From GENE LOGSDON

I have a hunch that readers thought I was joking when I wrote recently about growing tree seedlings in roof gutters. The picture above proves that it works. I thought by now (late summer) the seedlings would have died for lack of water, but we’ve had regular rain so now I can transplant some of those seedlings this fall if not next spring. I can just lift the plants out of the gutter and plop them, roots and leaf mold intact, in a hole in the ground. Ever since a reader, Ohiofarmgirl, called a broadcast seeder “one of those hand-cranked thingies” on her website, I have been thinking of putting together a catalog of farming and gardening  oddities with similar descriptions: sections of roof spouting I would label as “roof whatchamacallits for starting plants.”

There are weeds growing amid the tree seedlings up there in the gutter too, as you might notice. The trees are mostly maple, ash and elm seedlings which gives me an excuse to go into one of my favorite rants. The experts all tell me that I can kiss white ash trees goodbye because the emerald ash borer is killing them. Yes, the old ashes are all dying, but my woodlot is full of seedlings, just coming up wherever sufficient sunlight penetrates the tree canopy or, as you can see, on the barn roof. I argue that when the ash borer has killed off the older trees, it will run out of food and die off too, before these seedlings get old enough for them to kill. A whole new generation of ash trees will come along. Ash trees start producing seed when they are mere saplings.

That is what happened to the elm. Lots of new young seedling elms are growing all over our woodlot. They get old enough to produce seed before they are struck down like their parents. If we can just keep out of the woods those experts who want to kill all the endangered trees to stop the spread of a disease or predator, the ash will survive.

There are also wild cherry and cottonwood seedlings in the roof gutter, which at first surprised me since neither of these trees grows close enough to the barn to drop seeds on the roof. The cherry seedlings, I assume, got there because birds ate the fruit and then pooped on the roof.  Cottonwood seeds, as the name implies, are carried along in the wind because of the cottony growth around the seeds, so they can float a considerable distance before coming to rest on earth. Our big cottonwood is at least a thousand feet from the barn. more

From GENE LOGSDON

I’ve written before about my attempts to build a haystack that looks like one in a Claude Monet painting (see links at end of this post). This year I came close, as you can see by the two pictures. The distracting blue plastic at the base of my Monet will eventually be put over the haystack although I think the stack will shed water without a cover as well as Monet’s did. I’m not taking the chance of a sudden 6-inch Midwest downpour ruining it— something I don’t think Monet’s farmers had to put up with. They didn’t build their haystacks inside a ring of woven wire fence either, so I’m cheating a little.

Online, you can find haystacks still being erected all over the world. (Reader Ian Graham has sent me photos of his— he does a good Monet, too.) And as for paintings, good heavens! It appears that almost all artists, right up to the present, feel that they must paint a haystack or a haymaking scene just like so many of them feel compelled to paint nudes at some time in their careers. I typed “hay in art” into Google, and up popped hundreds of hay paintings. Not to be undone by the absence of stacks in modern agriculture, today’s artists are filling their canvases with hay bales including those big round ones wrapped in plastic.

I like to think there is more going on here than just an arty thing. The essence of farming comes down to feeding plants and animals so that they can feed us. Grazing pastures is the most sustainable way for animals to eat and plants to keep growing, as the Great Plains buffalo proved. But in northern climates, that means some of the surplus summer pasture needs to be cut for hay for over winter. This was the most practical way to insure a steady food supply back before farmers went crazy and decided to feed the world with corn and soybeans. People in Monet’s day saw much more than just the beauty of a haystack when they looked at one. They saw survival. As long as haystacks dotted the horizon every fall, society knew that it would survive until the next growing season. I wonder if even today, people look at those hay bales dotting a field and instinctively realize the same thing.

For those of you interested in making your own Monet haystacks, (it’s a very low cost way to make and store hay on a small scale) here’s what I’ve learned since I wrote about this subject last year. I quit mowing with the cutter bar (actually my cutter bar mower quit on me) and now cut hay with a rotary mower. The hay is mostly red clover or improved varieties of white clover like Alice. The rotary chops the hay up finer than I would like, or so I thought at first, but it dries faster, preserving the nutrient quality better. I can put it in the stack towards evening of the day after cutting and windrowing it. It dries faster also because I maintain only light stands of clover rather than heavy rank ones. The resulting high quality hay is, oddly enough, also easier to sculpt into a stack than long-stemmed cutter bar hay, especially hay with a lot of long, over-mature grass in it. Long grasses are too slippery to stack well. I actually would not have to use the woven wire base anymore. I can rank up this hay into a vertical wall, at least around the bottom of the stack. The trick is to always stack up the outside first and fill in behind it as you go up. Since medieval farmers did not have mechanical mowers, but harvested hay by the sickle or scythe handful and the rake-full, would that not be why they could form up such beautiful symmetrical stacks?

That suggests an even more awesome philosophical idea: what if hay that is more easily sculpted into a work of art indicates hay that is of higher quality in nutrients too? Could that be more than just an accident of happenstance? Perhaps in the most profound sense, art imitates nature and form forever follows function.
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Images: Monet Haystacks Midday; Logsdon Haystack Midday
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See also Gene’s…

Cheapskate Haystacks For Contrary Garden Farmers

An Offbeat Way To Make Good Hay
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From GENE LOGSDON
Upper Sandusky, Ohio

Not until I was well into writing my new book, Holy Shit: Managing Manure To Save Mankind, which is about  how to manage manure for soil enrichment, did I realize that cats, dogs and horses are a very significant source of valuable fertilizer that we are mostly throwing away. Or, as our friends’ cat, Django, indicates in the photo above, flushing it down the toilet. Until I got to know Django, my attention was focused on farm animal manure and human manure.  I was really surprised to find out how much feces, urine, and litter that pets were adding to our overflowing waste stream, let alone realize that cats were learning how to use the flush toilet.

Instead of wringing hands over the problems of livestock manure, the non-farm sector of society might first want to take a closer look at its own problem: manure from pet cats, dogs, and recreational horses— animals that have little or nothing to do with putting food on anyone’s table. According to recent statistics, there are 73 million pet cats in the United States in addition to an equal number of feral cats roaming the alleys and fields (and killing millions of songbirds). There are some 68 million pet dogs and of course millions of strays out there doing beneficial work like killing my sheep. In addition there are some 9.5 million horses and the number is rising.

The numbers I use in Holy Shit to calculate the amount of manure flowing from these pets can only be approximations but they are based on the best statistics I could find. A horse weighing a thousand pounds produces about 20 tons of manure a year including bedding. So unless I can’t multiply any more, 20 X 9.5 million equals 190,000,000 tons of road apples. Pet dogs and cats together produce per year another five million tons of manure.  All this waste is good, holy fertilizer. Dog and cat waste is particularly valuable because, compared to most manures, it is higher in phosphorus, the plant nutrient most difficult for organic farmers and gardeners to come by naturally. more

From GENE LOGSDON

If you look closely at the photo above, you will see what I failed to see for many years. Although I think of myself as a venerable member of the Brethren of the Holy Hoe Society, and have made shiny the handles of more than a few hoes, I took their construction for granted all these years. I did not scrutinize any of them, thinking that once you have met one hoe, you’ve met them all. Wrong.

In the photo, the hoe with the blue collar around the end of the handle (the collar is also referred to as a shank or a ferrule) is a cheap one, a bad one. Notice that the blade and the crook neck above the blade are separate from the collar. The neck fits down inside the collar. Notice the nails driven in around the neck. I had to resort to this kind of makeshift repair because the neck of the hoe kept loosening up inside the collar. Then the hoe blade would turn sideways every time it hit the soil surface. The nails hold the blade firm for only a few hours of weed whacking. Then I had to wedge in bigger nails. Eventually the whole contraption got too loose to hold the hoe blade in place this way.

Nor is the collar made so that it can be removed from the hoe handle— no bolt, screw, or nail holding it in place. Far as I can tell, some kind of machine pressed an indentation into the collar and on into the wood so that the handle would stay in place. For all practical purposes, this hoe is made to throw away in a few years. A real repair job, if possible, would cost more than a new cheap hoe.

Now look at the other hoe blade. This is a good hoe. The collar, neck, and blade are all one solid piece. Because I am not a great photographer, it looks a little like the neck is inserted into the collar but believe me, it is all one solid piece. Surely, someone still makes a hoe like this, but I have spent considerable time onlining and haven’t turned one up yet nor have I seen one in a hardware store. Smith & Hawken once carried imported tools with single-piece heads, but that company is no longer with us. The advertisers use all sorts of words to make it sound like the blade and collar are all one solid piece, but scrutinizing the pictures on Google, I have yet to find a full-length, real- life, garden hoe with a business end of one solid piece. But if you know of one, I am here to say: buy it.

The hoe blade cannot turn in the collar because it is part of the collar. more

From GENE LOGSDON

I’ve been eating home-baked bread from wheat flour slightly infected with vomitoxin.  I have not vomited, nor have I suffered any ill effects as far as I know. The bread tastes just as delicious as our non-vomitoxic  bread. I will try to explain and can only hope that you, gentle reader, will not think that this time I really have gone mad.

Agribusiness discourages the use of the word, vomitoxin, since it sounds more horrendous than the problem it causes, at least so far. The other term for it is “DON” which stands for a word so long it is hardly pronounceable and sounds even more forbidding than vomitoxin.

This spring, parts of the country, especially in the Midwest, experienced heavy rains right when the wheat plants were flowering and beginning to set on seed. Fusarium head blight struck. This fungal disease can carry vomitoxin.  Heads of wheat with the disease display whitish shrunken kernels or scabby empty husks of kernels. When the vomitoxin content gets really bad, the shrunken grains go from almost pure white to pinkish in hue and are referred to as “tombstones” in the trade. Agribusiness is discouraging the use of that word too, for obvious reasons.  There were no pinkish grains in any of the fields I walked in around here. In fact the wheat all looked quite healthy to me at harvest time.  Vomitoxin is not carcinogenic and hardly lethal in low amounts. Grain with low levels of it can throw livestock off feed or make humans sick to their stomach. There have been cases of gestating sows eating only vomitoxic grains aborting or getting ulcers, or so I read. more