Health & Peace,

Howard

I’d not realized that boards could concentrate worm-castings; but I’ve long employed the plywood sheet to collect bait for fishing. One good nightcrawler can be converted into two plump bream. But of course they eat and excrete (duh) while they are under that board; and I don’t know why I haven’t thought of this before.

When I talked once with Susan Quimby-Honer (known locally by kids as “the worm lady”), our Raleigh-based vermiculturist, she said we should think about just raising the worms right in the garden. Esay, right? Just skip a step. Unfortunately, it was a hit-and-run encounter as I was being called back to help build a re-used materials shed (longer story).

Question is, can the light-blocking cover (like the board) be combined with a mechanism for feeding the worms kitchen scraps? Year before last, I tried to partially bury a plastic plant pot with the bottom removed, and cover that with scraps inside (thinking the hungry Oligochaeta would crawl up at night and chow down). No such luck. The stuff just composted down at the usual (seemingly) glacial pace, with clouds of gnats calling their friends to supper. No worms.

Would cutting a hole in a sheet of old (untreated) plywood work, if I chop the scraps really fine for my toothless light-shy neighbors? Anyone tried in-the-ground vermiculture?

Could be Lee Reich who described the method of potato growing. Trouble is, it was in a discussion thread on some gardeners’ site, and I kept no reference. And I could easily have just tacked ‘Kentucky’ onto an incomplete memory, without justice.

Anyway, the method itself is working beautifully here, with near-absolute-zero volunteer plants needing to be pulled/smothered. Oddly, the slugs too, though they visit, don’t seem to be eating my potato plants at all, except for just one unlucky (for some reason) plant. Can’t explain that. Any ideas?

One thing that I forgot to emphasise is that another highly useful part of these methods which I’m teaching myself, trial-and-quite-few-errors style, is long-handled clippers.

I made a pair myself. I took the wooden handles off a pair of ordinary garden shears, and welded long tubes onto them; then bent each tube at several points to make the tool comfortable for me to clip at ground level from a relaxed upright position. The back ends of the tubes project behind me, and I welded steel counterweights to the back ends, until the whole tool is nicely balanced to glide the blades just above ground level as I clip. Quite weighty, but relaxed and easy to use, with a surprising area clipped in quite a short time. A useful complement to my scythe, and perfect for close, detailed clipping of unwanted plants around the food plants. Take care, though. Very easy, whilst you’re still learning to handle it, to clip off a food plant right at ground level, by mistake. Damn!

The idea was given to me by a fellow-member of the HDRA (British gardeners’ charitable organisation) years back. He grew food exclusively in TURF (!!) with a high clover content (white is best, but any will do) to fix atmospheric nitrogen as nitrate fertiliser. His two main tools to get good results were the clippers (and later a very narrow hand-pushed lawn mower, that he made himself, to clip very rapidly between rows), plus a potent liquid feed which he made — I’m not making this up! — by laying down sheets of this and that, wood, ply, cardboard, flat masonry slabs, etc., and occasionally harvesting worm-casts from underneath them. The casts, heavily diluted with water, were a kind of superfood slurry for all his food vegs.

This method gave excellent yields, by his descriptions. And even at the fastest-growing times of year, he reckoned that one clip/mow every 10-14 days replaced all digging, forking, raking, hoeing and weeding. Each clip cut short not just the grass, but also the clover, of course. And as the clover was cut back, there seems to have been a corresponding die-back of their roots, which released a burst of nitrates from the Nitrobacter-filled root nodules common to all legumes, causing a grown-spurt in the food plants. This periodic cutting, plus watering with liquid feed was all he did. But he got excellent food growth, all standing in a tidy ‘lawn’.

Neat, eh?

About visiting Cae Mabon:

Eric (Maddern) is a always a relaxed host for unexpected visitors, since he gets so many. A preliminary phone call would be useful to him, though. His numbers are 01286-871542 (landline) and 07789-810115 (mobile). Email: eric@fachwen.org

Sadly, health and overstretch matters mean that I’m no longer working on Eric’s garden, so I don’t know its present state. I just work the one permaculture set-up now, where I live.

Unfortunately, visiting that in July is likely to be problematic, because I’m likely to be away much of the time, with things being lightly supervised by the neighbour who will be feeding my dogs. They are ferocious guards against anyone who thinks to trespass when I’m not there. (Turkish Shepherd Dogs: absolutely not to be trifled with) But I’d recommend a visit to Cae Mabon to anyone. It’s a truly wonderful creation there, that Eric has made happen. And you never know: maybe fate will decree that we should meet, after all.

Cofion gorau, Rhisiart G

Ruth Stout’s books that I know of are “The Ruth Stout No-Work Garden Book” or “How to have a green thumb without an aching back” or “Gardening without work: for the aging, the busy, and the indolent” — I have got one of them used (can’t recall which one, as I’m not at home now). The first two are from the early 70′s and are out of print. You can google to find used copies, which is what I did.

Rhysiart, by the way, we plan to be in the UK in July in the Bristol area, and northern Wales looks awfully close on the map (to an American anyway). Since it’s possibly the last time we get to do any extended travel before peak oil lowers the boom on relatively cheap air fares, I was wondering if Cae Mabon is accepting visitors or if there is any other permaculture-related site of interest in the English southwest or west.

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By DIANA B. HENRIQUES
Published: June 5, 2008
Huge investment funds have already poured hundreds of billions of dollars into booming financial markets for commodities like wheat, corn and soybeans.

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The Food Chain
Production and Motivation
Articles in this series are examining growing demands on, and changes in, the world’s production of food.

Previous Articles in the Series »
Related
Leaders Speak of Their Own Issues at a Conference Addressing Food Shortages (June 5, 2008)
Monsanto Seeks Big Increase in Crop Yields (June 5, 2008)
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Ben Garvin for The New York Times
Andrew J. Redleaf, head of the hedge fund Whitebox Advisors, bought several grain elevators from ConAgra and Cargill.
But a few big private investors are starting to make bolder and longer-term bets that the world’s need for food will greatly increase — by buying farmland, fertilizer, grain elevators and shipping equipment.

One has bought several ethanol plants, Canadian farmland and enough storage space in the Midwest to hold millions of bushels of grain.

Another is buying more than five dozen grain elevators, nearly that many fertilizer distribution outlets and a fleet of barges and ships.

And three institutional investors, including the giant BlackRock fund group in New York, are separately planning to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in agriculture, chiefly farmland, from sub-Saharan Africa to the English countryside.

“It’s going on big time,” said Brad Cole, president of Cole Partners Asset Management in Chicago, which runs a fund of hedge funds focused on natural resources. “There is considerable interest in what we call ‘owning structure’ — like United States farmland, Argentine farmland, English farmland — wherever the profit picture is improving.”

These new bets by big investors could bolster food production at a time when the world needs more of it.

The investors plan to consolidate small plots of land into more productive large ones, to introduce new technology and to provide capital to modernize and maintain grain elevators and fertilizer supply depots.

But the long-term implications are less clear. Some traditional players in the farm economy, and others who study and shape agriculture policy, say they are concerned these newcomers will focus on profits above all else, and not share the industry’s commitment to farming through good times and bad.

“Farmland can be a bubble just like Florida real estate,” said Jeffrey Hainline, president of Advance Trading, a 28-year-old commodity brokerage firm and consulting service in Bloomington, Ill. “The cycle of getting in and out would be very volatile and disruptive.”

By owning land and other parts of the agricultural business, these new investors are freed from rules aimed at curbing the number of speculative bets that they and other financial investors can make in commodity markets. “I just wonder if they need some sheep’s clothing to put on,” Mr. Hainline said.

Mark Lapolla, an adviser to institutional investors, is also a bit wary of the potential disruption this new money could cause. “It is important to ask whether these financial investors want to actually operate the means of production — or simply want to have a direct link into the physical supply of commodities and thereby reduce the risk of their speculation,” he said.

Grain elevators, especially, could give these investors new ways to make money, because they can buy or sell the actual bushels of corn or soybeans, rather than buying and selling financial derivatives that are linked to those commodities.

When crop prices are climbing, holding inventory for future sale can yield higher profits than selling to meet current demand, for example. Or if prices diverge in different parts of the world, inventory can be shipped to the more profitable market.

“It’s a huge disadvantage to not be able to trade the physical commodity,” said Andrew J. Redleaf, founder of Whitebox Advisors, a hedge fund management firm in Minneapolis.

Mr. Redleaf bought several large grain elevator complexes from ConAgra and Cargill last year for a long-term stake in what he sees as a high-growth business. The elevators can store 36 million bushels of grain.

“We discovered that our lease customers, major food company types, are really happy to see us, because they are apt to see Cargill and ConAgra as competitors,” he said.

The executives making such bets say that fears about their new role are unfounded, and that their investments will be a plus for farming and, ultimately, for consumers.

“The world is asking for more food, more energy. You see a huge demand,” said Axel Hinsch, chief executive of Calyx Agro, a division of the giant Louis Dreyfus Commodities, which is buying tens of thousands of acres of cropland in Brazil with the backing of big institutional investors, including AIG Investments.

I’m actually stumbling and groping my way into doing terra preta permaculture right now. I had a bit to tell about it in De’s previous post here on Humanure.

Can offer also David Blume’s article on his website, describing the breathtaking productivity (with attendant enhanced ecological gracing) when he was producing food full time for several hundred people from a two-acre, steep-slope site.

(Sorry, I’m on K’s computer at the moment and a bit unhandy with her systems, so I can’t go looking for a link without losing this post. So — google David Blume permaculture)

Regarding grain permaculture: never forget that Fukuoka, for years before he retired, was producing premium yields of grain on one-eighth-acre plots with his famous ‘do nothing’ system of growing: no till, no fertiliser, no pesticides, no herbicides. Marc Bonfils in France and elsewhere has been confirming this independently with his ‘self-fertile soil’ ideas.

Looks as if workload this year will enforce my first foray into micro-plot grain growing to be a ‘Winter’ operation: plant later in the year, harvest next year. But already I have several hundred potato plants growing well, and foreshadowing something like a ton of tubers for later this year (deo valente!) to be clamped in the field for slow use, in the old traditional way used here (Britain). All of these plants are growing on a variant of Ruth Stout’s mulch-gardening method, developed by a grower in Kentucky (can’t find the damned reference again now!), which uses cardboard sheetmulch, then scythe-mulch (any old wild herb’n'grass stand that you can get at with a scythe, cut and dried just minimally) on top for the spuds to grow in. Each sprouting chit gets about a pint of compost material to sit in, on the mulch, but otherwise is fed entirely by regular waterings of comfrey-tea liquid feed.

‘Earth-up’ as the haulms grow not with earth but with successive layers of scythe mulch, which both feeds the soil as it breaks down, suppresses volunteer growth, and provides a clean, dryish cradling for the developing tuber crop.

One of my grand-dads was Irish, so I’m very aware of the danger of relying too heavily on spuds, which don’t have the hard/dry storage capacity of grains. An Gorta Mhor is still very much alive in the mind of modern Eire and all its diaspora children. On the other hand, the original Andean cultivators of potatoes dried them routinely for storage, so I shall be experimenting with some of my crop this year in my solar dryer, to see what happens.

Hwyl fawr i bawb, Rh

I’ve come across some interesting links/posts and wondered how it fit with in with the ideas on permaculture that you talk about here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta#Modern_research_to_recreate_Terra_preta

http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/taxonomy/term/39/9

http://hypography.com/forums/terra-preta/index3.html

http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/002347.html

It is time to rethink how we eat- bread, cereal, cookies — all lock us into dependence on the “machine”. Their convenience is so seductive though! cheap calories without thinking.

Now they are going to use GMO beets for sugar so it is time to get to know your local bee keeper!