot.
  • Picking too early: Cucumbers are too small.
  • Picking too late: When the skin begins to yellow and the seeds turn hard.

Eggplant (Solanum melongena)

  • Best time to pick: When the skin has a high gloss, and the side of the fruit springs back when mashed with a finger.
  • Picking too early: When the fruit is too small.
  • Picking too late: When the sides won’t spring back when mashed, and the seeds turn brown. It will be fibrous and have a strong taste.

Okra (Abelmoschus esculentis)

  • Best time to pick: When the pods are two to three inches long, and are still tender.
  • Picking too early: The pods are smaller than two inches long.
  • Picking too late: The pods become hard, fibrous, and tough, even after cooking.

Onions (Allium cepa)

  • Best time to pick: When the tops yellow and fall over (about ¾ of the stem has fallen over.
  • Picking too early: The tops are still green.
  • Picking too late: When the tops are all down.
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Soil is an ally to the gardener

Posted on June 20, 2010 by Robert Dailey

A gardener looks closely at the soil, studying it, enriching it, adding nutrients to it. She works with it untiringly, until it becomes not only an ally but a melding of the gardener and the earth. In a garden, soil is the essence.

Soil is made up of small grains of  rock (minerals) in varying sizes.  The size of the particles determines the type of soil. The smaller the grain the tighter they can pack together. The tighter they pack together, the less air and water that can filter through the soil. The less air and water, the more difficult it is for most plants to survive. But the reverse is true too: if the grains are too large, water can pass through the soil rapidly. If the passage is too rapid and too fast, the soil dries out, and roots die from lack of water.

Of course this, like most things, have exceptions. There are plants that thrive in heavy clay soils. Others do quite well in nothing but sand.

For the most part though, plants can do well in most soil types if there is enough organic matter in it. In addition to breaking up the soil, helping it to retain moisture and keeping the soil at a more constant temperature, compost also inoculates the soil with microbes and larger organisms. More about micro– and macro-organisms later.

The best soils are made up of 45 percent mineral (silt, sand and clay), five percent organic material, 25 percent air and 25 percent water. Even though good soil only contains a relatively small amount of organic matter, it’s still vitally important. The organic matter is decayed or decaying plant debris, microbes and larger organisms like earthworms. Water and oxygen are necessary to all life on the planet., so plant roots must be able to access them.

Some soil types are almost totally devoid of organic matter. Some soil types have organic matter, but are so tightly packed that roots have trouble penetrating them anyway. Some soil types have large amounts of organic matter. Some soil types drain well. Some drain too much, Some drain very little. Most soil types fall somewhere inside of these spectrums.

It’s a delicate balance. Good soil must drain well, but still retain some moisture. There must be enough space between the particles for air to get through to plant roots, microbes and other organisms.

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Master Gardeners

Posted on June 19, 2010 by Robert Dailey

Eight master gardeners donned gloves, hats and Felco pruners this past Thursday. Thus armed, they set out to conquer that most malevolent enemy of ardent gardeners – the weed, as well as a host of other foes which descend from time to time.

They trimmed the Texas sage and pruned the muscle tree back so it no longer threatened cars in the parking lot. The fast-growing and persistent pepper vine, winding across the Carolina buckthorn, up the fence and through the tall pines was routed by sturdy pulls. It’s roots were ripped from the earth – Beowulf gardeners ripping off the deep-growing arm of a Grendl weed.

A friend brought little black caterpillars, the larval stage of the Dutchman’s pipe swallowtail, and released them onto the just-bloomed vines of the same name. The pipevines wound through big-leafed patches of Salvia forsythia madriensis and up under the shady branches of the buckthorn.

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Compost – The Natural Fertilizer

Posted on June 14, 2010 by Robert Dailey

Despite it’s ordinary and vaguely vulgar sounding name, compost is a heroic and important ally in the battle for water conservation and a clean environment. It creates fertile soil, natural fertilizers and good growing medium for plants.
A Natural Recycler
 There are several ways to recycle organic waste. You can burn it. Put it in a landfill. Let it decomposed in a plastic bag in the backyard. Buy a goat, or several goats and let them eat their way through it.  Throw it in your neighbor’s yard at night. Or you can compost it.
    Burning organic wastes creates hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and tiny particulates that are suspended in the air and which can lodge in the lungs. In fact 10 pounds of leaves will make and amazing two pounds of air pollutant. In addition to releasing irritating smoke, it’s a fire hazard. Residue (ash) can be washed into reservoirs, lakes, rivers and the sea, causing further pollution.
 Burying green waste causes anaerobic composting, which in turn creates methane.  Methane is a highly potent (and poisonous) greenhouse gas and a major cause of global warming. And the half life of methane in our atmosphere is seven years (assuming no additional methane is added). Plus, regardless of how well its managed, runoff and seepage can occur in landfills. And runoff and seepage can pollute water systems. It is estimated that in many urban and suburban areas, 50 percent of all landfill wastes are made up of yard materials.
How about simply putting it in a plastic bag and decomposing it in your backyard? Okay. Try doing that with some grass clippings. In a few months, you’ll have a bloated mess that looks (and smells) like fresh cow dung. If any flies get in, it will not only smell unpleasant, but the wriggling mass of fly larvae (that’s maggots) is going to trigger a reflex action that’s a lot more distasteful than the smell.
Buy a goat. Now there’s an idea. Goats will try just about anything. Certainly, they will eat grass clippings and leaves. And the byproduct, goat poo, makes a great fertilizer. However, many subdivisions and residential areas have prohibitions on keeping domestic animals. And the constant noise, not to mention the unusual aroma, may not win favor in the eyes of your neighbors. It will also do good to remember that goats, as do most other animals, digest anaerobically. The process also creates methane gas and releases it into the atmosphere.
 Throwing green waste into your neighbor’s back yard might not endear you to him, but it would probably do less harm to the environment than any of the above-mentioned solutions. If the neighbor simply lets the yard waste lie there, it will decompose on its own, as does most organic waste left to its own devices.
 In fact, it’s the most natural of composting processes (although your neighbor might not agree).
 Compost emulates nature’s decomposition process, recycling organic materials like food and garden waste into a productive and usable product – humus.
But the value of compost goes far beyond the basic recycling process…and that’s what many people overlook.
Water Conservation
 It’s a simple fact. Soil which has compost in it holds more moisture. Composted soil acts like a sponge. The compost helps soak up moisture. In fact a pound of heavily composted soil can hold almost two pounds of water.
It helps resist evaporation of the moisture in the soil. In times when there is little or no precipitation for prolonged periods, composted soil continues to provide plants with moisture.
A gardener who uses compost is conserving significant amounts of water. That gardener is also saving money.
Improving Soil Fertility
Soil is not just fine particles of rock with some organic material mixed in. It is a living layer of earth. Each handful of good soil should contain billions of microorganisms (bacteria, fungi and single-cell animals), hundreds of thousands of small, almost microscopic arthropods, and hundreds of larger organisms like earthworms, sow bugs and other small insects.
These organisms have different roles. Some further break down debris and organic matter into smaller morsels that are more “palatable” to plants. Others convert nitrogen and other elements into forms plant roots can more easily take in. Larger organisms like earthworms move through the soil, recycling it again in their guts, all the while aerating and loosening  the soil.
Compost inoculates the soil with these organisms, enhancing its quality and fertility.

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Planting Bareroots

Posted on June 12, 2010 by Robert Dailey

Friday morning, I heeled in about 60 new bareroot trees – some red maple, others overcup oak, both natives to the area.  As I put compost in plastic pots, I mused on the the process of composting, that teeming microcosm of the universe. 

Musing on compost while doing some hard labor in the mid-morning Texas heat may not seem exciting, but I find it interesting. 

Unfortunately, my compost had gone anaerobic, and I came away with filthy clothes, and the sour smell of the compost going bad had more stick to it-ivness that the bits of detritus.

I came away odiforous, dirty and drenched in sweat, ready for a shower, a change of clothes and a cool drink.

Like the compost, I am always on my way from this to that. But today, I did manage to plant 60 trees.

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