In a way what Rec.gardens could use is a FAQ update. Too much work sadly so we must suffer eternal return. Perhaps a FAQ list of books we could muster long with a few odd items ? Just outside tearing out some squash suffering from too much shade just big leaves this in about 95F with a dew point over 70. Yea I know I can eat the flowers but the light they take takes from some other valued plants. Whew cool down due in 2 days.
Some music I found that I thought was gone. Warning this from a aging hippy.
Nearly 100°F here, yesterday. Not too bad but we haven't acclimated to the heat yet. It's supposed to cool down through the week and then heat up again next week. It's not bad here, but we need to go to the Central Valley, at least once a week, and it gets hot in Sacramento.
I finally got to untangling some Swiss chard that was set to germination in April. They were suffering in two, small, germination cell 6-packs. If they all survive, I think I'll be set for Swiss chard for the rest of my life (29 of them).
I hope one day to figure out the root garden. It seems that everything is in bloom; radishes, onions, parsnips, celery root, dandelion, borage. Where are the plants supposed to grow? The beets, and a few assorted lettuces are being overwhelmed but the flowers are festive;O)
One of my successes for the year is finding a good spot for my lettuce. Up at the top of the yard, against the ivy covered fence, they get morning and mid-day sun, but slip into the shadows for the afternoon. I don't know if this is new to anyone, but I spray the lettuce about 30 min. before I pick it, and it is much crispier.
One flowering parsnip is up to 7' now. It is only behind the sunflower because it is leaning on a potato cage. The potatoes are about 5' tall. All in all, not bad for 6 hours of full sun. Yeah, I know, it goeth before the fall, but if you got it, flaunt it;O) Seems like it is taking forever to figure out the best way to garden (a little over 600 sq. ft.) on my little plot of land, on a north facing slope, under trees. Fortunately, the road is just up the hill from me, and allows me sunlight.
I am guessing that in the long term organic horticulture has only a mild effect in storage. If you have 10% organic material in your soil you are sequestering more carbon than if you have 1% but it isn't going to be a big carbon sink. Assuming that you can still feed the numbers required. OTOH if you don't use all the chemferts that require energy to manufacture then you are saving some at that end.
improving soil is
This can only be answered properly by careful numeric modelling but I don't have a reference for it. My guess is that it won't be so valuable. However if combined with other methods such as forest re-planting and organic pasture management we might make some progress. Regarding the latter, I have seen studies that say that pastures (as opposed to crops) can store significant carbon. To do this you need to grass-feed your animals instead of ripping out the pastures to grow corn to feed them in lots.
I think that this would be possible but the big question is what would be the energy cost and financial cost to do it.
Regardless of sequestration there is no mid-term solution unless we stop burning fossil fuel at such a rate. We must decide to do this as a species, the limits of availability will make the decision for us in respect of oil quite soon but there is enough coal left to send earth well into the greenhouse if we keep burning it at an increasing rate. And only one long-term solution: stop population growth.
Only to those not paying attention. My point about organic, before you launched into your unsupported attack on "organic", was the when you get organic, you get more nutrients into your diet. If the enhanced nutrition of "organic" kept you from getting sick, then that would be a good deal wouldn't it? There are an increasing number of studies showing enhanced levels of vitamins in organic produce. More over vitamins have only been recognized for about 100 years. Now there appears to be another class of compounds, flavonols , which are important to human health. We wondered from your field to point out that part of the benefit of growing organic was to eat healthier foods. Cheap food that lets you get sick isn't such a good deal. Or as they say about Americans, we are over fed and under nourished.
If you don't have my 9:46 AM post from today, I'll happily repost it for you.
Also in the 9:46 AM post
Long story short, charcoal can last 50,000 years, and it can have the added benefit of improving the fertility of the soil.
Yes. The Haber process produces greenhouse gases as a by-product and it is a factor in the overall energy economy as that natural gas could be used (for example) to generate electric power or to run cars. The process can also use other hydrocarbons or none at all.
The haber process can be run from hydrogen produced electrolytically which doesn't generate GHG if you get your electricity from renewable sources but that would increase the price of fertiliser at current renewable electricity prices.
usually when people talk to me they include words like sanctimonious, silly or immature. so you have me as confused as a church mouse in a cheese shop.
the usenet has changed a great deal over the years i have been reading and writing. lately i think things are improving...
you need to mark the citations quotes differently from your own words.
i cannot tell if the following remark is yours or the "authority" you are citing...
not an EPA approved use of that material! i am shocked at you Billywonkanobi. ( :) )
*ding ding!*
do you know that there are places where earth worms are not native and they are considered alien invasive species?
have you studied any forest floor ecologies?
...
...
ah yes, that's a helpful idea and i suspect people will be amending away. since it is a lighter material i may include some in my tulip bed topping soil mix.
still gotta do it. *sigh* i'm sensitive to smoke though that it would have to be a pretty well engineered device.
today's authority is sometimes wrong. i worked for 7 people who were authorities and they were a lost cause. and so i don't trust authorities blindly and find most popular works too light on rigor...
because of that i have been trying to get a hold of more studious works lately. i was reading a college level plant physiology textbook a few weeks ago and it ignored so many topics and instead focused on the pet topics of the various contributors.
don't get me wrong, it was a good book for me to read but it was very incomplete and i was afraid that many students who had this as their only plant physiology book would be missing so much.
now i am looking for other good reads, so recommend away and i will line some of them up and see what they have to offer.
if it's valid. ;)
only those you included, but many i did not follow because i was offline (as i am now).
tossing citations back and forth with no personal interpretation on your part isn't a conversation.
tell me when you cite a link what it means to you and how it is lived by you. otherwise you are a shadow boxer.
do you garden? how do you garden? what do you garden?
I don't want to seem patronizing, so I'll just give you his bibliography.
CHAPTER 1: THE PLANT: CORN'S CONQUEST In addition to the printed sources below, I learned a great deal about the natural and social history of Zea mays from my conversations with Ricardo Salvador at Iowa State
formatting link
and Ignacio Chapela at the University of California at Berkeley. Ignacio introduced me to his colleague Todd Dawson, who not only helped me understand what a C-4 plant is, but generously tested various foods and hair samples for corn content using his department's mass spectrometer.
The two indispensable books on the history of corn are:
Fussell, Betty The Story of Corn (New York: Knopf, 1994). Columbus's quote on corn is on page 17. The statistics on wheat versus corn consumption are on page 215.
Warman, Arturo. Corn & Capitalism: How a Botanical Bastard Grew to Global Dominance. Trans. Nancy L. Westrate (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). Other helpful works touching on the history of corn include:
Anderson, Edgar. Plants, Man and Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952).
Crosby, Alfred W Germs, Seeds & Animals: Studies in Ecological History (Armonk, NY: . M. E. Sharpe, 1994).
????. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe,
900-1900 (Cam- bridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel (New York: W W Norton, 1997).
Eisenberg, Evan. The Ecology of Eden (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998). Very good on the coevolutionary relationship of grasses and humankind.
Iltis, Hugh H. "FromTeosinte to Maize: The Catastrophic Sexual Mutation," Science 222, no. 4626 (November 25, 1983).
Mann, Charles C. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005). Excellent on the evolutionary origins of the plant and pre-Columbian maize agriculture.
Nabhan, G. P. Enduring Seeds: Native American Agriculture and Wild Plant Conservation (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989).
Rifkin, Jeremy. Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture (New York: Plume, 19 93). The quote from General Sheridan is on page 78.
Sargent, Frederick. Corn Plants: Their Uses and Ways of Life (Boston: Houghton Mifnin,1901). '
Wallace, H. A., and E. N. Bressman. Corn and Corn Growing (New York: JohnWiley &Sons, 1949).
Weatherford, Jack. Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World (New York: Crown, 1988).
Will, George F., and George E. Hyde. Corn Among the Indians of the Upper Missouri (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1917).
Great, so to counter balance lack of rigor, you offer none? What do you use to justify your beliefs on up and down, good and bad, right or wrong?
You were reading an anthology by various authors writing about subjects that they supposedly would know the most?
You expected all of plant physiology in one book? Kinda makes you wonder what the other 40 units were all about.
You argue, but give no supporting authority: divine revelation, inspired intuition, bull shit? Who knows? You offer no argument for your denigration of organic food.
Since we haven't done the original work, it's my authorities against your authorities.
lame
I thought we were talking about the irrelevance of organic food. Why are you wandering off, or are you jut trying to change the subject?
oh c'mon, lighten up a little Billy, i laughed when you got out the clover tiara and really enjoyed the grass skirt shimmy.
i said i could not tell... i think " is a good symbol to use around texts from others...
...
the words "good soil" were used in reference to "50 worms per sq ft". not all good soil contains worms. in some places they are invasive and destructive.
any study of the history of science is rigor enough for the basic arguement i've made here.
it was a textbook called _Plant Physiology_ so i expected a broad overview of plant physiology, but they missed a lot of stuff that should be in a basic PP book.
i'm glad it was detailed as it was in some parts, but it completely ignored many basic plant phenomena. so i need to find some other text that gets those covered.
i've quoted it below so you know which text i'm speaking of.
a college level text should have a broad overview of all aspects of plant physiology even if there is not depth of coverage of some areas it should at least be mentioned and the basics outlined.
here i will give you a link and see if you agree.
formatting link
i think the following is a more balanced work:
formatting link
but i haven't read it yet. i'm putting it on my request list at the library today.
still that looks to be also set up for talking about only certain kinds of plants and my interests are in other forms which don't seem to be covered by either of these books. i'm going to have to keep looking...
ah, much better:
formatting link
that's on my list now. :) i think i'll bump this ahead of the last since i've already been through most of that already.
denigration? no, no way, healthy skepticism towards the new priesthood yes.
hold it, original work would mean what here? nutritional studies which include liver function tests? long term liver cancer rates vs life span increases? (which is probably available but not really accurate enough because it's not pre-agrichem).
no, i just want to see if you live what you quote.
irrelevance? i don't think i've ever said that organic gardening is irrelevant, what i have said is that it's wise to keep some healthy skepticism.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.