Earth...

[Farm1]

[Billy]

You must be one of those touchy, feely environmentalists.

Welcome aboard.

[songbird]

Farm1 wrote: ...

*waves hello!* :)

hi there! how has your season been?

songbird

[Farm1]

:-)) What on earth do you mean Billy? Where I live, even the most conservative elements in my country have been discussing issues such as land degradation and climate change for years. We've been waiting for the majority of USians to finally see the light and climb aboard.

[Farm1]

Greeting bird from this side of the planet.

Not brilliant. It's been very wet and we didn't get the sort of heat we need to bring on 'the great tomato glut'. I've had enough veg for eating and given to friends and family, but not enough to store for later in the winter. AND, I didn't even get one single eggplant!!! Just not enough heat. I did manage to incubate a few eggs though and now have 2 roosters to replace the gorgeous young fellow I lost last November. My poor chooks nealry drowned though given how much water was flowing through their pens - I can't recall a year with so much rain.

[Billy]

Best pull up a chair then :O( Nutters here don't use contraception, and there seem to be more of them every day. We are 5% ofthe world's population, and use 25% of the worlds oil. The nutters here don't see the problem, and the government here pays the oil companies to drill for more oil to sell on the world market. Good luck to us all.

[Farm1]

We've been regularly watching a TV show called 'American Pickers' and part of the charm of this show for us is the countryside they travel through. So far we've seen the 2 chaps travel in Tenn., Idaho, Iowa, Ken., Ill., and Wisc., (sorry if the abbreviations aren't right) and we are just astonished at how rich and lush the background countryside is. If they were doing simialar driving here and were that far from the sea, they'd have coveres some lush country but a hell of a lot of it would be sub-marginal country.

When your country hits the wall with droughts in large slabs of that lush country, then manybe your conservatives will also begin to see the light. Here it was our farmers who started the push because they lived with land degradation and you know how conservative they are politically and socially.

[songbird]

Farm1 wrote: ...

the entire desert southwest is living on the edge of water deprivation. this past winter did not give them much snow pack so this year irrigation water will be limited to southern California (where much produce is grown).

the states you mention are mostly eastern (other than Idaho) or borderline prairie. those are rich habitats that get enough rain to be ok without irrigation most seasons. they do get periods of drought, but not often.

we are fortunate here for water in the mid- west. this small chunk of property has a two ditches through it that run almost constantly. the water table is high. i also try to capture most of the heavy rainfall runoff that i can to let it soak in. i figure it is better to recharge the groundwater and well here via as many means as possible otherwise we might end up with salt water like many of the surrounding neighbors (old seabed here with layers of salt and coal below).

i have yet to see much change in the way of farmers here respecting water quality. i wish i could say different.

songbird

[songbird]

:)

oh arg!

i'm glad you got your new fellas, were they from the previous rooster via the hens or did you get fertilized eggs from someone else?

tough luck on the eggplant, do you usually have a large harvest of it?

new for me this season will be okra. i have seeds and am waiting for certain warmth well past the last frost date.

and now heading to the rainy winter season too? or do things normally dry out there in the winter?

songbird

[Bill Rose]

The southern Sierra Nevadas have about a third of their normal snow pack, and over all, from north to south the snow pack is less than half of normal. Fortunately, for those of us in northern California, although we've only had 2/3 of normal rainfall, our reservoirs are full. We shouldn't have water rationing, just the relentless annual increase in water rates.

Their (our) major problem in the Mid-West is erosion, wind and rain which carry away the topsoil, which is getting thinner every year. Our modern ways of farming (chemical fertilizers), reduce the numbers of micro-organisms in the soil. These micro-organisms cause the soil to bind together, and keep it from flying away. (Think "Dust Bowl") The states of South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas depend on water from the Ogallaha aquifere. About

27 percent of the irrigated land in the United States overlies this aquifer system, which yields about 30 percent of the nation's ground water used for irrigation. In addition, the aquifer system provides drinking water to 82 percent of the people who live within the aquifer boundary. It's level is droping, but not a a precipitous rate, but it is under constant attack. First they wanted to put a nuclear fuel disposal site over it, and more recently they want to run a pipeline from Canada to Huston to pump tar sand oil through, which will be sold on the world market, and which, when used and converted into CO2, will help accelerate Global Climate Change.

Definitely, someone let the dogs in.

[Farm1]

I did manage to incubate a few eggs though and now have 2 roosters to

After he fell of his perch (literally) I saved the eggs for the next few days and incubated them using a Hovabator borrowed form a neighbour. I set it up in our dining room and I must say given how seldon we use tht room, it was probably a more productive use than that room has had for years.

tough luck on the eggplant, do you usually have a

No, we don't ever have a large harvest of them because we're somewhat marginal climate wide. I dont' ever plant more than a few plants as I'm too mean to give them the space. We usually manage to get a few of the smaller ones but I couldn't even manage to get them this year.

Good luck with them. IIRC I think David H-S mentioned growing some of them last year

We had no frosts but just not enough heat. No long stretches of extended heat but just a few short sharp days of warmth and then back to coolish and rain.

Our rain is usually fairly evenly distributed throughout the year but this year has been very different to normal. Long range forecasters are saying it should be about average rain, but I have no idea how good their predictions are.

[songbird]

...

do you ever use black plastic around them?

he's quite a ways away from where i am at, yet i should be ok, my brother grows them at his place a bit further north than here and has less than full sun, still gets results.

that would be a very very unusual summer here, akin to one that would result from a major volcanic eruption or the sun being masked from space...

heh, well, ... :)

songbird