A Long Hot Summer
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Farming with Artificial Intelligence
You are born. Life gets more and more complicated. Then you die.
Okay. Maybe it’s not as simple as that. But simple is pretty hard to come by these days and more and more complicated covers a lot of our mutual experience. New ideas, methods, technology and players are springing up in every field. One of those fields is my own back yard. I have been writing about regenerative agriculture for 5 years now. It seemed pretty simple in 2019. Don’t plow. Plant cover crops. Be organic. Rotate grazing and you will be alright.
Ever notice how the more you know about something, the harder it becomes to understand, let alone explain? That happens to me a lot. When I was in an office showing people how to do basic things on computers, I would gladly demonstrate how with a few easy actions you could get a report to print or something like that. It didn’t work out so well. People mostly learned “Oh, Joe knows how to do that. I’ll get him to do it.” I ended up with more things to do by trying to show people how to do things themselves.
Farming regeneratively can get complicated: Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi attach to roots and form a symbiotic relationship that vastly increases the water and minerals available to the plant while using some of the plant’s excess gluten to extend their hyphal network to harvest nutritional exudates from bacteria and other microorganisms. So, don’t break the fungal network or let your soil become bacteria rich and fungi poor. See. Things can get a lot more complicated.
The solutions offered by regenerative agriculture depend on biology: microbes, bacteria, viruses, protozoa, fungi, nematodes, arthropods and earthworms. Sure. Chemistry is complicated but let’s not pretend that biology is simple. One of my guiding lights learning about regenerative agriculture has been John Kempf, founder of Advancing Eco Agriculture (AEA) in 2006. AEA wants to make regenerative farming the norm by 2040. That is not something one person or one company can do alone. AEA currently provides crop plans on more than four million acres globally. The real genius of the operation is to bring in agronomic experts from around the world and spread information through books, seminars and podcasts plus a large staff of in-house consultants.
I only farm one acre of grapes. Hiring consultants, doing soil and sap tests, doing extensive field work with employees and machinery is usually out of my league and beyond my budget. Making detailed crop plans is basically over my head. But, out of the blue, AEA has introduced Fieldlark AI. They took over two decades of tests, techniques and results from all of their consulting work and fed it into an artificial intelligence engine. Right now, it is free to use. There’s a fee after a certain number of questions. I had to check it out.
I asked it about a pest problem in one variety of grapes. The very immediate response asked a few questions about my soil etc. Then came a long response broken into 6 parts: 1) Short Term Treatments 2) Biological Control 3) Long -term prevention 4) Optimizing water management and carbon 5) Promoting Synergistic Biodiversity and 6) More questions to explore with ready answers. You will notice that these arranged themselves from immediate local actions to larger responses spread over time and area. Another query into Fieldlark about a weed in my field brought back another 6-part response arranged in the same order. Within each of these 6 parts there are 3 sub-categories: a) recommendation b) biological basis and c) Expected outcomes. Those outcomes cover plant performance, soil outcomes and yield improvements.
Granted, this is a very mechanical arrangement, but it is also helpful in terms of the most urgent actions to take first and what specific ingredients are needed to perform them. Embedded in the expected outcomes part is a feedback loop that presumably would fine-tune the response if the outcomes don’t come out. There are also recommendations to check with an agronomist to verify recommendations for your context. I’m not sure if that absolves the AI of responsibility but it might.
Discussing this new twist in agriculture with a farmer friend I found out that he has also used an AI to research farm problems. He used GROK which turns out to be a product from Elon Musk. It also turns out to cost money but not a huge amount. I bit the bullet and bought a month’s worth of advice for $20. GROK’s advice was much shorter and very product oriented. The first recommendation was to use yellow sticky tape – apparently lots of it if there are many rows with the issue. Next was to use insecticides with very poisonous ones listed before more organic treatments. Actually, I had already tried these particular organic products with limited success. Then it suggested biological controls, monitoring the sticky traps to see if they work and getting local advice perhaps again for legal reasons.
Since GROK is not based on a specifically curated set of regenerative agriculture data, it is helpful to see that each recommendation has a specific reference to see where it came from. As it turns out, the source of the recommendations was usually also the company making the product recommended. I don’t know if GROK gets a kickback from each company for each recommendation, but that seems likely. To be fair, Fieldlark also recommends specific products from AEA.
What really sets these two approaches apart from each other is the general assumption that the best way to control pests and disease in the source material used by GROK is with products and chemicals and the basis used in AEA is that the best approach is by improving the health of the plants. In Quality Agriculture by John Kempf, agronomist Tom Dykstra writes “When you have a healthy plant, you don’t have to use, for example, all of the pesticides that are being used today: herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, nematicides etc.” This point is reiterated in a field guide backed by the Australian government that states “Nutrient-dense plants are more resistant to pests and diseases.” Moreover, it goes on to note that pesticides and nitrogen-fertilizers may worsen the problem by making plants more attractive to disease and insects. In the long run, I hope that these AI’s can learn from interacting with their users. In my example of teaching computer use I became less effective and more burnt out when lessons failed to take hold. A decent AI should learn as it goes and become even more effective based on evidence not just a large language model.
Overmarsh Farm Commons
I have experienced mixed results with community projects. One food Co-op I helped start is still going strong. Another failed after many years. Some collectives of people living near each other dissolved over time. Others have gone on for multiple generations. Some community gardens flourish while others peter out. So, I was particularly interested to see how a project on San Juan Island was holding up while I visited the island for a family reunion in July.
Overmarsh Farm Commons is part of a host of activities taken on by the San Juan Grange, the largest Grange in Washington State. Other activities include a weekly Coffee Hour Wednesday mornings, agricultural training sessions and a booth at the farmers market. The official mission of the Grange is to “support a resilient community”. No doubt that vision is brought into sharper focus by living on an island. Leaving the island or taking a ferry to it generally needs to be arranged in advance. Disruptions can occur because of weather, economics or even mechanical failures or personnel shortages on the ferries.
Agriculture is evolving quickly. Eco agriculture is opening the use of sap analysis, biostimulants, (substances or microorganisms that, when applied to plants, enhance nutrient uptake, improve stress tolerance, and boost crop quality and yield, without directly providing nutrients), cover cropping, foliar sprays and other techniques that increase yield, build soil and cost much less than chemical additives. All this means that education needs to be continual for farmers. The Overmarsh model provides a mechanism for person-to-person agricultural education.
In his monthly letter to members of the San Juan Grange, President Roger Ellison states that “We recognize that combining efforts with others creates synergies, where the result is bigger and better than the sum of the parts. More importantly, though, we derive personal benefits to our mental health from being part of a community. Working with others gets more done and makes you feel good while doing it.” (Full disclosure: Roger Ellison is my brother-in-law.)
One of the benefits of having people with a variety of skills involved in the Grange efforts is that the organization has been able to leverage its legal status and history to garner major support. The land for the commons was secured through a 20-year lease by the San Juan County Conservation Land Bank. Additional funds for fencing, construction and solar-powered irrigation to every plot comes from the Land Bank and from community donations during the San Juan Island Community Foundation SJC Cares campaign at the county fair last summer. Tools to use at the garden have been donated by individuals and are stored on site in a building built with community funds and labor using discarded shipping pallets for framing.
At the farm, I was impressed by the variety of growing techniques in use on the individual plots. One group with animals had their own supply of manure which made for abundant growth. Unique trellises for beans; companion flowers; a separate area for corn so it would not shade row crops… the list goes on and on. The bottom line is that by seeing how each other’s techniques and tricks function side by side in the same soil, the best methods arise naturally. This combination of competition and cooperation is bound to stimulate annual advances in the best methods for crops on that site.
It will doubtlessly also highlight the best seeds for that soil and climate. Since the grange intends to save seeds and distribute them, the whole community will benefit. That part of the project acts just like nature itself does selecting the best combination of plants that creates the most mutual support and growth at any specific location. The diverse set of skills in farming, organizing, grant writing and construction that make up the grange environment which fosters the farm, mimics the diverse range of organisms with different strengths and needs that form a healthy biome. Overmarsh Farm Commons is just getting started. Having been there, I cannot prove that it will last for generations. But I did see the elements that make it stand out from any of the many other collective efforts I have been involved in over my lifetime. It was not an idea that was started and searched for a community. Instead, it was the product of an existing community with a vision for its own future. It was not a singular idea but a part of an interactive web of community activities created to make the community more resilient and also a lot more fun. It will be a worthwhile endeavor to keep an eye on. Northeast Washington shares a kind of rural isolation with San Juan Island. In these challenging times we could all stand to be a little more resilient.
Sheep in the Orchard
Many bad things have happened to our earth. Now it is time for the Indians to teach the white man how to live as one with the earth and each other. “People of the Falls” Mural Artist Michael Paul (1934-1993)
The Spring of 2025 in Northeast Washington has been wonderful so far. We are getting the rain we needed after a winter with very little snow. The fruit trees and bushes broke out in what beekeeper Doug Johnson calls a “Bouquet Bloom”. Fruit set abundantly and will need to be thinned. The grass is already high and green.
In this stage of rapid growth plants need nitrogen to fill out the chlorophyll molecules in their leaves where photosynthesis takes place and turns sunlight into sugar. When I see all that green grass, I think of all the nitrogen there. It has already been breathed in from the air and bonded to biology. That makes it much easier to take up again in other plants besides the grass. The most efficient source of nitrogen is urea, basically grass turned into fertilizer. Yes. We are talking about pee here.
Animals are mobile fertility factories. Our guts and the billions of microbes in them that generate the nutrition in our blood also eliminate abundant and immediate nutrition to the ground. In the ground fungus and bacteria bring the water, minerals, microbes, nutrients and even messages to roots and complete the cycle. I will skip the obvious problem with humans where most of the waste we eliminate never makes it back to the ground and move on to our fellow mammals, sheep.
I was lucky last winter to score several tons of aged horse manure. I spread it around under the vines and now have a halo of dark green grass under each vine. Even though it came from animals, fertilizing with manure took a lot of work and machinery. But my neighbor, Joe Petrucelli, has a good-sized orchard with high green grass and does not have to contemplate cutting grass, raking it up, adding it to compost, waiting for it to finish working and the spreading it under his trees. His orchard manager, Roman, brought in a herd of sheep complete with the cutest new baby lambs to do that job.
Not only does Joe not have to worry about compost, the grass in his orchard is being immediately turned into lambs and fertilizer at the perfect time. The lambs are growing fast. The grass is being mowed, and the trees are getting all the fertilizer they need to fill out those apples, cherries and pears.
There is some technology involved, electric fencing. But even that runs on sunlight. It makes a good substitute for wolves. Wolves are more than under-appreciated. They are considered an enemy. If we were dealing with let’s say, bison, in the wild, the wolves would make sure the herd keeps moving so that the ground gets a chance to restore the grass. Grass has deep roots and recovers quickly. Weeds survive on depleted soil by being toxic to livestock and don’t recover as quickly. So, wolves cull the weak animals and keep the forage in good shape.
To do that with fences you need to keep the livestock moving from one contained area to another. Known as rotational grazing or mob grazing, this technique, advocated by Allan Savory, restores depleted grassland and builds healthier domestic herds. Wild herds need wolves. Most often it is done with electric fencing that can be moved along with the herd. The sheep learn quickly not to touch the fence. It can be done with a system of permanent fencing as well.
In Joe’s orchard they use mobile fencing. It is actually beneficial to have tight bounds moved frequently rather than bigger areas. The close confines ensure that the animals don’t just eat plants they like but also eat or trample their least favorite plants and create room for the grass. The danger here is that if only noxious weeds are left and the animals eat them in desperation, the purpose is defeated. There is not a big load of noxious weeds to replace in Joe’s orchard, but that could be done if needed.
Electric fencing may deter wolves but the real danger to sheep, especially those with a lot of lambs in the mix, is cougars. So, Roman sleeps in a tent near the herd and is ready to ward off cougars if he hears a disturbance. In a more established situation, a herd can be sheltered at night for protection from predators. This system may not take a lot of equipment but it does take attention and action, which is one reason that there is so much overgrazed land infested with noxious weeds. The situation changes when cattle or sheep are grazed in the wild. Protection is possible but still takes time and attention. As quoted above, Michael Paul is right that there is more to learn from the natives. Domestic animals are at a higher risk than wild animals, yet herders can still keep predators at bay and hunters can join the hunt for wild animals with the predators. All of which means we can live as one with the earth if we pay attention.
Bonehead Bonemeal
It all started with a visit to a local meat cutter to pick up lamb. They had my lamb meat wrapped and ready to go. They also had a big barrel full of bones left over from the carcasses they had been butchering. They were dumping them somewhere and I had a feeling that a big opportunity was being missed. Last year I bought bags of fish bonemeal to compensate for what a soil test had determined was a lack of phosphorus in my vineyard. You could really see the plants perk up in places where I spread it. If you look on almost any bag of fertilizer, you will see an NPK rating. My bags of fish bonemeal said 5-16-0. This equates to 5 parts nitrogen, 16 parts phosphorous and no potassium. It was a good source of phosphorus because the phosphorus was already an organic molecule having been part of a fish. Plants take up minerals that are a product of biology more easily than they do straight chemical elements.
Bells went off in my head – (or maybe it was just tinnitus ringing in my ears). Here was something valuable for the soil, sourced locally, and free. There had to be a way to convert it to bone meal. So, I immediately contacted an expert, Google. Sure enough, there were lots of videos showing machines that could grind big bones to bits in minutes if not seconds. They were expensive. There were also ads for bonemeal. It was not too expensive at around $2 per pound. I blew right past those. I didn’t want to support some confined animal feeding operation and slaughter house.
There were also several youtube videos on how to make your own bonemeal. It didn’t look too hard. First, they suggested boiling the bones to loosen up the meat and fat so it could be removed from the bones. Then you needed to clean the meat off the bones, next dry the bones and finally grind them into bonemeal. But what about the expensive machines? They might be worth it if you could make enough bonemeal in a kind of light industrial operation to sell to your neighbors and use for yourself.
Still, I was not up for an expensive experiment. Then it struck me. I have a shredder. If that 10 horse Tecumseh motor on the Troy Bilt shredder could crunch canes pruned from the vineyard. Maybe it could break bones to bits. I dug into the bottom of the freezer and found several bags of bones that had been there for years. Getting them out was a good thing no matter what happened next. After they were mostly defrosted, I took one out to the shredder, started it up and threw in the bone. Voila! Bone bits. Well actually, bone bits and the grate inside the shredder had definitely been slimmed. Yuck! Boiling off the fat etc. was very necessary.
So back to boiling. I got out a 10 gallon stainless steel pot and set it up on a propane burner that could have been used to heat enough oil to fry a whole turkey. In went the bones and a bunch of water. Soon they were boiling away. This is where things got out of hand. After a few hours of boiling, checking once in a while, I went inside to listen to Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me on NPR. When I went outside again, there was a new smell in the air. Yikes! I ran to put more water in the pot. The damage was pretty-much done. What had been a merrily boiling batch of bones was now a gooey brown mess. The water was too hot to clean bones. I shut it down.
The next day I came back to do burnt bone triage: a box for bones, another for fat and gristle, and some old milk jugs to hold the left-over liquid. The fat and meat did come off the bones but not as easily as I had hoped. The 5 hour cooking time in the video was only for a pressure cooker. 12 hours was recommended for open pot boiling. Burning the batch was not recommended anywhere. Still, I had the boiled bones and a lot of other left overs. Maybe in the back of my mind I was thinking bokashi. Bokashi is a Japanese term for “fermented organic matter”. What sets it apart from normal composting is that it can make fertilizer out of meat scraps. Also, it is done in a sealed container so there is no smell. The final step after 4 to 6 weeks of fermenting is to add the liquid back to a regular compost pile. Later for that. One disaster at a time.
While cleaning the bones I realized that there was not much bone to the batch. Many bones packaged from the butcher still have a lot of good meat and possibly useable fat on them. The bones that I had seen in the barrel were big bare bones. The ones from the freezer were small pieces with plenty of meat, fat and gristle still on them. Thinking about it that night, I realized that my thinking was wrong and backwards.
I should have valued the process more than the dry bonemeal goal. I could have boiled the bones in good water for a full 12 hours. It might have been possible to then pour off the water and seal it in jars for bone broth. We use bone broth all the time for soups, sauces and even just to cook rice in. After the batch was cool, there would be fat on top. That could be handy too. The bones were probably the least valuable part.
The shredder did break them into tiny bits. But bits are not bonemeal. They needed to be dried in a dehydrator for 24 hours. After that you might be able to make bonemeal out of them in a food processor or even grind them up in a steel plate four mill. I’m sure stone wheels would clog up quickly. At that point they might best be blended with other compost. There are too many stories out there of gardens fertilized with bonemeal only to be dug up by dogs, skunks or rats.
On the broader scale of dust to dust, putting the remains of animals back into the ground might be best accomplished by other animals. Chickens and pigs will eat almost anything. There is also a lot more to recycle than bones. The skin, guts and hooves of butchered animals have uses too, even if they do end up underground eventually. So, my boneheaded bonemeal test was mostly a bust. $2/pound is starting to sound pretty reasonable.
Blue Ridge Farm
On the long drive up Aladdin Road to Blue Ridge Farm dense forest alternates with open fields and old farms. The area was once more populated than now. When the Goldfield mine and mill was running, you could operate a farm and work at the mine nearby. Jillian and Ryan Garrett are a modern version of those times. They have paying jobs working from home but just as much work maintaining the farm. At Blue Ridge Farm (blueridgefarmer.com) they have combined passions for wildlife, hardy plants, donkeys, chickens and compost with technical skills in using the Internet to promote Regenerative Agriculture and their own business.
It hasn’t happened overnight. In their resumé they have 15 years of farming near Medford, Oregon that included agrotourism. They moved to Northeast Washington still wanting to farm but with a keen appreciation for the nature already thriving here. It includes turkeys, bob cats, cougars, bears, elk, rabbits, wolves and many more critters. They photographed and watched the habits of the wildlife, then designed their farm to protect both the wild and domestic creatures. Their practices include harvesting their hay a little late to allow cover for young turkeys and fawns; closing their donkeys in at night so cougars and wolves won’t eat them; moving their mobile chicken coup and cyclone fencing with it to stave off coyotes, bob cats and other predators.
Plants need protection too. High fences to keep out deer; low tight woven wire to keep gophers from the cabbage and kale; mouse traps in the greenhouse; wrapping around the fruit trees. Even then, when the snow gets high, rabbits can girdle the trees; gophers can climb over wire as well as under raised beds; wire worms persist in the soil. Perseverance demands constant vigilance.
There was still snow on the driveway when I arrived. The Deep Creek Valley is cold. The Garretts have recorded temperatures down to -30º in the winter. The growing season is only 90 days on average. For serious protection from the cold, they have two Rimol greenhouses with propane backup heating as well as rocks and water barrels for thermal retention. The greenhouses have peaked roofs so that snow slides off and one has polycarbonate siding.
Besides all the infrastructure for protection, more is needed for production. This year’s crops were already underway when I visited. Raised beds on the floor of the greenhouse were partly empty but still had bok choy and rosemary growing in them. Temporary tables covered parts of the raised beds and hold electric warming mats with trays of soil blocks sprouting new crops. Soil blocks are a Blue Ridge specialty. At first, they seem odd like planting pots with no plastic sides and slanted in like pyramids rather than tapered at the bottom for easy stacking like plastic pots would be. The method to this madness is air pruning. In a closed pot, roots become a tangled mat on the walls and bottom of the pot. In a soil block, they back off from the air near the sides of the block and branch out inside the block. When the block is buried in the ground, the roots shoot out into the soil up to two weeks sooner than similar starts transplanted from a plastic pot. Plus there is no plastic waste left over.
To make the soil blocks, they have some little metal presses that you stuff with a compost mixture and then turn over and press onto a flat surface, even directly onto a warming mat. They have begun to have larger custom-made presses built. You can stack smaller soil blocks on larger ones as the plant root systems develop spreading down and outwards.
To hold good moisture and structure in this system you need good compost. Having tried commercial compost, the Garretts decided that they could do better. Their method is the Johnson-Su bioreactor. The hardware is fairly cheap: a pallet, woven wire fencing, some porous ground cover to line the inside of a round woven wire tower and a few 4” drain field pipes to set up breathing pathways in the center of the tower as you fill it with material to compost. There is a good video on the Blue Ridge website.
The donkey barn provides good manure for composting. There is more to the mix of course. Part of the beauty of the method is that it uses home-grown plant and animal waste and works in a few months with no compost turning or equipment involved. Worms love it in the moist environment that is warm but not too hot because it breathes. Worm castings make the end product hold together well but still permit air pruning. Jillian and Ryan sift the large chunks out of the compost before using it. This system allows them to export plant starts in rich soil without depleting the fertility of their own farm.
The seeds they start in these soil blocks are critical too. Cold-hardy varieties are a must, even when many end up in their larger row-crop greenhouse. Although some of the plant starts like rhubarb and elderberries are meant for outside use, many are used to fill their big production greenhouse with warm-weather crops such as tomatoes, cucumbers and corn. These help them feed themselves but also fill orders for community supported agriculture (CSA). This enterprise lets customers subscribe to weekly boxes of vegetables and possibly eggs delivered in season.
As if getting fresh local food grown in a way that enriches the soil and does not harm wildlife was not enough, Blue Ridge Farm publishes its own magazine that not only includes news about their operations, philosophy and techniques, but also offers recipes that use their products in tasty, wholesome and creative ways.
All of these enterprises along with their attention to living closely with wildlife has earned these Blue Ridge Farmers the 2024 Stevens County Voluntary Stewardship Program (VSP) Conservation Farmer of the Year award. This annual award was created by the Stevens County Conservation District to honor landowners who voluntarily implement projects that protect critical areas while maintaining agricultural productivity. The award is well-deserved. It takes an exhaustive amount of work to be so productive in harsh conditions. Leading does not just mean continuing to innovate in methods and varieties of food but also to undertake teaching others the how and why of creating healthy relationships with the land, the animals, the soil and the whole community where you live.
Mushrooms in the Mist
Many strange things are happening during this very mild winter. Down here by Lake Roosevelt there is no snow. The grass is starting to grow. Sweet pea leaves have stayed green all winter. Some insects were flying even though I thought they held off until temperatures were in the 50s. One effect that caught my attention was that mushrooms were popping up even though the temperatures barely got into the 30s.
Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of fungi meant to spread spores and keep up reproduction. I wondered how much growing they could do in freezing temperatures and what are these mushrooms anyway? I took a few pictures and looked for information from Google Lens. It was not encouraging or sometimes it was too encouraging. I will explain.
Mushroom 1 is identified variously by Google Lens as Tricholoma Terreum or Tricholoma Melanoleuca. At least it knew it was a mushroom. But the terreum variety is common to Europe and Australia and is edible. “Melanoleuca is a genus of mushrooms that were previously classified in the Tricholomataceae family. However, DNA studies have shown that Melanoleuca is more closely related to the Amanita and Pluteus genera.” (Wikipedia) So if it is Terreum, yum, if it is Melanoleuca you may die or have a weird trip.
What about Mushroom 2, found nearby. In one case it may be Camembert Brittlegill AKA Russulo Amoenolens (Russulo genus has 750 species.) or in another Wavy Cap, Psilocybe Muliercula. Yes that psilocybe! Lesson 1: don’t eat any mushroom based on Google Lens. Lesson 2: don’t use Google Lens to identify mushrooms.
Meanwhile, somewhere diving into the mushroom rabbit hole I came across a wonderful YouTube video created by the group, Show Me the World. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKtQ9p25ek0) It was about the ways fungi grow. Mycology is the study of fungi, a diverse group of organisms that includes mushrooms, yeasts, and molds. (I want to point out here that “rabbit hole” comes from Lewis Carroll’s Alices Adventures in Wonderland which itself features some very peculiar mushrooms.)
While picking up some quince, I found a patch of white mold under each one before I noticed the mushrooms. The white patch was a network of mycelium. Basically, fungi are just mycelium, threads often smaller than a human hair with a liquid core and a sheath made of chitin. They seem simple enough, but that is far from the whole truth. Although mycelium don’t have digestive organs, they emit enzymes that taken collectively can break down almost any material to a point where it can be incorporated into other organisms including the mycelium itself.
The chitin part of the mycelium is the same substance found on the outer bodies of insects. It is very tough and composed mostly of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen but also nitrogen. These are also the building blocks of all plants. Mycelia are constantly expanding and changing directions based on where food sources are. When broken down, they feed the soil. When finding food, they feed themselves and the food source too if it is a green plant.
Almost all mycelia are arbuscular mycelia. They attached themselves to roots of plants. Moreover, they integrate themselves into the roots. They do this by weaving between the cells of the roots and sometimes into the cells themselves. Inside an invaded cell they branch out into arbuscules. Arbuscules are tree-shaped subcellular structures that form within plant cells. The Latin root word for “arbuscules” is “arbusculum,” which means “little tree”. They are the main site of nutrient exchange between the plant and the fungus and are shaped somewhat like a lung. Like a lung they take in some substances and expel others. The mycelium are like little pipes that can flow in both directions. They take in glucose and other carbohydrates from plants. They bring water and minerals to the plants.
Plants attract mycelium by exuding hormones. If this is beginning to sound like a barter system, it very much is. Fungus are communicating and transporting nutrients that are valuable to their growth and also to the growth of plants. They expand the nutrients available to plants by an order of magnitude. Some biologists refer to healthy roots as “Rastafarian roots” because of their shaggy appearance.
The communication network is used for more than sustenance. Plants can alert other plants to diseases, water and nutrient deficiencies through fungal networks. Fungal networks respond to rich sources of food by growing bigger and denser near the source. They also respond to plants in need of nourishment by increasing the nutrient flow to the plant. In return they get a larger percentage of the plants’ sugar supply than from a healthy plant with plenty to eat.
In studying these fungal networks, botanists and mycologists have witnessed behavior similar to rail and highway networks. Main lines grow bigger. If those lines are broken or disrupted, smaller detours are used and increased. Like the Internet itself, they bypass trouble.
All of this is going on beneath our feet as we walk through the woods, fields and gardens. With so much exchange, growth and communication going on, disturbance to the soil is destructive to the biome. The most activity and turnover in soil happens in the top 6 inches. Leaves, branches, grass, seeds and fruit are building up on top. Fungus, mold, bacteria and microbes are breaking that organic matter down and absorbing it into the soil. The fungal network is extracting nutrients and transporting them to plants. Fungi are also being eaten by insects and animals. Plowing the soil disrupts that network. It releases nutrients once as organic matter breaks down in the soil but tilling over and over prevents the fungal network from regenerating. It needs a green cover crop to supply glycose from photosynthesis.
Even those of you with snow cover now will probably briefly see a fine layer of mold mycelia when the snow melts. Winter will end but the network will live on. Please give it some water and ground cover. If the fungus ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.
The Christmas Curmudgeon
I am writing this a couple days before the Winter Solstice. By the time you read it Christmas will be over and New Years too. Hopefully we have survived both events. I had a prioritized list for Christmas: write newsletter; get cards; print labels; buy stamps; send cards and newsletters; figure out gifts; get tree. Of course, there are many other line items in there like put up lights, actually buy gifts, wrap and send gifts etc. but you get the idea. Christmas is a self-imposed gauntlet of to-dos to add on top of getting in firewood, preparing to plow snow, getting snow tires on… How did we get to be this way?
There is not much to go on in the archeological record. Sure, everyone had observatories that pinpointed the exact shortest day of the year. Stonehenge, the pyramids, the Incas’ at Machu Picchu… The list goes on and on. What we are short on in archaeology are stories about what went on after people knew the days were getting longer.
The Seasonal section at Wal*Mart
Anthropology to the rescue. Dong Zhi, the “arrival of winter,” is celebrated in China by eating rice balls. The Hopi Indians celebrate Soyal with purifications and kachinas, protective spirits from the mountains. Scandinavians lit fires to ward off evil spirits. During the Roman festival of Saturnalia slaves were treated as equals (a little like Boxing Day in Britain where masters and servants trade places). Inti Raymi, an ancient Peruvian festival included feasts and sacrifices of animals and some sacrifices that well… Let’s say they went way beyond Santa Clauses naughty and nice list. The Persian festival Yalda, or Shab-e Yalda marks the victory of light over dark. Some Persians stay awake all night long to welcome the morning sun. (That sounds more like New Years.) At any rate, our Christmas festivities are not that new or unusual but they do tend to go over the top, especially on decorations.
Every year lighting competition gets more intense. LED lights are now ancient history. Software controlling them is where the action is. Lights now flash in many ways at many speeds possibly triggering seizures in individuals sensitive to light flicker, particularly those with epilepsy. How long until we have our own drone displays playing Santa and Reindeer in the air with sound and music?
Wow. The music. You can’t get away from the music. Not that it’s bad, it’s too good. Christmas music is persistent. It stays in your head. Old songs like Jingle Bells don’t bother me much but some others seem like brainwashing “The most wonderful time of the year”; “He knows when you’ve been sleeping”; “Up on the rooftop”. Often it just comes down to gifts. I used to make gifts for my kids. Now that they are middle-aged, not so much but usually food and drink which has very little environmental impact.
In our local Wal*Mart supercenter, whole sections are devoted to seasonal gifts and decorations. When looking at those displays, I have to ask myself “What is this stuff? Where did it come from? Where will it end up? From an environmental point of view, the answers are not encouraging. A lot of gifts use tag board packaging that is not recyclable. A lot of plastic inside is destined for the dump. A lot of colorful ink and wrapping is probably toxic. Many items are shipped on cargo ships running on bunker fuel then loaded on trains and diesel trucks coming from around the world and across the country. Everything with a bar code that measures what sells best and tracks who bought it. Does any of this stuff actually ward off evil spirits? That might be useful.
So, count me in as a Christmas curmudgeon. Interestingly, when you look that word up in the Oxford English Dictionary you get “a bad-tempered person, especially an old one.” Sure, they had to throw in the old person reference. Maybe it would be better to be considered a snob. At least that has a touch of class and wealth. Oh, wait a minute. The wealth part is not going to work out. I don’t have a big social security check or a car less than 20 years old. (But if you compare my resources to the income of the people who probably made these things, it’s giant.)
A snob would snub their nose at your run-of-the-mill Christmas gifts. But I can’t afford to do that either. The truth is. I buy lights and new gizmos. I send gifts made in China packed in cardboard made from newly harvested trees. I have a freshly cut tree that will end up as air pollution. I relish our display of cards from friends near and far and enjoy reading annual newsletters. I probably eat too many things that are not going to be part of a weight-watchers diet. I’m a Christmas hypocrite. I’ve been colonized by Christmas.
No reflective person examining their part in the whole Christmas parade can help feeling a little guilty for their part in it. But that’s where religion comes in. I was raised Catholic. I spent the first 20 years of life feeling guilty for one thing or another and going to confession to get over it. I’m totally prepared for Christmas guilt. Also, I have the Christmas newsletter routine down to a science. Careful journal entries, documenting pictures, consistent themes. Christmas newsletters are just practice for the new year and filing taxes.
Where the Wild Things Are
Harvesting grapes saddles you with responsibilities to make wine, put away your tools and clean up the vineyard. But in the midst of endless work there are surprises both pleasant and problematic. On the pleasant side, finding old bird nests is one of my favorites. It is a good reminder that not all birds are after your grapes and that some can even be helpful. Moreover, it shows that the vineyard is a healthy habitat for a number of creatures that you might not even know about till they have already raised their young and left.
While birds are generally well-loved and, as can be seen in the pages of the North Columbia Monthly, are often identified and photographed, I will only name a few and move on. The picture is probably of a robin’s nest. They can be noisy and when large flocks pass through in the fall, they can devastate a grape crop in less than a day. So, I have bird nets and neighbors sometimes use recorded distress calls. I know when robins are hatching young because they tend to leave blue eggshells on a pathway. Chickadees, woodpeckers, nuthatches and many other birds frequent the vineyard. My favorites are bohemian waxwings and piliated woodpeckers.
But we also have cats. So, I discourage bluebirds and any bird that I really like because the vineyard can be a dangerous place for them. Before I go any further with this, I want to lay down a principle about the health of any biome. “The greater the diversity of species available in any habitat, the greater is its health.” Before you shrug your shoulders with a physical “whatever”, I want to elaborate on some not-commonly-accepted ramifications of this maxim starting with gophers.
“Pocket gophers, commonly referred to simply as gophers, are burrowing rodents of the family Geomyidae. The roughly 41 species are all endemic to North and Central America. They are commonly known for their extensive tunneling activities and their ability to destroy farms and gardens.” (Wikipedia) Even in this first paragraph of the Wikipedia article gophers are thrown into the category of pests and varmints. Agreed, they are hell on garlic, potatoes, carrots… and many other garden crops. I admit to trapping them with good old fashion lethal gopher traps when they get close to those crops. We also have a self-seeding plant in the garden known as Gopher Purge, (Euphorbia lathyrism), which does discourage them. But getting back to our principle about diversity, gophers have some good qualities and a place in enhancing the ecosystem. Bear with me.
Most of my vineyard is not a garden. I don’t own a tractor. The top six inches of the soil is the most active part of the ecosystem. Turning it over, incorporating organic matter that breaks down and rots is the source of a lot of natural nutrition in the soil, especially when you are adding amendments like leaves, manure and biochar or cover crops like clover and vetch. Gophers enhance that process. I have seen them wipe out young vines and other plants. Where there are a lot of gophers, I suggest cutting the bottom out of the plastic pots that most plant starts come in to protect the upper 8 inches of roots from gophers. Walking the rows there is no visible damage to the older vines where gophers are present.
Gophers like plants with juice. They can’t visit the local watering hole. Moist, loose soil is their favorite. Their mounds encourage ruderal plant species, plant species that are the first to colonize disturbed lands. Native climax species eventually return but many forbes and flowers fall into the ruderal niche. It looks to me like gophers like to eat quack grass. You have to like that. They are called “pocket gophers” because their cheeks serve as pockets to use in transporting and hoarding food. When that food rots deep underground, it provides plant nutrients far below the surface where you would normally fertilize.
We’ve looked at gophers from both sides now, and you have to admit that they can get out of hand. Enter the gopher snake, (Pituophis catenifer deserticola). So, in some people’s minds we have just gone from bad to worse. Bear with me. They do look a lot like rattle snakes. Gopher Snakes even imitate rattle snakes when defending themselves by coiling up, flattening their heads to look like rattle snake heads and even striking out but it’s a head butt and not a bite. They are not poisonous. They eat voles, mice and other pests besides gophers including other snakes. Bottom line, they are also great to have around. The last one I saw was inside my 50-year-old pickup truck and leaving quickly in a hole through the floorboard. They can climb to eat birds and their eggs. Mostly, you won’t see them if they are underground eating or digesting gophers.
Also underground and mostly unseen, are yellowjackets, another creature that is probably on your I-hate-these-things list. Not so fast. Yes, they are nasty and relentless when disturbed. (I try to put a small flag by any underground nest I find so as to avoid it from then on.) Only fertilized queens survive the winter. They take a couple of months to ramp up production and can build colonies of 5000 workers. Early on they eat a lot of insects to feed protein to their young larvae. That is their biggest benefit. Their hives are made of wood pulp. The hives do not survive the winter in our climate and are digested by fungi when they rot. Not only is more fungus underground good for the soil, the hives can contain the yeast that will emerge again on new fruit, a benefit for my wines that are fermented with natural yeast.
You may not be warming up to this idea that diversity is healthy given these three examples. I haven’t even gotten to skunks, squirrels, racoons and several kinds of insects. But for each one of these I can cite examples of how they enhance the biome. More about that later. It works for plants as well as animals. Weeds tell us about our soil. We will do well to understand them before we attack.
Hoop House
Back in the winter of 22-23 we had a heavy snow after a long warm period. I still had a shade cloth over my 24’ by 20’ greenhouse. It caught the snow. The roof collapsed. As if have said several times, I learn a lot by making mistakes. That left me with the wall structure of a greenhouse but no roof and a lot of twisted pipes. By the time the cleanup was completed, there was no time or money to rebuild the whole structure. Besides, it was not in the best place for a greenhouse in the first place. Time for plan B.
Sometime earlier I had joined the Huckleberry Range Community Collective (HRCC). They have a tool sharing network and have a Facebook page and group. One of the tools offered is a hoop bender, a device to bend steel pipes and make a hoop house greenhouses. This sounded like a good plan B. I knew that they came in different sizes. A friend had proudly showed me his 10-foot-wide greenhouse and offered to let me use his pipe bender sometime before my greenhouse collapsed, so I declined at the time. Somehow that width stuck in my mind and I assumed that the two hoop benders were from the same company and had the same width.
As many things in this adventure, things were not so simple. My friend had a pipe bender from Bootstrap Farmer. (BootstrapFarmer.com) The one from HRCC was from Johnny’s Seeds (Johnnyseeds.com). Either one costs around $100 but Bootstrap has a shipping cost. A nice thing about both websites is that they are very specific about what pipe to use, something I was not getting from word of mouth. For the 10’ hoops, you need 1 3/8 inch “chain link fence top rail pipe”. The nearest source people remembered was Ziggy’s in Spokane. Talking to several stores in Colville I came up empty. Then I realized that I might be able to special order it and was able to do that through Builder’s Shopping Center in Colville. The pipe can come in 20’ or 10’ lengths. I asked for 10’ knowing I could strap that to the top of my car. A little math made me conclude that I needed 2 10’ lengths for each hoop in a 10’ wide hoop house and 6 hoops for a 20’ long house. So, 12 lengths of pipe all together. Cost $204. Not bad. I had salvaged pipe for a top tie rail, if you don’t, it is worth adding 2 more lengths of pipe.
The pipe arrived a week later. I took it home and unpacked it. 6 of the lengths had swaged ends. Those ends fit nicely into the ends of the 6 unswaged lengths. Somehow the source knew exactly what was going on and made it so I could piece together 6 20 foot pieces of pipe. The circumference of a 10’ circle is 31.41 feet so a half circle would be 15,7 feet giving me a little over 4.3 extra feet that I could use to raise the hoop over two feet off the ground on each side for a height of 7 feet, ( 5 ft radius of a 10 ft hoop plus 2 ft each side), plenty of clearance in my view.
Off I went to get the pipe bender from HRCC. It turned out that their bender was for a 12-foot hoop, not a 10 foot. That threw me off. Also, the pipe bender was actually made out of bent pipe itself which seemed weird since I had the Bootstrap version in mind. A little bit more math and I was back on board. The type of pipe was the same and there was still enough for a 6.5-foot clearance plus another 40 feet of floor space in the greenhouse. 12 feet was a better option.
The next decision was how to mount the bender. The Johnny’s website showed it bolted to a picnic table where the force would be sideways and it was assumed that the table would not warp or move. The Bootstrap sight showed it mounted on the wall of a shed so you could pull down on the pipe being bent. I went for the shed guessing that it was going to take a lot of force to bend steel pipe. Each bender came with a “cheater bar” that fit onto the pipe to give extra leverage for the last few feet, a good hint that a lot of force was in order.
It sure was. Luckily, I had extra pieces of pipe left from my previous greenhouse disaster that slipped over the 1 3/8” pipe and gave me a lot more leverage. Even with that I was regretting not doing more chin-ups later in life. The fulcrum of the bend is wherever the pipe touches the bender. The most force is at either end. If you want a section left straight, let it hang over one end. Bend a few inches of the pipe at a time and move the bent part of the pipe out the back of the bender. This gives you less and less leverage as you get to the end, hence the cheater.
My previous greenhouse used pipes pounded in the ground to position those standing up. So, I cut up some of my spare parts pipe to serve that purpose. That proved necessary since the 12’ hoop wants to spring out to 14’ until the ends are stuck in the ground pipes. Hoops are not Legos. They tended to flop a little one way or another and top centers didn’t line up exactly. Although not shown in some examples, having a top trail over the whole array lines them up more exactly and provides a little boost in getting water to run off or snow to slide off if placed above the hoops on the center line. I was glad to have some salvaged pipe for that purpose and the “bender” actually helped straighten it out.
Having the bone structure of a greenhouse is really just the beginning. Wrapping it, providing doors, making ways to ventilate etc. are all important and variable. That could be called Plan B(a).
BTW if you could use some pipe pieces for ground pipes, leverage or need self-tapping bolts to tie things together, I still have spare parts.