Western WA Restoration

IINTERCOMMUNITY MASS TRANSIT WESTERN WASHINGTON

2009-04-23T11:54:00.001-07:00

A QUICK REVIEW OF CURRENT INTER-COMMUNITY PUBLIC MASS TRANSIT IN WESTERN WASHINGTON

TABLE OF CONTENTS
A) LINKS TO INTER-COMMUNITY MASS TRANSIT WESTERN WASHINGTON
B) INTRODUCTION
C) INEFFICIENCY OF CURRENT WESTWASH INTER-COMMUNITY MASS TRANSIT
D)THE CARMA OF CAR CULTURE
E) OBJECTIONS TO MORE MASS TRANSIT ARE NOT WELL FOUNDED
F) EXAMPLES OF CURRENT MASS TRANSIT POSSIBILITIES WESTERN WASH
G) SAN JUAN ISLANDS-ANACORTES-MT.VERNON-BELLINGHAM-SEATTLE
H) BAINBRIDGE ISLAND TO THE NORTH OLYMPIC PENINSULA
I) MISC.WESTERN WASH INTER-COMMUNITY MASS TRANSIT CONNECTIONS
J) INEXPENSIVE SEA-TAC AIRPORT EXPRESS BUS TO DOWNTOWN SEATTLE
K) THE POSSIBILITIES OF FUTURE WESTERN WASHINGTON MASS TRANSIT

A) LINKS TO INTER-COMMUNITY MASS TRANSIT WESTERN WASHINGTON
In trying to make this blog post as effective as possible, I am first embedding links to relevant mass transit links in Western Washington. This is not a complete list, but users can move through these links to discover specific routes that suit themselves. It's helpful to go to the various websites linked here and plan out routes all at once, matching up connections for adjacent county routes and times, especially if one has a trip of 50 miles or more. Travelers may take various busses linking many rural routes in western Washington, with the added bonuses of generally being inexpensive, and many of these bus lines have racks for bicycles.

The greatest number of connecting routes occur during commuter times, which are either early morning or late afternoon. Saturday routes are sketchy at best and Sunday or holiday through-connections are rare at best. These tips are especially important to consider before planning airline connections in either way. It is important for travelers to study current schedules and plan their routes themselves. The first links here in Section A are to clearinghouses of mass transit info. After that, links are arranged in section B with carriers going from north to south in the I-5 corridor from Canada to the Oregon Border. In section C, carriers are listed from North or south on the Olympic peninsula from the North Olympic peninsula down to the Oregon border. A traveler can take public mass transit all the way from Blaine at the Canadian border all the way down to Portland.

Occasionally I have listed numbers in parentheses in some locations. These numbers refer to bus route numbers that service the specific locations mentioned. If I have had experience with the carrier, I am also leaving occasional short comments on their service.

I realize that I have left out some private carriers in this area, and perhaps some other public transit carriers. Mass transit options are frequently in flux, and diligent research could turn up resources not listed here. If one of these links doesn't work, please contact me and I will try and correct it if possible.

SECTION A: MASS TRANSIT CLEARINGHOUSES
*transportation for different counties in Washington:

http://www.publictransportation.org/systems/state.asp?state=WA
* Washington State Dept of transportation: www.wsdot.wa.gov/choices/bus.htm

* Washington State Ferry system : www.wsdot.wa.gov/ferries/ Washington State ferries offer vehicle and passenger service throughout Puget Sound. The ferry fleet is becoming aged and losing various boats at the same time it is meeting funding challenges to maintain historical service. At the time of writing this, 2009 will be the last year of the ferry connecting Anacortes with Victoria BC, a popular, inexpensive and scenic ferry run to connect mainland western Washington with Vancouver Island. Some ferries have ben decommissioned within the San Juan Islands, the Port Townsend-Keystone (vehicles are advised to inquire about reservations) run, and other places in South Sound. The ferries generally carry vehicles, and the San Juan Island ferry runs allow foot passengers with kayaks (extra cost, check in advance). On some runs, fares increase in the tourist season from May to September, and even more so during specific periods (Wed-Sat+-) during tourist season. Inexpensive to moderate costs.

*Amtrak. Our Local version of Amtrak serves the Area from Vancouver Canada down to Eugene Oregon. After leaving Vancouver it makes stops in Richmond and Surrey BC and Bellingham Mt Vernon, Everett, Edmonds, Seattle, Tacoma, Olympia, Centralia, Longview, and Vancouver Washington then heads into Oregon. Check carefully about ticket purchasing as tickets are not always available. Rail would be the most environmentally sound way to link Western Washington communities but at this time Amtrak service is too infrequent and/or expensive to be used by most inter-community foot passengers. Locally, Amtrak is usually better suited for interstate travel than intercommunity travel. Amtrak Cascades: www.amtrakcascades.com

SECTION B: MASS TRANSIT CARRIERS NORTH TO SOUTH, I-5 CORRIDOR

* Whatcom county (at Canadian border): Whatcom Transportation Authority: www.ridewta..com/ Although centered in Bellingham, WTA has busses throughout the county and very inexpensive commuter transit busses down to Mount Vernon in Skagit County. Inexpensive.

*BELLAIR AIRPORTER SHUTTLE: www.airporter.com Bellair is a private shuttle service primarily running the I-5 corridor from Blaine near the Canadian border through Bellingham to Sea-Tac airport. It has a branch line connecting with the San Juan Islands ferry terminal west of Anacortes. Bellair's busses are short busses, fast, comfortable, making few stops, and offering some late night service after some public transit have ceased. Bellair caters to Credit card passengers who make reservations, the busses reach passenger limits at times and the drivers often have very limited cash on hand to make change. Moderately expensive.

* Skagit county, borders Whatcom county. SKAGIT TRANSIT: http://skat.org The SKAT system serves the mainland of Eastern Puget Sound primarily within the heart of Skagit County but also has busses to Bellingham (80X), Everett (90X), LaConner, Anacortes (513), ferry landing at San Juan Islands (410) and Concrete. Skagit Station (with indoor lobby near downtown Mt. Vernon) also services busses to Camano Island (411C)and Oak Harbor (411W) in Island County. Inexpensive.

*San Juan County public transit within the San Juan Islands consists mostly of Washington State ferries. Foot passengers, (not cars) have been allowed to ride the ferries for free once within the islands (foot passengers pay to take ferries TO the islands). Of the limited land transportation within the Islands, Orcas Island has ORCAS ISLAND SHUTTLE: www.orcasislandshuttle.com Orcas Island Shuttle, which serves Orcas Island in the San Juans, has both a 'public bus' with schedule service and vehicles for charter . The public bus runs end of May until mid September. For more info please see San Juan Island heading later in this article. Moderate cost. San Juan Island has bus service that runs may to September, moderate cost, www.sanjuantransit.com

*Island County borders Skagit County on the Southwest. ISLAND TRANSIT: www.islandtransit.org serves Whidbey and Camano Islands, connecting with busses or ferries to Anacortes, Mount Vernon, Everett and Pot Townsend. Island Transit has one of the more admirable transit missions in Western Washington. It is free to ride, as voters within the county have chosen to fund it by 60 cents on every hundred dollars of sales tax collected within the County. Besides regular and special service routes throughout Whidbey Island, some routes also serve the Keystone ferry to Port Townsend (#6), the Clinton ferry to Mulkiteo(near Everett) (#7), between Whidbey and Mount Vernon (#411W), connecting with busses to Anacortes (411W), and between Camano Island and Mount Vernon (411C). Free.

*Snohomish County borders Skagit County on the South and Island County on the East. www.communitytransit.org Community Transit has busses from Stanwood in the Northwest to Granite Falls and Monroe on the east, to Bellevue and Seattle on the South, to Mulkiteo and Edmonds ferries on the west. The main terminal in Everett has many bus and train connections, with a large indoor lobby. Frequent service to Seattle runs most hours of the day. Frequent sand

*The city of Everett is also served by Everett Transit: www.everetttransit.org

* A multi county transit carrier extending from Snohomish County to Pierce County is
SOUND TRANSIT: www.soundtransit.org Sound Transit is most well known for the SOUNDER TRAIN , a commuter/light rail service that presently extends from Everett through Seattle down to Tacoma. Sound Transit links many eastside Puget Sound communities in the central region of Snohomish, King and Pierce Counties. It offers express busses between Everett and Seattle (510,513) Tacoma and the U District in Seattle (586), between Seattle and Woodinville (522), Everett/Lynwood and Bellevue (532,535) and others. In combination with Amtrak, trains run about 1 to 3 times northbound or southbound in early morning or 1-3 times in late afternoon early evening. See also Amtrak. Also, hold on to your ticket (usually offered by vending machine) as it may be good on connecting busses. Moderately inexpensive.

*King County is South of Snohomish County, with Seattle being its center. The main public transit carrier, King County Metro, http://transit.metrokc.gov is colloquially known as Metro.
Metro covers the metro area of King County and has numerous bus connections with other counties. It not only has bus and van lines but also light rail (covered separately in the rail section). Of special note for intercommunity travelers are the express bus (194) and Milk Run Bus (174) to Seat-Tac airport, the plentiful busses that service ferries from downtown Seattle to Bremerton, Bainbridge Island, and Vashon Island. Intercommunity travelers with more than one piece of luggage are advised to travel on non-rush hour busses if possible. Free (except between zones) transfers (upon request) permit bus journey to continue on other busses within the County. Bus schedules can often vary wildly during peak transit times. No main station, with most busses going through downtown Seattle on 1^st to 4^th avenues or the Bus tunnel accessed from street level every few downtown blocks from third avenue. Also see Sound Transit.
*Pierce County is the county south of King County, with its main town being Tacoma, and the main transit agency being PIERCE TRANSIT: www.piercetransit.org Has express busses to Seattle and Olympia. Inexpensive.

*Thurston County is South of Pierce County with Olympia being its biggest town. Th main carrier is Intercity Transit: www.intercity.com/ It has bus connections to Tacoma, Olympia, Tumwater, Shelton and towards Centralia and Chehalis.

*Lewis County is south of Thurston County and has two main towns, Centralia and Chehalis, that give the County's transit its name, Twin transit : www4.localaccess.com/twintransit/index.htm It connects with Olympia on the north and communities south towards Portland

*Lower Columbia transit has connections to Vancouver WA and Longview in the south and has a line as far north as Tumwater near Olympia. The Agency is called the Lower Columbia Action Council: www.lowercolumbiacap.org/Transportation%20Schedule.htm

*Clark County borders the Oregon Border and is heavily linked with Portland through C-Tran: www.c-tran.com/

SECTION C: MASS TRANSIT WEST SIDE OF PUGET SOUND FROM NORTH OLYMPIC PENINSULA SOUTH TOWARDS OREGON

*Private ferries from Vancouver Island to Olympic Peninsula: Black Ball Transport (passengers and vehicles) runs the 'Coho' ferry between Victoria BC and Port Angeles as does the Victoria Express (passengers only): www.northolympic.com/ferry/

CLALLAM TRANSIT: www.clallamtransit.com This system serves the North End of the Olympic Peninsula. Clallam transit on the east side connects with Jefferson County busses at Sequim (40) and another to Diamond Point (52). On the west end it has busses that go to Joyce (10), Neah Bay(16), Forks (14) and La Push (15). Clallam's main terminal (shelter and parking lot) in downtown Port Angeles is next to ferries going to Victoria, Canada. Inexpensive

JEFFERSON TRANSIT: www.jeffersontransit.com Jefferson County primarily serves the Northeast end of the Olympic Peninsula, but also is affiliated with West Jefferson Transit. Jefferson Transit, primarily based within Port Townsend, goes west to Sequim (Sequim Shuttle #40) to link with Clallam transit, serves a bus stop at the Washington State Ferry from Port Townsend to Keystone on Whidbey Island, has south bound connections to Quilcene which connect with lines to Shelton and Olympia, goes (bus #7) across the Hood Canal Bridge to connect at Pouslbo with Bainbridge Island links. Inexpensive.

*KITSAP TRANSIT: www.kitsaptransit.org Kitsap Transit primarily serves the Kitsap peninsula which is south of Jefferson transit and West/Northwest of Bainbridge Island. It has a bus #90 that links Bainbridge Island ferry dock with busses to Port Townsend and Sequim at Poulsbo.
Kitsap also runs transit lines down through Poulsbo to Bremerton.

*Mason County is south of Jefferson County on the west side of Hood Canal. Its transit system, www.masontransit.org/ connects with Jefferson Transit (on the north) at Brinnon, and also connects with Shelton, Olympia, Bremerton and Belfair.

*Grays Harbor County which is on the south/ southwest end of the Olympic Peninsula has Grays Harbor Transit: www.ghtransit.com/ which serves Aberdeen, Hoquiam and Quinault

For those who either provide or use existing mass transit locally, thanks much. Whenever I need to get over my frustration of getting from place to place locally, I remember how long it would have taken in the days of Lewis and Clark to complete the same travels.

B) INTRODUCTION
Even though we have a basic inter-community mass transportation infrastructure in Western Washington, we could greatly improve it if we shifted more public investments away from the car culture and towards more frequent and better linked public mass transit. The public funding problems of maintaining our transportation systems, including our state ferry lines, become more challenging each spring when the state legislature decides how to distribute transportation dollars for upcoming funding cycles. Maintaining our highways and ferry fleet is increasingly more expensive in fuel costs, construction costs, labor costs, carbon footprint costs, pollution costs and the out-of-pocket costs to the riding public. And yet with all of these costs, we have yet to make inter-community transportation significantly more efficient during these times when we need to be more careful with managing these costs.

C) INEFFICIENCY OF CURRENT WESTWASH INTER-COMMUNITY MASS TRANSIT
To illustrate this inefficiency of inter-community transportation in Puget Sound, take the typical example of a simple trip I took last summer in Western Washington. I needed to travel between Friday Harbor in the San Juans and Port Angeles on the Olympic Peninsula. As the crow flies, this distance is about 70 miles. Some may wonder why I didn't fly, take the private cruise boat from Friday Harbor to Port Townsend, take private mass transit down through Seattle connecting with more private transit to Port Angeles or drive my own vehicle. I considered all of these. Except for driving my own vehicle, I discovered that the costs of using these other transport means averaged 10 times the expense of using the sketchy public mass transit available, that in some cases I would be too limited in the baggage I could take or that some of these connections wouldn't get me through in time anyway. As for driving, yes I do have my own vehicle, and I have driven this route before.

But this time, for several reasons, I didn't drive. My first reason for selecting public mass transit was that after performing thorough research I thought I might be able to complete travel in one day between these two points. Theoretically my plan of consecutive public mass transit connections would have linked up properly, if all of the busses had nearly on time. Right. These linkage possibilities (between different forms of public transit) in this travel corridor were apparently not intentionally created by any bureaucracy, as there were very long waits between many connections. But I thought I would give it a try. My second reason for choosing mass transit is that as anyone knows who travels either on the San Juan/Anacortes ferry run or the Keystone/Port Townsend ferry run , car travel itself can be delayed by many hours at these departure terminals because of long vehicle lines. Third, as someone who wants to act on their principles, I try and take mass transit whenever possible. I want to lessen my personal dependence on oil (foreign or domestic) and also lessen my carbon footprint.

Although this was the height of the summer tourist season in these towns whose economies are heavily dependent on tourism, I was unable to complete this journey in a single day using mass transit. In fact, it took me 10 hours to travel solely between Friday Harbor and Port Townsend, a distance of only about 30 miles as the crow flies. I was unable to complete the last leg of my destination, as I arrived too late in Port Townsend to catch the last public transit bus of the day to Port Angeles.

All of these communities are served by mass transit, but are too much of a hodgepodge of connections, too often making reasonable inter-community mass transit links untenable. This particular sunny calm summer morning I boarded the 8am Washington State ferry leaving Friday Harbor bound for Anacortes. I arrived at Anacortes ferry landing a little after 10 a.m. At the Anacortes ferry landing bus stop, I soon encountered an arriving driver on the single private mass transit carrier that connects this ferry with local communities. I asked her if her private transit company connects with the Keystone Ferry dock. She responded that her company used to have a run from this Anacortes ferry landing to the Whidbey Island Keystone ferry landing (ferry here goes to Port Townsend), but that run had been canceled a few years earlier. After picking up a few passengers bound elsewhere, her fifteen- passenger bus drove away without me. If I wanted to use multi passenger transit to continue my trip I would either need to wait for public mass transit or hitchhike.

I decided to wait for the public mass transit to continue my journey. By mid-afternoon I had taken a SKAT (Skagit County) (410 ) bus to March Point (several miles east of Anacortes) and then I linked with a succession (#411W, #6) of Island County busses through Oak Harbor and arrived at the Keystone Ferry landing about 5 p.m. I caught the next ferry to Port Townsend, only to find that my 6 p.m. arrival in P.T. was too late for the last bus connecting to Port Angeles for the day. I was a little more fortunate than tourists (or many local travelers like me), as I had friends in the area. One such friend drove from Port Angeles and we drove back together to Port Angeles.

(I should point out that I was able to make my return trip from Port Angeles to the San Juans in one day using public mass transit (including ferries). I left Port Angeles at about 6 am and arrived on Orcas Island after 6 pm.)

This San Juan Islands/North Olympic Peninsula transit story is not the only example of poor inter-community transit connections in North Sound. For example, if I want to go from San Juan Island to Seattle, an 8 am Friday Harbor departure would finally get me to Seattle about 6pm. If I were to leave Anacortes Ferry dock after 4:15 pm, I wouldn't be able to get to Seattle that day, using public mass transit. I wouldn't be able to complete the trip anytime on the weekend or holiday using public mass transit.

Sometimes in Western Washington we pride ourselves on being economically resilient, politically admirable, and environmentally conscious. But often we have local infrastructure issues that do not demonstrate such conscientiousness. Today, many of us are concerned about the recent climbs in fuel costs, global warming, pollution, repercussions of dependence on foreign oil, the inefficiencies of domestic vehicle manufacturers, and the controversy over saving these manufacturing jobs and related industries. But do we actually believe that we will arrive at adequate transportation solutions to these problems by simply making changes in the way our cars or built or powered? Steps in changing our car culture changes are worthy, but shouldn't we also make significant strides with mass transit to get us where we want to go?

D) THE CARMA OF CAR CULTURE
In the last 100 years of American society, car culture has been at odds with mass transit as a form of transportation. According to the book "Twentieth Century Sprawl, Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape" the author Owen D. Gutfreund documents how an alliance of automobile interests turned the American transportation system away from mass transit and towards automobile culture. He explains how as early as the 1920s that there was much higher mass transit use than we have today. This alliance of automobile interests has been led by the AAA (Automobile Association of America) and composed also of car manufacturers, developers, main street businesses, oil companies, and highway construction companies who have poured money into the banks of politicians who practically dismantled existing mass transit systems and replaced them with our transportation infrastructure dependent on the auto.

Even when mass transit does exist, lobbyists and politicians have often oriented it towards private interests and not towards the public's benefit. Our own Washington State Constitution forbids public transit companies from enacting inter-community mass transit unless the affected communities specifically vote on enacting it. The reason this law was passed was so that private transit carriers would face less or no competition. But this law does not always benefit the public.

For example, because of this law, Skagit County did not have any mass transit links between Mt
Vernon and either Bellingham or Everett until 2006, and foot travelers had very limited options with private carriers. Even today SKAT cannot serve some outlying communities in Skagit County that have won elections in favor of mass transit service. Voters in these specific communities cannot have mass transit because intermediary Skagit communities (between them and voter- approved bus lines) have not voted to permit mass transit through them. Two results of this law are very high out-of-pocket costs to the user, the subsequent poor service in both times and areas covered, and the other adverse impacts mentioned earlier.

In Gutfreund's book he shows time and again that the people who would most benefit by more public transit are also the ones who have been paying much more than their share for the car culture orientation of highways and transportation infrastructure. These taxpayers are paying for those who most benefit by a sprawl and a car-dependent culture. The result is that it costs much more for all of us to move from place to place. In Western Washington, our Public Mass transit is rarely adequate for commuters to get back and forth to work. Private carrier transit becomes too expensive for many people to afford, especially on a regular basis. The result is that many of us are impelled to buy and maintain our own vehicles, with the consequent much higher economic, ecological and political footprints such a need engenders. Those who do drive spend significant income not only on vehicles and their maintenance but also insurance, fuel costs, much wasted time in traffic congestion of single drive vehicles and the alienation from fellow travelers occasionally radically exposed in the form of road rage.

Even the biggest metropolis in Puget Sound, Seattle, is woefully under served. One newcomer to Seattle recently wrote (on an internet blog about mass transit) of how back in Chicago he could use Chicago's extensive convenient public transit system and cabs to get easily from place to place and spend $150/ month to do so. The person now lives in Seattle with its poor mass transit system, cannot get around enough without a car and now needs to spends $500 a month on auto costs, and they don't drive much.

E) OBJECTIONS TO MORE PUBLIC MASS TRANSIT ARE NOT WELL FOUNDED
Some may object to public mass transit as they claim that this is a financial burden on all, even those who don't use it but use their own vehicles. Obviously, such positions ignore that the excessive pollution and excessive global warming caused by private vehicles with few or single passengers is an externalized cost that the general public must bear. Instead, we need to ask ourselves, do we as a society really want to cater to travel means that contribute more to pollution and global warming? Some may object to mass transit making more affordable opportunities for people to access attractive travel destinations, like the San Juans, or regional beaches or parks; they believe there to be more economic benefits by catering to people who fly or drive instead of those who use mass transit. But again, is public access to attractive destinations to be limited to those whose activities are not as environmentally friendly as we need them to be? Finally, the people who object to funding mass transit are ignoring that the highways that they drive their private vehicles on were disproportionately funded by people who don't have private vehicles.

F) EXAMPLES OF CURRENT INTER-COMMUNITY MASS TRANSIT POSSIBILITIES IN WESTERN WASHINGTON
Many people wish that they could use more public transit but such transit simply isn't available in North Sound to induce more people to abandon their person vehicles. I have talked with many people in the San Juans, the Olympic Peninsula, in the Skagit Valley, in King and Snohomish County and other places who would use public mass transit much more if it were more efficient. Yes, there are private carriers who go in between these communities but their expensive and convoluted payment systems, limited stopping places, and occasionally limited passenger space do not make them attractive to many travelers, who then decide its easier to drive themselves or forego the travel altogether.

For those who do want to use mass transit, especially public, to travel in between communities in North Sound, here are some experiences I can speak of circa the mid to late 2000 decade. Due to seasons and economic pressures the information presented here is subject to change at most any time.

G) SAN JUAN ISLANDS-ANACORTES-MT.VERNON-BELLINGHAM-SEATTLE
Since I have frequently mentioned the San Juan and connections out of Anacortes, I will start there. Within the San Juans, it has been a policy for some time that foot passengers once within the islands can ride the ferries for free (Passengers need to pay ferry fares to arrive in the San Juans). Terrestrial mass transit within the islands occurs more often in the summer than in the winter, but sometimes is worth considering. For example, the last few summers (about Memorial day to mid September) a small bus (Orcas Island Shuttle) leaves the Orcas Island ferry dock numerous times (about every 3 hours) daily and circles the island in a trip that takes a couple hours. For a reasonable fare ($5, 2007), passengers can both see much of the island or stop at various places and continue their trip later in the day ($10 all day fare, 2007) . The company also has taxis and their fleet of vehicles can also be chartered.

Both drivers and foot travelers wanting to connect with the San Juan Islands via ferries often find the connections daunting to complete in reasonable time unless they plan their travels carefully. Apparently the Washington State ferries are the biggest tourist attraction in the state, and the vast majority of travelers between the Islands and the Mainland use the ferries instead of flying or using private boats. Vehicle traffic is often extremely congested on these ferries, especially in the summer, one significant cause being the very poor mass transit service to and from the ferry terminals, especially out of the Anacortes ferry dock. Obviously, neither San Juan County or the state has invested much in improving mass transit service out of the Anacortes ferry landing. Instead, the ferries, the ferry parking areas, the and even the San Juan Islands themselves are often congested, especially during the tourist season and shoulder season weekends. This is not simply an inconvenience, the resultant excessive vehicle pollution is not always a dormant hazard danger to the Island's fragile marine ecosystem. Skagit County has gamely provides some connections to this ferry link with the San Juans, but cannot afford regular service throughout the day or on weekends. Unfortunately, driving ones own vehicle is too often the option travelers use to access the San Juan Islands. Foot travelers find very limited inexpensive opportunities to travel between the Islands and mainland communities.

For those who arrive at the Anacortes ferry landing and want to continue travel on public inter-community transit to either Mt Vernon or Seattle, they can do it but need to plan carefully. For example, even if a person arrives at Anacortes ferry landing on the earliest ferry, they will not be able to arrive in Seattle before 6 pm. If they want to get to Bellingham instead, there is a single theoretical chance they can arrive their before late afternoon. The single chance is if the 6 am ferry out of Ferry Harbor arrives on time so that they can disembark and walk the 5 minutes up to the bus stop at Anacortes ferry landing. There is less than a 15 minute window here, so if the ferry is late in disembarking passengers at scheduled times the foot passenger will not arrive in Bellingham before late afternoon.

Realistically, at present, circa April 2009, foot passengers from the San Juan Islands who do want to make either Seattle or Bellingham connections are presently best advised to use ferries to arrive at Anacortes ferry by 1 pm, weekdays only. (There is a broken transit link in the bus connections on weekends, as March Point to Mt Vernon has no bus service on weekends).. If weekday foot travelers arrive, later than 1:10 pm, there will be a significant chance that they will not be able to catch the second connecting busses (to Bellingham or Seattle) at Skagit Station on that day. If a person does make the weekday 1pm ferry landing bus, they can continue on to Bellingham arriving at about 5pm and the total cost for this trip is about $2 total. If the person wants to make Seattle connections the same 1 pm ferry arrival will get them to Seattle by 6-6:30pm (at the earliest) and cost about $7. Once travelers arrive at Skagit Station near downtown Mount Vernon, they can complete their mass transit connections departing up to about 6pm, if a person wants to spend a little extra time in Mount Vernon.

To begin public transit connections to either Seattle or Bellingham, catch SKAT bus #410 at the Anacortes Ferry Dock at about 1pm. It goes to March Point, near the refinery, where there are public bathrooms and a Park and Ride. From there the rider can catch whichever arrives first, either one of the free Whidbey Island Busses (ask driver) or pay 75 cents for the SKAT bus 513 leaving March Point about 2:15p.m. Both go to Skagit Station in Mt.. Vernon, both arriving about 3pm. SKAT Station, near downtown, has covered outdoor bus stops and an attractive indoor terminal lobby with seating, an info shop, Greyhound and Amtrak counters, and public bathrooms. There are more frequent busses North (80X) to Bellingham than there are south (90X) to Everett but both are very inexpensive.

Going south to Everett, the 90X bus leaves Mt Vernon about 3:30, 4:45 and 6pm, all arriving about an hour later at the Everett Station. Everett Station is huge, with lots of busses in all directions and a rail terminal for both Amtrak and the Seattle Sounder. If the rider wants to continue south on the I-5 corridor, one option is to catch either bus 510 or 513. These busses continue about every half hour until midnight and stop (on demand) in Seattle at 145^th and I-5 and also at 45^th and I-5. This bus has a final stop in downtown Seattle.

If a person wants to travel north to Bellingham they can ride from Skagit Station to Bellingham for 75 cents, the 80X busses departing 4:10, 5:10, and 6:10 .m. an arriving in Bellingham about 45 minutes later.

Although the San Juan ferry landing connections are hard, the I-5 corridor connections are a little better. The 80X bus to Bellingham has some Saturday service. Weekdays a person can catch a southbound 80X out of Bellingham station at 6:45 am and if on schedule they can make the 90X and Everett connections to arrive in Seattle before 10 am. Designed primarily as commuter services, the 80X and 90x busses also provide fairly good connections out of Mount Vernon's Skagit Station. One time I caught a 5:35 a.m. 90X southbound out of Mount Vernon in time to catch the Seattle Sounder train at Everett Station and arrive at the South end of Downtown Seattle by about 7:a.m. The train was more expensive than the bus, being $3.50, but on the Sounder I was able to plug in my computer, see shoreline scenery, and also use this fare ticket to transfer to a Seattle Metro bus to complete my journey to a Seattle neighborhood.
One of the reasons I write this is in hopes that other travelers will be inspired to use these inter-community connections and generate more demand and route linkages on these runs. Let us hope that we can have better morning, midday, evening and weekend connections on public mass transit service radiating out of the Anacortes ferry landing. The existing sets of these particular mass transit connection linkages are relatively new in service and need rider support.

Only since 2006 have these public mass transit linkages been available from out of Mt Vernon north to Bellingham and south to Everett. This new service has been augmented by start-up grants and when these grants vanish the continuation of theses services may depend on increasing ridership.

H) BAINBRIDGE ISLAND TO THE NORTH OLYMPIC PENINSULA
A better model for public transit inter-community connections is the one connecting the Bainbridge Island Ferry landing with the North Olympic Peninsula. I have ridden this both ways numerous times in the last 20 years and am surprised that more travelers don't use this set of mass transit links. An early morning weekday arrival at Bainbridge ferry landing can get the foot passenger to Port Angeles before 11 a.m. and an arrival in Forks before 3pm, with the entire cost less than $8 or $10. I have also used these connections to plan flights out of Sea-Tac airport for early weekday evening departures and for arriving back at Sea-Tac by early weekday afternoons. If bus connections were behind schedule, most bus drivers would call ahead upon request and my connecting bus's driver would usually wait (for a short time). A traveler between these destinations can look at relevant websites for the timing of connecting links and have 3 or 4 travel options weekdays. Again, like most Western Washington inter-community transit connections, there has been a linking bus that does not run on Sundays or holidays, and only twice on Saturdays.

To get from Bainbridge ferry landing to Port Townsend, Port Angeles, or other communities, the first link is to catch the Kitsap County transit number 90 bus at Bainbridge ferry landing. Ride this to Poulsbo and transfer there to the Jefferson County number 7 transit bus. This bus line will end in Port Townsend. To go to Sequim or Port Angeles instead, ride this number 7 bus to the 4-corners bus stop south of Port Townsend. Transfer there to the Jefferson County bus number 8 (Sequim). This bus ends in Sequim and connects with the Clallam County Sequim bus called the 40 Sequim shuttle. It ends at the Port Angeles transit center where other bus routes radiate from there.

I) MISC. WESTERN WASH MASS TRANSIT INTER-COMMUNITY CONNECTIONS
Many of these various county sponsored runs have more extensive connections, which are worth checking out. For instance in Clallam or Jefferson County service, one can go out to Forks, La Push or Neah Bay, all for very reasonable costs and often the busses detour into some unusual neighborhoods.. Skagit County has busses that go far up the Skagit valley , and Island transit makes many connections on Whidbey island in all directions, and the bus travel has been free. At some stations, like Skagit station, Bellingham Station, Everett Station and others the foot traveler can find shelter and facilities and connect with private bus lines, trains and light rail.

J) INEXPENSIVE SEA-TAC AIRPORT EXPRESS BUS TO DOWNTOWN SEATTLE
One link that anyone who flies out of Sea-Tac airport should know about is the Seattle Metro transit bus 194, which is an express bus which links downtown Seattle with Sea-Tac airport in about the same time it takes to drive, and during rush hours it can be faster, as it will travel on the transit lane which congested lanes of single vehicle drivers (except motorcycles) cannot use. This bus costs about $2 to $3, depending on time of day. Bus 194 runs most of the day, and in off hours a traveler can instead take the (milk run bus) number 174 which takes about twice as long as it makes many more stops .194, 174, and numerous other busses stop at the far south end of Sea-Tac airport terminal on the same level as baggage claim.

K) THE POSSIBILITIES OF FUTURE WESTERN WASHINGTON MASS TRANSIT
Mass transit between communities is often different than urban transit travel, as the longer, often rural travels seems to provide a better setting for more interaction between passengers and drivers, often making for a more enjoyable and educational ride. Riding these longer mass transit connections is a better way to enjoy the scenery than driving. The passenger can possibly read or do limited paperwork, so such travel means might be a more productive way to travel than driving in a passenger car. Finally, mass transit can offer excellent inexpensive ways to avoid parking at destinations along the way.

Those who do not have mass transit to their outlying community, and want it, will need to look into having a voter initiative to acquire it. Another course of action that hopefully our transportation leaders will take is to repeal the law which says that no mass transit is permitted between communities unless the citizens vote for it. Perhaps someday leadership and Western Washington communities will also realize the value in switching over to electric-powered transport vehicles, both terrestrial and marine. One of the things we need for our local ecosystem to recover is to implement less polluting and environmentally disruptive transportation systems. One idea is that our transit centers and ferry terminals may also be used as alternative energy collection centers, power storage and power disbursement centers to fleets of appropriate technology vehicles.

Today's crossroads in environmental, social and economic fields afford ample opportunity to explore and build on both new and old ideas. Instead of continuing battles between different ideologies, our time has come to implement ideas that work, wherever their source, and discard those that don't. Yes, it is time for amplifying more public inter-community mass transit and yes, future society can also benefit by tiered forms of private transportation, including mass transit. We can have express trains and busses for those who want to travel quickly and other levels of service for those that need either more stops or to carry different types or amounts of baggage. One already sees these travel options frequently in the developing world. In countries like Columbia, Brazil or Ecuador, a foot traveler can use either a bus (that travels quickly) that is much more luxurious than Greyhound buses or a person can use the chicken busses, those that stop frequently and where travelers can often haul bulky or rural items.

Western Washington would also be better served by using existing vehicle fleets and rearranging schedules so that outlying communities can be better serviced. For example, counties and communities can link up in master plans for completing inter-community links in reasonable fashion where no such plans now exist. One option to achieve this is to use the same vehicle to go to different communities (terrestrial or marine) on separate days of the week, or fill in certain time periods on certain days. Thus, the bus driver would be driving different routes on different days. This way, foot passengers throughout the area served can target these planned connecting route for the days and times to utilize much more efficient through transportation. For example, in my first example of getting from Friday Harbor to Port Angeles in one day, we could have 1 to 3 days a week when various busses and ferries link up their schedules so that instead of taking 2 days transportation a person could complete travel in half a day.

Another idea which would be great if the state were to coordinate would be to set up an intercommunity trip planner website. A person could enter in their starting point, destination and arrival time needed at the destination and the trip planner could show which are the best intercommunity bus linkages to put together to make this possible. Such a website could facilitate much greater usage of mass transit, less highway congestion, and less pollution.
Implementing an improved regional mass transit plan would not only have environmental but also social and economic benefits. Besides the obvious lessening of environmental pollution, increasing public inter-community mass transit will facilitate more social interaction between passengers than occurs in the isolation of individual vehicles. In this global information age, prosperity will follow those cultures that facilitate neteworking amonng their memberships. Economically, we could not only create jobs by building appropriate technology mass transit fleets and transit centers (including ferry terminals) but we could also keep much of the money local instead of losing our money unnecessarily to oil interests. Such endeavors would also have positive ripple effects throughout the manufacturing sectors of our economy.

Hopefully our leadership will seize today's opportunity to move all of us ahead in a bold initiative realizing a deepening commitment to intercommunity mass transit.

WEEDER GEESE AND VOLE CONTROL IN THE ORCHARD

2009-03-16T11:26:00.001-07:00

VOLE CONTROL AND THE WILD GOOSE CHASE TOWARDS WEEDER GEESE IN ORCHARDS AND PARKS

Once hand managing gardeners begin tackling food producing land sizes larger than about a quarter acre (11,000 square feet), they meet the Western Washington challenges of continual weed and grass controls. Before the non-mechanized era, animals were deployed in various capacities to manage grass in food-bearing gardens and orchards. Although remnants of this non-mechanized grass control are yet practiced in some foreign gardening traditions, this activity is rarely found in Western Washington today. The primary problems are that most of the animals are too demanding on the landscape, and mechanization costs appear to be less than managing animals are (actually, externalized costs of mechanization are infrequently calculated). Cows, horses and sheep not only need large areas to graze but they tend to eat or physically damage fruit producing trees and other crops. Pigs tear the ground up and goats prefer fruit trees to eating grass. Chickens do eat grass but they usually prefer eating insects, seeds, your veggies and fruit. Turkeys are not too fond of grass.. The one animal that seemed suitable for this situation appeared to be weeder geese.

VOLE DAMAGE TO THE ORCHARD
I was considering all of these animals for possible grass control solutions when I became acutely aware of a need for a non-mechanized mowing method in an orchard that I had initiated. This need for mowing became urgently apparent in the second September of this young orchard of about 100 trees, soon after I noticed that many of the trees were displaying redder leaves than usual. Upon strolling out to examine the trees more carefully, I found that about 30 of the trees had their life-sustaining bark totally girdled around their lower trunks and many other trees had partial girdling. Apprehension that these trees would die to the ground later proved true.

The culprit was one of our local species of voles, apparently Townsend's Voles. Voles are rodents larger than mice, and these ones made shallow tunnels in the ground or through the high grass. Usually they preferred eating green grass, but at summer's end when their preferred food had turned brown, they had turned their attention to knawing on fruit tree bark. Upon realizing this, I immediately embarked on damage control. I wrapped the trunks of all trees with ½ inch hardware cloth and cleaned out the high dry grass encircling the trees to help manage the trees better..

By the next spring, the severely damaged trees died to the ground. About half were to send up new growth from their rootstocks in subsequent years, and I was able to graft new scion wood onto them. The only consolation was that this regrowth was less work than starting all over with both new rootstocks and new grafts. New rootstock establishment would also need scion grafts of the eclectic fruit varieties I was experimenting with (which I would once again have to hunt down,) and the trees would also need the planting and the extra care that 1^st year young trees require.

With the voles apparent shift in diet, the young orchard had become under siege from both high and low knawers. My available orchard maintenance time was already devoted to establishing a perimenter deer fence higher than 6 feet. Early in the summer, deer had been jumping the 6 foot fence and quickly began whittling the young orchard down to stubs. I immediately covered the trees in bird netting and then added 6 foot diameter corrals of field fencing around each tree. This combination of strategies together cut down deer damage about 75%, but through the summer the trees were assuming unwanted shapes due to both the deer pruning and the bird netting wrapping. The holes in the bird netting also allowed tree twigs to grow through the netting, which if left unchecked became a tangled nightmare. So I embarked on building a higher stronger fence, but that perimeter solution had to be temporarily put on hold. Now I needed to shift to vole attention.

VARIOUS VOLE CONTROL STRATEGIES
My first life of defense for voles became immediate bark knawing prevention with physical barriers. The hardware cloth stopped the voles, but was not a fun task. Cutting and bending the wire mesh and closing the ends with tie wires tore up hands, as I was not able to wear leather gloves for all of the wire manipulation tasks. In subsequent years, the tree trunk diameters outgrew the hardware cloth bands and I needed to replace them with other barriers to gnawing. Store-bought cardboard type wraps were inexpensive and did protect the trunks for a couple years, until the weather wore them out. These bands in turn were replaced by more pricey expandable white plastic spiral wraps, which became sufficient protection until the trunks had reached 4 inches in diameter, and lees vulnerable to the voles gnawing.

It soon became apparent that the trees needed more than a first line of defense from the voles, as the trees yet suffered. In numerous cases, the voles simply turned their attention from the trunks to the roots of the young orchard, where the damage was less visible. This unseen gnawing weakened the trees furtively that winter and caused perhaps a dozen more trees a slow death over by spring. Simply protecting the tree trunks was not enough, the vole population needed control.

Voles are one of the most difficult pest problems to control in many landscapes in Western Washington. Most 4-legged pests can be kept out by simply building better fences, but not voles. Due to their high reproduction rate, constant vigilance is required. I considered my options. A common response, toxic rodenticides, only creates more problems. Poisoned rodents are eaten by natural predators which then die and the consequent rodent population explodes. As a sidebar, I have heard positive reports from market organic gardener friends that one particular rodent bait does have less drastic food web impacts. A mice and rat bait control called Quintox is made from one B vitamin which when eaten coagulates the affected animals blood and supposedly does not kill predator birds that eat the rodents.

Some visitors to the orchard people advocated using the alternative folklore control called 'Mole Plant' (Euphorbia sp. ). In an earlier garden I had already discovered that Mole Plant was not alternative enough. The voles simply ignored Mole Plant and ate most everything else. Besides, the real underground pest is most frequently voles and not moles. Moles are primarily carnivores and usually don't eat plants, although their tunnels can expose the trees roots to air and hence injure the plant. Moles might occasionally tunnel into some starchy tubers but generally they are after earthworms and other small invertebrates. Voles are the ones with big gnawing teeth, moles have a long snout.

VOLE TRAPPING

Another targeted control method is trapping, a solution that I have mixed feelings about. Having once trapped snowshoe rabbits for overwintering sustenance in my youth, I am painfully aware of both sides of the cruelty debate about animal trapping. Although trapping doesn't use toxic bait, it is not a casual endeavor. Sometimes, untargetted quarry is trapped and sometimes the trapped animal doesn't die immediately. On the other hand, if trapping becomes the only viable alternative to keeping the food producing garden happening, then it may be the difficult choice by necessity. I posit that it is better to take personal responsibility for one's habitat impacts in the immediate environs than becoming dependent on long distance food transport where natural habitats are much more compromised. At least in one's own backyard one can more readily see one's personal impacts on the natural world.

Vole trapping is more effective if numerous traps are deployed. Stake and lines go to the traps in their underground placement inside breather holes in tunnel complexes. The opening is then blocked above the trap. The voles detect lack of ventilation in their tunnels, come to investigate their breather holes, and encounter the traps. The blocking should not impede the traps function, so be careful if sod chunks are used. Perhaps easiest for marking trap locations for regular checking is to cover the breather hole with chunks of flat boards, flat metal, tarp pieces, black plastic etc. With any kind of trapping endeavors the quarry is less suspicious when human smell is absent. Trapping lore encourages practitioners to smoke or keep outdoors both the trapping clothes (especially gloves) and gear.

Overwintering vole colonies can be attracted to an area by using big sheets of plywood, tarps, metal or the like atop the ground (garter snakes also like some of these covers as wintering grounds, and garter snakes are allies because of their slug control). This drier, predator protected ground attracts the voles and some months later in the winter the voles are more easily confronted in this consolidated area. With voles, like most overwintering pests, control is more effective if populations are knocked down before spring reproduction commences.

Vole trapping does have many local adherents, as demonstrated by the outcry in Washington State about a decade ago when most trapping was made illegal by voter initiative. With any such injurious activity as trapping is, conscientiousness is the primary caution. About the only traps I occasionally use anymore are not for voles but for building rats, greenhouse mice, or landscape catch-alive troublemakers.

PREDATION OF VOLES AS CONTROL METHOD
Another vole control is dogs. Dogs seem to be programmed to discourage unwanted guests from their pack territory, so praising them when they are hunting voles encourages this instinct. The vole hunting value of dogs is enhanced if they are in pack mode and if the orchard grass is kept at least somewhat low. The pack company can be composed of other interested dogs or people, and the dog's vole control effectiveness is greatly increased when they are encouraged by other members of this pack. Dogs are much more effective if they are able to hunt voles when the grass is not too high. Dogs, and likewise the persnickety predator cats, have their vole-hunting limitations.

Natural predators are helpful in controlling voles, but orchards often have too many human appearances that scare these predators off. Besides, most four-footed natural wild predators like coyotes, foxes and striped skunks are usually not readily able to enter orchards because of the high deer fence needed on the orchard perimeters. Airborne predators like owls, red-tailed hawks and northern harriers also generally don't like hunting near houses, and are also less successful hunting where high grass provides protection for voles.

HIGH GRASS PROBLEMS IN THE ORCHARD
Besides being a problem in vole control, high grass orchards are difficult to keep productive, period. High grass impedes human movement, ladders, monitoring, maintaining and harvesting the trees. Realizing that the grass needs to be controlled is one thing, deciding on a long-term solution another.

The high grass in this particular orchard was particularly difficult to control and I had already worn out on keeping the orchard mowed. Using mechanical means for grass control had proven difficult because the field was very bumpy, full of clumpy bunch grasses and mole tunnel ridges. Besides the excessive time needed to mow these 2 acres on a regular basis, mowing the rough field cost excessive money. First year field maintenance had been destructive of rototillers, walk-behind mowers and riding lawnmowers, all of which required repair, replacement and fuel costs. As another liability, this mechanized control was also dependent on fossil fuels. The repetitive polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbon pollution these inefficient 2 cycle engines produced off-gassed into the field, which over time would add significant toxins to this prospective food producing area. Although I had been diligent about grass control the first year I established the orchard, I decided to take a break from such tediousness the next year. My boredom allowed the grass to grow unchecked that second summer of the orchard and the consequent high cover allowed the vole population to explode unchecked.

Hand control of the grass through scything or mulching the entire 2 acres was more ambitious than I was willing to practice regularly over the entire orchard. Scything is usually more practical as an initial grass knockdown or as an occasional control for pernicious spots. Mulching was done in circles around the trees, as grass itself is a fierce competitor of orchard trees. In this case the benefits of mulching for grass control slightly outweighed the mulching liability that mulch provided cover for the voles.

GEESE IN THE HUMAN LANDSCAPE
In the spring after the first major vole attack, the orchard finally received the extra help it needed, domestic geese. Over the next few years until the trees got some size, the geese kept the grass mowed down enough to discourage vole settlement, and finally also allowed predators to better control the voles. After the geese had been established a few years, the vole population was much smaller in this orchard than it was in neighboring high grass fields.

Perhaps this solution of weeder geese is not for everyone, but they are one of my favorite domestic animals. I can communicate better with geese than I can with many domestic animals. Weeder geese are fairly easy to control, smart, and their grass and weed control contributes to a gardening lifestyle.

I also like our wild Canadian geese in local landscapes, although I am outnumbered in this attitude by those who despise them. In public parks, consider the two main complaints against these birds, goose aggression and goose poop. Goose aggression is only a defensive behavior, and although geese may rush at someone they rarely attack unless provoked or are defending others of their flock. As for the goose poop, I figure lots of us gardeners use animal fertilizers in our gardens, and geese manure itself is mostly just organic undigested grass with some microbes and enzymes thrown in. The goose poop got there because the geese were hungry.

If geese aren't around to mow and fertilize the lawns in city parks, then lawn maintenance is usually done with non-organic fertilizers, weed killers and gas-powered mowers. The non-organic fertilizer and weed killers not only wipe out the landscape fauna put also work their way into the water and too often mess up aquatic populations and drinking supplies. The gas mowing not only mows the lawn but also spews gas exhaust into the landscape (most 2 cycle engines only combust about ½ the fuel they consume). Which is worse, goose poop or gasoline? Although people at home might put a cupful of manure around each tomato plant, I don't know of anyone who fertilizes their tomato plants with a cupful each of gasoline. And yet, our 2-cycle lawn equipment of mowers weed whackers, leaf blowers, rototillers, chainsaws are all coughing gasoline fumes into our landscape.

Since wild geese can fly into home landscapes, they are slow to appreciate why fences were put in to keep animals from clobbering the landscape. In figuring out how to keep wild geese out of my large gardens, I have learned that they respond to relentless discouragement at every single infraction. Since my preferred pest prevention method of fencing doesn't work with them, I have experimented with other techniques. I have found that flying frisbees at them is a more effective threat than rocks or yelling alone. As I do like geese to be around in other areas, I don't want to scare them away entirely. If the geese moved to a place where they can help keep the grass down, like a nearby orchard or field, I praise them. Over time local wild geese can learn that fencing around specific areas renders such areas off-limits, and violators are prosecuted.

As spring returns each year we renew old feathered acquaintances. The first day that wild Canadian geese showed up in early spring after the previous fall' major vole attack, I realized once again how much I like watching and hearing them. I have noticed the annual geese migrations marking the seasons of my life since childhood days. Their huge V flocks in migration flyways are like compass arrows in orange juice sunrises and burning ember sunsets, I was especially attentive towards any geese this particular spring because my winter's research on vole control had pointed me towards acquiring domestic weeder geese. During long days huddled around wood stove heat I had learned that lots of other people for many generations had already reached similar conclusions about the place for domestic geese in home food-production lifestyles.

Although none of our Canadian Geese are fully domesticated, geese have been fully domesticated in Asia and in Europe. In these cases, domestication probably occurred by encouraging year-round residence by feeding them and by breeding geese towards body bulk that was larger than flight capacity. Now, as this wild pair of Canadian geese honked to their graceful splash-down in the farm pond, I felt intrigued at the idea of getting to know geese even better. These moments pushed me over the top, and that morning I went down to our local Farm Supply store to see who was chirping under the heat lamps in the brooders.

DAY OLD GEESE ADVENTURES BEGIN
During my research of the various species and varieties, I looked for varieties that were generally less noisy, less aggressive and bigger than others. I picked 2 domesticated varieties of the European wild species, the Greylag Goose. I went home with a pair of day-old grey and white Toulouse geese and a pair of day-old white Embden geese.
The young geese bonded with me immediately. As I read about the greylag geese I learned why. In the book " The Greylag Goose" by Conrad Lorenz, the author demonstrated why his work in animal behavior catapulted him to become a co-winner of the Nobel prize in Medicine. His opening story in his goose book could be aptly applied to my situation, so I roughly paraphrase it here, as I remember it.

"When I was 5 years old, my parents let me keep a goose in my upstairs bedroom in our countryside home in northern Europe. My later-to-be wife, well, she couldn't keep a goose in her bedroom until she was 7. Now that was over 60 years ago, and in the intervening years I have always been around geese, either with the home flock or studying them in the wild. I just can't get away from them. Now, my wife, she has never been quite as enamored of them as I have. This just goes to show how important age is on imprinting."

For those of us not imprinted on geese, but are not enamored of geese, perhaps reading his book will ease the dissatisfaction. After all, these are the largest birds most encountered fairly closely when we are outside of zoos. In Conrad Lorenz's book, the reader learns much about the intricate social behaviors and intelligence of Greylags. Surprises abound.

UNDERSTANDING VARIOUS GEESE BEHAVIORS
Even though animal specific animal behavior can be right there in front of someone, sometimes the person doesn't recognize it. For instance, I hadn't noticed what was going on sometimes with the geese racket until some visitors to the farm observed that my geese would only honk from a hundred yards away when the conversation turned to my talking turn. Having read Conrad's book I suddenly realized that they hear me and were making the "long distance call' that Conrad Lorenz describe in his book.

Another time, again thanks again to Conrad Lorenz's insights and the geese's trueness to form, I was able to understand other important behavior which links the flock together, the "Triumph Ceremony'. The first lesson began one afternoon when I was upset that the adult goose flock wouldn't clear out of my path fast enough for me as I walked by the pond. I was too uppity fast and aggressive and one defender goose attacked me. My Aussie dog companion grabbed the goose, named Doorbell, and in the melee that followed Doorbell's bill drew a little finger blood.

After feathers, fur and rear ends had settled, then came subsequent reflection. I realized that if my self-worth depended on me proving that I was a more alpha animal than a goose, then I was really in trouble. So, from then on, I instead prided myself on my self-security by changing my course and allowing the goose flock plenty of room and time to also move if I was passing through and didn't have time for a visit. I never had another problem like that melee. Actually, I learned to appreciate that Doorbell's controlled aggressiveness was a virtue and not a liability, as he was only protecting the flock. As there were numerous predators around, instead of challenging him for his defensive actions I began to praise him for this sacrificing behavior. Good old Doorbell. Doorbell always patrolled the space between the flock and possible threats, and wouldn't attack unless pushed too much. Once the flock or threat, possibly me, had moved to allow for one another, then Doorbell would proclaim victory in the Triumph Ceremony. He would stand up and shake his wings and ruffle his feathers while honking and nudging other flock members.

Geese also have a greeting ceremony that most people misinterpret as aggression. They lower their head while approaching. If they are not hissing, then this is basically a greeting behavior. Aggressive behavior is when the goose is both hissing and flapping its wings spread out, as their powerful wings are their strongest defense. If that ever happened on the farm, it usually occurred because some bored kid was harassing the geese. To prevent bad publicity and if the situation got out of hand, I sometimes intervened by grabbing a goose by the neck and pinning its head to the ground until we all could separate. Usually only dominant older male geese show this much aggression. Even when I was performing the generally scary behavior of picking a goose up, most females and young males wouldn't become aggressive at all.

Geese have strong social bonds that last for the possible decades of their lives. Unlike promiscuous ducks, geese mostly mate for life or until a partner dies. Geese are especially protective of young, even if not their own. This isn't like turkeys or chickens, which may kill chicks not their own. For instance, one time I was too late in stopping the turkey named Auntie Frantic from gobbling up one of 'Mom' turkey's week-old chicks.

THE POWER OF IMPRINTING IN GEESE BEHAVIOR
Sometimes the social bonds between geese become quite complex, as illustrated in their imprinting behavior. When I first bought home the two pairs each of day-old geese and ducks, I quickly built them all a small insulated brooder house. They immediately became imprinted on myself and a friend as their surrogate parents. Every afternoon we would go on an adventure. The first adventures were out to the pond, and early on they were apprehensive of the water. After feeding on chickweed and grass, the goslings would then climb up on my chest and nap while I read or enjoyed the sunny spring sky. About a week later we all were ready for more ambitious adventures, and the group of eight birds would follow us daily in a single file on strolls down the path to the wooded creek, where the birds quickly learned to scamper out of flowing rivulets. But one day their social interaction and imprinting behavior became much more interesting. The childless pair of day- camping Canadian geese discovered the young Greylag goslings.

This pair of Canadian geese had been around for some weeks now but spent the night elsewhere. They usually touched down at first light of those April morns into the pond. One such morning they finally heard the loudening chirping of the young goslings in the brooder house. The Canadian pair flew out of the pond and onto the grassy lawn near the brooder house. They quizzically turned their heads trying to figure out what was going on in that little building. When I came outside to tend to the young birds the Canadians flew off a short distance. Soon the fuzzballs were all out in the morning sun pecking at the lawn and exploring nearby. I watched the Canadian Geese pair nervously as they approached the goslings and ducklings. I didn't know what the interspecies co-operation or rivalries would do. I soon discovered that the Canadians were not interested in the ducklings at all, but within a few moments were nosing up to the four 10-day old Greylag goslings. The goslings were tentatively curious about the Canadians for a moment, but them would scamper back to me chirping loudly. Some moments later they would approach the Canadian Geese pair again and the Canadians tried to push them around and away from me. The Canadians approached and hissed at me as they tried to rescue the greylag goslings from me.

After several mornings of similar interaction, one day our whole little morning soap opera went over to the pond, only the Canadians flying the distance. I had been trying to introduce the goslings into the water with little success. Although some would follow a paddled boat, they weren't in the water unless I was. The Canadian pair was able to separate the greylag goslings and herd them into the water and wouldn't let the escape. The goslings tried. At first the goslings attempted to scamper across the water surface as if on land. Eventually they forgot their fear and scampered underwater as well. They chased their reflections. They climbed up on one another's backs in the water. The Canadian Geese watched this approvingly. The only activity they would not permit was when the goslings strayed too far from them. By now it was apparent that the Canadians were not a threat to the young greylag goslings.

Within a week of introductions, a routine was established. Like an alarm clock, the Canadian geese pair would arrive honking at first light and wait for me to let the goslings out of the brooder house. I would lead the goslings through the gate to the pond area. The Canadians would take over from there. They would parent the greylag goslings all day long in the pond area, leading them in swimming and in foraging. Relieved of my immediate parenting duties, I admired the new family grouping from nearby. I built a permanent waterfowl complex near the pond with numerous fenced or covered rooms, nesting cubbyholes, windbreaks, automatic waterers and automatic feeders..

The goslings moved into the complex at 2 weeks old while I continued working on it intermittently. By the time the complex was all done in early June, the greylag geese were larger than their surrogate Canadian geese parents. But the greylags were yet imprinted on me, and this was beginning to cause a bigger rift between them and the Canadians. When I approached the greylags to lead them into the pen at night, the Canadian geese, in protection attempts, would try and position themselves between the Greylags and myself. The male greylags would perceive that the Canadians were acting as a threat to me, and insert themselves between me and the Canadians, attacking the Canadians. The Canadians would try and insert themselves back in the middle again, which of course the Greylags didn't like. Finally the positioning had arrived at my knees and suddenly the Canadians would look up and be right next to me. They would rush off in surprise. Eventually, by the end of June, the Canadian geese gave up on this untenable arrangement. They vanished from the pond until the following spring.

THE GREYLAG GOSLINGS BECOME WEEDER GEESE
The Greylag goose flock prospered. As they grew larger in size and numbers, the un-mowed orchard grass got shorter and shorter. Within 2 springs the goose flock swelled to 30 birds, and the field was headed toward a poopy golf course look. The un-mowed field became easy to walk in, and while I maintained the trees my Aussie companion dog hunted voles. Northern Harrier Hawks began picking off the voles more often as well. The vole population plummeted, as did their damage to the orchard. By then, most of my goose management chores consisted of letting them in and out of the pen in morning and night, or encouraging them to feed in the field throughout the day. They needed this extra encouragement as they really liked the pond, and choice human delivered food became the carrot to move them from place to place. I would be surrounded by them while leading them around the field with feed or to the pen at night with feed, and they never attacked me. Oh, in a crowd one or two might nip at my pants leg, but heck, they do that with one another. Actually, Doorbell became the goose most ready to eat corncobs from my hand, and one of the first to later die in defending the flock from the annual migrating spring eagle.

As I began to understand the geese I also began to appreciate their intelligence in understanding me also. When I was first trying to get them into the pen at night, I used my standard animal herding technique, 2 long sticks or PVC pipes in each hand extending my reach in both directions. Then I trained the Australian Shepherd dog standard commands to help herd the birds. Then I evolved to using food treats to attract them into the pen at night. If I was consistent enough in my praise and admonishment that they began to understand my body language and what was unacceptable behavior.. Geese are vocal animals, and calm quiet reassuring talk and movements make them comfortable enough to allow someone to hang out with them in close quarters. I also learned that adult geese are very protective of goslings and that I could usually allay occasional suspicions of me by both presenting a low silhouette and imitating the chirping of young goslings. They also learned to respond to firm reprimands without freaking out.. Sometimes I would notice the geese cautiously about to enter through the accidentally left-open garden/pond gate and sneak into the veggie and berry garden. From a couple hundred feet away I would question "What do you guys think you're doing?" The flock would gaggle amongst themselves for a few moments, then turn around and go back through the gate into their fenced yard and pond area. Heck, that won't happen with chickens, turkeys, cows, cats, rabbits, goats, most dogs or even some kids. Geese are smart.

The geese and I began to trust each other so much that I it soon became ok for them to venture into the mixed berry and veggie garden when the spring grass was growing quick. While I weeded nearby, they knocked down the grass before I transplanted out the spring veggie garden into row covered beds. After a while the geese began taking subtle cues from me about when they could go into the garden. Eventually they wouldn't go into the garden even if the gate was left open, unless I encouraged them with beckoning spoken and body language.

The gardening effort was part of the geese management program. Like with the ducks and poultry around I frequently gave the geese various weeds and over-productions of greens. I tried to keep a year round supply of the easy-to-grow nutritious green they liked, kale, around for daily greens backup for them and the poultry. Oh, and one spring weed deserves special mention, I hunted down patches of it every spring. Chickweed is nutritious and gobbled up by young goslings or other domestic 'chicks'. All the birds on this farm also ate from a rotation program of grains on the farm. Pre-eminent was an early field corn variety bred to either feed animals or use as a flour corn. Various Oats, wheat, barley, and rye varieties matured earlier than the corn so that animals could eventually eat fresh grains from mid-summer until the dried grains ran out in late winter.

Besides creating conditions for vole damage to diminish, the shorter grass made the orchard much easier to maintain for pruning, new planting care, insect control, and harvesting. To encourage the geese to use the orchard more extensively, I catered to their needs. One spring I put in a smaller pond in the middle of the orchard. A high winter water table on the clay soil provided an opportunity for this seasonal small winter seepage pond which helped attract the geese, (and winter visitor wild mallards) into the orchard. I also learned to close off pond access occasionally and put feed and summer drinking water at opposite ends of the orchard so geese would move through the orchard to drink or eat grains. A big animal corn crop would translate into about 15 ears a day for a couple months in the fall tossed around the orchard as this also encouraged them to disburse and feed throughout the orchard.

Geese, unlike ducks, are total herbivores and grass can be their main diet. The only times they ever damaged the young trees was in late summer and occasionally in winter when they would occasionally gnaw on bark because the grass was brown. They did do minor branch damage, but never killed a tree. Geese in the orchard are totally benign compared to other pasture foragers like deer, goats (sort of domesticated deer), sheep, cows, horses or pigs.

INFRASTRUCTURE NEEDED FOR DOMESTIC GEESE
Like any plant or animal which we interact with in our landscape, our eventual memories are more pleasing the more positive the experience was. By enculturating domestic geese to abandon their migrating activity we have compromised their ability to fly from predators, bathe in waters of their choice, mix with large groups of their own kind and limited their access to various natural food opportunities. In exchange for these sacrifices of freedom they have made for us, a keeper of geese has not only authority over them but also responsibility for their well being.

First, geese are named waterfowl for a reason. Every effort to provide regular access to water is much appreciated by them. They like to bathe a few times a day, like to sleep on the water, and drink more water than most other farm animals. Unlike ducks, they do not muddy up the water with dabbling or eat frogs or fish. They also prefer both their pond and field areas to be open to the sky, as shrub or tree cover provides hiding places for predators to sneak up on them. The survivability of geese is greatly enhanced if they are locked up every night in a pen with poultry netting above and on the sides. If the poultry netting extends into the ground with double-fist rocks lining weight on the fence along the outside pen edge, then digging canines or racoons can't get to the inhabitants inside. Windbreaks, shed roofs, separate rooms with a door in between them, and small covered solitary nestboxes hidden on old board walls can provide protection from rain, disturbance from others and a safe place to nest. Automatic feeders and waterers in the pen save a lot of daily maintenance time, but have liabilities of attracting mice or rats. The automatic waterer valves need a few replacements yearly, especially in winter. The watering and goose pooping tends to make certain pen areas soggy messes which are best addressed by wearing rubber boots when entering. . To help make the pens floor conditions more habitable for the geese, add litter regularly in the form of dry litter like hay, straw, cornstalks or wood chips. Geese do not need supplemental heat in the winter time, but they do need unfrozen drinking water in the colder winter days.

Although weeder geese can get by on just what the landscape affords, this landscape rarely affords the food variety that wild geese attain in their daily wanderings. Thus, I advocate not only giving them store-bought feed but also garden produce and special crops specifically grown for them. To manage them in an orchard, feed them a light ration in mid-day, and lure them into the pen at night with a regular evening feed. A standard feed program is to use an all-purpose feed for the first 10 weeks of life. After this, about a handful of corn per goose per day is enough, although I usually add more variety. If overfed, the geese don't forage as well. Well fed domestic geese can weigh up to 15 pounds, while sparsely fed ones in late winter might weigh 5 pounds or less. The less they weigh the easier it is for them to fly. The orchard flock would sometimes wander over to the top of the neighbors hill, and when startled fly a hundred yards at 30 feet high back into the pond.

Although they can fly under special circumstances, domestic geese can generally be controlled by fences only 3 feet high. With metal T bars and electric fence clips, a non-electrified field fence or poultry netting fence can be quickly installed looping onto the fence clip prongs. This low fencing method allows the geese to be moved between various yards of the landscape. Goose mowing can be concentrated in certain areas, or the geese can be excluded for other areas at specific times such as interplant crops, brand new trees needing protection, harvest of the crop within that yard, or if the geese begin gnawing on low branches in the grass-destitute days of mid-winter.

PREDATORS OF DOMESTIC GEESE
Predators are much more of a concern for geese health than are diseases. Geese don't have many diseases, especially if provided with ample clean water, protection from precipitation, fresh greens daily, and a well balanced supplement of grains or feed. Since domestic geese are basically flightless but of a prey size that numerous species of predators find attractive, then their appearance in open landscapes attracts predator attention. No matter how diligent the management is, there will be more than one predator who can figure out how to attack the geese. The first line of protection from predators is strong fencing. On the outside of an orchard or pasture a deer fence will help keep most predators off the geese, but it is not enough by itself.

In the 13 year history of geese at this orchard, it was finally predators that killed the last ones off. It was mostly because they were not penned at night anymore. Because of time limitations the geese management became more lax. The orchard fence was failing, the geese were not being locked in the pen every night, and predator cover near the pond grew dramatically. Adult geese here were killed by racoons while nesting outside the pen, by eagle attacks in the pond area, and by unknown predators in other cases. Other predators seen in the immediate area included various dogs, bobcats, coyote packs, skunks, cougars, mountain lions, bears, golden eagles, great horned owls and ravens (predator of goslings).

Surprisingly, the tiny predator that eventually appeared after 10 years became the most devastating and finally killed the last remaining eight geese and goslings left. Even stout fencing would have little effect on these diminutive, fearless marauders weasels.. These animals were so brazen that on more than one occasion a weasel came under the closed door into my bedroom and sat staring up at me from a few feet away for a few minutes. It was hard to accept that such a small animal could kill adult gees but the evidence was overwhelming. Weasels would appear soon before we found a killed gosling or goose. The adult geese would be killed even if in the water. A common symptom was that the head of the goose would either be severed or there would be fatal wounds at the back of the gooses neck. A little bit of eating would be done behind the shoulder blade but usually the rest of the body would be undamaged. Owls were also suspected as they also frequently remove the head from their prey, but sometimes the geese would be killed like this in the day. Although the majority of relevant literature and biologists consider geese to be too large a prey for weasels, I have been around weasels enough to know that they like to make their own rules.

Of course, people are the major predator of domestic geese. Our predation sometimes begins even before the eggs are hatched. Raided eggs are large and rich with strong flavors, probably better suited for baking than for stand-alone cooked meals. Since geese lay a limited number of eggs for only a few weeks in early spring, hatching rates during these few weeks determines the size of the years flock. If overly disturbed in any incident during this time, they will abandon their nesting for the year. A single Aggressive unfamiliar dog appearing at the edge of the pen for only one afternoon might set the bird off from hatching out any young that year. On the other hand, sometimes the birds will lay clutches in a couple of places before deciding to raise one of the clutches or not.

POPULATION MANAGEMENT OF THE DOMESTIC GOOSE FLOCK
Predator impacts and geese reproduction rates are a pendulum-swinging balancing act with the goal being to keep the size of the goose flock suitable for the size of the land needing mowing. A single family of 6 to 10 geese will work for an acre of mixed perennial crops but it may be 4 or 5 an acre during a dry summer, and 6 to 12 during a wet one. Sometimes the goose management has worked so well that the population climbs to an unsustainable level. Since a single goose can have 6 to 10 young each year, then a flock might grow ten times in size in a few years. This happened to me, and even though the waterfowl complex I built had 3 fenced rooms and a few hundred square feet of space, it was too small within 3 years. During this time the waterfowl population grew from 4 goslings and 4 ducklings to over thirty geese and almost a hundred ducks. It became too crowded and the ducklings couldn't get food or were accidentally trampled. Competition for feed turned vicious and many birds, especially timid ducks needed special feeding attention. The prospect of the flock growing even larger was not practical, so, a larger yearly culling of the flocks became necessary.

Among many people who manage farmyard animals, the least liked aspect is not the expense or maintenance time but the killing of the animals in one's care. I justified to myself the periodic killing of geese because it was the only way I could figure out how to handle this artificial population explosion I empowered to occur. Although I grew up hunting and fishing, I will never get used to killing animals. Even if the geese were not so difficult to prepare for cooking, I would have preferred to let them live..

Geese are much more tedious to process for consumption than are chickens or turkeys. Unless one invests in a bit pricey machinery which knocks the feathers off, the difficult plucking of all of the feathers off of a butchered goose will take an hour or more. A large chicken can be dressed out in 10 minutes, a turkey in 20. Skinning waterfowl is quicker than plucking but cooking choices are more limited with skinned birds. If the down feathers are saved for future use, protect them from insect damage.

THE WILD GOOSE CHASE ENDS
I only occasionally visit the orchard now where the domestic geese once were. The fruit trees are now established. If they simply receive continual protection from deer then they may outgrow all furred predators. I yet encounter Greylags occasionally, but usually they are kept more as pets than as members of a tandem hand-and-bill landscape management lifestyle.

On the other hand, as the populations of resident wild geese in Western Washington has grown almost a hundredfold in the last 30 years, I can more easily satisfy my imprinting needs on the goose species which originally inspired my fascination, these Canadian Geese. I have lately been working on a farm with a full grown orchard, and this past winter various Canadian Geese flocks frequently grazed in the orchard openings and adjacent fields.

As I watch them I am yet learning new idiosyncrasies, This winter I saw a male Canadian goose that had paired up with a goose of a different species, a White-Fronted Goose female. Frequently this pair would wander off by themselves while the rest of the flock was somewhere else. Other times this winter a solitary goose would come by and hang out for a few hours, an unusual occurrence for such a social animal, and I wondered what had happened to its usual flock. This idiosynchric behavior makes me appreciate the adaptability exhibited by the wonderful goose family of species. In this troubling time of mass extinctions, I am glad that sometimes animals can co-exist with us, and I hope we can co-exits with more species of them. I am glad that people have discovered that some geese have been social enough to adjust to occasionally fitting into the gardening lifestyle I aspire to maintain.

Living primarily on grass, geese travel in worlds of sky water and land, visiting both high and low latitudes, carrying their supplies in their bodies, needing no heat in the winter or tractors in the summer. In many ways, these dynamic animals have much I can yet learn about living a simpler life. Perhaps I am the one who needs to be domesticated by geese.

Re: home food cooling alternatives

2009-03-02T13:44:00.001-08:00

Alternatives to grid powered refrigeration

As the last days of winter wind down and the summer gardening season begins, I think of the decades when I have been relatively independent of longer distance power needs for refrigeration. On the few times when I have set up powered refrigeration at home, I am reminded of both my monetary costs to myself and the externalized costs beyond home. Actually, living off the grid, where one needs to generate their own power has educated me on how much energy various powered goods consume.

Refrigerators and coolers really gobble up the power. These appliances are not alone, and I try and discover alternatives for each. Watching meters, wallets and visits to fuel centers I have learned that the real big needs which most of us have are heating air, heating water, washing and drying clothes, cooking and refrigeration. Even the common alternative to grid powered refrigeration, propane tanks or solar panels can consume some thousand or few dollars worth of specialize refrigerators, or power systems to accommodate solar energy in the summertime and generators in the wintertime.

For those multitudes who are on the grid, these total community costs of grid powered refrigeration are a substantial fraction of the power needs put on Western Washington dams and other power sources. As a natural history buff, I note that in Western Washington the biggest loser of dams are the damages to our river basin ecologies, a damage which has usually hidden costs which most of us don't realize. More on this later.

But we have two simple alternatives to using grid-based home refrigeration which work if we change our lifestyles. The first method is to use non-powered or alternative powered ways to cool our food and the second method is to store food and the second is to let the environment maintain fresh food for eating as we need it. The first alternative is more practical for wintertime refrigeration, from about November through March.

The second alternative is for year round application. The cheapest and simplest home cooling alternative is to use picnic coolers to keep refrigerated food in picnic coolers on shaded porches outside.. At this moment I have 3 picnic coolers outside, with various amounts of food in them. On a nearby post is a thermometer, which I note everyday. Coolers work fantastic when the avenge temperature is between about 20 and 50, and modestly ok up to about 60 degrees. 50 degrees is about the temperature that our common local male tree frogs begin croaking. The outside temperature for the last 4 months (since Nov 1) has been between about 15 and 45 degrees, and is usually in the high 30s and low 40s.

Most foods that need cooling keep for comparable amounts of time in my porch cooler as they would in a powered indoor refrigerator. Cabbages and carrots keep 6 weeks, celery and Brussel sprouts 4 weeks, eggs 3 weeks or more, lettuce one weeks and beer indefinitely. Meats, juices and cooked food vary from a few days to longer.

Some people may object that the picnic cooler idea is a health risk. A lot of our ideas
about refrigeration are born out of vague health alarms and are borne more from a cultural template than based on objective testing. Humanity never had powered refrigeration until few generations ago, and it has survived alarmingly well without it.

Somehow food cooling ideas also vary from culture to culture. For instance, us Americans learn to keep our cheeses in the refrigerator. But when I stayed with a friend in Paris, my friend was always removing the cheeses from the refrigerator which I had put in there. And if you don't think the French know something about cheese, well, go there and find out for yourself.

The same cultural variations exists with cooling meat products. I have done a fair amount of hunting and raising domestic animals for food, and in both cases are strong traditions of seasoning meat in cool outdoors for a couple days, usually with salt and pepper and occasionally other herbs on the meat exterior. In fact, a huge amount of our culinary spicing heritage came from using antibiotic herbs to help preserve meat from spoiling. Thyme, sage, rosemary and marjoram are all common ingredients in both poultry seasoning and sausages. Whatever cooling setup I have, I try and cook or deal with uncooked meat within 3 days of when I get it.

In my opinion, refrigeration is not a guarantee but only a helpful redundant backup way to keep from getting sick on bad food. I theorize that the two most important ways to avoid bad food are to use your senses to detect spoilage and secondarily to know your sources. Just like when cooking chicken you look for red meat close to the bone to know when the chicken is done, you can also look for discoloration, slimy food, or mold. I rely more on my nose to detect bad food instead of expiration dates, as I also rely more heavily on my nose to tell when food is done in the oven than on the cooking times and oven temperature dials.

These sensory skills are the same ones needed even if one has powered refrigeration, as food can spoil just as easily there. In fact, I would imagine most of us have regretted eating store-bought food that looked off in the display case but the price was right and we ate it anyway because we trusted that the store had been diligent. Then we became sick. I have had bad food much more often from restaurants, even 5 star restaurants, and other vendors than I have ever had from my porch coolers.

Knowing sources of our food is imperative, even beyond the purchase point. As someone who worked in commercial orchards for 5 years, I learned personally about the usually total lack of adequate sanitation and hand washing facilities of fruits that eventually ended up on consumers tables. In dining out I have noticed that I get stomach discomforts much more frequently by eating at commercial buffets or potlucks than I ever have from handling and cooking food at home.

Generally, I personally consume highly perishable foods very quickly no matter the characteristics of home storage. I also keep these food, especially meat, double or triple wrapped, and in separate coolers of their own, coolers that I wash diligently as needed. I usually only eat fresh meat once every couple weeks or less, so its not a big deal for this food group which needs extra attention. As someone who worked as a commercial cook for some years in my youth, I recognize the sanitary importance of keeping raw meat surfaces cleaned immediately and not permit cross contamination with other foods or surfaces.

In the summertime, a person can also have other backup refrigeration techniques. One is to cycle water filled jugs, like quarts or gallon juice bottles through a friends freezer and use them to keep a cooler full of food cool. In fact, a neighborhood group could share the costs of freezing these water bottles. What also helps, as in any cooler or freezer, keeping it full of things uses much less power than if the cooling means has to continually keep empty air cool.

A second summertime food cooling alternative one is to use a small refrigerator/ freezer of one's own. If one has some do-it-yourself skills, one can make such a combo off-grid fridge/freezer for about 600 to 800 dollars, with the capacity of the average grid-tie fridge/freezer design. The best design is a chest type unit, with a smaller freezer section that has a regulatory set of baffles at the top on the side bordering the larger refrigeration section. A chest style is best because cold air settles, so that when the door is opened all of the cold air doesn't spill out like it does in a front opening unit. One can set up thermometers (connected to digital meters if desired) in each unit and hand operate the baffles at the top of the dividing wall to let the cold air move from the freezer section into the refrigerator section. An efficient cooling unit is the style sold for use on sailboats, and can be bought for about $400.

A framed and insulated plywood box with a weighted pulley lid (it can get heavy with the insulation on it in an unheated or dry shaded outside area are suitable construction parameters. 6 to 8 inch foam insulation on all sides and bottom and top are what really help keep the heat from drifting out of the unit. A few dedicated 80 watt solar panels system combined with cooler winter temps are proven sufficient for our region. If solar isn't always available, there might be alternatives like wind or micro-hydro to power this unit. On friend assembled a powering alterative of a car alternator and a micro-hydro pelton wheel and 1 inch pipe with 60 psi pressure from a summer uphill garden irrigation pond to occasionally power their refrigeration unit on sunless winter days.

We also have other ways to cool food that have been in use for centuries that don't involve power. One is to use built-in cupboards in our kitchen or pantry insulated on the inside and with screens outside to cool the cupboard contents with cooler outside air, sometimes with water towel, water trays or cool ground based plumbing variations to cool food. A second method is the good ol' root-cellar method, which most often uses the average year round ground temperature of about 50 degrees to help cool food, augmented with regulated vents for allowing cooler air or excluding warmer air.

The second main part of a strategy to cut down on grid dependent refrigeration needs is to link with our natural environment to feed us directly. There are 2 ways to do this, our immediate landscape and the natural land or marine scapes around us.

In our immediate landscape, gardening in our region has the realistic capacity to feed a person every day of the year with fresh food. Let the garden keep the food fresh instead of the cooler. In Western Washington a 5000 square foot garden can be maintained without a rototiller and feed you. The list is extensive, and I have been gotten about 80 percent of the food I have eaten in the last 30 years from my gardens in western Washington, the vast majority of it being fresh.

As a few examples, such a garden can produce annually produce enough food for 4 people, the major food groups are filled with hundreds of pounds of protein foods like dry beans, fresh peas and cole crops, starches in the form of sweet corn from July until Thanksgiving or potatoes from July until April, and greens every day of the year especially via season extension gardening. Fresh fruit can be eaten every day of the year via apples that keep until June 1 and strawberries that begin ripening June 1. Dried foods like peppers, parsley, and basil don't need power to dry and last for years.

On a slightly more involved diet setting, if one has domestic animals they can feed chickens garden scraps and get eggs, meat and manure fro the garden. Geese can supplant mowing efforts. Other domestic animals can fit into this home based food producing regime but are a little more involved needing more time and available land.

Earlier I mentioned how dependence on centralized systems of power have an adverse ripple effect on controlling our power needs. For example, we have dams supplying grid power to refrigeration needs, the same dams that are so destructive to self-contained salmon runs. But think, if we could readily go out into the natural world to go catch a salmon with dinner, we wouldn't need to have a cooler to keep them in, or need grid power to power the display cases in store seafood sections, or the antecedent power costs of trucking, trucking, flying, shipping, faraway fishing boat power consumption.

These are some of the hidden costs of depending on dams to have the convenience of grid power refrigeration. Further downstream from dams the situation is similar. We have extensive marine industries and shipping terminals whose activities have frequently clobbered the productivity of marine food producing systems to the point where rarely can anyone in this region get much food from the marine scape. Instead, many people need to work in these fields so that they can pay for things like their electric bills for running their refrigerators and freezers. Now, when jobs are scarce, we discover that such behaviors have decimated our local marine environment's innate productivity, and besides not having the money to go buy some fish for dinner, our local economies have eliminated the local fish where we could once go catch them for ourselves.

Sometimes we as humanity become so dependent on technology that we forget why we acquire it in the first place, and if we don't stop to think about it more, we become victims of our own lack of thought.

The picnic cooler and food garden are so ubiquitous, its really not a big step to make
them even a more integral part of our own lives, even on a small scale. We use coolers at sporting, camping and entertainment events, and we also already use summer food gardens for exercise, relaxing, entertaining and other needs. In both cases of picnic coolers and gardening, we could change our behaviors to use them more year round and more intensively.

Sure, these options (to grid tie refrigeration) like coolers, solar panels and even gardening also involve technology, but each of us can make informed decisions on the relative costs of our choices on the world around us and eventually, to ourselves.

All of this talk about food has made me hungry. I think I'll go out on the porch and get some leftovers from last night's dinner, and add some leeks and parsley from the garden.

NW history capsule of the link between salmon and people

2009-02-23T13:14:00.001-08:00

A CONTINUING NW HISTORY OF THE LINK BETWEEN SALMON AND PEOPLE

Pacific First Peoples have the singular distinction of having had a long history of a healthy integrated relationship with NW salmon. Although these peoples often had technology to take huge salmon harvests, and sometimes did, they also frequently developed cultural touchstones which helped guide them in educated, respectful and balanced relationships not only with salmon but also with co-operating tribes and other members of local northwest biomes. Certainly there were and occasionally still are excesses in these relationships, but none of these peoples nurtured enduring attitudes believing that humans are superior to nature and can always successfully manage nature better than nature can manage itself. That attitude did not emerge until a modern wave of immigrants appeared on the Pacific Coast.

Most modern studies acknowledge that the continued decline of regional salmon populations began with the arrival of immigrants who had few if any generations of history in North America before they arrived in the Pacific region. Accommodating fortune hunters throughout the natural world has been a policy theme throughout the history of these modern immigrants.
The first exploitation of Pacific salmon runs by these relative newcomers to the continent occurred no later than 1818, when the English-based Hudson's Bay company ordered its trappers to extirpate beavers from the Columbia River System in order to discourage American trappers from the region. Ownership and boundaries in this relatively unmapped region were yet under dispute between the US and England. The massive removal of beavers from both the Columbia watershed and throughout the Pacific west caused salmon runs to plummet, and illustrated that a single significant stress could wreak havoc on salmon populations.

The history book of Pacific salmon, Salmon without Rivers, chronicles how subsequent decades of immigrant activities often led to serious declines in Pacific salmon throughout the northwest from California to Alaska. Following the Fur Trapper period, a second wave of exploitation began with various gold rushes, the first of these striking Sacramento Valley watersheds in the mid 1800s. By 1870 many salmon runs in the neighborhood watersheds were decimated both by over harvesting and by habitat destruction, beginning with canneries, mining toxins and mining in riparian areas. Other salmon-adverse activities then and since have included logging, clearing, railroad track and road building, overgrazing, development, waterway industries, dams, over harvesting by various fishing techniques, source and non-point source pollution, reorganizing natural watercourses, dependence on hatcheries as a cure-all, intentional mixing of genetics, inability to understand and effectively avoid introducing exotic fish diseases, predators and parasites and, of course, climate change.

The new world had beckoned these immigrants with jobs and prospects of becoming rich in adventuring through this untamed land's natural resources. The most competitive were to be rewarded, admired, and supported in times of peace by being an employee and in times of war by being a soldier. Such allegiances did not enhance either First Peoples' communities or the
natural world in which these immigrants appeared and wrestled dominion over.

The concepts of 'dominion', 'territory', and 'ownership' are each fractured into different definitions and believer communities by various segments of society as a whole. Anyone who wants success in working to protect and restore salmon needs to navigate sociological issues between these segments.

The orthodox segments of 'dominion' adherence, to be referred to here as 'Orthodox Dominionists', refers to the mentality of those that are accumulating mileage and hoarding quantities of resources. In its pure form it is unvanquished greed. Orthodox dominionists believe that if they work hard, acquire property and stay out of trouble, then they have the rights to do with their property as they see fit, whether it is detrimental to the world around them or not.

The stewardship segments of 'dominion' adherence, to be referred to here as 'Stewardship Dominionists', believes that we as humanity are in this mix of life and that our happiness depends on the extent to which we are beneficially linked with this mix. This philosophy is need based, not greed based. Stewardship dominionists believe that having the authority of dominion comes with it the responsibility of accountability; that we need to recognize the effects of our activities and leave things in at least as good of shape as we found them. Until this concept of dominion is more achieved and practiced, the 'Orthodox Dominionists' non-accountability perspective will continue to corral Pacific salmon declines.

The concepts of 'territory', 'ownership', 'dominion' (and their various adherents or non-adherents) merit further discussion, but that discussion is for another time and place. Besides, many advocates for a specific belief system do not always practice the concepts that they advocate. In this technologically complex world it is difficult for an individual to sufficiently assess the costs of all the specialized behaviors of everybody else which contribute to this individual's own personal lifestyle costs to the natural world. With the litany of various salmon-adverse activities performed by a wide range of endeavors, it is more easy for an individual to blame someone else for our local salmon woes than to take responsibility for distant ripple effects of one's own behavior.

Those who do want to act responsibly learn that everyone who lives here locally lives in a salmon watershed, a watershed once permeated by salmon to almost every creek and rivulet. Everyone who lives here also uses goods shipped here via a salmon inhabited saltwater habitat, a historical home including most every estuary and nearshore. The lives of all human inhabitants in the Pacific NW affect salmon. The more resources a local consumes or landscapes a local alters, the more one affects salmon. It may be uncomfortable to contemplate such effects. With more and more people struggling to make ends meet, accountability may become perceived as more of a luxury than a responsibility. Who should pay and how much? Any volunteers?

Fortunately for salmon, there are a growing number of volunteers who struggle to have accountable (including to salmon) lifestyles, but unfortunately. We volunteers are not yet in enough numbers to overcome the rising tide of natural resource (including salmon) exhaustion, but we continue because we have found a path that makes sense to us. Complete individual accountability (of an individual's lifestyle costs to the natural world) is rarely achieved, but with growing numbers of individuals actively engaged in this process more means are created and it becomes easier for each individual to be more accountable. The higher the percentage of people who share our path, the larger our path will become and the less need for travelers to stray from this path.

We who believe in stewardship see that Orthodox Dominionists constituencies are exclusive and self-serving, and view nonmembers (including human nonsubscribers and the rest of the natural world) as existing for their benefit, disposable and replaceable. Orthodox Dominionists constituencies entrench hierarchal structures within themselves where base membership opportunities for advancement are primarily restricted to how well the base members exploit both themselves and those 'below' them, i.e., nonmembers. 'ODom' philosophy is akin to 'King Dom' philosophy, the similarity is that most 'Orthodox Dominionists develop smaller boundaries between their empires. At the very least they want to become kings in their own home, sometimes deferring to larger Dominions until retirement age or until the next generation or subsequently. . .

This desire for personal power has permeated humanity throughout history, a desire rising and falling, generally regardless of political or religious system. It is only that the Northwest has been a recent, relatively new arena of natural resources to plunder, that this belief system of greed is able to be accommodated locally. Even before that could occur, this Northwest orthodox dominion foothold has only been possible by decimating and excluding local First Peoples societies. Orthodox dominionists have prevailed in most immigrant communities as they have arrived in the Pacific West.

Most of us are tied into this system if not by choice than by circumstance, regardless of our affects on species like salmon. Our specialized, individual lifestyle impacts to salmon come from electricity and heating generated by fossil fuels or large hydroelectric dams, from diverting streams into our faucets, from buying produce from Mexico and electronics from China, and manure from Skagit County. Our impacts come from our septic systems and outhouses, from abandoned vehicles and ridden ones, from decay resistant building products and using pesticides (whether organic or not), from flame retardants in household goods and antibiotics and hormone alterers in our medicine cabinets. Most of our impacts come from a lack of understanding about what our impacts actually are.

As local populations realize that we are reaching the end of the larder of natural resources in our local marine and terrestrial environments, many of us are advocating and practicing change in our daily lives to adjust to this. In order to cut down on impacts, we are becoming more community based and less isolated. We are becoming more self-reliant and home-sourced in almost all product and power consumption; growing perennial oriented food with available rainwater, using less than 100 watt-hours electricity a day and heating with home based resources. We are consuming less energy for transportation by working jobs as close to home as possible. We are beginning to wean ourselves from our dependence on other specialized interests that have economic priorities.

We who will make a diffepositive difference are choosing need over greed, choosing community over isolation and choosing a retrievable future over a throwaway future.

remebering a value added craftsman Tony Vita

2009-02-09T14:41:00.001-08:00

VISITS WITH TONY VITA

craftsman, 1938-2008

This is one of many reflections of the legacy of our departed friend, Tony Vita. The kernel for this particular story germinated in May of 2007, about a year and a half before Tony left us. For most of the previous ten years, I had been visiting Tony 2 to 4 times a month, and learned much about his life from both story and observation. In early 2007 I had begun compiling an online journal that included many stories and articles in hopes that this journal might inspire a more sustainable culture in western Washington. There were numerous aspects of Tony's life that I considered might contribute to this journal. Thus, beginning in May 2007 visits with Tony, I took casual notes about his life to augment my general knowledge of our unforgettable friend.

My intentions were to assemble a rough draft of Tony's story and then he and I could later collaborate on filling in the details. There seemed to be no rush on completing the story, as at the time I did not anticipate that he would be passing so soon. But I was wrong, and Tony never was able to proofread this document. Thus, it is only my responsibility for variances in this story from the way Tony would have presented it. At the time I had begun, I was not thinking of this story as a tribute. But now that Tony has gone, I am compelled to integrate both my original inspiration of sustainability and also today's tribute, in hopes that this story will sustain aspects of both sustainability and tribute. As the years turn for me, I have come to honor such cultural craftspeople as Tony more than the cultural products that they create. Without these people we would have neither their work nor the continuity of how to maintain their skills in our culture.

If at times I appear to drift into tangential philosophical subjects, I ask the readers's indulgence. It is because with these explorations I am attempting to encourage both myself and others to take some lessons from interactions with Tony where we can help continue some of his influence in our lives. For me at least, I find some solace that in some small ways, Tony lives on.

That said, this particular story glimpses at Tony's daily lifestyle in retirement, touches on insights he had gained from living in both the Old World and the New, and concludes with notes on his previous career of quality craftsmanship as an upholsterer. Tony's retirement reflected on sustainability concepts because Tony's backyard flock supplied chicken manure for local gardeners, Tony brought lively lessons I valued on education and globalization to our discussions, and Tony excelled in his value added career as a master of his trade.

TONY'S CHICKENS

One of the most available sustainability practices available to many of us is to raise much of our own food, and having a nearby source of chicken compost is one of the most practical ways to fertilize a more sustainable garden. I was lucky to have been part of a such a cycle with Tony and his large backyard flock of chickens. Manure from Tony's chickens often helped me grow broccoli, garlic, and onions. In return the garden supplied him with these and other veggies, and the chickens with garden scraps. Once Tony had cancer, I considered this an increasingly beneficial arrangement because it helped keep him stocked with fresh produce in his diet. By the way, I am one of many who believe fresh produce to be one of the most important preventions for disease, including the growth of cancer. Frequently, as in Tony's and mine own cases, lower income people tend to have diets low in fresh produce if we need to buy it, as produce is more expensive than processed foods. Whenever Tony admonished me for bringing him more produce than he thought he deserved, I replied that actually I was the one being selfish. It is actually in my own interest to help keep my friends healthy.

Beyond such kitchen values and friendship connections, a neighborhood chicken manure/gardening connection has larger benefits to local communities. This neighborhood arrangement is a more benign arrangement than most organic gardeners achieve who only have access to commercial fertilizer sources, even those who want to acquire manure from organic free-range commercial chicken farms. Neighborhood chicken/garden circles help provide a closer sources of chicken manure, thus foot printing less carbon transport costs and bagging costs on the environment.

In some such idiosynchric neighborhood chicken arrangements as the one that Tony created, the chickens have richer lives than the heralded 'free range' admired in the average commercial coop. 'Free range' labeling frequently signifies little more than that the birds are not caged 24/7 in 4 birds to a 2 square foot cage. Tony's chickens far exceeded this. Many of them lived years beyond their economic profitability, they established intricate social structures amongst themselves, their environment, and people. Tony's chickens lived better lives than any commercial free range operation of which I am aware.

Tony's birds were more his friends than his prisoners. Occasionally I would be visiting Tony in his living room and I would hear chirping from the loft above or see chicks scampering out from behind a stack of papers by his work table. I was more nervous about this than Tony. As chickens and roosters go, they went often, and I was alert for this. They were not yard or house trained. I was one of those who attempted to persuade Tony that his chickens' excesses justified keeping them locked up continuously in his expansive coop, both for their protection and mine. I tried to explain that 'free range' didn't need to signify that friends had to guard their peas and corn on the plates whenever Tony's gourmet dinners arrived.. But Tony only smiled as he shooed the birds away for the visitor. He loved his birds and their extensive freedoms, even though he incurred the significant costs of both cleaning up and paying for this flock of 50-100 birds. His birds followed him everywhere, they were some of the friendliest chickens I have ever known.

Tony's lifestyle became so entwined with his chickens that their eggs became part of an alternate 'gift' currency that Tony had with friends. Although he occasionally sold excess eggs for some years, he preferred the eggs go to 'gift' commitments he believed he had with others. His eggs became even more prized because of the extra measures he took to provide them. Every day Tony embarked on an arduous (Tony had chronic feet and leg injuries) egg hunt around his cabin, as the chickens frequently changed their nest hideouts. Invariably some nests were undiscovered, until a new clutch of 8 or 10 chicks pipped out of the bushes. Invariably, Tony would throw up his hands at such announcements, exclaiming.. "I have too many chickens! I could imagine the chickens eyeing Tony's friends, replying, "We don't have enough Tonys!"

For the eggs that Tony did discover, he rationed them carefully, almost all of them going to his friends, who he prized also. Tony frequently wanted assurances that the egg quality was OK, and the recipient would peck around for some superlative that had not been recently used. Such superlatives were appropriate and needed, as the friends' appreciation needed to provide Tony with abstract sustenance also. Tony often went months without eating any eggs himself, while frequently passing around dozens of eggs daily. Such sacrifices of Tony were difficult to curtail. When one attempted to decline a gift of eggs, Tony threatened the risk of losing the friendship. Such threats were suspect, because Tony was too considerate and too tolerant. His practiced 'anger' could not mask his true nature.

Tony loved animals, and his chicken flock management reflects on this. Consider his roosters. Although most roosters are usually culled at an early age from most chicken flocks, Tony's birds were never featured in the wonderful Hungarian dish, chicken paprikash. No, even though his flock constantly overpopulated, Tony never ate any of his own chickens or roosters. He vigorously attempted to likewise train his numerous well-fed cats or the occasional dogs he watched for friends. Consider the effects his chicken management had on local wildlife. Flocks of neighborhood seed and bug eating birds foraged regularly because of the ambling chicken food 'Scatterer' and the bugs that appeared in the resultant chicken litter. Crows and ravens snacked on the hidden eggs and fuzzier mouthfuls. Hawks, owls and falcons hunted adult chickens and roosters. These birds of prey were so frightened of Tony that they wouldn't let him approach closer than 6 feet while they plucked away on the warm chicken stump. Tony loved animals.

Now that Tony's chicken arrangement has vanished, the neighborhood wildlife has had to adjust. For instance, in the recent snowy weeks I saw many more seed eating songbirds around my cabin than I have in winters past, and I speculate that the disappearance of the local chicken yard has something to do with them migrating here. With Tony's recent passing, I'm convinced that the neighborhood's wildlife diversity will decline, as I certainly don't set the table like Tony did.

TONY'S CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE ON EDUCATIONAL VALUES

. I suspect that local people diversity will decline in the neighborhood as well, as Tony had people customs that unfortunately are too peculiar in self-obsessed societies such as ours. Tony was a giver, and he also gave everyone a chance. He always carried something in his hands when he came to visit and his hands always reached to offer some food or treat when visitors arrived at his place. Peculiar people believe that everyone else is peculiar also and Tony decided on an initial approach with all these peculiar people of practicing friendship instead of suspicion. These others learned that Tony himself had the peculiarities of a Hungarian accent and an Old World perception on lifestyle and career. He came from a culture that often valued a person's contributions to their community whether they made a lot of money or not. Tony welcomed those of all classes and persuasions to his cabin, and countered this with a strong disdain for behaviors which were greedy and exploitive.

One's level of academic education wasn't as important to Tony as was what the person actually learned and practiced. Tony had been educated in a culture that valued such tradespeople as himself not only for what they could contribute to society but also because of the productive niches that such trades provided for those so suited.. In the Hungary of Tony's youth, after completing 8^th grade, a student could choose to continue with a higher academic education or to enter a trade. Training for a trade involved 3 or more years of apprenticeship schooling in a group setting, followed by 2 to three years of internship with a master of the trade, all depending on individual circumstances. Upon successfully completing this program, an apprentice became a master of the trade. In Hungary, an individual needed to be a certified master of their trade before they could practice it.

After Tony's academic education ended at 8^th grade, he took the trades' path. He studied upholstery both in class and then under a master upholsterer, until he graduated as a master upholsterer himself. Our conversations about different educational systems became lengthy, and I do hope the reader will tolerate me digressing on this for a moment. I think it is important to recognize the importance of educational paths such as the trades' path that Tony took after 8^th grade.

Tony and I were dismayed that similar educational path choices are not readily available in the western world, nor in today's Hungary. Will mastery of upholstery will join other lost arts and skills? The costs of limited educational opportunities to society are apparent. As a society we lose reference people who can show us how to make quality hand crafts, needs which resurface in times of economic depression. Also, here in North America we have so many young students who do not perform well within the narrow range of educational goalposts required of them, the two main ones being more complex Math and English. In many instances these students have affinities to excel at other skills, but they don't have a chance to learn them in childhood, and consequently often flounder later in life. Many such students will never use Math skills beyond multiplication and division or English skills beyond reading newspapers and writing notes or letters. But they might create brilliant masterpieces in other fields of endeavor if given the appropriate chance.

While many educators aspire to level the playing field for all, do we really want uniformity of even such basic skills as English and Math? If so, then how come Mark Twain's writings are so enduring, those stories embedded with curious dialect and slang that challenge today 's traditional grammar teachings? In learning math skills, why should all be forced to learn subjects like algebra or calculus that only a few of us will ever use? A carpenter can build an incredible house with only rudimentary knowledge of gravity and little facility with geometry and none for algebra. Tony and I were nonplused by such a blind education. We agreed that many of us are more suited for communicating in music, arts, crafts, trades, in vanishing tongues or with chickens than we are in the 'big 3' of reading, writing and math. The cost of neglecting these other paths is that our human history has and will continue to become shrouded with mysteries in all these fields. Are we to continually look back at vast ancient libraries of unique world views and wonder how we lost them?

In recapturing conversations with Tony I remember much talking about paths of learning. I was distressed that he had a skill that was vanishing and such skills as his are often difficult to rediscover. In our conversations I wanted to understand how our culture could allow such skills to vanish. Tony and I found ourselves questioning the core concepts of education. Is not the primary goal of education to first guide a person on how to think for themselves? Of what use is hammering in particular knowledge presently useless to an individual, especially if such individual has little interest in this particular knowledge? If they ever had an idea of where they were going in the first place, should the goal of education be to make the student forget where they were originally going?

Chagrined, Tony and I agreed that the educational system in North America has become so obtuse that we have millions of recent college graduates who don't know what they want to do with their lives. We also have millions of older adults who lack portable job skills when their town factory closes. Even for those who keep their jobs, most of them have so little affinity for them that they can hardly wait to retire so that they can then do what they really want to do, something which was often foreclosed by economics earlier in their lives. Apparently, the price of over-specialization is the loss of such self-reliant connections and resiliency.

Tony and I agreed that our educational system needs re-education. It grades out graduates into interlocking boxes of religion, politics, weekly routines and treadmill competitions with the dubious rewards of being able to maintain one's places in the boxes. Where is the well-rounded education that teaches students a little about everything, a lot about a few things and the ability to effectively learn on their own in the world beyond classrooms? How else can a student find the shining innate creativity of enterprise that occurs when each can follow the path truest to them? How can we expect our economies to adapt to the changing fortunes of the marketplace if we do not encourage the skill sets of innate innovation in all the playing fields? In the trickle down theory of economics it is not always water that dribbles down on the people at the base of the economy. These people are scrambling for food water and warmth. Neither Tony or I could figure the point in trying to heat up economic fires by lighting big wood at the top of the fire pile. A fire is started with little tiny pieces of kindling at the bottom of the pile.

The dysfunction of our educational systems contributes to this dysfunction of our economy by inferring degrees of knowledge that supposedly endow graduates with 'special' understandings in specific fields that are superior to the average person. When non-specialized members of society defer thinking about education to those graduates with education degrees, these members might not question the ideas that fires are started by lighting the big wood at the top of the pile. If they do question this, these independent thinkers are usually dismissed as being unqualified. No, such educational systems proclaim, the average person should follow the rules and stick with the big three and then get their own degrees or skills in some exclusive specialize field.

Actually, these circles of exclusivity are like machine gears that only fit certain machines for limited time periods. Mass production of too specific of educational skill sets leads to over competition and obsolescence. We end up not learning the innovation and quality workmanship that occurs when one loves their endeavors. Although most people change career paths 2 or more times, our educational system is rarely adept at providing our people with various skill portfolios. This educational system dysfunction leads to widespread job dissatisfaction, fast-buck crime and con games among all social classes, exploitation of others and the environment, escapism towards substance abuse, planned obsolescence and throwaway societies.

Additional costs to our society arrive when a person unwillingly falls into the less or non-productive membership segment of society that needs help. 'Successful' people often begrudge these solicitations from the fallen because the yet 'successful' people believe they believed that they have worked hard themselves, made sacrifices and compromises and everyone else needs to get their own trips together. But is it really a desirable goal of our society that the only way you can succeed is by doing something you don't truly believe in? If you disagree with this statement then why is it that so many 'successful' society members themselves usually aspire more towards retirement instead of loving to perform their work until they are incapable of doing so?

For those of us who admired craftsmanship such as Tony's, let us advocate that our society take lessons from Tony's educational background. Let us support trades training path alternatives after 8^th grade completion. Such paths could better prepare young people to be both living-wage earners at an earlier time , and possibly make more money when they leave their parents' homes. Let us economically support quality and diversity of local skill sets instead of the cheapest products of distant mass production.

Beyond primary job skills, such trade(s) backgrounds provide one with backup skills for possible fall-back jobs later in life. It is rare to discover adults who do not want to work, but common that they do not have skill sets that are currently sought in their local economy. Many become unable to find work niches, or once retired they are not as valued as they could be perceived to be. Let us also include their voices at the top echelons of society' policy directions.

Tony and I both were saddened by the disappearance of high quality craftsmanship in the western world and its replacement with throwaway mass production goods. Tony shook his head at how hardly any upholsterer these days knows how to properly tie a cushion spring so that it causes the material to lie flat on the cushion. He spoke of how there was a brain drain of higher quality craftsmen out of eastern Europe who knew how to do high quality crafts, all because these skills are in short or non-existent supply in western Europe and North America. There was no competition for these people in the US. Today these skills are also vanishing in Eastern Europe's educational systems as they 'adapt' to global 'free' trade. Tony had seen the outcomes of both worlds, and shook his head again.

How does Tony's craftsmanship training as an upholsterer specifically apply to our own local Northwest sustainability? One inherent caveat of sustainability is to do and make things that last using renewable resources. Tony's high quality craftsmanship gave truth to the phrase 'durable goods', as applied to forestry products. Woodworking disciplines are especially appropriate in our local communities. We have tremendous forests and forestry potential in our region, but these forest opportunities are barely appreciated. Here in western Washington communities, much of our forestry rich environment is shipped out of state as raw material. Where are our vibrant woodworking industries such as high quality furniture making? Where is the youth training and apprenticeships in our educational system to furnish local industries with workers for such industries? Why are we shipping overseas both so much raw material and the job opportunities that use our local raw forestry resources?

Establishing more local companies which make high quality furniture could have numerous benefits. This could create many more jobs than presently exist locally, while encouraging our current forestry practices to be more resilient and environmentally improved.. Environmentally, making longer lasting goods uses up natural resources more slowly, in this case our forests. The diversity in species and age compositions of our forests can also be improved, as longer lasting furniture needs older trees which have fewer knots, and higher quality furniture needs more diverse species than are commonly found in our currently mono culture managed forests. Shifting to such value added forestry industries also discouraging the long distance shipment of raw materials, which has a much higher carbon footprint than making finished goods locally. Excess energy is consumed in transporting the bulk raw goods and in the waste from processing these raw goods.

TONY'S GLOBALIZATION EXPERIENCES

Tony also gained rather more unique perspectives on globalization than most of us acquire. In his lifetime he lived under various political and social structures that have been at odds with each other. Born in 1938 Hungary, he lived under German occupation until 1945, when Russian tanks and troops rumbled into Budapest, displacing the Nazis. The bosses changed but life remained difficult. Tony grew up under Communist occupation until he escaped Hungary in the late 50s. After escaping, he lived under Capitalism in the US for the rest of his life. Tony was well familiar with both the aspirations and excesses of each of the various political structures. He learned that for reasons of national security issues each system vilified specific groups of people. He learned that in each system a leadership cadre enjoys extraordinary and frequently exclusive rights to the accumulation of wealth and power.

The lessons of exploitation accumulated throughout Tony's life. Since his birth in 1938 until his early twenties, Tony had only known occupation, first by the Nazis, then by the Russians, and like many of his young compatriots he yearned for freedom. I always wondered if Tony's chicken flock enjoyed exceptional liberties because Tony himself had been a prisoner of an occupying country. Tony answered that he liked animals, then added that animals didn't try to get over on you the way that some people try to do.

As the Cold War gained traction in the 1950s, so did the chess game between its major players in order to keep their spheres intact. Tony was a victim of these competing global interests. In the Mideast, the Western World, particularly the U.S., was concerned about keeping global trade routes open, especially the one they feared that the USSR might usurp, the Suez Canal. Control of the Suez was being hotly contested by Egypt and Israel, and the USSR was making overtures towards Egypt. During the same time period, Russia was struggling to hold onto satellite countries acquired as spoils of WWII. Poland, a Russian-occupied country, had revolted against the Russians, and although Poland didn't win freedom, Russian did concede to Poland increased rights of its people. This partial success of Poland inspired Hungary to challenge Russia.

In Budapest, by now Tony Vita was in his late teens, just finishing up his apprenticeship to become a master upholsterer. He watched as elementary children taunted Russian soldiers patrolling the streets, and watched high-schoolers escalate the harassment, playing games of chicken with the soldiers and throwing objects at them. Hungarian mothers and older people berated young men to show some spine and also challenge the Russians. At the same time, radio broadcasts from Voice of America began encouraging the Hungarian people to rise up against the occupation, promising that the US would support them.

On the streets of Budapest, Tony was one of the many young men listening to the Voice of America. Hungarians loved America and could hardly wait for the American troops to arrive. . Tony joined his friends as they picked up shovels and picks to challenge the tanks rumbling into Budapest. But where was the help promised by the Voice of America? The ill-equipped Hungarians fought desperately, expecting the promised American troops to arrive at any moment. Russia was incensed at this challenge from those wielding such inferior weapons and pushed huge tank columns into Hungary. Tony lost many friends in the ensuing fighting. He was captured and imprisoned by the Russians. He was sent first to the Ukraine and then back to prisons in Budapest. During this time he tried a futile escape under a train. At some point in the fighting and imprisonment Tony was shot in the feet. He didn't want to talk about that.

Only later did Tony and his friends learn that they had been pawns in the chess game of globalization interests. They discovered that the Voice of America was encouraging Hungarians to rise up because America wanted to distract Russia from becoming more involved in the Suez Canal crisis. America had no intentions of helping throw the Russians out of Hungary. America sent no military help to the Hungarian rebels, one of which was Tony. Eventually, the US brokered a truce between Israel and Egypt, greased by huge financial rewards. Israel and Egypt became the number one and number 2 beneficiaries of US foreign aid, a policy which has continued to this day. Hungary continued to receive the Voice of America.

Back in Hungary, Tony's continued escape attempts were futile. He finally gained parole but his security was never certain. At Christmastime one year a policeman friend of his Tony's brother warned Tony that he was about to be imprisoned again. Fortunately, Tony had worked in the train yards and found a hidden cubbyhole behind the locomotives. Tony escaped to Vienna underneath the Orient Express in the bitter cold of early January. He was the first escapee of that year and made international headlines. Tony's escape was bittersweet. Although he was away from the Communist occupation of his people, he was now living under the American administration which had betrayed the Hungarian people.

Like many around the world he began to differentiate between the ideals of America and the administration of these ideals. The ideals of America sustained him for the rest of his life, and he would not relinquish those beliefs. These ideals have no boundaries nor exclusive ownership by one nation, they dwell only in the hearts of people such as Tony. Even though he lived the rest of his life outside Hungary, he would never betray the Hungarian people, even though officially Hungary was a communist satellite of Russia. In fact, Tony never became an American citizen; he would not agree to the Citizenship requirement that he be ready to bear arms against all foreign enemies, as this agreement might include enmity towards his home country of Hungary. He would not return to Hungary for 40 years, and when he did, it was riding the Orient Express aboveground this time, in the passenger compartment from Vienna to Budapest.

By the early 1960s, after transiting a refugee camp in Germany and staging in London temporarily, Tony landed in New York, where he found his first job here, as a dishwasher. He soon found employment in his trade of upholstery. His workmanship became quickly admired. When he moved to Los Angeles a couple years later, many New York clients would ship their furniture cross country so that Tony could do the upholstery. During Tony's long career he also lived in Vancouver, Las Vegas, and western Washington state.

Tony's career was mixed between some jobs he needed to do to survive and the jobs of quality work that he loved to do. Altogether Tony did over 100,000 pieces of furniture during his lifetime. He worked on upholstery on planes and in mass production factories, sometimes upholstering hundreds of chairs per day. For one company he was so quick doing thousands of restaurant chairs that his co-workers ostracized him; their slower paces made them look bad and affected their wages. I do not exaggerate when I posit that millions of us have come in contact with some of Tony's work.

In 1980 Tony went back to the Hungarian way of doing upholstery. His dream of opening his own shop was finally successfully realized in Las Vegas. He had a successful business, bought a home and began raising a family. Tony was a quality workman but some people took advantage of him. Again his integrity arose. He always lived by the motto, "If you are not satisfied, he wouldn't get paid." Some shady clients would take advantage of this philosophy. These people would build and furnish their houses by threatening to sue people they claimed did inferior work, and such people learned that Tony was an easy mark. Besides, Tony was often perceived as a foreigner who didn't deserve respect. In one instance a Jewish woman in Los Angeles refused to pay Tony for completed work, calling him a Nazi, apparently a reference to his accent, because Tony had been born in Hungary in 1938.

Tony's business survived all of these setbacks but not the last. His first wife destroyed the business, in a cascade of betrayals. After this Tony thought he was too easy a mark, for people wanting to take advantage of him. He went back to working for others, and never reopened a storefront all his own again.

Tony moved to Washington State and worked in the Seattle area and in North Puget Sound. Although he eventually attempted to retire, demand for his work continually arose. He would do special favors for friends and was a mentor for various other upholsterers in the region. Tony only halted upholstery projects when his hands had finally become too tightened to work with upholstery needles. At the end of his days he struggled with the realization that he might not be able to finish furniture projects that friends wanted help on.

Tony always was willing to help others, and various people besides occasional business contacts took advantage of him. Because of various people like this he lost a house, a boat, some animals, tools, food, medicine, vehicles. But he was always ready to give new acquaintances a chance, and even older ones with which he had long lost contact. Tony was elated at the liberation of Hungary at the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s, and dreamed of returning their for many years. He finally had the means and documentation to do so after retirement.

Eventually, at about the millennium, Tony was able to contact his family that he had not communicated with seen since he had fled as a refugee in the late 50s. His Hungarian passport finally arrived and he took the Orient Express from Vienna to Budapest. Tony's return was a story mixed with both joy and sadness. He embraced his long-last family and friends. He Once he settled in he looked around, hoping to see a Budapest flourishing under the banners of democracy. But he was to discover differently. He learned that in the 1990s the Robber Baron vanguard of unregulated capitalism had moved into Hungary and filled the vacuum created by the dissolution of the occupied Communist regime. In the short time since then various trans national corporations have stripped Hungary of its quality industries and moved the jobs out of country into third world economies. Once the capital of the factories that made the premier articulated transit busses in the world, now Hungary became one of the capitals of the pornography industry. Even though Tony had fought on the streets against Communist occupation in the 50s, in 2007 he ruefully noted that in many ways today's Hungary is worse off under this type of Capitalism than it had ever been under the Communism he had once fought against.

Tony and I commiserated about these lessons. We agreed that any political or economic system was only as good as the people who use it. Tony was one such person, who would give credence to any political system. He was somebody who has left the world a better place by his having been here.

The globalization of commerce never trumped the culture of Tony Vita. He had finally found where he wanted to be, in a rural cabin off the beaten path where he could have some animals. Tony had acquired a fondness for the countryside early in life because as a young boy he would visit his grandparents where they worked draft horses at their remote Hungarian farm. Although he spent most of his life in urban areas he finally returned to the countryside in his retirement years. Even though it wasn't Hungary, Tony was finally at home, with his chickens, cats and friends.

TONY'S UPHOLSTERY SKILLS

Learning something about upholstery from Tony was important to me, as at various times I have made furniture. Up until the last year I anticipated that Tony would get a small furniture shop set up again and I could then video him and learn how he did his work. But that opportunity never arose. Unfortunately I didn't get detailed lessons with how he handled his prized tools and materials. I did get to see them though. He would show me remarkable, rare sewing machines. He showed me upholstery needles that cost 100 to 200 dollars each. But I never was able to see Tony use any of them. All I learned were some of the stories and observations.

When Tony learned upholstery, his class learned all aspects of furniture making. They started by venturing out into the Hungarian woods and cutting down particular Hungarian Pine trees to begin the furniture making process. Each student then would make a chair, table, sofa, loveseat or whatever. They did all of the measuring, cutting, fastening and finishing. Then they did the upholstery. As the classes matured, different students discovered different affinities and for Tony, he liked upholstery. It was indoor work, and without the dust of woodworking.

Upholstery does have its intricacies of accomplishment. Tony told one story of how he learned a lesson on the correct sewing knots and sewing process. The master came around to where Tony was finishing up sewing the upholstery cover on a particularly difficult piece of furniture. The master noted that Tony had ignored a mistakenly tied knot, far back in the continuous thread of knots that Tony was making. Rather than let the knot remain, be cut out or have Tony begin anew, the master had Tony go backwards with the needle through all of the holes and knots of his previous work, maintaining the integrity of the thread. Laborious hours later, Tony finally arrived at the improperly tied knot. He retied the knot correctly and proceeded to finish the piece correctly. Never again in his life did he allow an improper knot in his work.

Tony often commented that there is little or no chance in the US for a person to learn a trade well, from the ground up, and said that we have no masters to teach the traditional upholstery ways . Tony was one of the last of such masters. Not only did he learn the skills of upholstery from a master but he learned the history.

Like most who enter into a field of work, no matter their schooling, most of us start out doing mundane work. Newcomers to the workforce may believe that they are not recognized for their true skills, and sometimes that is true. At other times the employers are assessing the person's character beyond their newcomer job skills, before they are willing to give the newcomer more challenging tasks. During his early career Tony also went through these early proving grounds. Tony upholstered throwaway $200 factory furniture where he made 20 sofas a day with staples 8 inches. But that was not what he was truly about, and he had the job skills and the character which allowed him to eventually advance.

Tony's true line of work was on high end furniture and for 75% of his career he worked on antiques and custom upholstery. Most of his work was done on furniture from the 1800's and early 1900s. Although in retirement he might work on a friend's chair for 10% of what it would cost in a regular shop, he was qualified to work on the best. He worked on a Louis the XIV chair from the 1700s that used palm fiber. He worked on some Biedermaer chairs for Bill Gates where the gold threaded fabric cost $1,000 a yard. These chairs came into the shop worth 5,000 apiece and left the shop worth $25,000 apiece.

According to Tony, the foundation of excellent upholstery is hand-tied springs that are tied so the cushioning is flat, smooth, and straight. He said that most upholsterers don't know how to get the springs down to the right level. Tony added that the best upholstery is hand-stitched, and will last a lifetime. A preferred stitch for him was called a 'Fox Edge". Some of his preferred materials are often unavailable today or quite expensive. He preferred a specific spring twine. Some of his other preferred materials included horsehair, sea moss, and palm fiber (in the trade called "Afric" and made from miniature palm trees that are cut up and steamed). He would break up the palm fiber by hand before using it for the stuffing. Because alder is more bendable than oak, Tony greatly preferred using alder his materials' frames.

He preferred staples over nails for holding down the upholstery cover. He also preferred dowels and screws over nails or staples for holding together furniture frames. He abhorred nails. He showed me treasured tools of his trade, long needles and sewing machines I didn't know even existed, and some that are rarer and rarer. Tony was a master of his trade, and such mentors are perhaps the surest course to rapid learning by others.

When Tony and I were in peoples houses, I would ask him about the furniture. He would look at it, sometimes turn it upside down, look for details, then expand upon when and where it was made, its style and materials, and if when and how it had been repaired or re-upholstered. He knew its current and potential value and how difficult it would be to find the quality materials needed to restore it.

IN MEMORY

I want to conclude with what Tony would have wished for us, a salutation to our health. Tony was always considerate of others, and the only Hungarian phrase I ever attempted to learn from him could be translated as "To your health!" Whenever Tony and I sat down to eat, we would click our glasses together and I would attempt to say the phrase, garnering either a smile or admonishment . About half the time I was successful. Not knowing how to write it in Hungarian, here it is phonetically the way I remember it, "Ah gawd shay gad draucht". Even though I tried learning it over 10 years, I am still unsure if I get it right. Sometimes Tony would shake his head, "No! That's not the way you say it! You don't say 'Up your rear end!" Here's the way you say it: . . ."

Unfortunately, I don't know how to finish the last quote from Tony. I no longer have Tony around to correct me.

I guess now if I am to learn it correctly then maybe I should try and find another Hungarian friend, . . Or maybe I should go ask some chickens.

p.s.

after I sent this on to a few folks, Tony's daughter kindly sent me back the way to say this salutation. Please note that some of the accents in Hungarian do not show up in this keyboard transcription of mine

egeszsegedre

(egais-shai-gai-dre) She added that sz= s sound and s=sh sound.

INTRODUCTION TO A BLOG ON WESTERN WASHINGTON RESTORATION

2008-02-22T16:19:00.001-08:00

Hi all,
Welcome to a forum for discussing various natural history related restoration activities in Western Washington.

This blog's mission is to provide a forum for discussing and initiating some sustainable and responsible activities and policies for western Washington. Concerns about specific current events, such as global warming, catastrophic species decline, and existing environmental policy failures are primary incentives for the initiation of this forum.

This blog's effectiveness will depend on the degree to which information and perspectives that are presented here are used to protect and restore our natural world in Western Washington. I especially invite participation here for those who believe their ideas and experiences are insufficiently represented both in current management policy and mainstream media, regarding western Washington ecological restoration. You do not have to be the best speller or the most articulate writer in the world, as I could never make those claims myself. Instead, I do hope this blog can become a touchstone for new voices and leadership in various topics presented here.

I expect some will disagree with information and perspectives I present here. Please realize that though I may advocate policy changes and behavior changes, I am not interested in ruining anyone's life in any way. By the same token, I prefer to support those whom I believe are unnecessarily exploited by certain behaviors and policies. I believe that we all need to learn about our own impacts on the world and attempt to be as accountable for them as we can. I personally don't claim to have yet arrived to have eliminated all of my own adverse behaviors, but I do struggle to make the world a better place. This is the most important behavior that I value in myself and others. Such struggles may require any one of us to abandon previous behaviors, jobs, or lifestyles. In the face of today's worldwide imminent exhaustion of many resources, we all will face struggles to adapt. The success of each of our own futures will often depend on how well we are equipped with knowledge and behaviors that facilitate protection and restoration of the natural world.

Some of the relevant topics I envision here include the following:

. . .initiating ideas on Neighborhood Natural History groups so that people can meet, educate, work, and develop natural history activities born of the members' interests.

. . . initiating discussion on establishing a citizen-based database website for Western Washington species, allowing for both input and viewing on such a website.

. . . initiating discussion on establishing an annual biological inventory review of Western Washington flora and fauna species incidence, population dynamics, threats, and recoveries.

. . . initiating discussion on how local scientists can assemble and integrate all existing scientific research into an entire picture showing the dynamics and interrelationship of various local species.

. . . initiating discussion on an "Adopt-a Species" program. This program is to encourage individuals to thoroughly investigate or share knowledge of a species that the individuals have an intrinsic interest in, especially those species seen as significant ecological disturbers (e.g., invasive exotics) or those who are significantly disturbed (e.g., threatened or endangered species) threatened species.

. . . links to relevant resources to Western Washington restoration

. . . local individuals' anecdotal stories of plants and animals, presenting a biological dynamics counterpoint to the scientific reductionism upon which most local ecological policies have been based.

. . . profiles of people (especially local ) who have noteworthy careers, hobbies, or behaviors which are sustainable, impressive self-directed crafts, or that I believe are deserving of recognition for some natural history relevance.

. . . garden tips. The reason these will be included is because I, as the author, have my greatest skills as a gardener, and believe it is valuable to advocate participant ecology (gardening) as a counterpoint to spectator ecology.

. . . initiating discussion on the value and practicability of advocating the idea that all fishing, sports and commercial, in western Washington, by 2020, will be done without using fossil fuels.

. . . specific species subjects on which I think have relevance to improving an individual's effects on our behaviors with this species toward benefitting the natural world around us somehow.

. . . initiating discussion on impacts and existing policies dealing with population growth in Western Washington.

. . . initiating discussion on policies of current property taxation, and if the taxes are presently accurately being assessed for habitat and energy impacts. I will advocate that individual property owners be rewarded for habitat enhancement, and properties adversely affecting a habitat will pay more according to the severity of such impacts.

. . . initiating discussion on policies of industrial impacts on the local ecology, including but not limited to pollution, energy consumption, accountability for their impacts, and their specific involvement in restoration efforts.

Ok, that's about it for now. Thank you for the time you have taken in reading this.

Comments are appreciated.

Enjoy,

Glen

OH THEM COHO ARE SLIPPERY OH THEM COHO ARE SLIPPERY

2008-02-21T21:07:00.001-08:00

COHO AS A NORTH SOUND SPORT FISHER SEES THEM

As most any successful sport salmon fishermen can tell you, hooking an adult Chinook (King) or Coho, ( Silver) salmon on rod and line is pound for pound one of the most challenging North American game fish to actually land. Within moments, experienced northwest marine sports fishers can often tell exactly what they have hooked. If the quarry is either of these two most sought after marine salmon catchable by fishing line (not nets), the experienced fisher knows the clues.

The large adult Chinook does one of two things. It might act lethargically unconcerned about this hook and line nuisance until it actually sees the boat or fishermen, and then the Chinook bulls away like a freight train on steroids, in long line depleting runs, and all that the fisher can hope is that it changes its mind before the line is gone. The second thing the adult Chinook might do is the same freight train routine from the moment it is hooked, skipping the lethargy arrogance. Some minutes may pass before the Chinook actually rolls on the surface, allowing the fisher to confirm their suspicions with a smiling tension on their face. A good salmon fisher can usually land one out of every two or three Chinook that they hook, the percentages getting smaller as the larger that the Chinook is.

Catching Coho salmon is a different story. Usually within moments of hooking a Coho the fisherman sees the fish jumping at the surface. If any salmon ever were to evolve wings, it would be this one. If the fisher does not keep a tight line at the jump the Coho can throw the hook and be gone. If the reel drag is set too tight and the fisher has too much tension on the line, the jumping Coho might snap its head away from the fisher and break the line, even if the pound test of line is twice the salmon's weight. If the fisher frantically tries to loosen the line, the Coho might rapidly spin the spool of line into a bird's nest or too much slack, creating other opportunities to throw hooks and the fisher's hopes to the winds.

Besides frequently jumping, the Coho scribbles the water palette, creating slack line and frantic reeling. The experience fisher tries to keep a tight line and steady tension but the Coho stutters course changes again and again as the fisher feels the rod tip snap down repeatedly like a grass blade in a gale. If the reel's drag is set a tiny bit too tight at any moment, the sudden tension will break the line. If the Coho dashes under the boat the fisher plunges the rod tip deep into the water. The fisher hopes that when the Coho jumps on the other side that either the line doesn't fray and break on the bottom hull of the boat. The fisher hopes that the bend in the line's course doesn't create either too much tension or too much slack once the line is free of the keel, motor or some line that didn't get reeled up in time. A good salmon fisher is pleased to land about one out of every three or five Coho hooked, with the percentages going down the bigger the fish is. Catching a 30-pound Chinook is much easier than catching a nine-pound coho. Oh them coho are slippery.

Unfortunately the Coho salmon are not only slippery to catch, but they are also getting much slippery to find in western Washington waters, especially in North Puget Sound. Soon after general salmon seasons have been opening here in recent years, more and more fishermen here are joining in that old refrain, "It ain't what it used to be." Our local North Sound Coho, the source of so many fishing tales, this long time-staple of us marine sports fishermen, is slip, slip, slipping away. Will our once (occasionally nonfiction) fishing stories all be gone, to be entirely replaced by fishing tale fantasies?

A SPORT FISHER'S SNAPSHOT OF CURRENT NORTH SOUND COHO

Coho used to be the reason that most local sport fishing trips were considered successful or not, and lately in the North Sound it has been mostly 'not'. It wasn't always like this. Local fishers used to catch Cohos much more often than they caught any other salmon, but now fishers hardly catch either. In fact, until recently, those who spoke of Coho disappearing were usually greeted by fellow fisher folk as alarmist, lacking skill or plumb darn unlucky. There was some truth to this. If fishers didn't catch the coho themselves, they could usually point to somebody they knew who had recently done ok. Although most of us North Sound fishers might not catch a salmon every time, we could usually mark S (for Silver) in our salmon catch cards a few times every half dozen trips or so. Coho were the regular folk's saltwater salmon because local adult Coho tended to be in many more places than Chinook, in greater numbers, and for longer seasons of time. But lately, the rare times us regular North Sound fisher folk get out our pen at all, it is only to mark C for Chinook in our salmon catch cards. Nowadays, the once less common (and more protected) Chinook are recorded more often on North Sound Catch record cards than Coho are.

Us North Sound sport fishermen, especially saltwater ones, don't have many alternatives. We can rarely mark salmon catch cards for Chum or Pink or Sockeye salmon either because we rarely ever catch these species in the saltwater. Chinook and Coho are the only salmon that most of us sport fishers catch in local saltwater fishing holes. These two species may be found here much of the year, and also are piscatorial (fish-eating) feeders. Adult Pinks, Chums, and Sockeyes are not found in Puget Sound except when passing through to spawn, and they also are mostly planktivorous or crustacean feeders, so they are much less likely to bite on sport fish bait or lures.

Somehow the decline of local Coho has slipped off the marine radar, and only a few of us sport fishers seem to have noticed. Certainly the magnificent Orcas and Chinook deserve all the help that they can get, but hopefully the general public might fish out enough time to consider the coho's plight also. Besides listening to anecdotal dismay among North Sound sport fishermen circles about the scarcity of North Sound Coho in recent years, perhaps this public can go to some of the local managing bureaucracies that track these sorts of things about our local Coho salmon. Then the public can join us in the dismay and wonder what is going on.

On the state level, computer users can go to WDFW, Washington department of Fish and Wildlife, web pages and peruse sport fishers' saltwater fishing success records by looking at Creel Census reports. These Creel Census reports consist of on-site interviews with us sports anglers at local boat ramps and docks. These census reports are divided into four marine regions in western Washington. WDFW employees visit docks and boat ramps throughout the year, recording fishermen's catches. The North Sound region encompasses docks from Blaine down through Bellingham, Anacortes, Whidbey, Camano and the San Juan Islands.

In the period from 11-1-05 to 5-1-07, after interviewing some thousands of returning marine anglers, the total number of Coho that were reported caught in the entire North Sound region were 38 fish. 38. Even though this information was collected by WDFW and available for WDFW perusal within weeks of data entry, it seems that these Coho scarcities were hardly noticed in the subsequent year'sd regualtions. In the April 2007 to April 2008 sportfishing regulations published for this same north sound region, wild Coho were still being allowed to be caught for much of the year. Go figure that one.

For those who want another perspective on how the North Sound Coho are doing lately, go to the federal level. An NMFS, (National Marine Fisheries Service), document presents even more evidence of recent North Sound Coho declines. In NOAA NMFS Tech Memo 28 Appendix E, the status of various Salmonid species in north Sound streams are listed. According to this appendix, the status of most of our North Sound Coho runs are either depressed or unknown, with only a few runs listed as healthy. Apparently the NMFS does continue to occasionally study local Coho populations. These survey endeavors may become easier to perform in the future, as fewer and fewer wild Coho runs persist in North Sound.

SNAPSHOT OF COMMERCIAL FISHING STRATEGIES ON NORTH SOUND COHO

At the moment, it seems hard to believe that the Coho are doing Ok around here. Perhaps current Coho policy local fishery data collectors are also perplexed about what's going on with North Sound Coho. For starters, they do they have difficulty collecting and analyzing data on Coho to form strategies to protect Coho from overfishing by North sound sport and commercial fishermen. Sport fishers sometimes forget to turn in their salmon catch record cards at the end of the fishing year. Commercial fishermen often avoid fisheries observers that might report on excessive bycatch numbers of Coho (and other relevant Species of Concern). Because they don't want to lose their income that occurs once their openings are shut down, commercial fishermen generally dislike to exceed official quotas and rail against restrictions on their fishing methods.

During commercial openings for Sockeye or Chum, local commercial fishermen often do not report the bycatch of species of concern like Coho. Consequently, bycatch information is often not reflected at official documentation centers or in policy decisions. Policymakers often restrict that official commercial fishing data come only from canneries (who might offer such a low price for the coho bycatch that the fishers never take the cohos there). Through this mechanism, the allowable coho bycatch totals are kept low, keeping the fisheries open for the commercially targeted sockeye runs, while scarce Coho continue to be caught.

Coho are not the only commercial bycatch species adversely affected by current management strategies on collecting bycatch info. Endangered Chinook and seabird species of current high concern, like Marbled Murrelets and Western Grebes, are also frequently not mentioned in bycatch reports. Because of this, many advocates for protection of relevant Species of Concern believe that commercial saltwater fishing methods should be limited to techniques (like trolling) that do not have as adverse bycatch impacts as do techniques like gill nets, long lines, or trawls.

Coho advocates might also prefer that sport and commercial salmon fishing endeavors occur only in the neighborhoods of estuaries where healthy salmon runs are actually present. Such a policy lessens impacts on endangered populations that at present are easily decimated in open waters (where fishers do not know the origins or status of the salmon that they catch). Such an estuarian policy would also impel sport and commercial fishers to become more involved in maintaining the health of salmon runs which they wish to harvest from.

THE CANADIAN CONNECTION WITH NORTH SOUND COHO DECLINES

North Puget Sound Coho are also adversely impacted by insufficient protection in waters to the north, in British Columbia, where wild salmon protection organizations square off against the curious spectrum of various government bodies, commercial fishermen, and the fish farming industry. Salmon don't usually deal with passports or visas, so various species swarm out both south and north of the border from Canadian rivers and streams, with little monitoring. Some of the biggest North Sound salmon runs that are fished by Washington State commercial fishermen are Sockeye runs originating in the Fraser River Watershed of Canada. Likewise, various salmon runs bound for US water return down either side of Vancouver Island bound for US spawning grounds.

According to Richard Strickland in his book, The Fertile Fjord, the Fraser River outflow fan empties three to five times the amount of fresh water into the Straits of Juan de Fuca as all Puget Sound Streams combined. Many environmental groups in the Fraser River freshwater watershed and the islands of the Fraser saltwater outflow fan system are concerned about the critical status of various Fraser River Coho runs. Many of those runs go though US waters, especially the San Juan Islands, but few co-ordinated efforts occur to make sure that wild Coho bound for the Fraser are protected in U.S. waters.

Although in 2003 the Canadian government proclaimed the Species at Risk Act, numerous petitions to list various endangered Fraser River Coho runs have failed. The primary opposition to such Coho listings primarily includes those who fear a listing will impact their financial or entitlement interests: commercial fishermen, fishing guide boats, and even some First Nation peoples. Although the Coho has primarily been the bread and butter of the sport fisher's and any ethnicity self-reliant fisher's larder, and although these groups have often made significant economic benefits to the local Canadian economy, few if any Fraser river restoration efforts have been directed toward Coho recovery. Instead, Canadian fishery policy makers note that the real money and lobbying influences come from fish farming and net fisheries of Sockeye and Chinook. Consequently, when wild salmon protection and recovery efforts do occur in the Fraser River's watershed, they do so because of commercial interests in Chinook and Sockeye, while Coho often gets forgotten on the back burner.

COHO ARE NOT WELL SUITED TO THE ECONOMIES OF CAPITAL STREET

The biology of Coho also affects the reason why coho are not as popular a species for enhancement or recovery as some other salmon species are. Coho are the neighborhood's fish, and where money and property rights dominate, they are as wrong as self-reliance and organic gardening.

Besides being more of a glamour fish with a large market price, Chinook spawn in all sorts of rivers, but especially in big rivers, where riparian management is more publicly visible and vulnerable to public concern. Many runs of Chinook leave their hatching waters immediately for the marine environs, so watershed protection for them is easier than it is for Coho.

Besides being an esteemed culinary salmon with a larger market price and whose concentrated schools are more easily netted than other salmon species. Sockeyes spend the first year of their lives in lakes. Lakes generally receive better protection than do rivers or backyard creeks. Lakes offer some premium real estate waterfronts, do not flush out as often and are often used for drinking water storage, bathing, and marine sports activities. Salmon adverse activities in lakes are more easily discerned and more often discouraged, so Sockeye habitats are generally better protected than salmonid species which spend life cycle times in streams and creeks.

Chums and Pink Salmon, although not as rewarding per pound economically as are Chinook and Sockeye, quickly depart after hatching into the saltwater, so do not demand as much watershed protection as do salmon species which spend significant time in freshwater.

Coho are a different story. Their marine populations are generally more dispersed, they are not as valuable of a commercial catch as chinook or sockeye are and they spend the first year of their lives in streams and rivers of all sizes. Like Steelhead, Cutthroat and Bull trout, Coho is the backyard Salmon, the forest brook salmon, the cow pasture creek salmon, the logger's lunchtime entertainment salmon. To protect Coho and these others in riparian areas generally demands much more cooperation and possibly concessions from riparian zone property owners than most of the other salmon species demand.

COHO JUMPING AND JUMPING FOR COHO?

With all this evidence of this long time decline of regional coho populations, one wonders if previous coho management strategies have been and continue to be inadequate. Does coho recovery have the necessary public support to outweigh other economic interests? The consequence of stricter fisheries harvesting methods and of changing curent Coho stream riparian practices engenders considerable opposition from commercial fishermen, loggers, developers, municipalities, and fish and wildlife management polices.

Coho do have an uphill battle to rebound from fishing lore to the excitement of seeing their silver acrobatics near our fishing boats or their thrashing in knee-deep pools gorged with gravel spawning redds. It remains for us all to decide which stories are to be told.

At one time, Coho were not the only ones doing all of the jumping. Have you ever jumped?

Oh them Coho are slippery, oh them coho are slippery.

DRAMA IN NORTH SOUND: THE CHERRY POINT HERRING CONNECTION with CHINOOK AND ORCA RECOVERY

2008-02-21T13:59:00.001-08:00

DRAMA IN NORTH SOUND: THE CHERRY POINT HERRING CONNECTION

As north sound marine communities scramble to deal with recent endangered species listings of local populations of both Orca whales and Chinook Salmon, an unlisted and less glamorous species, Pacific herring, (Clupea pallasi), may hold some of the keys to recovery of both Chinook and Orcas. That is, if this herring population can survive. A very significant matrix link on the Pacific Ocean food web between plankton and piscatorial predators, many local observers link significant membership declines in local marine communities to precipitous herring plummets.

Growing to lengths exceeding 18 inches long, Pacific herring are remarkable fish. They can swim as fast as salmon their own size, five to seven body lengths per second. They have specialized retinas in their eyes which allow filter feeding in the dark. They have bundles of nerve receptors between their lateral lines and swim bladders which allow for rapid vertical movements in the water column. Unlike most other fish, herring need to gulp air from the water surface to fill their swim bladder.

Marine scientists pretty much agree that when available, Chinook salmon comprise 60% of the diet of orcas, and that Pacific herring comprise 60% of the diet of Chinook salmon. Yet neither the current Endangered Species listings for North Sound Orcas nor North Sound Chinook posit recovery strategies for recovering the steep declines of our local north sound herring populations.

Once the largest population of herring in Washington State (comprising 32% of the total out of 20 total populations and a location of more than half the habitat of Puget Sound populations), the Cherry Point population, centered in the same region as these orcas and chinook populations historically spend much time, has declined 94% in the last 30 years, from an estimated population in 1973 of 13,606 tons to an estimated population in 1999 of about 733 tons. Yet since 1999, this Cherry Point herring population has twice been denied endangered species listing.

Uncertainty prevails over the percentages of various insults leading to this continuing herring decline, but a shotgun array of stresses assaults them. Many of the insults are human caused, related to pollution, habitat destruction, specific marine policies and lack of accountability.

Petitioners for listing Cherry Point herring, including many fisheries biologists, claim that nearshore human activities close to the heart of the Cherry Point spawning grounds are some of the significant causes for this decline. Oil refining, cargo shipping, and smelter activities are in the heart of the remnant existing premium herring spawning grounds.

Policies for managing the industrial zone around the Cherry Point herring spawning grounds continue to be contentious. Cherry Point is home to two refineries, an aluminum smelter, and other shipping and heavy industry uses. The BP Cherry Point refinery is a main player in the current North Sound Drama, as it has ambitions to construct a new shipping pier adjacent to the remnant CP herring spawning grounds. At the heart of the issue are the effects of potential oil spills (hydrocarbons) on herring.

Petroleum products are toxic in minute doses. The Washington State Dept. of Ecology says that one part per million is the threshold of hydrocarbon toxicity. Alaska State uses a threshold of one part per 100 million. When spilled, many aromatic hydrocarbons rise to the surface film of water. Since herring frequently surface to ingest air to fill their swim bladder, they are especially sensitive to this pollution.

Oil not only affects spawning herring but also their offspring. In studies performed after the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill on March 24, 1989, 99.9% of the affected herring larvae died immediately from oil pollution. Of the ones that did survive, they had mutations and genetic disorders which contributed to their inability to reproduce. According to a study done at the Exxon Valdez oil spill site (Ott 2003), mutations caused by these hydrocarbons have been passed from generation to generation, adversely affecting disease resistance and reproduction. Although this accident happened almost 20 years ago, these herring populations have not yet even recovered to a sizable fraction of pre spill numbers.

The largest refinery in Washington state, handling 225,000 gallons of crude oil a day, is the Cherry Point BP refinery, which once belonged to Arco. Built in 1972, during its first year of operation this refinery spilled more than 20,000 gallons of oil during the herring spawning-season. Since 1975 more than 20 separate incidents related to Cherry Point refining operations have released tens of thousands of gallons of oil into Puget Sound, many of them occurring during the herring spawning-season. Between 1994 and 1998 this refinery was discharging between six and eight million gallons of industrial effluent per day into Puget Sound. On August 29, 2001, 22,400 gallons of oily water were released into Puget Sound from this facility.

On March 1, 1996, the Army Corp. of Engineers extended a permit application to BP Cherry Point to build a second shipping pier at their refinery facility, and renewed this permit extension on June 29, 2000. This was done over the objections of several parties who claimed that allowing this permit extension was done in violation of the Magnuson Act. According to the Magnuson Marine Mammal Protection Act of October 1977, "no agency may grant any permit, license . . . which may increase the volume of crude oil capable of being handled at any facility other than oil to be refined for consumption in Washington State."

Figures from two bureaucracies demonstrate that Washington state refineries today already are importing, refining and exporting most of the oil that is handled in Washington state. According to official statistics found at the website of the Energy Information Administration of the Federal government, petroleum product refining capacity in Washington state in 2007 was at 626,000 barrels per day and the consumption of petroleum products in Washington State in 2005 was at 153,000 barrels per day. According to a report found in a Puget Sound Action Group's website, "Puget Sound is one of the country's primary centers for refining petroleum. Refineries at Cherry Point and Anacortes, in northern Puget Sound, import 550,000 barrels of unrefined oil each day. . . Daily about 300,000 barrels of refined products are exported by tanker vessels to other domestic locations and via the Olympic Pipeline to Oregon."

Opponents to the shipping pier expansion appealed the Army Corp.'s permitting of BP's dock extnesion permit. On March 15, 2004, Ocean Advocates filed suit, but lost in district court. In August of 2006 the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the lower courts ruling, and faulted the Corp. for issuing a pier construction permit without even performing an EIS review. The Army Corp. expects to submit its EIS review statement to justify its permit approval to the Court of Appeals in the fall of 2008.

The Conoco-Phillips refinery at Cherry Point has also released oil spills into the herring affected areas. On June 27, 1999, 1,000 gallons of crude oil were spilled into Puget Sound, and on June 13, 2001 more than 1,260 gallons were spilled. Both of these spills occurred during the spawning season for the nearby Cherry Point herring populations.

Between 1972 and 1999 the BP/ Arco and the Conoco/Phillips refineries have reported 73 spills at their Cherry Point refineries. Also in 1999 a petroleum pipeline ruptured in Bellingham and 277,000 gallons of gasoline were released and flowed down Whatcom Creek. A fire ignited that killed 3 people and much of the remaining gasoline entered into Bellingham Bay, which is close to Cherry Point.

Other local heavy Cherry Point industries and land-use policies also merit questioning about their impacts on Cherry Point Herring.

The Alcoa/Intalco Aluminum Smelter site at Cherry Point has been the highest ranking heavy-metal-contaminated site in Washington state not undergoing a cleanup. It began operation in 1966 and has a capacity to produce over 300,000 tons of aluminum per year.

Several thousand PCB (a highly toxic and highly residual now illegal chemical) transformers were incinerated at an Emerson Site near the Nooksack river. This river flows into Puget Sound near Cherry Point.

Trillium Corporation, which owns a critical shoreline habitat adjacent to the remnant Cherry Point herring spawning grounds, advertises potential uses for its property (on its February 2008 website), "The 1,034 acres, with over 7,000 feet of shoreline along the Strait of Georgia, is available for use by a wide range of commercial, light and heavy industrial, and ancillary uses. The site is the largest single ownership industrial property along the international shipping lanes available for sale in North America. . . . Its current zoning is 'heavy impact industrial' . . . As a generally rectangularly shaped site, it consists of several parcels allowing for ease of subdivision."

Since the 1990s, construction of the large Gateway Pacific Shipping Terminal at Cherry Point has met considerable concern related to possible impacts on Cherry Point Herring spawning grounds.

A co-generation plant at Cherry Point gaining traction through the 1990s and early 2000's, sponsored by Puget Sound Energy, has also been controversial and appears to be currently put on a back burner, at least for the moment.

Legal battles and impacts to Cherry point herring are not restricted to the Cherry Point Industrial zone. The huge untreated sewage plume from Vancouver mixes into the Fraser River outflow fan as it passes by the existing Cherry Point spawning grounds and through the extirpated herring spawning grounds. Only in 2007 was the City of Vancouver ordered to begin treating its raw sewage before dumping it into the Fraser River outflow fan.

Other human impacts on herring throughout the Cherry Point region include many other stresses. Pesticides and nutrient load disturbances arrive in the region from local agriculture. PBDEs (flame retardants) concentrations, known thryoid and memory disruptors, have increased 1500% in the fat of local harbor seals (whose diet is 20-60 percent herring) populations since 1984 (one recent study showed that Puget Sound women have 5-10 times the amount of PBDEs in their breast milk as European women do). (The role of harbor seal predation on limiting herring population recoveries also merits further policy review, as seal biologists in 2005 claimed that North Sound Seal populations were increasing 12% a year). The effect of climate change on local water chemistry (including diminished oxygen content) is another stress on local herring and their plankton prey populations.

The same policymaking bodies that manage local Orcas and Chinook also manage local herring populations. Although policy makers and their staff fisheries' biologists agree that herring have declined tremendously in this area, the most powerful policy maker (NMFS) has decided that Cherry Point Herring are not a distinct population and do not merit endangered listing protection. This conclusion is not uniformly accepted by all interested parties. If Cherry Point Herring populations do not fill a specific ecological niche, how come neighboring herring populations have not moved into the area vacated by the disappearance of the Cherry Point Herring population? The debate is not going to end soon, as some scientists respond that herring populations may oscillate on cycles as long as one thousand years.

Although scientists recognize 20 distinct populations (including offshore) of herring in Washington state waters, the importance of any single one and the genetics of all of these populations are poorly understood. Of the 18 known Puget Sound stocks, the number in depressed or critical status tripled between 1994 and 1998. In 1973 the Cherry Point Population alone was 13,000 tons, but by 1997 the entire Puget Sound herring population was only 10,000 tons. Recent studies in 2002-2004 show further substantial declines to these other herring populations.

Cherry Point populations appear to grow to the largest sizes of any herring in the entire North Pacific, with 12 to 15-year-old fish reaching more than 18 inches in length. C.P. Herring are the only local population that spawns after late winter, spawning in May to June. C.P. herring may be the only local herring population that has some membership not going out into the ocean but remaining in Puget Sound through the summer and fall. Cherry Point herring have otolith isotope ratios indicating adaptation to lower salinities, like those found in North Puget Sound year round. C.P. herring also carry a different parasite than other local herring populations, the round worm Anasakis simplex, which also have cetaceans (whales and porpoises) in their life cycles. This suggests that CP herring may feed in different ocean or Puget Sound Areas than other herring populations. Yet they are not recognized as a distinct population segment.

In a June 2006 memo of NOAA defending its action not to list the C.P. Herring, part of the reason for not listing C.P. herring was because not enough information was known on local herring populations to justify listing CP herring. NOAA referred to statewide herring population surveys performed in 1996 and 2004. If other herring populations were to be expected to fill in the niche vacated by the disappearance of Cherry Point herring, one would hope data to be gathered on all of these other neighboring populations. But apparently this did not happen. The stock status for a neighboring population to the Cherry Point herring, the Northwest San Juans, was listed as unknown for both of these surveys, the only herring stock for all Puget Sound herring stocks listed as unknown for both years. This NW San Juan herring population spawns in the heart of North Sound Orca watching tourism.

One unrelated study did find a 24% decline in eelgrass beds between 2000 and 2001 in the area of this NW San Juans herring population. Eelgrass is a critical component for local herring spawning and provides a rich habitat for local marine life in general. One of the main suspects for the eelgrass disappearance are the effects of the substantial motorboat traffic (and resultant pollution) in the area, powered by such fuels as are refined at Cherry Point.

Current policymaking questions regarding key members of local marine food webs do not end with herring, Chinook, or Orcas. When we lose herring and other forage fish, this loss has ripple effects, oftentimes wave effects throughout the food web. The more apparent effects of herring declines are on primary and secondary predators: food web members like chinook, orcas, porpoises, sea lions, seabirds and regional fish populations are also collapsing. According to Dept. of Fisheries in Canada, herring comprise 71% of the diet of ling cod, 53% of halibut, 42% of Pacific Cod. Pacific herring are common prey for western and red-necked grebes, red-breasted mergansers, both Dall and Harbor Porpoises and rhinoceros auklets. The rich herring spawn sites ares critical to many migrating seabirds including Scoters and shore birds beginning long migrations to summer breeding ground. Altogether, many interdependent marine species populations are suffering recent catastrophic collapse as mirrored in local herring populations.

The less apparent effects of food web collapses occur not only to part or full time members of local marine communities but also to local terrestrial communities losing subsistence food resources from dying salmon. The loss of herring is a key loss to wild chinook salmon, to Orcas and to many other ecologies. According to Quinn's recent book (out of the University of Washington press) Ecology and Behavior of Pacific Salmon and Trout, the loss of wild salmon affects both us terrestrial humans and other members of local terrestrial communities. Quinn cites studies that salmon carcasses account for 20% (other scientists say 30%) of the nutrients received in riparian habitats of salmon bearing streams. Although wild salmon contribute nitrogen and other macro and micro-nutrients, perhaps their most valuable contribution is the significant amount of phosphorus in their bodies.

Phosphorus is the limiting nutrient in the health of freshwater ecosystems. It is an important root and fruit nutrient for plants and important bone nutrient in animals. Macroinvertebrates, amphibians, stream fishes, 51 species of songbirds, many mammals and terrestrial insects are all adversely affected by the loss of salmon in streams. A study on Stellar Sea Lions collapses in southeast Alaska eventually revealed not only the importance of herring to the diet of healthy Stellar Seal Lions but also the importance of herring to the diet of local salmon and consequently to the health of local riparian watersheds where salmon spawned. Foliar leaf analysis of riparian flora in watersheds with large salmon runs revealed much higher nutrient levels than in riparian flora in watersheds that had suffered estuarian herring population collapses and consequent declining salmon runs.

Some may posit that other species of local forage fish could fill the food web gap created by disappearing herring populations. But these other local forage fish populations have also suffered serious declines and today are even less understood or protected than herring are. As an example, the once productive LaConner spring smelt runs plummeted in the early 1980s, and have yet to recover. The huge North Sound sand lance runs, helping feed thousands of seabirds, have not occurred since their last upward bounces in the mid 1990s. Educated observers believe that these other forage fish declines are affected by similar shotgun arrays of stresses suffered by local herring populations, but no productive recovery solutions have yet been enacted for them either.

The scientific confusions about protecting herring and these other various preys create unanswered questions about the validity of recent official strategies for protecting and recovering local Orcas and Chinooks. Whenever these species (Orcas and Chinook) are listed as endangered and the decline of their food base is well documented, don't these endangered species need their food web to strengthen and stretch out instead of weakening and contracting?

The inability of state and federal local marine regulatory agencies to adequately protect and enhance local marine communities is only one factor leading to precipitous declines of matrix species like herring. Why are local polluters, including both producers and consumers of fuel products, not more involved in fixing the problems of herring declines? Why are marine resource extractors and consumers (of species dependent on herring for food) not more involved in herring recovery? Why is the externalization of costs (suffered by marine communities in the form of pollution by local industrial, municipal and agricultural polluters) not being adequately paid for by these polluters (in the form of active participation in herring population protection and recovery)?

We have no single answer, no silver bullet, to all of these questions. Pacific Herring are getting clobbered by a shotgun array of stresses and their recovery is dependent on a shotgun array of solutions. More than anything, Cherry Point Pacific Herring need leadership from all sectors of society to step up to the plate and change relevant destructive behaviors to positive ones.

OTG July 15-22 If Madrona leaves...

2007-07-14T21:09:00.001-07:00

OTG July 15-22 If Madrona leaves, who will notice?

Madrona trees both deserve and need more appreciation from wetside gardeners.

In our region, Madrona, our most significant evergreen broadleaf tree deserves many accolades. Offhand, I can only think of the scarce Golden Chinkapin as the only other broadleaf evergreen tree (and it is a nut tree too) . G.C. also needs more enthusiasts to ensure its future, but the lofty Madrona is more common and more accessible to help out.

Madrona is a pleasure for the senses. Its branches invite touch, its pigeons lull our ears in autumn, its fire smoke and blossoms are pleasant to smell, its grandeur illuminates dry hillsides for our eyes, and its leaves help give us quality vegetables to eat.

With its smooth red bark on younger growth, this tree is a pleasure for touch. With its popularity of fruiting berries with band-tailed pigeons cooing, it brings us pleasure to our ears (By the way Band-tailed pigeons are the largest North American pigeon and on the Audubon watch list, meaning that unless something is done to protect them soon, they are probably headed for endangered species listing). It provides welcome shade nursing the succeeding conifers in our forests, and is arguably our best native tree for building treehouses.

The tree is also exceptionally beautiful. If one cannot ascertain its place in American forestry from one's own experience, consider the following story.

In the late 60s, a premier 160 acre San Juan Estate received a pre-eminent landscape plan from a famous New York landscape designer, replete with choice plantings from all over the world. For the planning, the landscaper looked at local soil surveys, climate, water, exposure, topography and some pictures of the cleared fields to illustrate his palette with his planting choices. It was not feasible for him to actually visit the site until some years after his planting had been executed.

When he finally was able to visit, he shook his head in disappointment. He had not become aware of the forest he had changed until his vist. He now saw,all around the border of the fields, the occasional Madronas that had escaped the axe. When he saw them in flower, he told the property owner that he had already had an exceptional planting in place, and all his choice landscape additions could not improve on the beauty that the Madronas had already brought to the landscape.

Unfortunately, Madrona is often such underappreciated, even discarded, because of one particular rather unique feature that many don't like. It sheds leaves and bark. In the heat of the summer, its leave litter up patios, walks, decks, and driveways, right when everyone wants to enjoy the outdoors. Many property owners consider this litter a nuisance, but this attitude is born more of unappreciation for the ecological value this leaf litter bestows. Not only does the leaf litter help the forest and field floor with its protection from heat and transpiration, but it also provides a free high nutrient mulch delivery service to the discerning gardener, just when such a gardener needs mulch the most, in the heat of the summer.

You can collect madrona leaves wherever there is a tree, but the optimum place is probably to collect such leaves along seldom used road edges where cars don't often park. Here, usually neighboring tree roots and branch debris do not complicate raking. Also by collecting leaves from here, one is less likely to be raking up car toxins like leaky oil etc. If one needs to collect around the forest, leave at least a third of the leaves for the forest ecology.

For collecting leaves of any type, try using something like 6 or 8 bushel-basket-sized pots in a garden cart, to collect and haul the leaves to the garden. to get a full load for the garden, stomp the leaves down in the pot and pack loose leaves around the pots once they are in the cart. Its easier if the leaf collection site is not uphill to the garden. Once the cart is in the garden, prioritize the leaf distribution around things that really need small mulch materials, like onions, and garlic (if it is a late planting).

Leaves are also superb for continuing to mulch potatoes, because as potato plants grow up they keep sending out side tubers and if the tubers are exposed to the sun they get green and toxic. Potatoes love a leaf mulch.

The leaves are also good if 12- inch-wide banded alongside colonizing corn rows, to help knock down the leftover weeds. These leaves can also be used around some of the bigger garden plants like tomatoes, squash, cukes, broccolis, but I usually don't find enough leaves for these things, and can mulch them with cardboard also.

Madrona numbers are declining in our region, not only from property-owners disturbed by its littering, but also by a disease that some forest ecologists are trying to figure out its cause and implications. For many of us who can speak, and for many more in the forests who cannot, we want the leaves on the ground and in the sky above.

We certainly don't want the tree to leave for good.

Annual Bioregional Species Surveys

2007-07-14T21:00:00.001-07:00

ANNUAL BIOREGIONAL SPECIES SURVEYS

In these days of increasing awareness of habitat disruption and change, apparently many are unaware of approaching extinction changes until a concerned specialist petitions for Endangered Species protection for affected species.

Usually, neither property owners or local or state bureaucracies are very fond of federal intervention in local habitat management, so they are rarely the ones initiating endangered concerns. Property owners worry about restrictions on their affairs, and local bureaucracies prefer being viewed as successful resource stewards, instead of questionable failures. Federal agencies are likewise loathe to get into local issues, but because they are not fond of the courts enforcing their mandates, they usually take such a cautious approach to figure out what to do. They are often more effective as information processors than as pre-emptive stratigizers for affected species enhancement.

Generally, once endangered species status is granted, it drastically changes not only resource management but local socio-economic pictures for many years. And yet, granting of the endangered species designation is the actual recognition that something drastic is actually happening. Where there's smoke, there's fire. Its usually easier to keep the house from being lit up than it is to put the fire out once it really gets going. In this day of continued species decline, it is incumbent to revisit the existing endangered species listing process and take earlier protection measures.

For these reasons, far-seeing resource agency managers advocate performing annual bioregional species surveys, in order to know where future fire flash points might be, and take precautions to avoid this well in advance. Instead of nonchalantly wondering if a species population might be possibly plummeting to critical status, their amplified surveys will help all resource management agencies keep track of their resources more regularly, They then can alert all to take protection measures before the affected species plummets to Endangered Species critical status.

For these resons,clearly our habitats and species need more than the Endangered Species Act. First, they need these annual surveys to inventory the status of species. Second, they need better resource management policies that do not allow them to plummet to endangered status. Third, this data needs to be in a single web reference point with population data regularly updated and available to all.

Like many surveys, whether censuses, store inventories, or whatever, the survey style would be more efficient if it had different levels of examination at different times. Perhaps identified matrix species could be surveyed annually, genus representatives surveyed biennially and known local genus comprehensives surveyed every 3 or 5 years. In order for survey participants to both acquire a more complete biological web picture and to maintain a consistent work load for consistent study groups, comprehensive surveys could rotate from year to year. So, for example, say this year it was seabirds, and next year it was birds of prey, and the third year it was migratory passerines, etc. At the same time, if any species reached a concerned status, it should not only receive annual or more frequent monitoring but also further research geared towards enhancement and protection.

Such an ambitious endeavor deserves more support than simply depending on resource management agencies. In many cases, an endeavor like this could receive such support. If one looks at how much people love their cats, dogs or horses, then it is apparent that familiarity with a species usually breeds concern for its welfare. It won't apply to everyone, but for some. For example, once some watch wild juvenile salmon through binoculars for a dock afternoon, they very well may will often enjoy the experience as much or more than they did feeding their aquarium fish.

Seeing animals in the 'wild' is seeing the animal as it truly is, its life is the story, not simply its name, its colors, its call, its feeding, but the whole show.

One of the major reasons biological webs are torn asunder is because that's the way we are taught to understand them. People become specialists, reductionist scientists, guidebook snap-shooters. Such objectifying other species makes them easier for us to eat, sell, to master, to discard, to not care. But once one gets familiar with the stories of the individuals as a whole to themselves and to the web of life, they see that the web paints their picture in it too. We each are the sum of all our participation in the web around us.

For these reasons, any kind of survey efforts do find some amounts of volunteer support. We do have a lot of people who connect. We have the Christmas Bird Count, the Breeding Bird Survey and Bird feeder Surveys. We have lepidopteran societies, native plant societies, the Audubon Society, the Wilderness Society, the Nature conservancy, Mycological Societies, volunteer fisheries enhancement groups, and lifetime bird lists. We have the interests of volunteers who have already been doing independent surveys and recognized that things need to be done.

The questions are, "Do our resource managers have vision beyond their education? Will the
public learn in time that it is as important to put the world together as it is to take it apart?" One would think so. If managers don't have a resource to manage, then they will lose their jobs. If the public is unconcerned about diminishing resources, they usually don't last too many generations.

In this info age, some enterprising effort could, to a large extent, co-ordinate both volunteers and bureaucracies to interactively share survey research on the web. It is only going to happen because of someone making it happen, because those involved recognize the intrinsic worth to themselves in participating, instead of depending on grants or waiting around for bureaucracies to manage such an endeavor. Perhaps local businesses who are affected by resource depletions end game would recognize the value of active support before their livelihoods were severely impacted. They could help with financial support. In any case, such an endeavor is ambitious and would need to be satisfying for a certain minimum number of participants for a long period of time in order to become established.

If one wonders what such an effort would encompass, well, most all local biology. Start at the bottom and work up. Plankton, bacteria, plant and animal diseases, forage fishes, aphids, marine and land invertebrates, bottomfish, small birds, big birds, small mammals, amphibians, snakes, big mammals.

One thing in this info age that we do have increasing access to is both regional and world views, in depth. We are all gaining access to the knowledge of how to put the pieces together of how we fit into the existing ecology. Regular biological surveys would help us keep track of where we are.

OTG July 8-15 summer garden fertilization, top dressing

2007-07-05T11:27:00.001-07:00

OTG 7-8 TO 7-15 SUMMER GARDEN FERTILIZATION, TOP DRESSING

Once the garden is all planted, and all the drip systems in, with judicious fertilization and mulching, the effectiveness of drip irrigation can be increased many fold.

There are several steps to achieve this. Please read all steps first before beginning, as it will make better sense to you then:

1) begin the work with getting the garden soil damp down to at least 5 inches. Either rain or irrigation can achieve this. Once the soil is not mucky and sticky, perhaps 2 hours, perhaps
2 days its time to weed. Weed roots pull out much easier in moist but not wet soil, and digging in soil is much easier at this time.

2)Try and get the garden weeded directly around the plants at least 8 inches diameter around small plants like onions and carrots, and at least15 -18 inches for larger plants like tomatoes, squash. For establishing perennial fruit canes, trees and vines, a 24 inch diameter circle is good. Similar weeding patterns are good for similar sizes of plants of any types, whether herbs, ornamentals, herbs trees, etc. If the plants are able to be mulched, there is no need to exceed these weeding specs.

3) Unless the plants got a very good fertilization, or are being weaned from fertilization, this is an excellent time to apply top dressing. I use top dressing a lot, as there is much less chance of burning the plants if planning on counting the initial transplanting to have all the fertilization needs for the summers. It also gives me a chance to catch up after the hectic transplanting season. Finally, most plants like to not eat when they first get up (germination), like a small meal for breakfast (first transplanting), like a good brunch ( second transplanting whether to bigger container or ground), a real big lunch, (once the plants are established), like a good snack at tea time (midway through growing season), and a big meal at dinner (right before they are coming into full production).

I generally recommend using chicken manure as the primary nitrogen source to general gardeners. It is generally easily available, of high enough nitrogen concentration to make a difference, is a fairly balanced all organic fertilizer right at the high limits of plant tolerance to burning, and is suitable for most types of plants, except acid loving ones like rhododendrums, blueberries, and most conifers. I (top dress) band it in row crops, putting it alongside the row about 1 inch high and a few inches wide. For season long specimen plants like peppers, fall or winter broccoli, basil etc, I will use maybe about 4 handfuls per plant. With tomatoes I will use 6 handfuls and squash 8 handfuls. I finger mix this in to the top 2 inches of soil, keeping it directly away from the plant stem. Concentrate the mix especially under the drip spots, but on specimen plants that will get mulched, it can be spread more widely in a banded circle about 15 inches out from the stem.

Remember the rule about manure, the more it stinks the more rich it is. (Also try and keep your manure source from being soaked, whether in bags or compost piles. Keep this source tamped from rain. Unfortunately most garden suppliers don't pay enough attention to this, and their manure bags are often significantly leached of nitrogen before you buy them. If the bags are dry and powdery and smell good, you are lucky.

If using top dressing like this, try and repeat this feeding every 5-7 weeks through the summer, with the last feeding about a month before the plant is finished production. If an overwintered crop, do the last feeding about mid October and resume in mid February, but at slightly longer spring intervals afterwards. By repeated summer top dressing, and with judicious top pinching of buds, in most local places one can get basil plants to still be dark green and 2+ feet in diameter in early September, and February Brussel sprout plants 6 feet in diameter (which make big Brussel sprouts much more worthwhile harvesting). Do the same top dressing routine if growing plants outdoors in containers. Use more fertilizer for the bigger annuals, and less for the perennials and smaller plants.

4) ASAP after fertilizing, thoroughly wet the soil. Nitrogen is extremely fluid in both the soil and atmosphere. They say that manure loses half of its nitrogen content to the atmosphere within one hour of being excreted. If you have ever made manure tea, you discover that you get about 3 to 5 washes per batch of manure to water before the tea significantly loses its punch. By getting the ground somewhat soaked after the fertilizing, perhaps even by rain, before mulching, the mulch will trap much of the soil moisture from future evaporation.

5) ASAP Mulch the plantings. I prefer using leaves, seaweed, cardboard, straw. I might use hay in a first year garden, but abhor it in future gardens, because of its weed seed content. Non glossy newsprint is ok, but 3 layers lasts only about 6 weeks. For loose materials ( like leaves, straw, seaweed), I mulch as soon as the plants are about 12 inches high, and like to eventually get a mulch at least 3 inches thick for everything. Squash, potatoes, and raspberries can be mulched 12+ inches. In any case, keep the drip lines under the mulch.

Mulch is also much more forgiving to absent gardeners than those absentees who don't use it. In fact, it can cut water needs by half or more. One final word about it. Although not all mulch fans would agree, choosing to keep it down all year, I tend to cycle it through my garden needs. Usually there are periods in fall or spring when I do not have mulch on the ground, especially if I am growing or anticipating growing plants which might receive damage from pests that love mulch, like rodents, slugs and sowbugs. In cases of permanent plantings, the mulch is also permanent, only receiving renewing, in order to keep the weeds down.

Now that you have finished reading, you can understand why I listed the weeding diameters earlier. In about 6 months of a thorough mulch being on the ground, the weeds are killed. If something like cardboard is used as a mulch, it can accomplish killing more weed seeds in this months period than many years of tilling and hand weeding can. So don't go digging up all those weeds, mulch them. Once they are dead and decaying in the soil, the garden soil is much easier to dig in for future plantings. Save your back and knees. You want to still be gardening when you are old, when the fresh produce can continue to be your best health medicine you get.

At the end of summer, such mulching value is very apparent when you lift it up. Tomato roots, even under cardboard, will be right at the soil surface, and spreading far out from the plant. Since most mulch is a partial barrier to soil evaporation, the drip effectiveness is often doubled in surface watering effectiveness. This is especially valuable in bed crops of onions, garlic, carrots etc. where consistent moisture is much more important than the dramatic wet/dry cycles the plat roots endure in a non mulched bed. Often, this is a big difference between success and failure with such crops.

OTG July1 -8 garden mapping recordkeeping

2007-06-30T17:16:00.001-07:00

OTG July1-8 Garden Mapping, Record keeping

Now that most of us have the bulk of our plantings done for the year, its amazing how quickly we forget the names of the things we planted this spring, or last spring, or some other springs. It comes back to haunt us.

Come September, we try to recall both the names of the abundant delicious tomatoes so that we can grow them next year, and the names of the less than stellar ones, so we won't ever grow them again. Of course, most of us don't write this stuff down, and in some year or two's future September, we find that again we grew that worthless tomato, or pepper, or Brussel sprout etc. the list goes on.

Most such casual observation styles results in the gardener feeling incompetent, maybe even believing they have a black thumb. The truth is, most seed varieties brought off the generic store shelves are generic seeds well-marketed or well-known for a long time, well-priced, and well surpassed by superior varieties that discerning gardeners have discovered through a modicum of research, variety sampling, and note taking. This extra effort tends to discover not only varieties mech better suited to ones particular garden site but also to ones peculiar garden style, even the black thumb style. Every gardener has their own techniques of planting, fertilization, watering, siting, weeding, and harvesting.

Unless one has a long-term photographic memory, many plant names are forgotten. The best approach to avoid this dilemma of is by maintaining a system of redundant record-keeping. This can begin with using indeliable writing on ground or attached plant tags or markers at plants or rows. These tags or markers work well especially for quick field ID, but they also tend to disappear.

Whether one uses tags and markers or not, a generally more reliable reference is to make garden maps, recording planting dates of the specific varieties. Whether these maps are hastily drawn sketches of single plantings, single beds, garden sections, or the entire garden or landscape, the most critical things to do are to make and save them. Clipboards or notebooks are better suited for this. Occasionally it is helpful to consolidate these various sketches into slightly more carefully drawn maps of larger areas. Once one is done planting for a while, as at the end of either the main spring/summer planting or the fall planting, it is helpful to consolidate available maps, and then also make a few photo copies of the master map. The original can be archived along with a couple other copies. It is very helpful to keep a field copy of the current master map in a zipped plastic bag attached to a clipboard. This clipboard map can go into the garden, prepared for both showers and dirty hands.

If one is buying new property and has a lot of possibly impressive landscaping but not records of the plants names, it is often worthwhile to hire somebody who can identify the plants, recording their observations somehow. At the same time, gardeners can anticipate future gardeners at their place by making accurate maps of perennial plantings like trees, shrubs and vines. This can be done both by maps, and possibly audio, photo or video records. These audio or video records can archive valuable gardener commentary. Finally, some gardeners might want to submit their garden maps to a community record archive, especially if one has remarkable plantings.

For someone who has kept garden maps of various gardens over the decades, maps have also provided me with surprising help by reminding me not only of specific plant names, but also of how I combined plants successfully, especially in flower beds, vegetable beds, and smaller garden beds.

If one wants even more of a record of how gardens go, it might be helpful to photo it, perhaps with names of plants and the dates included in the photo. If you do this, it is helpful to use a large permanent marker on a neutral background, like brown cardboard, taking pics on cloudy days, when the light is not bright or dramatic.

Although the garden is so real in this moment, and one thinks that it is so easily experienced, it is a unique moment in time, one that will never come again. All we can do is try to remember it.

OTG 6-24 to 7-1 garden fruits for beverages and bbq

2007-06-23T12:02:00.001-07:00

Summer holidays are brightened by garden makings. Today, consider the fruits.

As summer solstice marks the advent of fruit production and summer holidays, gardeners can make such occasions memorable while at the same time dealing with some of their excess. If you are lucky, one thing you might have en masse now, just in time for the first summer relatives or the upcoming 4^th of July, is excess strawberries or rspberries. These fruits, like many others, are are excellent for processing en masse for beverages or barbeques.

For berry beverages, the classic easy way is to simply freeze them whole. Strawberries, raspberries and blackberries are best for this. Either fresh or frozen chunks can be squashed in a pitcher at the ration of about 1 part fruit to 5 parts water. Begin the process by putting the berries in a bowl and just covering them with water. Squash them with a potato masher, and then pour the liquid through a strainer into a pitcher. Repeat the process 3 times with the same fruit. By this time the ratio of fruit to water is about 1 to 5. You can drink it like this, or make it stronger or weaker. You can add sweetener to it if desired. This is a simple, easy homemade healthy soft drink. You can make up refrigerated gallon jars of this homemade juice for a guaranteed summer party hit for young and old.

If you get a lot of berries, you can prepare for the following years summer holidays by making fruit wines. The classic proportions are three pounds of fruit, 3 pounds of sugar, to one gallon water. You also want some little packets of yeast nutrient, some pectin enzyme and some citric acid, either powdered or from a citrus fruit. Its easier to make 5 gallon batches at a time, in a big plastic bucket for the primary fermenting and then a carboy for secondary fermenting. I have made a lot of grape wines and non grape wines (purists say the only wine is from grapes), and I have never had a failure with blackberries or raspberries, as the sweetness or dryness can be adjusted at the table. Strawberries are more particular. Visit a wine or beer place to get outfitted with supplies. Its pretty cheap to make fruit wines, much cheaper than buying the ingredients to make homemade beer.

Besides drinking your garden fruit juices, how about adding them to the bbq? Both with berries and other fruit, one can become a topnotch barbeque person by incorporating fruit into the bbq preparations. The idea is to soak the meat in a fruit based marinade for a couple hours before cooking. The meat will absorb the moisture and flavor of the marinade and in a covered bbq it will result in a tender, succulent moist meat full of flavors and taste sensations.

The first rule is to choose a fruit that will enhance the meat, not overpower it. Pick a mild fruit like pears, apples or plums for a mild meat like halibut, bottomfish or chicken. Pick a stronger fruit like raspberries, strawberries or currants for stronger meats like lamb, salmon or steak. If using fruit from out of the region, consider that citrus fruits go especially well with poultry.

Crush the fresh fruit, (you can even use jams or processed fruit if in a pinch) in a big bowl. I figure about 1to 2 gallons of fruit for every 10 pounds of meat. I like to go with a sweet and sour motif on all my marinades, so I add some sweetener (if the fruit is lacking sweetness), and either some lemon, lime , orange or grapefruit juice, or pineapple for the sour component. Be sparing with using vinegar as the sour component, if at all, as it is quickly overwhelming. I also like to use modest amounts of salt, or a touch of soy in my marinades, as this helps draw the flavor into the meat. Likewise I use some oil, like olive, sesame, or safflower, as these help draw the flavor out of the herbs that are going to be added.

Depending on the type of meat I pick different arrays of garden spices. For strong meats like goat or sheep, I will use strong Mediterranean herbs, like oregano, marjoram, thyme, bay, parsley, sage, onions, pepper and garlic etc. For beef I use savory, pepper, sesame seeds. For seafood I will use garlic, dill, some tarragon, some lemon grass. With any kinds of meat, basil seems to always work. Thumb through some recipe books for ideas on which spices work with which meats. You can always go off on an ethnic tangent, using various paprikas or other peppers, or gingers or oysters or salad dressings or even good old mayo for the meat and potatoes crowd. Whatever suits you, the marinade can have a few to a few dozen ingredients. The main thing for the medley is to go with a motif, so the flavors and sensations enhance each other and don't become blah. Herbs can be used dry, or fresh, usually stems and all.

After the marinade has been adjusted to ones taste, make enough of it to just cover the meat in the bowl, and let it sit for at least an hour and a half before going on the bbq. Get the bbq fire going a couple hours ahead of time for big ones and an hour or so for small one, in order to have a lot of coals.

It is very important to sandwich all cuts of meat in between two grills, for ease of turning without the meat falling out. With tender meat, you will need a finer grill mesh. Old grills can come from old stoves. Throw them on the fire for a while before cooking and scrub off with a wire brush both before and after the bbq. Try and get matching grills, and cut and wrap some tie-wire (ask at your building supply store) into 'hinges', fastening the grills together along one edge (simply a few loops twisted and bent ends for each of a few places on one side of the grills). Once this 'hinge is fastened, open up the grills (like a greeting card), lay the marinated meat inside, and close the grills, fastening both the loose end and all sides with tie wire. The tire wire should hold the grills so tightly together so no matter which way the meat is turned, it wont fall out.

You can set this assemblage directly on some rocks or bricks around the fire, but it is much better to lay it on a bigger grill that spans the entire bbq. You can get various grilled meat assemblages arrayed on a big fire, if you are cooking for dozens of people. When you are bbqing for more than 6 or 10 people it is very helpful to have a dedicated assistant, one such assistant should be enough for bbqs of up to 50 people.

The small holiday bbq way is to use a bbq with a lid and coals. A lid is imperative in bbqs, even if it has to be makeshift, like a few big stainless bowls over a campfire. A lid helps hold the heat in and prevents the meat from drying out. Make sure you use one.

After the meat is on the bbq, you can put all the herbs and fruit directly atop the cooking meat, and if it falls into the fire, no big deal. When turning the meat, use the liquid remaining from the marinade to baste it. At the end of the bbq, the marinade contents should be all gone.

For larger bbqs of wood fire origin, my favorite heating material is fruit pruning wood, preferably at least a year old. This wood can vary from 2 to 8 inches in diameter. Make sure the fire and fire circle is big enough to keep a fire going off to the side of the bbq, in order to replenish the fire with hot coals as needed. Fruit wood has sweet aroma, makes hot coals, and doesn't spark. I save fruit tree prunings specifically for outdoor fires. If you can't find fruit wood, deciduous woods like alder or maple are ok. Try and stay away from the conifers, as their smoke is more resinous and strong, overpowering the food's flavorings.

One final word of caution. You might get to be so in demand with your bbq success that you get invited to too many wingdings, where you have too good a time. Some of that fruit wine or regular wine, or even beer might get added to those marinades, and before you know it you don't have a recipe anymore but just a make it up as you go along cookout that is different every time. Oh well, there are only so many summers, right?

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adopt a species, adopt a habitat

2007-06-23T11:53:00.001-07:00

And adopt a participant ecologist-yourself.. That way, when you are looking for leadership, you can first look in the mirror.

In humanity's long and crisscrossed journeys, roads and trials pass through idyllic valleys, dramatic mountains, broad seasides, occasional canyons and abysses. As great things usually come with a price, today's remarkable world of knowledge, ability, convenience, and creature comforts has a tag, and its not getting cheaper. Now we face the escalating costs caused both by increased competition for diminishing resources and the consequences of past quick expenditure of resources. For those who lose competition, for those who either prefer not to fight and for those who cannot adequately compete, they face hardships and possibly extinction, past, present, or imminent.

Not all of us have yet become mired in any significant low spot in the road. There are those who lives are yet pristine, yet enraptured with dreams of plenty for them and their own. Perhaps they do not worry, believing that hard work entitles all to a special privilege where they are not accountable for their footprints on the planet. Besides, they are constantly being told by convenient entitlement spokespersons not to worry. These spokespersons have the credibility of representing segments of society who have already achieved these dreams of plenty, and they are in seats of power throughout bodies of belief and policy. These spokespersons reassure all who will listen that although there is always road work ahead for humanity to do, certainly there is no abyss ahead. Oh, perhaps there are the occasional low spots in the road, but many of those have been traversed before.

These spokespersons trumpet that for whatever lies ahead, that 'necessity is the mother of invention' and once again the ingenuity of free enterprise, enabled by undiscovered or new technology, will once again rescue humanity from the specter of this low spot of diminishing resources. They dismiss questioners as alarmists. If there is a low spot to encounter, they will find a way to gallantly declare it non-significant, dismissing it as a 'washout', as a topographical snafu which which any old human hiway of understanding can overcome. Then, as always, it's back to business as usual.

They are not alone in being unconcerned about such troubles. They also find curious companionship among those who actually do believe that there is more than a low spot in humanity's road ahead, perhaps even an abyss, but these people can deal with anything, so why do anything special about it? They are apparently chosen ones, willing to trust in a greater force, willing to perhaps leap into this what others might perceive as an abyss but which their faith convinces them is only an illusion. For them also, its full throttle ahead, believing they also are entitled to use up resources without accountability, as they have found a way that transcends such concerns.

Again, it's business as usual.

Finally there are those who both dismiss the acquisition of plenty for one's own as a dire folly of humanity, and do not possess the faith of abyss leapers. These are concerned about this low spot, as it possibly might be more than an inconvenience. They are uneasy about the road ahead, perhaps it intimates more travail than travel. They wonder if there even exists an alternative route around such a low spot, contemplating or perhaps embarking on scouting missions for a route around this spot. Who knows if there is quicksand near this low spot. Could it possibly collapse into a deep crevasse, a canyon, or even an abyss? Hopefully it is not a black hole.. Hopefully, they or some scouts will find a satisfactory journey around it, so someone can report back to the growing number of others camped further back, those who at some time have slowed their travels on this particular road, salvaging what they can. Although the future is hard to predict exactly, for all of these peoples, the old saying rings true, "If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging".

It's not quite business as usual anymore.

So what is business as usual anyway, concerning humanity's' road on this planet? Anyone who is even vaguely familiar with either biblical or natural history has had the opportunity to learn about either the imminent or actual disappearance of both landscapes and species within the period of human history. Are we facing similar circumstances today, or is this another false alarm?

In the bible we find the story of Noah, where Noah rounded up all the animals in pairs, where they all outlasted a great flood in his boat. Well, Katrina was a pretty big flood, and although we don't know too much about the animals, the people affected by that have sure had a hard time. In natural history, we learn not only of prehistorical extinctions of things like the dinosaurs, but also of human-caused extinctions from the stone age up until the present. Who knows what happened to the seven wonders of the world? With all of the roads in the world, one would think that by now we should have a few thousand wonders at least. One wonders.

Do all of these historical stories pale beside today's drama of humanity's attempt to subjugate the planet to service? Why do so many in humanity still claims that this is humanity's right? For them, this right is proclaimed either in various sacred texts or in economics twisted interpretation of Darwin's ideas, claiming a theory of 'survival of the fittest', when in actuality Darwin proposed more of a theory of adaptability. In any case, such ideas of dominion over nature and ones fellows, of entitlement, are only valid when people believe them, believing them because it legitimizes their greed. For them, the stories of humanity's dominion is past, present, and future. For them, this dominion is more important than the extinction facing a host of species throughout the world.

Yet one wonders what the lessons of history were really about. Does any lesson have value unless both understood and applied? If these were simply lessons for only the purpose of telling them, what is the point of subjecting children or other spectators to them, when people could be using their time in endeavors where they actually use what they learn?

For those whose education is both well understood and practical, they might trend away from today's era of over-specialization, so they can better assess what impacts their paths and roads contribute to the whole impacts of our species. For them, they are awakening to the costs of deferring too many areas of human endeavor to others to manage as they please. For them, they question this deferment, as it generally resulting in the only thoroughly explored areas of human endeavor as being the ones involving the prospects of short-perspective enrichment, generally limited to one's family and friends, rarely beyond the span of one's grandchildren, if even that. For them, they see the domination of this perspective in the world resulting in an everyone-for-themself culture, with a consequent backlash where everyone is also a victim of others not caring for them either. For them, this short-term perspective is enough of a problem within humanity's' internal affairs, and they see the problem greatly amplified (beyond humanity) in the rest of the organic and inorganic world, for which humanity in general has even less concern.

For these people, they wonder. Does not the diminishment of both the human and non-human worlds around us makes each of our lives less rich? Wouldn't it be boring if such a perspective were carried to its end result, if the world were crowded with people fighting over scarcer and scarcer resources and where this humanity's companion life only consisted of a few breeds of domesticated food animals, birds, and domesticated plants? Wouldn't it be boring if the rest of such a planet was devoted to human hardscapes, resource extraction ventures, and universal dog-eat-dog social structures, with convenience and quality of life diminished to a few families who themselves had very limited movement because of worrying that everyone else was out to get them?

Who, rich or poor, me or you, wants that? Is this business as usual?

Sometimes, humanity needs to stop and ponder such things. Today is one such day, for tomorrow never comes. Nowhere can we see the tomorrows of plenty for all are in our future. Nowhere is there evidence that short-term perspective is all that we need for either humanity's or the planet's future. For beneficent promises of both, we, as humanity, need to realize the wisdom of caring that extends beyond the short-term perspective. We can change our tomorrows, but we have to first change ourselves.
Certainly there is hope we can actively accomplish a beneficent future, but in order to do so, we will need to re-evaluate many fundamental ideas and their applications in out lives. Both ideas and technology are born from us, and we are their masters. Although the comforts of social structure and routine may make our belief systems seem natural, we need to continuously realize that they are of own creation or acceptance, and we need to continually objectively explore beyond them for improvements. From this perspective, 'business as usual' appears to be a dead-end road.

Routines and belief systems are the results of specialization, and to unfetter oneself from them is to decentralize ones life and participate in the greater whole. It happens anyway, in the cycle s of life and death, so why not get a head start? Not only participate a lot with one thing, but also participate a little with everything.
In embracing a larger view of the world, one tends to feel small, and even smaller when looking up at the night sky. One might feel too unqualified to participate in areas beyond one's level of expertise. But the truth is that everyday people can make significant contributions to about every area of human endeavor. Every molecule of each of us is critical for this universe, and the various arrangements are bewildering. We all participate in this whole, but at varying levels of awareness.

On the practical plane of ones own life, we can all make these various assemblages of molecules much more interesting by more actively contributing to both habitat and species restoration. We are needed to do this. Let us make humanity a worthwhile accomplishment for biology. For both habitat and species restoration, including our own, let us become involved. We can all contribute. Most people are unaware of how little even our scientific specialists and policymakers actually know. Let us break out of our specialty niches, our illusory niches of entitlement, and open our eyes to the world and it to us. Let us participate in the greater whole, no matter how daunting or how little prepared we are. No need to be intimidated, as in any field of endeavor, the truth is that everyone else just brings their own perspectives, no matter how many or how broad. In any endeavor certainly a huge amount of data and studies have been done, but any person who wants to synthesize the data into a theory or conclusion of what it might mean is usually reduced to cherry picking to appease peer pressure.

Both scientists and policymakers have so much invested in their careers, that any conclusions they're entrusted with making are primarily suited for acceptance, and validity a welcome convenience, and some level of uncertainty almost always present.
Participate more in science and policymaking. Scientists are continually discovering how much more complex each species is, concurrently discovering how ignorant humanity has been. The question arises, "How can one know anything unless one knows all?" This journey of discovery is not only open to these specialists, but also to all of us, by more thoroughly exploring the natural world around us. If the specialist is to attain heights of understanding, they will appreciate this broader perspective base. I don't know how many times that me, as a casual self-trained observer, has mentioned some species' or habitat observation I have made to a scientific specialist, and this specialist has not previously acquired this knowledge.

The only two things critical to embarking on such a change to habitat and species restorations is the subject concerned and the person observing it. The first step on this journey is to find the intrinsic interest in the subject, springing from ones own specific curiosity or concern, to spark the motivation to actively work to protect this species or habitat, regardless of the prospects of ones own personal immediate gain.
Perhaps this first step is the only one critical, as the loss of any single species is a diminishment to humanity, and if this step is never taken, perhaps humanity will also be lost.

Within our own wetside Northwest region we find long lists of both species and habitats in trouble, trouble. Over 90 percent of our forests have been logged in the last 200 years, over 80 percent of our wetlands have been drained, most of our tidelands have been altered, most of our rivers have been dammed, and most of our companion species have declined in numbers and range. Many lists have been made of these local declines, by such as Washington State and US federal bureaucracies, the neighboring B.C. bureaucracies, non-governmental organizations and individuals, books and websites. All are resources for viewing lists of species in trouble in our region.

For example, in the January 2007 State "Species of Concern" list compiled by the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife, we find listed about 55 populations of fish, 30 species of amphibians or snakes, 85 species of birds, 60 species of mammals, 40 species of mollusks, and 80 species of butterflies. There are many populations of another animals, plants, fungi, and other aspects of the organic world also in trouble in our region that could also benefit by advocates participation in their restoration, with the status of many of them receiving scant if any attention at all .

So, you might ask, what exactly can one do? As previously mentioned, motivation is the core step. Even if one sees ones efforts as a losing battle, that's not true. One has changed oneself. One still has at least the personal memory that one did learn something worthwhile and is trying to apply it in their own lives. Most of us do not think it desirable to lose our memory, so we might as well make it as good of one as possible.

Once that is straightened out, perhaps the next thing to do is to ask yourself, what habitat, species or types of species do you find interesting enough in that you are willing to thoroughly learn about and perhaps help recover, sustaining that interest for a substantial amount of time? If you can encounter the species in your own neighborhood, perhaps you can actively enhance its presence personally. If the species is beyond your direct accessibility, perhaps you can research and assemble knowledge about it and become an advocate or provide resources for its restoration to other groups or bureaucracies.

One can either join in a study originating from others or from oneself, setting whatever parameters they or you like, as long as they are legally acceptable of course. This type of activity falls under the banners of an Adopt a "(blank: fill in your own thing here). It could be something existing, like "Adopt a Beach', 'Adopt a Stream', or it could be something of one's own, like 'Adopt a species', or 'Adopt a Habitat'.

As an independent type, I can give myself as an example for those who would rather fill in this type activity into their lives as they see fit, instead of structuring their life to fit around someone else's program. For myself, I tend to bite off small pieces at a time of big projects. I focus on learning thoroughly about only a single or small group of species at a time, and a single habitat. I set realistic goals of how much time, effort, and money I can dedicate to this. Once I have accomplished as much as I can, I expand into something else.

Continuing this present personal 'Adopt a Species' program I have 'adopted' a couple of local species of concern, a bird species, the Western Purple Martin and a fish species, the Cherry Point Herring Population, and am considering 'adopting a plant species, the Garry Oak. As an illustration of my participation with one of these endeavors, I will use purple martins.

My intrinsic interest in purple martins began because of a couple of things. I have always been enamored of the acrobatic flights of the swallow family, their approachability, and their help in controlling flying insect pests. In the mid 1970s, as a first project in a carpentry class, I built a 16 unit purple martin house and erected it in various Washington state sites. My efforts with these birds was fruitless, and meanwhile their population had dipped from thousands in the 40s to only 6 know nesting pairs north of the Columbia River by the mid 70s. In the late 90s, I hear of new successful volunteer efforts at restoration, and a few years ago I rejoined the advocates.

As an example of my recent activity, something anyone could do, I have researched the birds a lot on the web, have contributed to a group of other local martin volunteers, (led by the outstanding commitment of Stan Koska), have built and put up martin houses in 3 separate locations, worked with occasional other wildlife trust organizations, have been a report center for friends who encounter this rare bird, have written info on restoring them on this blog, and try and make more public outreach on it also. For example, on June 27, 07 at 8:58 am on a Seattle fm station, (KPLU), a segment airs on these birds that I helped facilitate the connections to, the segments title being "The Return of the Purple Martins to the San Juans".

Anyone who has an intrinsic interest in an species could do something like this.

On my personal 'Adopt a Habitat' idea I have chosen a local beach which every couple weeks I do about a 3 hour round-trip beach walk along, taking notes and sometimes pictures or video. I also take along a backpack, binoculars, extra water and clothing, an assortment of plastic containers and bags, this or that net, various ID guides, and other miscellaneous gear. On my walk I note weather conditions like cloud cover, wind and temperature, water temperature, turbidity, tide and water current conditions, what species of land and sea birds I see and their numbers and behavior, what species of juvenile salmon, forage fish and other fish I can see from the shore, what invertebrates I see, what mammals I see and their behavior, what types of seaweed are in abundance or flowering, what land plants are in flower and their incidence, and miscellaneous things like people behavior on the beach, woody debris activity etc.

If this is done consistently and over many years, one can accumulate very valuable scientific data for scientists and management bodies. Even if you don't do it for many years, the records still may be valuable, or someone else might be able to perform this at a later time. If one were to pursue this even more, one could make even more valuable studies, using YSI meters to record dissolved oxygen, salinity, ph and other measurements. If one has a penchant for microscopes, the world of both phytoplankton and zooplankton is rich, little documented, and not only the base of marine ecosystems but also very little studied.

I have had a local scientist studying juvenile salmon that as far as he knows I am the only person in our county who is regularly patrolling a stretch of beach, and he considers it very valuable, but the funding managers are preoccupied elsewhere. That's OK with me, grant funding can be as much of a straitjacket for research as it can be a vehicle for studying.

Again, anyone could do this, all it takes is the intrinsic interest personally don't know why others aren't doing more things like adopt a species or adopt a habitat. With binoculars both birds and wild fish are fascinating to watch, way more interesting than seeing them on tv or in public or private zoos or aquariums.

A great thing about being a volunteer in any endeavor is that often has more latitude to set ones activities and advocacy. In fact, we really need an informed citizenry to participate more in policy making. Even if one doesn't do this public life, one can still make important contributions.

These preceding personal templates for scheduling parts of my life, 'Adopt a Species', and 'Adopt a Habitat' are only a few ideas of how to participate in restoration activities. When I was very involved in the plant world I would do generalized bloom surveys of both domesticated and wild plants. Others participate in existing database collections like the Breeding Bird Survey' or 'Winter Bird Count'. If such structures are not reachable at this time, simply work in your own garden, and raise as much of your own food and other resources, that is the base of being accountable. Once that is done and if gardening still seems like a good avenue, perhaps participate in community gardens or public parks. Perhaps initiate wildlife enhancement in any of these gardens.

Once one's 1)Research makes them a relatively informed citizen, they can embark or sharing this knowledge through the steps of Educating others, 3) Advocating to management parties, and finally 4)Leading strategies for restoration.

I capitalized these letters to make it easier for me to remember where I am going on all these projects of mine. I want to make it a simple path for myself. I call it REAL Research, Education, Advocacy, Leadership.

After one has established research patterns so they are woven in ones life, they can begin educating themselves and others by networking on specific projects, and perhaps begin working with scientists of all ages and qualifications. Ideas one has acquired in research will have more validity once they survive the examination of public discourse, and how well they match up with other ideas about the same subject. After this education step, one can begin advocating with bureaucracies, and public outreach like through the media, schools, community groups, and interested family and friends. Finally, one reaches the fourth step in the REAL process, where they are the leader, and where policy originates or is funneled.

I am tempted to begin listing individual local species or habitats that need your help, as certainly there are many with which you are familiar in your own neighborhood and you would say, "I didn't know that they were in trouble!" But the truth is, that one of the core problems with the decline of species and habitat worldwide is favoritism towards a few, especially when limited to family and friends and only for a couple decades ahead for them or ourselves. Besides, our goal is to realize that this planet is all of ours home, and every place and every species is deserving or recognition and appreciation.

The final questions to ask oneself are:

"How big is ones world?"

"Does one want to work to an entire world rich with diversity of peoples, life and landscape diversity?"

"Will it ever be possible for us to go everywhere and feel that it is all of ours flourishing home?"

"If ignorance is bliss, what is awareness?"

OTG 6-16 to 6-23 transplanting after the breakup

2007-06-16T17:28:00.001-07:00

Out There Gardening June 16-22: Transplanting after the breakup

For those who have been following the 'Out There Gardening' series started last winter, it will continue, but in a much smaller format, while the in-depth focus here shifts to other issues related to western Washington restoration. Although gardening is my personal area of best achievement, I perceive these other issues as also important part of restoration needs for our wetside Washington region, and for a while at least I will concentrate my longer posts on these issues. The first long positing in this new emphasis is about community gardening, which has been recently posted...

This particular post here is the first of the 'Out There Gardening' series in the shorter format, more tip oriented instead of a detailed exposition.

OTG: Transplanting plants that need the soil ball to be broken up

Hopefully everyone has gotten all of their in-the-ground category of plants moved into the ground by now, but if not, remember that the approaching hot days of the height of summer are a challenge for those little root hairs to readjust too, as the ground dries out so quickly in the long hot days of summer. This caution is especially true if one is unable to transplant the plants with the entire soil ball intact. If one is breaking up clumps of leeks, brassicas, corn, basil, onions etc, here's a few tips that I have found helpful.

First, a couple days before transplanting, feed the plants a manure tea or other fertilizer solution so that they are fed for the journey to their new home, until in their new situation the new little root hairs can become established. The day before transplanting, or some hours before, its good to moisten the area where the plants are going to be transplanted, aiming to have the soil texture moist but not gummy or dry for when the transplanting operation actually takes place. If one is planting the entire bed, or knows the exact spots where the plants are going, then fertilization (and moderate drenching) are good to do days (or weeks if it's a strong fertilizer like uncomposted chicken manure) before the transplanting operation. In any case try and get so that on the planting day, the soil is workable. I don't know why people plant into wet or muddy ground unless they absolutely have to. If possible, try and transplant on a cloudy or showery day, hopefully followed by similar weather. Otherwise, transplant later in the day, and try and keep the exposed plant roots out of direct sunlight.

To break up root masses of say 40 leeks or onions or whatever that are all planted together in a soil clump, swirl the bunch of seedlings in a 5 gallon bucket of water, letting the potting soil fall apart while gently separating the roots. Once separated, I like to lay the plants down on a planting tray, and shade them (the roots especially) from direct sunlight with an empty manure or moistened burlap bag until the individual plants can go in the ground. If I can't get them all in the ground within a couple minutes, I will leave a gallon pot in the 5 gallon bucket (about 2/3 or so full) of water, and keep the loose seedlings in the pot there. This keeps their roots submerged and the plants consolidated so they aren't getting lost in the bucket of dirty water. If the plants on the tray are starting to dry out at all, then I simply dunk them in the water a little.

After transplanting a certain amount of the plants, if it's a hot dry day, within no more than 15 minutes its good to sprinkle around the new plants a bit. No need to saturate the soil on this initial sprinkle, as the roots need oxygen too, and saturating the soil drives the oxygen out. Later on in the day, or the next day, its ok to saturate the soil. If the plants are wilting, its more important to keep the high humidity around the leaves than it is to keep the soil saturated. If it is super sunny and hot, the plants can benefit from some makeshift shading for several days, and frequent sprinkles to raise the humidify level near the leaves.

Finally, if you have a special gift, try out your rain dances, they help you stretch out your stiff knees and back. And if you want a green thumb, keep your fingers in the dirt where the mold can grow.

community garden leaps and waits

2007-06-16T16:15:00.001-07:00

He who hesitates is lost.

Look before you leap.

The optimist says you win either way, the pessimist says you lose either way. In the gardening world, you just keep right on going, hoping for rain when its too dry and for sun when its too wet. And these days, gardeners are also more and more looking for simply the opportunity to continue gardening. Community Gardens have an important role to play in the future of both feeding people and protecting home and habitat, as long distance agriculture becomes less feasible.

Throughout history, in cultures all over the world, organizing land management practices that create flourishing communities has been a constantly evolving challenge. In our region, as we enter the end of the age of oil, we also enter a time when we need to re-examine both how our economies and land management practices can adequately respond to the growing costs of long distance agriculture.

As the price of oil continues to escalate, the prospect of decentralized energy and decentralized food production becomes more attractive. The cleaner, most energy efficient response is for both building (except cooling oriented buildings, like refrigeration practices) and decentralized agriculture land to be situated to directly capture as much solar energy as possible. These 2 basic needs (shelter and food) can be partially met with attached season extension systems (like greenhouses, sunrooms, window boxes, etc) which capture both building heating and sunlight for warmth and heating. These needs can further be met by gardening outside around the home, in the neighborhood, or as now often common, through long distance agriculture.

For sustainability, besides consolidating shelter spaces, the exterior environs in any given area (the size of area determined by what can be reasonably daily accessible by non polluting means by all occupants of that area) should accommodate as much resource production for the occupants as possible.

Obviously, the models for both regional and national landscapes, based on the last one hundred years of oil economy orientation, do not meet such a land use structure. Most people use fossil fuels to commute to work, . They work and use buildings (like homes or shopping, or entertainment) that do not capture energy and also shade both arable land and buildings around them. Much of the urban landscapes not given over to hardscapes are given over to trees whose shading precludes both food growing and solar energy heating.

The advent of the global economy continues to be based on resource exploitation instead of resource conservation for varied and optimal use. Ironically, the global economy has yet to create a sense of widespread individual perception that this entire planet and its inhabitants comprise our global home, and that we are all transitory neighbors, whether plant, animal, man or other. As the cost of energy escalates the cost of this lack of perception, local economies can sustain a high quality of life for fewer and fewer members, and eventually all members access to a rich immediate environment is restricted or eliminated.

As a highly social species, one promising behavioral facet we possess is the ability to rebuild both our local food production and our neighbor bonding by specific social interaction which often crosses cultural boundaries, by participating in community gardening, which is also more egalitarian model for sustainability.

Community gardening has many aspects to it, and although individual participation may be rewarding on some levels and discouraging on others, it reflects the nature of what occurs when one deals directly with nature and community.

On the rewarding level, community gardening provides opportunities for many members to grow nutritious food for themselves, which might be too expensive for their budget to buy, or not provided in food help programs. It especially offers an opportunity for non-property owners to garden, whatever their living situation or rental gardening opportunity status is. Property owners also might find community gardening attractive, as they often find that community gardens provide much better sunlight, better soil conditions, and extra space for food gardening than their property provides. All participants can get free, productive exercise, and as a bonus can participate in a somewhat surprising specialized ecology of fascinating birds, insects and animals. Community gardens offer a rich opportunity for meeting new friends and learning both by observation and communication.

On the discouraging level, the growing popularity of community gardens sometimes limits the amount of land available to individuals. Often the land is leased, and occasionally sold, so the gardening space is lost. Sometimes gardening neighbors inadvertently create pest problems. Sometimes the gardening site needs much reclamation, and even then does not provide optimal soils or microclimates. Theft, vandalism, and roaming dogs are unwelcome occasional issues, the fewer the better.

All in all, community gardens reflect the community. Gardening teaches patience and the ability to accept failure, both being virtues that eventually are necessary for success with oneself and in the larger world. Community gardens offer an opportunity to make not only a positive difference in one's own life, but also in teaching others, especially children, about raising food, a disappearing skill in many cultures, but of possible great value for future generations. Our long agricultural heritage especially needs to enhance this neglected link, as today's mechanized, specialized agribusiness has corroded this fabric of intergenerational transfer of ability.

To more effectively renew the next generation with this knowledge, I am reminded of a story told by Conrad Lorenz as he opened one of his books, 'The Greylag Goose'. Conrad Lorenz won the Nobel prize for medicine for his animal behavior studies involving imprinting. Although 'The Greylag Goose' is about the greylag goose (the familiar barnyard goose domesticated from a European wild goose species) Conrad Lorenz does allude to his imprinting studies in his opening remarks to his goose book. I will paraphrase here what he says, as I do not have the book handy to check on the exact details.

"When I was 6, my parents let me keep a greylag goose in my upstairs bedroom in our home in Germany. Now as for my wife's background, her parents didn't let her keep a greylag in her bedroom until she was 8. Well, all that was about 70 years ago, and all my life I have always had to have something to do with the greylags, whether raising flocks of them, studying them in the wild, or, as here, writing about them. As for my wife, although she has tolerated all this, she has never been quite as taken as I am with the greylags. All this just goes to show you how important a factor that age is on imprinting".

Although I hope that other communities are recognizing the importance of getting kids started early in gardening, one community gardening program of which I am aware of that has been expanding on this idea for some years now is in south Seattle at Marra Farm. Once a family farm for generations, Marra finally drifted back into a wild state a couple decades ago, before being resurrected through the efforts of many dedicated indiviuals in the last 10 years ago. For details of both its history and how you might learn or participate, please find it on the web under Marra Farm, South Seattle.

Today Marra farm comprises several acres and several use types. Part of it is managed as a Seattle community garden P-patch, available for Seattle residents to garden on their own plots. Another section is maintained by a Southeast Asia gardening community. Another section is maintained by Seattle Youth Garden Works, where teenagers can garden and sell their produce in local markets. Another section is devoted to growing food for the local food bank, which services a lot of people who welcome the fresh produce often unavailable in food augmentation programs.

As a peripheral program to this, a local elementary school participates in both learning how to grow and use garden food and in providing an opportunity for children to have their own garden plots. This program is expanding to different grade levels, and is apparently very popular.

Because of the innovative success at Marra Farms, under the outstanding knowledgeable leadership of the staff managing the large enthusiastic volunteer contingents at the food bank and childrens programs, we are all shown that we can reclaim our agricultural heritage, in the wake of long distance food production becoming increasingly untenable. (Wow, that was a long distance sentence). Individuals at either Marra (or any Community garden) can participate on many levels, whether gardening, equipment maintenance, paperwork, outreach, donations of time and material, etc.

Even if a community gardening structure may seem unwieldy to an individual, they can still participate simply by arranging with a local property owner to reclaim abandon land or garden on land that the property owner can't keep up with the way they once did, whether urban or rural. For enthusiastic gardeners, the property owner can sometimes have an economic benefit also in the form of open space or agricultural use tax breaks.

Hopefully in our future other land conservation organizations will also recognize the value of creating and consuming agricultural products locally. Land trusts, conservancy trusts and wildlife trusts might be pleasantly surprised to see some of their conservation goals met by including community gardens as adjuncts to their other targeted land-use goals.

This is the time of year when gardeners main planting is finishing up, and can once again see what the rest of the world is up to. Hopefully there are community gardens in your neighborhood that will see your footsteps soon. Leaping allowed.

OTG 6-10 to 6-17, year-long fresh, local fruit season begins

2007-06-09T17:26:00.001-07:00

Year round fresh fruit from wetside northwest gardens begins

The beginning of the new fresh fruit season is here. In our region we can have fresh fruit year round from our gardens, beginning about now with early strawberries. I say about, because if one has an attached greenhouse or regular one, they may have been eating strawberries since April . With an attached greenhouse some local friends can even be eating fully ripe Skylar table grapes at the end of June (a vine from the same root, trained to be outside of the greenhouse, is just then flowering).

Growing your own year round fresh fruit fulfills many personal functions. A home gardener can grow fruit which they know how it has been grown, exactly which nutrients are put into it, what sprays have been used, and what environmental impacts have occurred to their site, like lead drifts from roads. The home fruit grower can select for quality varieties for their own preferences, and develop a diet based on fruit consumption more timed with the seasons, which may have health benefits. On a personal note, a couple decades ago when I quit eating citrus while in this temperate climate, I noticed that my incidence of colds decreased, especially in the winter.

Fresh fruit growing at home also has impacts beyond the home. It greatly diminishes the energy costs of transportation, transportation in general accounting for 70% of the energy consumption in the United States. It also diminishes one's dependence on destructive monoculture practices elsewhere, which usurp much valuable fish and wildlife habitat both directly and indirectly. Direct impacts of this are easy to see as the habitat is simply vanquished. Indirect environmental impacts of long distance agriculture are more hidden, being things like aquifer depletion and contamination by pesticides, and the pollution of fossil fuels involved in this distant agriculture, the need of this agriculture for dams, and the loss of diversified farmscapes throughout the world to large scale monoculture.

This monoculture not only impacts such farmscapes, but beyond our borders in the third world whole geographical regions are often transformed into third world cash crop economies, depriving citizens there of opportunities to live a decentralized, sustainable, community-enhancing lifestyle.

The best way to assure a consistent supply of locally grown fresh fruit year is to have overlapping harvests of different fruit types. If you don't have season extension fruit setups, then the early varieties of strawberries are beginning now. I advise three types to grow, an early one, a main crop and a day neutral, and you should have a total of about 2+ months of strawberry harvesting during the summer. One early strawberry to consider is 'Earliglow', which matures about 3 weeks earlier than the main crop. There are many main crop choices; I personally grow a couple that have done better for me, 'Benton' and 'Sumas'. A day neutral like Selva or the ubiquitous Tri-star fill out occasional harvests throughout the season, perhaps slight early harvest, then a main crop in mid July, and then a moderate crop in late August.

The first of the three types of raspberries production overlaps the end of the main strawberry crop. For this first type, the main crop raspberry, I like the variety 'Comox', as it has a naturally branching habit, is productive, and doesn't get so tall. I don't prune raspberry canes anyway, like most people do. (In tests I found that pruned canes are about 2/3 as productive as unpruned canes. I do thin out smaller canes in February). The second type of raspberry, the so-called everbearing raspberries, are actually raspberries that will fruit more heavily on primocanes than other varieties (raspberry canes live two years, the first year canes are called primocanes and the second year ones are called floricanes, which are the main fruit producing ones. Most everbearing growers try and enhance the first year production, by not only variety selection but also mowing down their canes every year. This encourages the roots to put all of their food reserves solely into new canes. amplifying the crop of these, which usually begins in late July or early August. Myself, I skip the mowing of the 'everbearing types' and although I don't get as heavy of a primocane crop, I do get an early, modest crop of raspberries from the overwintering floricanes and a an ok amount of crop from the primocanes. As an 'everbearing' type, I like the variety 'Summit'. The third type of raspberry, the so-called fall raspberries, are a mish mash of various cane fruit crosses. I don't have a favorite to recommend here, as none of my modest varietal sampling has revealed any standouts. The older variety 'Heritage' certainly was not one, and newer ones like the gold-colored 'Autumn Bliss', or the purple 'Royalty' both are occasionally ok. In any case, although all these various types might put out small flushes or scattered fruit through late to thanksgiving, I have never been impressed with raspberry flavors from fruit ripening after early September, if even that.

About the time the maincrop raspberries are finishing up in early to mid July, the cherries are beginning. Cherries are particular about reliability in the wetside northwest, either with various diseases, pollination problems, or bird predation wipe-outs. New dwarfing rootstocks may prove to finally make feasible bird netting a possibility with cherries. In the interim, local home growers might include in their collection some of the yellow fruited cherries like 'Starksgold'. In general, birds think that yellow or green fruit is not ripe. In all fruit (cherries, apples, grapes, currants, berries etc) cases, try and keep your non-dark fruits far away from your dark ripening fruits, as the birds will discover the non dark-fruits (to be ripe) much more easily if planted alongside the dark ripening fruits. Also, make sure you have compatible pollinator varieties available for whatever varieties you choose.

Later in July some of the first blueberries begin. Variety selection is not as crucial with blueberries as care is. They definitely need protection from birds, and the easiest way is to plant them in single rows no more than 3 to 4 feet apart and rows 7 to 10 feet apart. Plan on making a hoop frame covered with bird netting in a few years. Blueberries have very small root systems and are slow growers, so absolutely no grass, weeds or competition should be tolerated. They also must have an acid soil, and some manures, like chicken manure may be too alkaline for them. Perhaps the best thing for each plant is to have half of the soil mix in the (15-gallon sized) planting hole to be peat moss. (I am very sparing in my recommendations for using peat moss, as peat resources are environmentally limited and disappearing. If you can find a demonstrable, more benign substitute for peat moss, please do so and also educate others). After planting blueberries, try and keep them mulched from 8-18 inches high (no leaf burying) and twice as wide as the drip line with a yearly mulch of conifer needles or bark, possibly shredded or chipped. Blueberries also benefit by regular watering and twice a year organic nitrogen fertilizing. Finally, get a collection of different blueberry varieties going, both for pollination and continued harvest until late summer. Ones I like to include are 'Duke', 'Bluecrop', 'Blueray' and 'Olympia'. After 25 years of well taken care of blueberries, the shrubs might be 10 or more feet in diameter, but the 4 foot spacing recommended above should be good for the first 10 or 15 years, and then the plantings can be thinned if necessary.

By late July and early August, more fruit is maturing locally, and gardeners can easily have fresh fruit through until mid October. The first apples are ripening, like the variety "Earliest'. Plums begin, but the better ones are usually later. In early August peaches, apricots, figs, blackberries, currants, gooseberries, service berries are filling in the fruit larder. In late August the good plums are at their height of maturity, and the pears begin. Through September and the first half of October is the time for melons, kiwis, grapes and fresh pears and apples.

After about mid-October, although occasional fruit, like certain varieties of pears, grapes, and apple will still be around until Thanksgiving, the only fruit that occasionally might be outside and ok eaten through the winter are some late varieties of apples. On the other hand, many varieties of pears and apples can be stored to ripen through the winter.

To successfully eat a continuous supply of your fresh home fruit through the winter, until the early strawberries begin in mid to late spring, the local home gardener should aim for certain goals. First is to select good storing varieties of fruit that mature consecutively.

Apples will be the mainstay, as some of their varieties will keep until late May. Many gardeners are familiar with the ubiquitous 'King' the most planted apple in the Northwest, which ripens in storage usually about December. Many gardeners are familiar with the newer 'Jonagold', which can keep into January+ sometime. Not as many gardeners are familiar with rarer February ripening apples like some I like, apples like 'Golden Nugget', 'Ashmeads Kernel', 'Golden Nugget' or the wonderful 'Common Delicious', a parent to the (mediocre) 'Red Delicious'. Apples ripening later through the winter may not have as high of flavor or quality characteristics, but they are fresh fruit. 'Melrose' can keep until April with specialized care. The old variety 'Northwest Greening' is the one I am personally familiar with that will still keep until Memorial Day with casual care. Its not a superb flavored variety but it is a reliable long-time keeper. Its main virtue is that it closes the year-long loop on fresh fruit from your garden.

The main other storage fruit locally are the winter pears, which can keep into January or so. Old standards like Bosc, and Comice are good candidates to include in your orchard.

For storing winter fruit, take good care of it. Very careful fruit handling is paramount, as any slight bumps will bruise the fruit, causing rot which can spread throughout the fruit. The fruit should be examined at least every 2 weeks both for ripeness and to cull out any fruit ripening. Ideally the fruit would be kept in a high humidity place, slightly above freezing, inaccessible to rodents or other pests. Since most of us don't have these conditions, the next best place is a root cellar, and the third best place is an unheated outbuilding or storage shed, preferably insulated. In any case, try and avoid average temps above 50 degrees, and low humidity environs (which dry out the fruit). An enclosed porch is often a more practical alternative for most folks who don't have a root cellar.

As mentioned at the beginning of this segment, adventuresome gardeners can even extend their fruit production through the use of season-extension systems. Before the advent of railroads in the early 1800s, gardeners on both sides of the Atlantic used greenhouses to grow fruit in the shoulder seasons, often even tropical fruit. The tradition continues in some public buildings in France, where citrus and other tropical fruits are grown in large containers on wheels, and rolled out for the summer sun. In some places the overwintering greenhouses are still called 'orangeries'. Even today, at the Tree Fruit Research station in Mt Vernon, many citrus and other subtropical varieties have been experimentally grown under cover occasionally for the last decades. Some gardeners grow bananas year round outside, covering them in winter with thick mulches. Some gardeners have gotten Meyer Lemons to not only live outside in sheltered locations but also to produce fruit after several years old.
To really learn about fruit growing locally, one of the best ways to learn about it is to become a member of a local fruit society, like the Western Cascade Fruit Society. There are chapters of ths throughout much of Western Washington. There are also fruit growing societies on the Olympic Peninsula. These societies are excellent places to meet other fruit enthusiasts of every level of knowledge, to attend seminars and field trips, to acquire fruit propagation knowledge and fruit propagation material, and to sample fruit in the fall fruit shows. The Tree Fruit Foundation is another local organization that is always appreciative of support, as it helps support tree fruit research at the Mount Vernon Experimental Station, where orchard days and valuable work helps fruit growers of every circumstance.

Other notable resources include the book 'The Fruit and Nut Inventory' published every few years by the Seed Savers Exchange, which lists a huge amount of fruit varieties and where to get them from anywhere in North America. One could even go further and join the Seed Savers Exchange, which has both a few publications each year on maintaining edible crops, especially vegetables, but also publishes the Yearbook every year in February, where home gardeners can offer or acquire seeds or propagation material for vegetables, fruits, and grains. A third resource, frequently of high expertise, to consider joining is the society for adventuresome fruit and nut growers, NAFEX (North American Fruit Explorers).

Ok, its about time to go harvest those strawberries. That's some of the best education of all.

OTG6-2 to 6-9 Basil baseline

2007-06-01T19:19:00.001-07:00

Basil is the most popular culinary herb grown in the west northwest. Few people grow it successfully, but this is predominantly because of lack of understanding and not lack of ability or interest. Meanwhile, the stores sell small packets of leaves for exorbitant prices, and the leaves rot within 5 to 7 days in the fridge, whereas in the garden all they need is a little watering upkeep, once set up with th right growing conditions. Think of all the packaging and natural resources used to provide and keep cool this token market product, which a gardener with a sunny spot can grow. It is really easy to have too little basil, and nigh impossible to have too much.

Here, hopefully will be found ways to grow and use as much as at least one person could want, if not many others who would be glad to have it shared with them also.

First off, basil likes a warm, moist fertile site. Enhance your microclimate, and don't listen to those who claim basil likes an average soil. Lavish it with sun and fertilizer and ample watering in the hot days and you will have many smiling summer party faces around.

Drip works much better than overhead watering, and plants should be fed at least every 4 to 6 weeks through the summer with a fertilizer top-dressing mixed into the drip emitter spot located near each plant.
Ideally, basil likes daytime temps in the 80s and nighttime temps in the 60s. If soil is moist, basil can handle temps up over a hundred. If soil is dry on the surface it can handle nigthime temps down to 40. Tenmps at any time lower than 40 are damaging., although damage may take a week or more to appear. Frost will kill basil. It can survive a few days at air temps between 30 and 32, as long as it does not get frosted directly on the leaves. Low temperatures cause symptoms similar to other growing problems.: browning leaves, droopy leaves, or yellowing leaves. During cold temps, try and keep the soil aerated, dry, and very lightly moist or less. In the seedling stage, usually only a slight spot of watering in the center of the pot is best.
Actually, this works good with any plant in cool or cold , moist weather. I have had 2 inch high tomatoes set outside on a covered porch on March 5^th locally, under row cover, and not lost a single one to damping off, out of 50 plants, simply because I watered extremely sparingly.

Heavy soil watered late in the day is bad for basil during the nights. It abhors wet cold soils (below 45 degrees. (It likes wet soils when the temperature is over 80 degrees).

T o consistently get sufficient crops of basil, a grower needs some season enhancing techniques. Serious growers will start basil seeds under cover in late March or early April. High seed germination percentages occur with daytime temps over 75 and nigthime temps over 50. Keep the soil dry during coooler times and slightly moist when over 70. Basil sprouts and seedlings are easily killed by damping off, caused by a combination of a wet soil surface and extended temperatures below 55. In cloudy days like this, again, minimize watering, sometimes it may not be necessary for 3 to 6 days if the weather is continuously cloudy. If watering at all, water early in the morning on sunny days, and it helps to water with warm water ( 75 to 90 degrees) as this will rraise the whole temperature of the potting soil mass considerably.

Basil grows slow unless daytime temperatures are over 75. Seedlings started in an unheated, uninsulated greenhouse may take 6 weeks to get 4 inches tall. Basil likes lots of sun throughout life, so house indoor seedling development may be variable acoording to light percentages. Seedlings are nurtured like this until late spring. Although basil can be set outside in early June, or even direct sown outside in early June, it is not the ideal procedure. The best growing situation then is in a cloche, a translucent structure that can be opened or closed to direct sun and rain, and closed at night. This is the best situation for basil from June 1 to July 15 and again from September 5 to mid October. From July 15 till September 5 the best situation for basil is in the ground in the garden , in a full sun, sheltered from the wind site.

Some growers without cloches will use row crop covers as an intermediary enhancement for basil, and this can be valuable for larger field plantings.

Basil is finicky about moisture. When the weather is warm it loves moisture and adequate watering, like with any plant, is reflected by a sheen on the leaves. Basil grown in pots through the summer should not only have good drainage but also daily watering during hot sunny weather. In cloudy moist weather back off on watering. In the ground, basil greatly prefers drip watering, as the soil is generally more consistently wetter than the leaves. Basil generally does not like wet leaves through the night, although this may be unavoidable during rainy spells. If the leaves look dull or droop, water the plant. If well fertilized, basil can withstand drought to some extent, but does not grow near as productively.

Basil loves a soil rich in organic matter and manure. Seedlings do not get any fertilization until they are moved into their first 4 inch pot. For pot culture, fertilize with approximatenly one small handlful dry fragrant chicken or steer manre every 4 to 6 weeks through the summer until September. If the manure is black and doesn't smell, it will have little fertilizing value, although good for soil structure. For ground culture, either dig in substantial manure amounts or line out topdressing to individual plants or below drip irrigation line emitter slots. In any case, make sure soil is consistently well watered for 7 to 10 days after fertilization, to help feed the plant and cut down the risk of burning the roots.. Some amount of root burning or plant metabolism disfunction can be caused by fertilization. Common symptoms of rich fertilization, which may appear 3 to 7 days later, are some leaves becoming blotchy brown, or the plants leaves may become twisted or disformed. In either case, if watering is sufficient, the plants usually recover in about 10 days and make substantial quality leaf production for several weeks. The most economical way to apply fertilizer is spot banded directly under drip outlets on drip tape. Symptoms of lack of fertilizer is lack of vibrant growth in warm or hot weather, leaves not being big, fast growing and dark green.

Generally, basil in the ground has a harvest window of mid July to early September. Cloche harvest extends the season from June 22 until October 15. Some people overwinter basil in a sunroom or heated greenhouse. Regular house conditions become too low of light levels for quality flavor development by early January.
Besides lack of providing the above conditions, the most common cause of low basil yields is lack of pruning and thinning. For maximum harvest production, start basil in late March or early April indoors, with 3 to 5 seeds per 6 pack, usually about (2) 6 packs. Replant (2) 6-packs likewise again every 10 days until mid April, then 4 six packs the next couple weeks, then a full tray of six packs the first or second week in May. Keep replanting until satisfied with your total number of plants you want. Later in the season, I usually only do 2 seeds per 6 pack spot, as I am more interested at that time in getting rows filled out than in early yields, as I already have that covered.

Once the seeds are up and their first cotyledon leaves are fully developed, the entire soil clump can be transplanted to 4 inch pots with about a quarter cup of rotted manure to pot. (Mix the potting soil enmasse, not individual pots).

Ideally the first plantings of basil would transplant into a 16 to 24 foot UV resistant poly cloche in mid May. Do the entire soil clump of 3 to 4 plants spaced about 1 foot apart per clump. I like to do this row of clumps as a center row in the 4 foot wide cloche. Two outside rows of pepper plants (ideally in tomato cages to help support fruit laden branches) are along either side of the center row of basil. Run drip irrigation down the three rows. An east-west cloche orientation is best for cloches. If the cloche is 4 foot high on one side and 3 foot high on the other side, it is easy for a person to weed. I like the UV resistant poly because I can make flexible 'curtains': 1x2s (or 2x3 or such) lath sandwiching the plastic with 2d galvy nails. Alternatively various design hoop houses also serve the same purpose. The flexible plastic allows the houses to be open for rains and direct sunlight, which food plants (and many others) greatly prefer in summer locally.

No matter when or where the basil plants are grown, pinch and eat the tops as they develop, even starting when the plants are 2 inches tall. Within a week to 10 days, do it again. Each time you do this, the plant will make two branches. Thus the first pinching is one top per plant, the second is 2^nd harvest is 2 top pinches per plant, the third is 4 per plant, 8, 16 etc. Try not to get to close to the new side buds, or that will injure them. If you don't pinch the plant will soon go to seed at a small age. If you do pinch and do everything else good, the plants should get a couple feet or more in diameter. Eventually the plants will try harder and harder to go to seed, but continued pinching until September is advised unless you want to save your own basil seed. If you do want to save your own seed, you need to select your best plants and never pinch then from their early spring beginning. Basil takes a long season to ripen good seed in our climate. Any pinching slows seed development and takes away needed food resources from the plant.

Back to the cloche. In this cloche planting, as soon as the plants are up about 4 inches, halfway between each pinch period, you can thin out a plant or two from the entire clump of basil. If there were 4 plants in the clump, thin out one, if more than 4 thin out 2 or so at a time. Whatever you need for eating at the time thin or pinch. Do thinning when the soil is moist, so the plants pull out easy. So the approximate ritual is pinch, wait 4 days, thin wait 4 days, pinch, wait 4 days, thin 4 days etc. Sometime in mid June you are down to single plants (where the clump of several to many were), and these single basil plants should be about 12 to 18 inches in diameter. By the end of June, the peppers in the side rows next to this central basil row could be 2 feet high, and the whole interior of the cloche is solid green. At this time, end of June, you can begin or finish harvesting the entire central row of basil out of the cloche, transferring sole possession to the peppers. The peppers need the space.

While this cloche management has been going on, you could have begun transplanting into row cover rows of basil directly in the garden. I usually like growing basil in 3 row beds, with some of the most finely prepared garden soil devoted to them. You can do various arrangements of these rows, but generally, the basil is in either one or both of the outside rows, and the interior central row given over to something else. Sometimes I do one of the exterior rows to basil and the other to peppers. If I run out of either, I might continue that row with the other. The central row can be given over to a choice of things. Usually I have at least 2 beds like this, maybe 25 or 30 feet long each.

In one of the central rows I might do a double row of band manured leeks 6 inches apart (with the drip line in between) started February 1, on 2 inch spacing in the row. Along with the 2 outside rows of basil manure band fertilized, and drip alongside, I then cover the entire bed with row cover directly atop the planting, The dense central row of leek planting helps hold the row cover up, and offers some support against wind or stormy weather. I begin thinning and eating the leeks, first to 4 inches apart, by mid to late June, one month or so after the bed has been planted. By late July, I or friends have eaten this entire double row of leeks. (I have other leeks planted elsewhere in the garden, and eat them up until late April the next year). In early August, you can replace the central row of leeks with a double wide row of overwintering carrots, which you will eat next April. In mid to late fall after the basil and peppers are gone, you can begin establishing the outer 2 rows with June bearing strawberries. The row crop cover can stay on until midsummer, and then go back on when the basil are transplanted out. Both the strawberries and the overwintering carrots will benefit immensely from the winter row cover, although eh row cover itself will not. It doesn't like the wintry weather.

The central row of the other bed of basil/peppers can be given over to fussy seedlings or other special subtropicals. I often do seed transplants of herb perennials like lavender, rosemary, thymes, True Greek oregano (Origanum heracliaticum, if it isn't strong flavored and a well behaved oregano its an impostor, usually Oregano vulgare or an inferior variety of O. Heracliaticum). Or I might do marjoram or lemon grass in there. I really like this central row for lily seedlings, and other seedling bulbs, or slow growing seeds starts of trees (often conifers are good for this) or shrubs (evergreen usually slower.) This central row can get very interesting. This entire bed likewise is covered with row crop cover until July sometime. When its taken off in mid summer,, the 2 foot high lemon grass and sundry other herbs and such make it really look like a tropical paradise.

These 2 beds begin getting the same basil harvesting treatment as the cloche got, taking over in good production July 1 after the basil has been all harvested out of the pepper cloche.

Finally, my later plantings of basil, which are from my May starts, get interplanted here and there throughout the garden and various rows here and there. Basil leaves are great for giving away, and you can really do up a feast, a party or such with a big batch of pesto. An 8 or 10 pound bag of fresh basil is a great auction item in mid to late August for fund-raising. It is very rare to meet someone who doesn't like basil.

If you haven't got indoor starts, basil can be direct sown from about June 1 to 15^th. If nothing else, make sure you prepare the soil finely. Especially get rid of the roots and sod. (See my earlier cardboard mulch posting if this is the case). Both basil and pepper roots do not like competition. To be honest, I would only direct sow if I absolutely have too. Instead, if I had limited resources I would plant a lot of seeds to 4 inch pots, kept warm, maybe indoors or under row cover outdoors, and then thin once all the seeds.

A few years ago I moved to a new house and garden site about June 6, and one of the first things I did was plant 10 4inch pots with about 60 seeds each. I hardly had any gardening equipment with me, so I was improvising. In the interim I made (2) 35 foot long 3 foot wide beds, converting them from sod via shovel and cardboard. On June 22 I transplanted 500 basil plants to the 2 outsides of each bed, making 4 rows altogether. I did this on a hazy overcast day, shielding the plants from the direct sun as they were separated on a tray or piece of plywood. I transplanted the half-inch high basil plants 2 inches apart, band fertilized them with chicken manure, put down drip tape and then row covered each bed. I sprinkled them daily for a couple weeks, sometimes twice a day until their roots got down a couple inches. By about July 4^th I began harvesting, pinching tops. I would do half the planting at a time, and the other half on the second harvest. On the third harvest, I began thinning out every other plant, again doing half the planting. The next two harvests were pinchings, the next two were thinnings. Soon, instead of 500 plants every 2 inches in the row, I had 125 plants 8 inches apart, then 60 plants 16 inches apart, by early August. By mid August I was harvesting about 10 or 15 pounds of big basil leaves each week.

Even if a gardener gets an early spring start with basil, it can be worthwhile to get new seedlings up until mid June. This late planting gives superior September harvests than the early spring harvests.

Besides pinching, gardeners might want to also harvest lower side shoots entirely if the leaves are getting shaded or too dense. This is especially important in late summer, as the leaf quality deteriorates. Alas, come September, the basil harvest wanes. The cold damp nights begin causing the dark blotches on the branches and stems. Usually by about the second week of September, I am beginning to harvest the remnant basil plants for drying, as I use almost the entire plant.

For drying, do not pull up the plant. Instead, clip off the plant with some hand pruners right above ground level, being careful not to break it apart. Inside, in a non sunny but warm room, hang the plants upside down on high strings on branch crooks. Lay newspaper underneath to catch fallen leaves or branches. I even do it in the bedroom, having 4 or 6 12 foot strings suspended overhead, full of plants.The room smells great with these hanging basil curtains overhead. Do not harvest on a rainy day, and leave good air space between the hanging plants so the leaves dry and don't mold. You can open windows or sunny days, for air circulation, but don't let sunlight ever fall on the drying leaves or it will yellow them. When the leaves get crinkly dry in a week or 2, you can detach the strings and carry the plants to a room spot with the floor covered with newspapers and strip the leaves. You can crush the plants in paper bags to break off the leaves, or strip the leaves by hand into a big bowl or film developer tray or cardboard box or such. After the dry leaves are stripped, keep them loose in a paper grocery bag open at top for a couple weeks or more, gently stirring every couple days. Any excess moisture will evaporate at this time. Package into glass or locking plastic bags when humidity is low, as dry leaves rehydrate in moist humidity.

Alternatively, as the hanging plants are drying, they can be pushed together a little to accommodate new harvests. Plants can also be stripped as they hang from the strings. It is good to allow multiple harvest periods over several weeks to process all the basil plants. The last fresh leaf harvest outdoors is usually late September or early October.

After the leaves have been stripped from the plants, the stems can also be used. I usually pack the dry branches together in a box. Sometime in fall or winter, when I feel like a cold is coming on, or I really want a treat, I will gently barely simmer or infuse a 4 gallon packed pot of basil branches for 15 minutes. I then drain off the 'tea' water straining it into a big pot or bowl where I can pour it over my head and body and catch the liquid in another bowl or pot. Do this repeatedly. A person has not lived until they have luxuriated in a basil tea shower. And you get to have a few leaf specs in your hair afterwards too.

There are lots of ways to save basil after harvest, in pesto, oils. etc. I have tried them all, and still make this and that thing for freezing during the winter, but nothing compares with fresh basil. Dry basil is my main storage method. In sealed plastic bags or gallon glass jars, it usually is fairly ok for cooking for 18 months or slightly longer. Then it really goes downhill in flavor. I prefer keeping the leaves intact as long as possible, as crushing shortens their lifespan of flavor.

There is some hand picking of stems when you go to cook with dry basil. It is so versatile I don't know where to start talking about cooking. One thing I use it up a lot is in bread oven pizza bakes, or just winter baking days. I like to put it in bread or pizza dough along with dried marjoram, and fresh garlic, oregano, thyme, rosemary, and sage.

As far as varieties of basil, culinary virtues are the main thing I look for. The basil than can withstand the coldest weather in fall or spring is Hairy Basil, sometimes known as Holy Basil. It goes to seed relentlessly early as a small plant, so is mostly appropriate for the shoulder seasons. In my opinion the most versatile basil is Napoletano. It has large crinkly leaves with good flavor, suitable for pesto or sandwiches. Some strains of Thai Basil could contend for the best flavor of basil. Actually, gardeners should keep close eyes on where they get their Sweet Basil Seed from. Although most basil available is called simply 'Sweet Basil' there is tremendous variation in the culinary quality and production of the plants.

There are various flavored basils.

Mrs Burns Lemon Basil is far superior than the strain 'Lemon Basil". The Lemon basils can be sparingly used in seafood or poultry dishes or in herb teas. Garden herb tea mixes suggestions can begin with lemon grass or superior strains of blackstem peppermint.

I personally am not that enamored with most other colored, flavored basils or ornamental basils like Cinnamon, Licorice, Purple Ruffles, Burgundy, Tulsi or such. I have grown over thirty varieties of basil but it has been such a long time ago that I experimented with them that I cannot remember most others. Recently there have emerged more specialized varieties of Sweet Basil, and I sold many of these varieties in a 2 year market gardening endeavor some years ago, and most customers loved basil but not all agreed on the best flavor. For some it might be Italian, or Genovese, for others it might have been a specific seed companies Sweet Basil Variety. In any case, gardeners are encouraged to try more than a couple varieties, as they might be much more pleased with one than another.

Basil has a long history most folks are unaware of. It was a preeminent hair herb in olden days, and probably declined because of its expense. I learned of this hair virtue accidentally. In one 25 day period some decades ago each day I rated a different hair herb for four criteria: cleansing, feeling, endurance, and overall effect. One day I wold make an infusion of strained rosemary and pour it over my head a few times at the end of a shower . The next day I would do it with sage. Other days it would be lavender or southernwood or black cherry bark or nettles or chamomile etc. 25 different herbs, each on a separate day. At the end, I looked at my notes of which I liked the most. And the two winners were...... rose petals, and basil.

Basil also enjoys a long folk history as a stomach tonic. I can attest to that. I have grown many thousands of species and cultivars of plants in my life and basil is the centerpiece of my summer food garden. For me it has been simply great for improving digestive system irregularities. For someone who has been known to occasionally indulge in coffee, onions, beans, junk food or critter roasts, basil has often gotten me back on track.

Basil is so revered in some places that it has a spiritual significance. Some peoples put basil leaves in the palms of their departed loved ones as they begin their journey down the Ganges. I personally feel a little better prepared for a heavy duty virus attack or exhaustion burnout or emotional roller coaster if I have enough extra basil to spare some for a special shower or such to begin my approach to dealing with the issue.
It has long amazed me how difficult some people think basil is to grow. Then I begin realizing that I think it is so easy to grow because I have liked it so much that I learned how to grow it well many decades ago. It still continues to surprise me how I can occasionally get a harvest when I didn't expect much because of some stress or another..Heck for me, it even survived the rabbit hordes and drought last summer. Not a bountiful harvest for the neighborhood like usual, but plenty for me anyway. (The rabbits didn't bother it, the drought did some but not totally).

Maybe why I find basil so easy to grow can be reflected in this snapshot of my relationship with it. I just began a new garden in another new site this spring (heading for 30 garden sites in my career now), and as I was recently planning out where everything might go, I said "Well, of course, the first thing to figure out is where to put the basil." By the way, the second thing I said was "and then of course we have to figure out the melons." (Melons was what last weeks post was about).

As my favorite month of the year May sadly ends today, gardeners like myself need to content ourselves with prospects of the fruition of our efforts. For me, I have always much more enjoyed the prospect and the excitements of what will come than I have the actual arriving. Now the dawn choruses begin to lose some voices, and the tree frogs head for the hills, and hopefully our gardens. For those who still have not gotten around to getting ready for the great bounty of summer, its time to get out those basil packets. You only have a couple weeks left this year to still get a great garden thing happening.

There are only so many summers you can have a garden. This is another one.

OTG 5-27 to 6-3 melons a first year garden fruit

2007-05-24T22:21:00.001-07:00

OTG 5-27 to 6-3 Melons a first year's garden fruit
For gardeners who want fruit in the first year of a wetside northwest garden, growing melons is a challenging endeavor to possibly fulfil those wishes. Most other fruiting plants take a couple years or more to produce in quantity, the only exception being day neutral strawberries (if well grown). Day neutral strawberries also have their own set of challenges in a first year garden, demanding substantial relief from weed competition, especially grass, which is usually a common remnant from conversion from sod or pasture. Day neutrals can offer fruit in early summer to late August, while most melons locally ripen late August to possibly early October.
Besides enjoying melons, growing them also has other benefits. Most melons sold locally arrive from long distance warmer areas, with the ecological liabilities inherent in long- distance agricultural production and distribution. Home-grown melons offer the advantage of being picked at perfect ripeness, an erratic opportunity with store-bought melons, especially considering that melons do not continue ripening after being picked. Finally, one of the melon types, muskmelons, offers a rich supply of vitamins in addition to its assessment as a favorite fruit of many choosers. I once met someone whose mission that year was traveling around Mexico looking for the perfect muskmelon, as he thought it the perfect food, and wanted it to be the main food of his diet.
Adventurous local gardeners will have more success with muskmelons than watermelons. Most people call muskmelons 'cantaloupes', but actually cantaloupes are a specific type of muskmelon, referring to the ease with which the ripe fruit detaches from the vine. Watermelons generally need more heat and longer growing periods than muskmelons do to properly mature.
In both cases, heat and full sun are the major requisites for melon maturity. They also have fine root systems that don't take kindly to big weeds or weeding out big weeds. Keep the weeds down from the beginning. Although melons like water as much as most other garden plants, they can also produce crops in more droughty sites. My last year garden site ran out of its' water supply on July 17, and it was a hot rainless summer garden on the southwest sandy slope where these melons grew. But both muskmelons and watermelons set fruit and grew many into maturity. The production wasn't near as good as if they had been watered, but I still got about 80 pounds worth of superb fruit on about 50 feet of row.
The first step in melon growing is to select early ripening varieties. The best method for this is to consider melon varieties already grown locally. Your local organic or CSA (community supported agriculture) farmers are often adventurous enough to explore melon growing, and learning their successful varieties is a good way to pick varieties for your own efforts. 10 years ago I saved muskmelon seed from some various fruit I liked that had been grown by some various local organic market gardeners, planted seed of the various varieties, and 10 years of casual selection later I am happy with my muskmelon variety. I simply save seed from my favorite fruit every year and let the bees do the rest (melons are open-pollinated so can cross-pollinate over half a mile or more distance, whatever the range of the bee is).
For the watermelon seed I use these days the story began about 20 years ago. In the mid- 80s I received some "White Wonder' watermelon seed from Wilford Herman, a kind gardener in South Dakota, who responded to my 'short-season melon wanted' request I had listed in the Seed Savers Exchange Yearbook ( I cannot recommend a more worthwhile gardening organization to join than the Seed Savers Exchange). By the early 90s I couldn't find any seed company in the US that listed 'White Wonder', but it had already become my favorite. It still is my favorite watermelon and the only one I have grown since the late 80s. It is white-fleshed, and small, only 2 to 8 pounds or so usually, but that helps it ripen early in our short season climate. Ripe watermelon is ripe watermelon, I can't complain about its size, color, flavor or juiciness. They are all ok by me.
(I'm sorry not to better recommend melon varieties you might try, but I don't have easy access to my database gardening notes at the moment, from the 80s when I was sampling dozens of melon varieties locally. Also, I have not kept up with the newer melon offerings, having moved on to other fields of natural history study.)
The first few years in testing melons, it's wise to begin with modest expectations, to assess your site potential. You may discover you have a troublesome site, eventually realizing that in your particular spot you have to do high maintenance (like preventing rainfall on the leaves at fruiting time) if you want a crop at all. I learned this humbling lesson repeatedly in my main melon variety sampling ground back when I was avidly sampling and notating vegetable varieties in the 80s. Every year I would be drooling in anticipation of the great melon crop that was filling out in the beds, bragging, showing off, and promising melons to friend when the melons would ripen.
For those several years in the 80s I was growing 10 varieties each of muskmelons and watermelons in a 1000 square foot Seattle sampling plot, and I could hardly wait to rate their flavor. Every year I would have an apparent great crop appearing by early August, with up to a couple hundred 4 pound plus fruit some years, only weeks away from field ripening, and dozens already as big as any average supermarket muskmelon (I never got big watermelons to mature).
But almost every year my aspirations were shattered. Almost every year in mid to late August a 2 to 5 day rainy period would occur, and I would come out one day to find almost my entire planting of melons wilted, near total losses. You'd think I'd learn something, and I tried. I went to libraries and contacted plant pathologists around the country, from both the government and universities, even sending out tissue samples. They were all as puzzled as I. The closest diagnosis was Fusarium wilt, although it wasn't identified exactly as that. In any case, in subsequent years I planted both bacterial and fusarium wilt-resistant varieties of melons, and the only muskmelon varieties that seemed to resist the wilt were the fusarium wilt- resistant variety Iroquois and some green fleshed muskmelons. The watermelon plants didn't wilt entirely like the muskmelons did, but would get an almost closed leaf appearance and grow feebly after the storm events.
Subsequent to experiences in that garden site, I have learned that wilt is not apparently everywhere in this region. If there is one thing I've learned, plant diseases are curious, often needing specific conditions to develop. I am a real oddball as far as that goes, as I am intrigued by the diseases, and am always tempting them, even if I may have learned how to easily avoid them. My favorite challenge is to get wide genetic bases in my seedstocks and see who can resist the diseases, or other pests.
Anyway, I am even today uncertain to what extent melon wilts occur in various regions within the wetside northwest. I have not had problems with it in most other gardens regionally, including other personal gardens in Seattle, the Olympic peninsula, or the San Juan Islands. In those places I learned other things about growing melons.
In the 90s I moved to a cold garden site for 5 years at 1000 feet altitude in the North Olympics. Never once did I see the temperature break 90, and there were usually only a few summer nites warmer than the 40s. I was able to grow limited quantities of muskmelons only under cloche, and watermelons only in the (unheated uninsulated) greenhouse, growing them there in 15 gallon pots (every third watering done with manure tea) atop a plastic covered waist high table that was a planting table all spring. Generally I don't like growing food crops through the summer in greenhouses, their glazing lowering sunshine intensity and their 'closed' environment more conducive to insect problems like mites and aphids. But for greenhouses, cloches or start frames, often left vacant of plants in the summer, melons can be a good choice, especially if the glazing can be opened for direct sunlight.
After the Olympic gardening experience, for much of the next decade I had gardens in the San Juan Islands, and many experience gardeners there have had rewarding experiences growing melons there. The amount of success is primarily tempered by the quantity and duration of hot summer days in relation to storm events and their duration. No melon wilt reports have come from any of my friends there.
In propagating melons, gardeners are advised to start a couple pots of each about the second week of May, allowing ample time to do at least one main crop planting about May 20 and possibly a last planting by June 1^st, if necessary. Melons need warmth over 80 degrees to germinate well, and the seeds will rot in colder wet soils. This is the primary reason for germination failure, as it is usually not bad seed, as the seeds are generally long-lived. For example I got 20 percent germination on 11 year old watermelon seed. Generally only a couple splashes of water on the pots are all that is needed for germination, and not thorough soaking.
If one doesn't have a warm greenhouse where the sun can heat up the soil surface, an alternative sprouting method is to plant the 4 inch pots with about 4 seeds each , and then germinate them in a portable ice chest, with daily changes of hot water in closed containers, using whatever is available, from hot water pads, solar showers down to lidded pint yogurt containers etc. Soil temps in such a chest container can average over 80 degrees. Seeds in such an environment should all sprout within a week, possibly in a few days. Like all curcurbits, plant the cluster of germinating seeds en masse with the soil clump into the same spot.
Melons need a finer prepared soil than squash or cukes, but it can still be 'spot' or 'band' prepared. I have frequently prepared melon rows on immediately reclaimed pastures or lawns. Basically I sift out the sod using cardboard as the sifting 'table' (described in my cardboard mulching post). I like to transplant the melons in late May or early June in to chicken manure enriched soil, and then cover up the weed environs with cardboard mulch, run some drip irrigation to the plants, and then cover the plants with row crop covers. The row crop covers trap extra heat and make for earlier maturing melons.
The row cover is pulled back during the time that melons are flowering, the most common pollinators I have seen are bumblebees, (see bumblebee post). Once most of the flowers are finished appearing and a substantial number of fruit has set, then its time to recover the melons with the row crop cover. Not only does it continue to hasten maturity, but the row crop cover obscures the fruit from many predators, like crows, rabbits, deer, squirrels, etc.
Several signs indicate when muskmelons are field ripe. The first is a color change in the skin to a more yellow appearance. Frequently a gardener can smell a ripe melon simply by walking beside it. A third indicator is to gently push on the end of the melon and if it is ripe it should give in a little bit. Finally, simply slightly turning a ripe fruit will detach it from the stem. Muskmelons do not ripen after picking.
Fewer signs indicate when watermelons are field ripe. The fruit generally grows quickly after being pollinated, reaching a certain size, and then slowly ripening. When the tiny curlicue tendril immediately above the fruit turns dry and brown, the watermelon is probably ripe. At this time, the underside of the fruit has a large white spot, where the sugar has settled. Finally, the knock test is valid for assessing watermelon ripeness, with a hollow deeper sound indicating ripeness. A higher pitched ring means it is not yet ripe, and a thud means that it is over-ripe.
In my short melon sampling career, I learned much more about gardening than simply about melon growing. I especially learned about increasing warmth in the garden. In my efforts to increase melon production, I built my many cloches, seasonal greenhouses, and tried variations on clear plastic mulch and black plastic mulch.
I took a lot of various soil and air temperatures and learned some surprising numbers. In mid May at noon on a sunny day, I tested various spots for soil temps at 3 inches deep. In sod the soil temperature was 50 degrees, on flat cultivated ground it was 55, in cultivated raised beds it was 58, in cultivated raised beds with row cover it was 61. I also made some 40 foot long mounds with the crests 10 feet apart where I wanted to plant the melons, the height of the mounds was about shoulder height when I first made them (they settled during the summer). On the May day of soil temp measuring earlier described , under black plastic the soil temp was 68 degrees at the top of the mound. Under clear plastic at the top of the mound the soil temp was 88 degrees.
Measuring heat in plastic cloches on cloudless summer days, gardeners can easily get interior air temperatures over 120 degrees when the outside temp air temp is in the mid 70s,
A way to increase soil heat is by watering with dark garden hoses (or even the black drip_ tape) once the sun has warmed them up. Such water can even get scalding hot by early afternoon (too hot to water plants), but by watering when the water temp is below about 105, then the heat of the water is transferred to the soil, helping keep the plants' roots warmer at night. (I also use warm water for watering container starts inside till spring really warms up).
Nowadays I have simplified my melon growing to the cardboard and row cover method. This method is fairly benign with the row crop cover being the more polluting technology. But I try and use it discreetly and weigh its use against other alternatives. (I prefer the woven row crop cover as it is much stronger and in using it judiciously and avoiding it being torn, single pieces can last 10 years).
One thing is different about melons in comparison to other curcurbits like zucchini or cukes. Almost everybody, especially the gardener, is happy to get them. For those who like to grow their own fruit but don't have perennial fruits into productions yet, melons are a good one to fill the gap. Who knows, it might be a pretty big gap.

OTG 5-19 to 5-26 cardboard mulching

2007-05-17T22:44:00.001-07:00

The long golden May days of garden prep and planting
Oh, these are the busy gardening days, when both the soil and air are finally warm enough to spend entire days in the garden, digging and planting. But where to prioritize energies now, as everything just wants to go grow grow and get sun, water and food aplenty ASAP and when will that darn gardener get over HERE anyway?
The vacuum of need draws gardeners into consolidated rituals, making them organized for the disorganized. The gardener's captured in a natural world of fractile patterns spinning off vortexes, scientists, artists, the full catastrophe.
There's work aplenty today, and we gardeners can visit a moment, but in May we are gardeners. I don't know where this energy comes from to answer all the calls from the garden wannabes, but the energy always appears and drains us dry and then recharges us for the next day a little more. Each day we get an a little extra lift, this time of year. We wonder, "Can gardeners can get energy directly from the sun by working outside?" I know in Alaska's 3 month summer day almost anyone can keep going relentlessly, almost without sleep.
Of course the scientist in me has to wonder, "Maybe it's not the sun energizing some of us, but perhaps it's the earth battery energizing us molecule assemblies"....
Such obtuse questions will have to be fit into the task stream somehow. During all the dirt contact these planting days, we will have to forget to eat, especially at midday. Too many clamoring voices, "Come over here! And bring the hose with you!" So, us hapless gardeners have to wonder where are we going to get that extra energy from, if we aren't even allowed to remember to eat? Well, a few years ago, I thought I'd do all of us a public service, and answer this question if I could. I decided to really explore this perplexing problem of who is really recharging us, the sun or the earth.
So, one day those some years ago, when I was entering my 5^th decade of gardening, I thought I'd test both myself and the shovel, see who would give up first. Or, if we actually both survived one full day of planting, how much would we get done together? One full daylight day of planting at 50 degrees north?.
So this one mid May day, a day just like today, me and my shovel, and my rake and scythe, and pitchfork of course, we all wheelbarrowed together out in the garden at first light. We all cut high grass and dug up new garden ground by hand continuously all day long till last light, with only occasional water breaks for everyone, and the tools got many more rest periods than me (but they worked harder when they were busy). We were building mountains of dirt and then rolling the sod down them and carting the sod remnants off to the top of the compost pile.
About mid-afternoon one of us tired, thinking hazy, cruising automatic. At one lost point, while scything a new area in prep for raking, the two steps required before digging new ground, that one of us drifted off daydreaming.
This one of us daydreamed into another time, leaving most of the others behind except for the scythe. The two subjects were in a field of maybe a dozen other gardeners, all cutting at the high grass. This one daydreamer looked over at these other gardeners and they were all wearing hand made clothes with similar colors and materials. They just kept cutting away, and weren't bothered at all at how this stranger and companion scythe could have appeared in their midst. This daydreamer was certainly more concerned at such an unexpected appearance by themself. But apparently this daydreamer was just another cutter in a long long line of others before, someone unimportant, someone who worked the land just like the long line of gardeners that would come afterwards.
The daydream dissipated and the daydreaming me and my companion scythe paused, reveling in the moment. Some robin came and scarfed up a worm.
Most of the rest of humanity in these parts was at work, in school, doing home chores, or perhaps shopping.
That day me and my buddies got about a thousand square feet of scythed pasture pasture sodded and weeded out and light and airy and sort of level. At one pont we had a 30 foot long, 5 foot high hill behind my line of sod in front of us. Old Shovel would cut wide squares of sod loose then toss a couple dozen sod clumps at a time to the top of the mound behind us, letting them roll down to the bottom of the mound, their cargo of dirt spilling onto Our Mountain. Once the allotted amount of rolled sod balls had accumulated along the bottom of the mound, Pitchfork would perk up and shake the sod clumps free of dirt, tossing the stubborn ones to the top of the slope for more rolling free of dirt. When bereft of most soil, the sod clumps flew into Wheelbarrow for the journey to the King-of- the-Garden's (Winter Squash) throne-to- be at the top of the Garden. Then along came Mr Tidy, a.k.a. Rake, who skied along the back slope of Our Mountain swooping Dirt down to level ground, leaving flat s0d-free Garden in Our Mountain's wake, as Our Mountain followed us on Our Sod Adventure.
So a thousand square feet of ground recovered from pasture is how much garden this one particular gardener assembly could dig from scratch in one May Day at 50 years old for the oldest part of the assembly. I don't know that this assembly could have gone all day like that any other time of year or got that much done. I don't know where this energy comes from, but it works. Or more correctly, the assembly work for it, whatever 'it' is. I wonder, is all this odd molecule association actually some conspiracy to trick me to provide entertainment for robins and other observers? Hmm.
Nope. I think I have the robins fooled. But probably not the worms. I've done this enough to know there's too many rewards for me also. All these gardens cleared from pasture or woods or lots have always given me much more than I put in. I've seen more art, heard more music, smelled, tasted, felt, learned, thought in gardens than any other museum, concert hall, perfumery, 10 star restaurant , ivy league school or any other place I have or have not been to. Besides, a 7-10 thousand foot garden gives plenty of stuff for a gardener to be generous to all friends, and that is one of the best feelings anyone could have, to be generous. Giving away healthy fresh food to others is... like playing doctor without needing a license..
So, surely, such hand-digging for such a 7 to 10 thousand square foot feedable garden is feasible for most folks. You just gnaw away at it as you can, and then when you get done what you can, you turn it into perennial landscapes and just keep marching your gardens out from the edges. If you need to move gardening spots entirely across town or country, well its not like you are wheelbarrowing off to a different planet, more like a different part of a bigger garden. The sparsist would say all that one such gardener is actually doing is carving out time. A gardener could retort that they are simply not getting totally worn out by something else they have to do first, like kids, career, or catchall. If that was the case then such gardener would surely miss such 'alleged' recharging wondering, and that is just too too much fun to miss. Heck, probably only a few generations ago, such wondering was the norm for most anyone who paused in a mid May field.
One of the saddest but truest commentaries on the modern world is how work has gotten a bad name. It's something people think they have to do, and some day they will be able to retire from and not have to 'work' anymore. I think such attitudes are why a lot of people are glad pastoral agricultural days are allegedly confined to the past. How sad. People are just missing out on a great feeling, that of feeling exhausted at the end of a day mucking around in the dirt gardening. People always ask me, "So, Glen, what are you going to do when you retire?" I say "I retired when I flunked out of college" Now I can work the rest of my life. Gardening has paths to all endeavors.
In olden days we all worked the land and we all knew the stages of the moon, because that was the main light for night wandering. It probably will be again soon once this techno glitch of civilization finishes its downhill course of progress. Won't be any me sitting on this computer. Sitting at a campfire instead.
I still recommend this mountain moving method, especially if someone wants to hand clear a garden area thoroughly and quickly, getting rid of all the sod at once, especially if they want to start a garden as au naturel as possible. Then again, there are a lot of other choices for clearing new ground. There are animals. Either plowing or grazing or penning. There are mechanized ways, using tractors or tillers. There are various hand digging ways, either quick turn and plant or sort soil from sod and weeds. There are various mulching ways, and there are various combinations of any of the above.
Mulches are worth considering for retired mountain movers, having certain advantages over other land prep methods. Animals involve a lot of time and expense maintaining. Mechanized equipment is expensive, needs somewhat skilled maintenance, and also locks the gardener into using petroleum products in their food growing areas and atmospheres. Hand and foot digging is more benign, but it is wearing on the body. Mulch involves some physical labor, but per area it is less backbreaking.
All mulches have seasonal maintenance liabilities and assets, but careful planning can accommodate them. Mulches do tend to build up populations of slugs, sowbugs, ants, and the occasional rodent. On the other hand, mulches give shelter, especially overwintering, to wildlife beneficial to gardeners, like garter snakes, tree frogs, and toads.
Over the decades I have vacillated in my assessments of the value of mulching, sometimes abandoning mulches because of pest buildups (usually appearing after the winter plant protection I also like mulches for) and then returning to them again when I began a new garden where none had been before. Along comes summer and its
"Mulches or weeds, which will it be", that is the question. Or is the question, "Hey, if you aren't going to water us, when are you going to bring us a mulch?" Mostly in retrospect, I finally figured out what I had been doing right about mulches both then and. Now I am comfortable using mulches as generally a single step in killing off weeds and in some cases, soil improving, with occasional mulching regressions for administering forgotten garden recoveries. But generally my gardens tend to cycle out of dead mulches into either green mulches using the garden planting scheme as a cover, cover crop recycles, or evolutions towards perennial landscapes.
Different mulching techniques also have various assets and liabilities. Most plastic mulches consume fossil fuels and end up being trash in landfills (UV resistant black plastic lasts much longer, is more expensive, still ends up being garbage eventually, but probably uses less fossil fuels overall than regular tilling or plowing). Wood chip mulches are too acidic for veggie gardens and usurp available nitrogen while they break down. Hay or spoiled hay mulches are ok for gardens only soon after they have been first created, as hay is laden with weed seeds. Lawn clippings sometimes heat up too much and burn plants, or are too tedious or unavailable or have too many sprays applied to them. Straw mulches, like from grain fields (wheat, oats, barley, rye) are excellent as they don't have weed seeds, but they are either too unavailable or too expensive for maintaining large garden areas. Leaf mulches are superb for long-term soil improvement, but are seasonally available, and tend to build up large populations of sow bugs, which are problems on little seedlings, and ground fruit like strawberries and tomatoes. All of the preceding organic type mulches tend to have so many spaces between them that grass or weeds grows back through them, unless constantly renewed.
CARDBOARD MULCHING
One of the mulching techniques that me and the rest of the gardener assembly are partial to is using cardboard. We kind of stumbled into cardboard mulching accidentally. We had several hundred pots of starts we were cycling out of a greenhouse into gardens or market sales and the available staging area was limited to mowed areas. Of course, grass would grow up both between the pots and too close to the edges to be cut easily, eventually shading the littler starts. So, we started putting down 3 layers of newspaper, making 3 to 4 foot wide beds and then putting the plants on top of that.
At that time I in particular got concerned about the toxicity of the ink on the paper. But an internet perusal of the organic certification standards for Washington State clarified the story. Newsprint is ok these days, except for glossy paper. Cardboard is ok except for the waxy coated ones. "Hmm, cardboard." I thought to me myself.
Over the last 7 years I have used both newsprint and cardboard extensively, and I like cardboard more, simply because it is more durable, thus less work. 3 layers of newsprint works effectively about 6 weeks and then it decays, needing replacement. Cardboard can go 6 months or more. It takes about 6 months to kill off the grass and weeds in one spot. If the pieces are still usable, I keep moving them both around the garden. When they get into smaller pieces, they get real pliable, so use them for mulch packing around overwintering outdoor containers or such. Finally, all cardboard or mulch goes to the compost pile (or worm bin) where the worms really like it.
Cardboard, although it doesn't add much nutrition to the soil, does do one thing real well, that neither tilling or most other organic mulches do. Arranged into an overlapping sheathing, it not only kills sod and weeds, it also significantly kills weed seeds that germinate.
I begin using cardboard as soon as I start a new garden. After cutting and raking the grass and weeds, I stake out the garden into rectangular sections, measuring the 4 sides with a 100 foot tape. using 4 stakes and using the 3-4-5 rule which any rough framing carpenter or better know, double-checking opposite diagonal corners (or fractions of the rectangle to make sure they are within an inch or so . Keeping it 'square' (90 degree angles), helps a lot, because then all of your garden rows or beds will be able to have even spacing in between them and even widths within the bed. A lot of times in laying out gardens, this is the only measuring I do with a tape, and I am a carpenter by trade. Most of the time I use a shovel or rake length to figure distances between rows, as in subsequent seasons I will keep changing the rows around, building the garden plan via full length adjacent rows of a single crop per row consolidating here and there into beds, and then that row might become a path in a year or so when the succession stuff in the row is all harvested out.
After I get those 4 stakes, I take two more stakes, a hammer and string. I pound in the stakes at the ends of the row I want, figuring rows about 3 feet apart for corn, brassicas, tomatoes, peppers, or potatoes, (in my order of plant recommendations for colonizing new ground) and tighten string to the stakes. Then with a razor sharp shovel (use a half-round file to sharpen, the bevel is on the upper side) cut 2 lines the length of the row, each line cut about 6 inches away from the string. Try and keep the spade blade vertical as possible when cutting, so you get a relatively square trench when you later dig it out. Once that is done, I roll up the string.
Then get some big pieces of cardboard, hopefully about 3 or 6 feet wide and 4 to 8 feet or so long. Big cardboard pieces work best.(Get them in alleys behind appliance stores, bike stores, whoever sells stuff in big boxes). Lay the cardboard pieces down right next to the edge of one of the cuts, making a cardboard path 15 or more feet long. Once this is done, you can begin digging the row. Every 10 inches or so, shovel cut out a section of sod (about 10-12 inches square on a side or so), throwing the sod up onto the cardboard. What you are doing is cutting a shovel deep trench about 10-12 inches wide, which will become your row. Go down the entire row, clearing it all out of sod, and get the sides of the trench fairly steep. A razor sharp shovel works much better for cutting perennial weed or clover roots than an unsharpened shovel. When this stage is done, all the sod will be piled up on the cardboard alongside the row.
At this point, take a rake, and rake the sod back and forth down the row, being careful not to puncture the cardboard, and keeping the sod atop the cardboard. Sometimes I will rake all the sod down to one end of the row, and then rake it all back. I vary the pattern for entertainment and improvement. Sometimes I don't have enough cardboard to do a 30 foot row in, so I will do one section at a time. If you don't have at least 10 or more feet of cardboard, it is much more tedious raking back and forth. In any case, periodically get the sod raked to one end, and then you will just have the dirt left on top the cardboard. Flip the rake over, and push this fine dirt back into the trench. Finally accumulate the sod clumps at one end of the row, bereft of almost of the soil. Haul them off to the compost pile. Pull up the cardboard, and go on to the next row.
Similar cardboard methods also work for clearing beds, but this is tedious, and the only time I do this is for basil, (which will be succeeded by a strawberry interplant in the fall with a double row of overwintering carrots in the middle, covered with row crop cover all winter). This cardboard sod clearing method does not work as well when the soil is wet, especially if it is heavy clay. Heavy soil moisture also wears out the cardboard quicker. I can generally use only a single set of cardboard to row out a 10 thousand foot garden, if I do it when the ground is not wet, and if I keep the cardboard dry from rain or dew.
Once the rows are made, you can use smaller, overlapping cardboard pieces in between the rows to kill off the sod there. To keep wind from blowing it around, I weight it down with bark, leaves, corn stalks, hoses, drip lines, old boards, rocks or sometimes the sprawling plants (like tomatoes, brassicas) themselves hold the cardboard in place. It will also generally stay in place after it gets rained on a bunch. To plant the row, often even corn, I like to use container-starts spot fertilizing. I then lay out drip, and occasionally cover with row crop cover and mulch close in to the plants with leaves. In the fall, I plant favas on the north side right next to the cut corn stalks cut them down and lay the stalks lengthwise in the row. You can either fall or spring plant potatoes on the other side of the row, and thin out the row-marking, nitrogen- fixing favas in the following spring for more mulch for the potatoes. Or you can rotate in brassicas, toms or other row crops like onions or leeks in the second spring, or even do some beds. That second fall, after you harvest, the garden is pretty weed free, and pretty easy to make either beds or rows in the future. An added benefit of the cardboard is that it keeps the paths mud free, and your shoes and knees drier for wet day garden visits.
Even though cardboard is an ephemeral product of our times, us gardeners learn to be creative, and depend on ourselves, such decentralization an important trend to renew in days when humanity loses its way. Its not like we are really doing anything special. It's all part of the bargain of being a gardener. We gardeners are all cultivated by those other gardeners who went before us, and eventually we become the cultivator ourselves instead of the cultivatee.
Uh, oh, I think I hear something calling.
These long golden May days just keep coming around.

OTG 5-12 to 5-19 Hmmm 2, 3, 4 Hmmm 20, 30 40, Here come the hummingbirds

2007-05-11T19:16:00.001-07:00

And that's the way they sound too, especially when you get thirty or forty at the feeders.
Actually, the real hummingbird numbers most of us hummbird enthusiasts are familiar with is 4 to 1. That's the ratio of water to sugar. These guests are particular about this ratio, and if it is off too much, or the water has gotten moldy or fermented, they let you know they don't like it by staying away. And you certainly don't want that. Hummingbirds offer too many enjoyable moments, both in presence and story.
Its pretty easy to get hummingbird stories, if you live in the less urban spaces they prefer. Yes, hummingbirds do appear somewhat in urban backyards, but the closer to hardscapes the fewer the birds. For instance, I would rarely see hummingbirds in most of my Seattle gardens at various sites in the city, but in my Olympic Peninsula or San Juan gardens, hummingbirds would commonly show up by the dozens, even up to 30 or 40 or more at the couple of feeders when the main migration of Rufous hummingbirds is passing through, in early May. On the other hand, some urban dedicated sugar enthusiasts can buck the trend. For instance, Anna's Hummingbirds have become more regular guests through even snowy winters at Seattle feeders as more people dedicate themselves to managing the feeders through freezing weather.
Once hummingbirds get used to the person filling the feeder, curious things happen. Its pretty easy to get them to land on your fingers, if they are held near the feeder, as 'perches'. Its about a guaranteed thing to get finger-landers if you do it at the height of the migration, when the birds are vigorously competing for feeder access. Generally, the ones landing first on your fingers are the juveniles and females, as they are often chased away from the feeders by the zealous male feeder guardians, and these ones welcome a person's presence, as the overamped males cannot stand people either. Patience is the key to getting finger-perchers. It might take about ten or fifteen minutes of just hanging out next to the feeder to get them to feed at it at all, and then another 3 to ten minutes of holding your fingers up to get them to land on your fingers. Once they get used to your fingers, you can often get one on each hand, and they might not want to leave for minutes. Besides patience, the biggest challenge is getting sore muscles holding your fingers up to the feeder. The main challenge is that your arm gets more and more sore from being held upright.
Hummingbirds are momenteers. One year, before I had my drip irrigation installed in a brand new garden site, I was hand-watering starts, since the water pressure was only about 8 psi, too little to run any kind of sprinkler. As I was walking around with the light spray coming out of the hose nozzle, a female Rufous began surfing on the hose spray. She would angle in and catch the stream of water about 6 feet away and fly up the spray towards my hands, body surfing side to side. As soon as she reached the nozzle, she would zip around to the spot 8 feet away at the end of the spray, repeating the surfing process. This went on and on, and several plants got overly thoroughly overdrenched, while I held the spray in one place here, another there, as she followed me around the garden waiting for more opportunities.
A friend, Robin, has a hummbird story I am fond of. She had one female Rufous that had been around through much of the summer, long after most of the other hummers had moved on. One day, Robin went into a small outbuilding to do a chore and when she turned around to leave, there was the female Rufous sitting on the wooden floor, looking up at her from a couple feet away. Robin and the bird stared at each other for a couple minutes, while Robin tried to figure out what was going on. Suddenly Robin got an idea. She went to the feeder, and sure enough it was empty. As soon as Robin filled it back up, the Rufous was there immediately drinking up heartily. This bird also would sit on twigs near Robin while she was drinking her morning coffee, or reading outside on the porch.
About every hummingbird enthusiast has similar encounters. What is not as common is the attitude towards feeding with sugar water. Some people are opposed to it, believing it is a processed, non nutritious substitute for natural food sources. Other people use it, realizing they don't have many consistent flower possibilities to offer the birds, and are concerned for the hummingbirds survival and sustenance, especially during uncertain and often cold weather periods. As for me, it seems that my yearly 5 pound bag of sugar gets used by hummers more than for chocolate cakes, and I think the net pleasure is sugar well spent.
Of course, the natural food source advocates have a good point about nutrition issues with sugar water, so hummbird enthusiasts often worry themselves into creating and maintaining hummbird friendly landscapes. Fortunately, Nature has a long head start on us in this region, providing early regional spring native flowers. The shrub Red Flowering Currant is a popular stop, and surprisingly the Salmonberry flowers get visited too, but it doesn't seem for as long a pause. It also seems that hummingbirds like to nest in the semi-open woodlands or border lands where these shrubs occur. Others claim the Indian plum is another native with spring hummers, but I have not had the opportunity to assess that.
There are a lot of flowers I can vouch for as hummingbird attractants too. Numerous people have constructed lists of popular hummingbird plants, and to be honest, in my experience, only about half the flowers on these lists get visited much. It also seems that there are a lot of flowers on the hummingbird lists which the hummingbirds just stop at for a second or two and move on, and never seem to be enthused about the available nectar. So, I am not going to list those flowers here. Perhaps in some instances these flowers would be more utilized, or perhaps by other hummingbirds than we have in our region.
One strategy I do advocate though is to have a flower succession for them through the summer, so that something they like is always in bloom, at least until late August, when the last of the Rufous are leaving. By the way, observers report that half of hummingbirds' diet is small insects. All I have occasionally seen eat is them sitting on a branch licking off aphids.
Hummingbirds can get a gardener out of entrenched plant choices, as they have me, who tends to like pastels, or color combos, anything but simply red, except in excess like with Shirley poppies which cameras have trouble not blurring the edges with. Then along come the darn hummers with their brazen love of red or pink flowers, and they don't like these poppies either. Fortunately for me, other colors are sometimes visited, especially if the flowers are tubular in shape. For instance, I have seen them really enjoy white Nicotiana, when the flowers open dusk to dawn.
So hears my list of flowers, besides the ones already recommended, that I have seen them visit, with stars by the ones I more recommend:
* Wegilas. Flowering sages. Columbines. *larkspur and delphinium, **the kniphofia (red-hot-pokers) complex, *fuchsias, *silene (catchfly), *beebalm ( a.k.a. bergamots, Oswego tea of boston tea party fame, I recommend the variety 'Cambridge Scarlet' bergamot as its red flowers are especially ornamental). Butterfly bush (Buddleias). *Honeysuckles. 4 o'clocks. *Foxglove. Lilac. *Crocosmia (montbretia).
In reviewing the list, I see I many favorite flowers but gave the most starts to kniphofias. Individual varieties might have a one or two short bloom periods during the summer, butt have much else going for them. They can hold their own against grasses, appearing like a big grass themself, almost naturalizing, and yet not becoming invasive. They also can handle drought or heavy soils. So they are well suited for the low maintenance or abandoned border. There are also many varieties available, blooming for various different time periods in the summer. Finally, seed eating birds, like goldfinches like them. Seeds can flower in their second summer, or gardeners can buy named varieties.

ok. Humm 2, 3,4, Hhmmm, 20 30, 40. Here come the hummingbirds <->, <->,^^^...

OTG 5-7 to 5-14 dry Beans, protein and soil improving

2007-05-03T12:57:00.001-07:00

Dry bush beans are one of the most accessible protein sources for home gardeners. Primarily as a gap filler crop, casual growing of dry bush beans in various regional mixed gardens (averaging 7,000 to 10,000 square feet) can reasonably average a harvest of 70-100 pounds of dry beans, which breaks down as to expect an average of 1 pound of dry beans per 100 square feet of such mixed garden space. Along with fresh peas, occasional garden fed chicken products, and brassicas, a local gardener can expect to easily fulfill about 90-100 percent of year-round protein.
I cannot personally advocate a 100 percent veggie diet. For myself anyway I have learned from experience that my presently preferred health satisfaction is enhanced enough by vertebrate seafood that I continue to prefer consuming it. On a positive note, although I am reluctant to give up consuming seafood, I realize that by being a marine harvester I have been inspired to learn much more about caring for the marine environment than I had in my years of abstinence from marine products. Furthermore, in advocating for marine restoration, I have more credibility by being able to speak from a somewhat personally educated perspective. Certainly meat, including seafood is not critical to many peoples' health, and for these admirable people, home grown dry beans can be a rewarding way to grow food that 100 percent of proteing, and those surely will learn not only about growing beans but also much more about one's own impact on the planet.
Dry beans are a gap filler both in time and space. Within the row they can all be planted 3 to 6 inches apart. As an interplant all but the pole beans (which don't make a good interplant) can be planted maybe about 4-6 inches apart. Timewise, Fava beans fill a great gap in winter garden planning, considering the limited variety of plants available and easily handled. Dry Favas can be planted en masse by themselves, in mixed cover crops, or as intercrops. In summer, dry Bush Beans are superb for planting as a filler crop in every conceivable possible niche, especially valuable once all the other crops are in. The other type of dry beans, dry Pole Beans are more restricted in their planting location possibilities, but make up for it with their productivity per square foot and also in their value as a quick growing visual screen and windbreak on a fence trellis, pole tipi or trained up a deck or building or such.
Dry beans have numerous other virtues. They are crops that have much longer harvest and consumption windows than fresh beans, so are much more adaptable for complex planning than fresh beans are. They are backup intercrops in case adjacent crops fail. If other crops need the ground, the dry beans can be cut for soil improving mulches, turned into the ground in cover crops or simply allowed to fend for themselves amongst the advances of more ambitious crops, like winter brassicas or indeterminate tomatoes. If the beans end up rotting into organic matter , that's ok too, as they are not pernicious perennial weeds, but actually are very valuable both as a living or decaying mulch.
Dry beans can also be of superior value to store-bought beans in the kitchen. Many cultures have specific recipes for specific varieties of beans. The home gardener has a wealth of choices to adapt to one's culinary cuisine. For instance, my favorite bush beans cook down twice as quck as commercially available bush beans, becoming much softer for spreading. My pole limas and large seeded fava beans are also of higher eating quality than store bought beans.
Dry beans are also valuable as a trap crop. Their easy and quick growth makes them less painful to lose to pests than other plants. Rabbits, deer, slugs are often distracted by eating bean plants, before they find and damage crops that have difficulty recovering from damage, like peppers, summer brassicas or carrots. In a recent inadvertent experiment in an unfenced 10,000 sq ft garden, 2 years ago rabbits ate more than half of my bush bean plants, but the garden still produced about 80 pounds of dry beans plus 40 or 50 gallons of peppers. The following year in the same garden, only about 10 percent as many beans were planted, and 80 percent of the bean plants were eaten, while the same number of pepper plants planted as the year before only yielded about one pound of peppers total, the rabbits gnawing almost all the plants to stubs. Similar disasters that year befell brassicas, carrots, the large strawberry patches, and many other crops. I don't garden there anymore, the property owner didn't want fences or row covers, both of which would have diminished the damage.
Although dry bean growing is infrequently done by home gardeners in our region, it has a continuing long history worldwide. It was also important in the early settling of North America, both by first nation peoples and later by European colonizers. Hundred of varieties of heirloom dry beans have arisen and been passed down from generations, and in the last decade have become a new niche food in progressive markets.
Gardeners might also discover new varieties growing in their own garden, which might evolve into fascinating undertakings. In one of my gardens about 10 years ago, some sneaky unknown pollinator crossed a dry bush bean, (the heirloom rare and good red and cream colored bush bean 'Mohawk') and a dry pole bean (the heirloom purple podded 'Cherokee Trail of Tears'). I discovered the secret nuptials the following year when I planted 'Cherokee Trail of Tears' seeds, which had been saved from the year before. One single pole bean plant caught my attention, having pale leaves and seed pods but purple beans. When beans from this single plant were planted the following spring, they produced a wide assortment of plant types, pod colors, sizes and yields, bean colors, sizes and yields, and varying harvest windows. (In deference to both of it's immediate parents' names and also to our first nation benefactors who domesticated the common bean in the Americas, this bean acquired the name "Tribes". A side benefit of plant breeding is that the gardener can honor others by naming the new variety after them). For those who ever studied Mendel's laws of genetics or for those who are intrigued with prospects of sorting through dozens of different varieties for much future testing, such unknown sneaky pollinators reveal both the richness of species and the uniqueness of each expression of it. The sneaky pollinator was probably one of the 250,000 species of beetles, humbling is know-it-all gardeners simply by being so sneaky we have trouble simply identifying it, much less understanding it.
Although the planting specifics of dry beans varies, the harvesting and drying does not. All dry beans are best harvested only on dry days when the seed pods are dry and crackly. IF one has a lot to hand harvest of a specific type, one technique is to harvest the pods directly into a large paper grocery bag inserted into a 5 gallon bucket. Pick only the dry crackly ones, making subsequent passes through the garden every 5 to 10 dry weather days to pick the dry pods. Put 2 or 3+ grocery bags of dried unshelled pods in a large apple sized box, storing them inside. Boxes of bags of bean pods can be stacked atop each other, for processing later in the winter. Just make sure that all the pods are dry. If that is consistently not happening, change the bean varieties for an earlier maturing type and get an earlier start. I am all smiles if all of my summer beans are in the ground (either direct or from indoor starts) between May Day and May 15, and if my favas are all in between October 1 and Halloween.
When starting out with a new variety, of if only small harvests are involved, one can either pick dry pods into small brown paper bags or pick into buckets or bowls and spread put on shallow cardboard or paper trays or plates, temporarily drying them further atop shelves or bookshelves.
Try and avoid picking pods when they are flexible or green, as then the beans inside will also be moist and will be more difficult to dry and have much shorter storage life. Usually the weather will clear and the wind and sun following the rainy period will often dry out the pods much better than interior conditions could ever accomplish. Sometimes moist pod harvest is unavoidable, because of late plantings, short season growing areas, or extended rainfall throughout the harvest period. In this case, shuck, cook, and eat the beans within a few days. If you can't get to immature bean harvesting all at once, or have limited time, hang the entire bean plants indoors from strings or nails up high, where their falling leaf litter mess can be controlled and they can dry out until you can get to stripping the pods off. If future seedstock is desired and incompletely dried beans are the only beans matured, frequent turning on screens or paper based trays might be the only recourse for seed saving, but generally makes both poorer eating quality and much shorter storage life. Gardeners learn that variety testing, selection, and selection within varieties will develop the best beans for each gardeners specific gardening opportunities and techniques. If you want to possibly gradually improve the variety to suit your gardening style, look for the best plants in your garden and ribbon them for seed saving.
For those who have a lot of grocery bags around to shuck on some wintry day there are various shucking techniques to choose from. I have narrowed mine down to a few. The slower, sociable way is to crack them by hand, passing around bowls to casual guests doing another activity as bean shucking is busy hand work. Many people like this, gaining a sense of accomplishment while visiting. A faster way to shuck the beans is to spread newsprint or a big cardboard or tarp or old sheet or such on the floor, dump pods out, and use your bouncing tennis shoes to crack the beans free of the pods, while sitting in a chair. For those who want a lot of bean pods processed quicker, possibly immediately at harvest if the pods are absolutely all totally dry, they can roll the pods up in a large piece of fabric and stomp out (not sitting in a chair) the pods, or even the entire plants uprooted.
In any case, after the beans are shucked, store them in a large open permeable container, like cardboard or paper bags) stirring them every couple days. After a few weeks of this seasoning time in dry air, they can be stored in larger bags, and packed away in a cool dry place with the rest of the seed collection. Look at them in good light to make sure none are molding before storing in the seed collection. To be honest, this is one of the few seeds I often store in large plastic locking bags, almost all my other seeds are stored in paper envelopes in bags.
Before preparing to cook dry beans , there is usually some cleaning needed of debris left amongst the beans. Rolling the beans on a large cardboard tray will leave debris at the higher end as it is tilted. Continue this separating process numerous times until at least all the dirt is gone. Alternatively, like with most seeds, winnowing (pouring the seeds though the air on a windy day) will blow most of the chaff away. After this first step, the beans can begin to be soaked overnight. Stirring the beans will raise floating chaff for sieving off, which can also be done after soaking overnight, when the beans are drained and put into cooking water. The drained water is high in nitrogen, and is good for watering most house or outdoor plants (no more frequently than every third watering) . The liquid with which it is replaced can be stock from cooking down poultry or ham bones, if one is a meat eater, adding much flavor to the bean dishes. I also almost always a a bunch of garlic to the cooking water, and the rest of the spicing depends on the exact product desired .
DRY FAVA BEANS TO GROW HERE
Fava beans, also known as broad beans, are best planted in October. Earlier planting and the plants get too high by midwinter, more prone to being killed off exposed above snow to freezes below 15 or so. Sometimes this early mortality is desirable, if one is lazy and wants to have the beans rotting in the ground when the gardener gets out to garden on February days. Favas can also be planted in February, along about pea planting time. It seems like spring planted Favas are impacted more by black aphids that the fall ones, due to their later maturity. At any time, both crows and rodents are very fond of sprouting favas and can devastate plantings. Row covers over seeds and hidden planting help but active discouragement of these pests is the best antidote.
In cover crops of large areas, favas perform better if done in a wide array of mixed plants, like crimson clover, winter rye, hairy vetch, winter peas, barley, wheat, and (if a long-term planting is desirable) some perennial legumes like alsike, white or red clover or alfalfa, depending on soil types. In this case, broadcast the smaller seeded type favas, and possibly till all in, keeping a close eye on the smaller seed eaters too, the tweetie birds. Sometimes a distractant food offering far from the planted area will stuff the pests bellies enough that they don't eat the field sown seeds as much. It's not advocated to make this a habit.
There are many varieties of favas but only 2 basic types, small and large. For the small gardener, although the larger seeded ones yield less, their cooking quality is superior, and shucking yields quicker productivity. Contrary to other's regional recommendations, some strains of the variety 'Windsor' are well worth looking at as their choice for a large-seeded Fava . Every fava consumer should know about Favaism, it is not a myth. In short, don't eat raw or undercooked favas, or too many at one time. The elderly, young children, and ill people need to be extra careful. Also, those with Mediterranean ancestry should be careful. Occasionally it is a fatal condition. On the other hand Fava eating has an odd side benefit, as it can be a prophylactic against the parasite that causes malaria. Fava eating has a long and distinguished history in Old World cuisine, consumers are advised to learn the specifics. For more info on favaism, check out the web, or Gary Paul Nabhan's wonderful book, "Songbirds, Wolves, and Truffles", which also talks about pellagra (and many other things), a vitamin deficiency disease from eating too much corn as a staple without Central American style processing.
Favas are excellent for marking fall planted potato rows (or other winter garden rows_, and can be pulled up in May and laid down as a potato (or anywhere) mulch once they start crowding the potatoes (or other plants). In fact, by using a punch stick (the end of a rake or hoe works fine) to punch 3 inch deep holes throughout the garden, fava seeds can be punched in at every possible spot. Afterwards use the tool end ,like the hoe blade corner, to cover the seed with dirt. After the plants are up and begin competing with a more desirable crop, they can be pulled out as a mulch or compost pile stuffer. Make sure you leave a lot of plants to go to seed, for future seed stock. I often plant about 10-20 pounds each winter.
Be patient, once you decide on a variety to grow for a while, it usually takes a couple or few years to build up significant seedstocks of beans, garlic, and potatoes from small samples to have plenty for eating, gifts, and ample seedstock.
DRY BUSH BEANS
After sampling about 50 or 60 varieties of summer dry bush beans, about 20 years ago, I finally settled on 2 varieties about 20 years ago, "Red Valentine" and "Mohawk", and have been replanting seed out of this collection ever since. These met all 3 of my main criteria for veggie varieties I wanted to work with, being good, old, and rare. (Good is a very subjective standard and I have many criteria I was measuring beans by. Old and rare are more easy to sort out). Fortunately, with growing interest in growing heirlooms veggies, many worthy heritage dry bush varieties are happily grown by an increasing number of gardeners.
Generally once I get a large garden 7,000-10,000 sq feet basically weed free) up to speed from scratch which takes about 2 to three dedicated years, I like to get my main spring planting done by May 15, (except for successions of corn which I do until July, and some succession brassicas). As soon as my spring planting is done, I flip my rake or hole upside down and punch holes everywhere in the garden, each hole on the next pass getting a bush bean seed. I do a lot of row edges, as these 24 inch diameter plants will fill even the paths in, by tilting sideways. I fill every gap in the strawberry bed, every unplanted gap in the tomatoes, brassicas, or predation spots. By August, I want to see the garden a solid green mat, and the bush beans are what make it happen.
DRY POLE BEANS
Pole beans I often start inside in small 4 inch pots between mid April and May Day. They take longer to mature, and I want them to get a head start, I do maybe 3 seeds per 4 inch pot, and 3 pots per foot of 6 foot high trellis. I like growing garden peas on the shadier side of the trellis, and plant these pots on the sunnier side. That way the trellis has a 6 foot high screen of green from July 4^th until late September. By being high in the air, the pole beans tend not to get moldy as quickly as the sprawling bush beans. The late maturing Scarlet Runners might get their final harvest some years about Thanksgiving.
The most productive pole beans are the runner beans, and the Scarlet Runner complex seems to be the most productive runner. Runners come in white or scarlet flowers, with either black, white, or mixed color beans (such mixtures ranging through browns, whites and blacks). In warmer sites in our region, runner beans can become perennial, making foot long black tubers. These large seeded beans don't cook down as soft as other beans, but are more flavorful, and suited as a side dish, for soups or the food processor.
The common kidney bean, Phaseolus vulgaris, (the same species as the dry bush beans mentioned above but of pole habit), is represented by a wide spectrum of varieties. After sampling dozens of pole varieties, I originally settled on growing 'Cherokee Trail of Tears' because of it historical value, its ornamental screen of purple type leaves and pods, and because of the dark purple beans good for dishes reminiscent of Central American cuisine. As inferred earlier, I have abandoned growing it while my hands are full sorting out its offspring these last 10 years since that sneaky pollinator cross.
The final pole beans to recommend, if you like this kind, which I do, are pole Limas. For decades I could never find a Lima of any kind that would mature in this region. Finally, through Tim Peters seed company, (for decades Tim has been developing and distributing valuable or interesting garden seeds out of Oregon), I obtained 2 pole Lima varieties (One's name is 'Donna', I forget the other one) about a dozen years ago, and have been enjoying consistent harvests from them in warmer sites in our region. Limas definitely benefit by a container start as described above, and only get about 4 feet tall by seasons end, with modest productivity. I like growing them on a small fence behind my trumpet lilies, as they both types of plants prefer premium sun and sheltered siting. Occasionally pole Limas will make perennial tubers also.

There are other dry bean possibilities, for our region, and I have tried about a dozen other species . Some people are having some luck with some chick pea (garbanzos). Certainly such others could and do contribute much more knowledge about these other possibilities, and I applaud them and hope to learn more of such successes. As always, each of us gardeners are only one link in a long long line of stewards, owing almost all of our success to those wh have gone before, and hopefully continuing such tradition in some small ways ourselves.

Often living in countrysides regionally where I may not get to the grocery store for months, especially in winter, my stash of home-grown dry beans provide me with a great sense of food security. I tend to do about a batch of dry beans a week in the winter, and they are my primary protein source then. With the numerous dry bean types I grow, I have several cuisines to elaborate on. I prefer them so much over fresh bean varieties that I have not grown fresh bean varieties for about 20 years now. I have too many other crops (like basil, toms, peppers, sweet corn, melons, basil, cukes, summer cabbage, basil, melons) maturing at that time of the year that have limited harvest windows, so I basically save my bean intake for the winter time.

Along with their nitrogen fixation in the garden, beans give so much and ask so little, never needing more than a glance of manure. They have been mainstays of civilizations for thousands of years already, and hopefully for many more to come.

OTG April 30-May 6, Yard Waste and Veg Garden Royalty, Vining Squash

2007-04-27T18:29:00.001-07:00

Yard Waste and Vegetable Garden Royalty, Vining Squash,

If we could take a poll, we would find that every vegetables' favorite place to see the explorative, and often invading, vine squashes, is on the garden edges, where the vines can be trained either onto fence lines or encouraged into other kingdoms. Well-cared for squash vines can get 40 feet long in this region, challenging pasture, hedges, and wild blackberries, and, of course, the rest of the garden. As an animate garden subject admiring these Squashers' ambitions, I have often volunteered for throne detail. The throne provided is a compost pile throne, complete with a court of cukes, nasturtiums, and ambitious volunteer flowers and cherry tomatoes and such. The Squashers get the back of the compost pile and the cukes most of the front with the others filling in as various attendants for esthetics and token pleasantries for the animated public. All of these plants roots feed on the compost pile, its surface hidden under a cardboard mulch, which discourages weeds. Also hidden under this are drip lines, from which all drink.

This throne accommodates the Squashers' rambunctious behaviors, as when they get greedy for more territory us animate subjects can send them on diplomatic journeys to neighboring districts, like the fence, or out into the lawn, or various heathen lands. Surprisingly, this royalty is often quickly satisfied, as they really enjoy setting fruit up in the air right on the fence, off the ground their offspring turns out pretty clean-skinned at season's end.

What is really rewarding for us animate subjects is that this compost throne placement turns a possible garden trouble into a treasured asset. Seeing as how that hauling off yard waste is throwing away premium organic material, it's a challenge for us animateds to figure out how to manage stay-at-home yard-waste in an esthetically pleasing manner. Untended weed piles can become overgrown and unsightly with weeds, and the lack of summer moisture causes slow deterioration of some component roughages like sod roots, corn stalks, raspberry and grape vines. But with a few special considerations, the voracious appetites of the Squashers can help break down these rough organic materials.

Our majesties' home actually begins construction a year before they move to the palace, which is also known as the 'compost pile'. As soon as they move in we begin building them the next years pile. This way, we keep at least 2 compost piles active. The first pile is for adding new material to, whether yard or kitchen waste. This pile begins in spring, and lasts until late the next winter. At this time, it is screened with half inch mesh into a barrow or cart or such, and the screened material used either for potting soil mixes or building new garden beds or rebuilding edges.
The remaining rough organic material becomes the palace throne. It can be piled a foot or more higher, even if it is very airy and hardly digested. For the base its perfectly ok to build it up like a airy mattress, with the previously mentioned vines, sod roots, or cane prunings. In new gardens, this pile of last years roughage might even be 5 feet tall, and 6 by 10 feet on the sides. (By the way, this is also an opportunity for summer benches, tabletops and waterfall projects, using weathered planks or hypertufa or other such creativity.)

Along about early May, its time to plant the top of this compost pile. Even though the pile might be really airy, it can be a success by providing a few other amenities for the royalty. First, get at least 3 inches of relatively better quality soil atop the pile. Get the top of the pile flat, and the sides as steep as possible. This can be simply garden soil, screened composts, or rakings from around the compost pile or such. No need for any store bought material.

After having started cukes in pots about April 15, nasturtiums and vine squash in early May, wait till they are showing their first true leaves before transplanting to the pile. Stage the various pots in position, with the squash on the north side row on an east-west orientation, each clump about 4 to 5 feet apart, The cukes go on the south side row (E-W orientation, about 2-3 feet apart), with nasturtiums in a middle row. Keep them is relatively straight rows, each row about 2 to 3 feet apart, because driplines work better if in straight rows. Wherever a pot is staged, dig a big hole in that spot, and fill it with manured and rich amendment dirt. For the squash, it will be a 5 gallon hole, and for the others about a 3 gallon hole will do. Transplant all your containers, then, and run your drip lines. I like to band chicken manure alongside the drip lines, about 3 inches wide and 2 inches high. This way, when the drips go through the manure, the liquid 'tea' helps encourage the various plants root systems to grow even more, as most plant roots like to grow near the surface. After this, cover in between the plants with cardboard. Other mulches can be used too, like newsprint, or such. I used to use black plastic for this, but I prefer figuring out gardening techniques that avoid it.

In any case, get ready to accept that there will be some amount of both a wild look and weeds growing. Squashers, and to a lesser extent the cukes (salad cukes preferable over picklers, as they have a more generous harvest window) can handle this weed competition, and the nasturtiums and volunteer flowers and veggies help make the compost pile interesting and more pleasing.

Besides making yard waste solutions more esthetically pleasing, this type of compost pile breaks down quicker. The summer irrigation keeps the compost pile moist, and the roots of the plants break down the material much quicker than simply leaving a compost pile dry through the summer months. Sod roots and canes and such break down in 1 year this way instead of 2 or 3 or more.

In the fall, all these plants finish up, and either the pile can be rescreened, left in place, added to over the winter, or combined onto the pile of other stuff collected through the summer. In any case, it should be screened by the late spring of the following year, and a new Squasher throne court established.

If you want to have more squash than this throne compost pile provides, then consider hills of squash on the outlying areas of the garden. These outlying hills can also be created if you don't want to use the compost pile throne. Just wheelbarrow loads dug from your old compost pile to create these various hills, usually about 2 wheelbarrows per hill is fine. For this arrangement it works better to run button emitter drips to each hill, coming off of spaghetti tubing or ½ inch drip lines. The tape or soaker lines can be used, with the intervening spaces between the hills filled with container starts of kale, late winter brocs or chards. Usually this is rough ground, so I don't expect much yield from these interplant crops, preferring to use the button emitters route. If you have a lot of water, you can run your hose there occasionally onto the mounds, diking up the sides so the water pools in a depression where the plants are. In any case, avoid overhead watering, as this greatly increases mildews on the leaves., causing early squash demise.

These outlying district squash hills should be 6 or so feet apart. Again, prepare a 5-gallon sized hole filled with good dirt in the center of each of these hills. Then mulch the plants with a weed impermeable membrane, like cardboard etc as the rosette of squash leaves opens up to the vines. Healthy plants can have vines grow 12 to 18 inches a day in July and August. Often you can hand or power cut down the weeds/lawn immediately before the vines venture into the new area, letting the vines hold down the mulch membrane from blowing away. (Some other weights might be necessary, depending on your microclimate). The vines are easier to pick up and move if done before their tendrils wrap onto grass or weeds. Also, when vine tips are pinched, the vines don't grow any longer. Usually only one fruit set to a vine is good. There are usually about 5 to 8 vines per plant. If there are 2 to 4 plants per hill, then a single hill can yield between about 5 and 20 fruit, mostly depending upon the volume of water and fertilizing they get.

Since squash is a bit tricky in germinating, its good to get an early start seeding them in pots so you have time to try another batch of seeds if the first one fails. About May Day is about time to start a few pots of squash. Anticipate doing a double amount of seed planting about mid May, and by Memorial Day, you should know what you have up and can start your last batch of squash seeds for the year.

Squash is a bit tricky to handle until it gets established. The plants are fragile both above ground and below, so careful handling is imperative. Since the root systems are rather coarse and don't hold the rootball easily, make sure your rootball is compacted a little, as too loose and it will break apart at transplanting. Since squash grow so fast, and if this growth is interrupted, the squash plants can easily be stunted. Figure that they germinate in about 5-10 days, and should be transplanted into the ground within 5 to 8 days after germination.

Do about 4 seeds per 6 inch pot, and about 3 pots every 10 days till Memorial Day. For germinating the seeds, the main trick is not to over-water. The main reason people can't get squash seeds to germinate is that they water too much. All they need is about 2 tablespoons or so at planting in the pot and then no watering until the plants are up with big leaves a couple weeks later. Don't thin out the seeds that do germinate, and don't break up the soil clump. Transplant the soil clump entire.

I advocate winter squash, vining types instead of bush types. The reason I like winter squash is because of ease of handling the harvest. Unlike summer squash, which you have to eat in a few days window, you have many months to decide when to eat winter squash.

I like the higher quality flesh of the Cucurbita maxima squashes, especially for pies, soups, baking etc. Extras of these types of squash make great gifts for 1-2 years old kids, (this type of squash is used in baby food jars Extra winter squashes of this caliber make excellent much appreciated holiday gifts for folks from Thanksgiving through Groundhog Day.

There are about 4 species of squashes grown in north American gardens, but only 3 are grown much in our region. Fairly remote seed savers have an easier time if they only grow one variety of each species, as the squashes will insect pollinate up to a mile apart. The most commonly grown species is Cucurbita pepo, with varieties like zucchini, pattypan, acorn, spaghetti, pumpkin, crookneck and straight neck. They have coarse flesh, come in bush or vine types and generally are summer squash. The second species grown much is Cucurbita maxima varieties, like Buttercup, Sweetmeat, Hubbards, Delicata, Kiri, and Atlantic Giant types (up to 1000 pound champs). These types have fine flesh, are usually winter squash, and seldom if ever are bush squash.

(Some companies claim to have bush types of these like 'Bush Buttercup', but beware of such claims. The Oregon company I bought seed from offering 'Bush Buttercup' ignored my personal letter alerting them that I had a vine squash grow from seeds they claimed to be bush varieties. I have advocated gardeners get seeds elsewhere since this irresponsible behavior they exhibited.)

The third type of squash grown locally, Cucurbita mixta types, generally needs a longer season than western Washington affords. The most common example of this type is Butternut.
Most squash variety collectors and afficionados recognize that the superior squashes are the maxima types. For over 50 years, one of the main standards that others have been measured against is 'Buttercup'. It was developed as a northern alternative to the sweet potato. Its history has roots in Brazil, and its parents and grandparents were 'Hearty' and 'Green Delicious' both chance seeedlings out of farmers fields on different New England farms . (For further info, please refer to 'Vegetables of New York), and find the volume dealing with 'Squashes of New York'. Long out of print, of 1920s or 30s origin, you will only be able to read these fantastic series of fruit and veggie books in the reference section of horticultural libraries).

The reason 'Buttercup' has been a standard for 50+ years is that is has high quality sweet flesh, is a good keeper, is fairly prolific, and has a nice size, about 4-6 pounds. Another maxima type that a lot of people like is 'Delicata'. In my opinion Delicata is too hard shelled, too small and doesn't keep as well. Some heavy duty squash afficionados like the Hubbards clan, cutting them into sections and refreezing the other parts, as they are too large for family dinners. In our region, 'Sweetmeat' growing from about 4 to 16 pounds, has long been a treasured regional squash. About half the time I find it to outperform 'Buttercup', and it generally yields more. For seed saving ease, it ends up that most of the time anymore I only grow 'Sweetmeat'.

After cool September days the fruits mature fruit and the vines yellow, around equinox. Like cukes or watermelons, a white spot on their bottoms indicate that sugar has collected there, one of the signs of ripeness. To harvest, its best to snip with hand pruners, the vine where it meets the stem. Try not to break the stem off, or bang the squash even slightly, as this is the most common way to have rot set in during storage.

The squash can be stored in drier unheated outbuildings, garages, cloche, bulb or start frames, root cellars, as long as the building temps inside are above about 25. The default location for most people is a cool shelf in the basement. Don't bang the stem while putting it in storage, and make sure that rodents don't find them. Avoid hard frosts directly on the fruits, as rot will begin here.

Squash is one of the best home grown crops for the holidays and beyond into February.
When colonists arrived in North American they found the natives were more interested in the seeds than in the flesh. Dried and toasted squash (known commercially as 'pumpkin') seeds are highly nutritious. All seeds of Cucurbita are cherished by chickens and turkeys.

Speaking of turkey, when the holidays roll around and you are thinking of pies, pick out the fruit that is either the most yellow, or the first ones showing bruising in storage. Surprisingly, some of the summer squashes are sometimes good keepers also. One friend often has baseball bat sized zucchinis still holding in good shape in March.

After various ways of cooking squash, I settled on a 3 step process to prep for pies, table etc.
The first step is to cut the squash in half on a large cutting board with a meat carving knife. Be careful of your fingers. Deseed the squash, separating the seeds from the tissue as much as possible, and dry the seeds on newsprint or cardboard tray, spreading them out and turning every couple days at first, and less often afterward. (Usually I like to cut the squash in half horizontally if the stem is pointed up.)

The second step is to steam the squash, in a couple inches of water, in a large lidded pot, on the stove top. I try and get it so that the 'cups' are facing up, or the 'top' replaced on the bottom, the way it grew. The idea is to keep the flesh out of the water, where it breaks down more quickly. At a gentle steam, a squash cooks in an hour or 2, depending upon size. Steam cooking squash keeps the flesh moist and also makes pan cleanup much easier than if the squash is baked in the oven.

The third step is to clean out the squash flesh once it has cooled down some. The flesh can be scooped out of the shell with a spoon. At this time it can be eaten at dinner, or saved for holiday pies.

After dinner is over, you can take all of the squash shells out to your compost pile, the next summers throne. If you don't get to growing squash again this year, that's ok. The seeds you saved will last many years if kept cool and dry.

Out there gardening april 22-29 bumblebees

2007-04-20T21:16:00.001-07:00

When Thoreau surmised,
"Well then, I am lord over all I survey"
bumblebees turned hide, yellin'
"I'm rich by what I can give away"

Off the bumblebees flew with their special delivery mail, possibly red dead nettle, broccoli, or dandelion pollen, as is their habit these warming spring days when every nook and cranny in woods, pasture or garden is bursting with todo lists.

Back at Walden, Thoreau sighed at the bumblebee's sudden departure, wryly noting that one side effect of the diminishing of species diversity is that us lords have less to survey. Perhaps it was time for another activated carbon conference, with the first order of business for the master of ceremonies to announce, "And now will the real bumbler, please stand up?"

Well, that was then and this is now, and finally with the recognition of global warming, activated carbon conferences are occurring perhaps more than we would like. Thoreau is gone, as are many species of surveyees, and the diminishment continues. Of course the biggest concern is that diminishment will actually extend to our own species, then surveying will really get tricky. One latest such curve ball is today's concern about the sudden disappearance of more than half the US honeybee colonies in the last 6 months, called Colony Collapse Disorder. Yikes!

As is the want of prevalent re- or de-ductionist science perspectives, people want to know what the exact stress is that is diminishing the honeybees, so that the silver bullet solution can commence. But it's a tricky order. Are honeybees succumbing to mites, pesticides, gmos, cell phone radiation, spectrometer changes in the atmosphere, over domestication and narrowing of the honeybee genepool, viruses or some combination of factors? Zikes!

Then along come the dynamic scientists, discarding the concept of silver bullet problems and solutions, seeing that shotgun stress blasts at the life web are blowing out some big holes, and its gonna take a lot of strand weavers to make it catch the magic kingdom again. Of course, no one knows exactly what dynamic scientists are anyway, so for the time being the silver bullet theorizers hold court, warning that much of humanities food supply could be threatened if honeybee colonies contine to decline. As for us regular folk, us farmers and gardeners, we will need to look to other pollinators to fill in the gaps. Hopefully every ecology has natural pollinators handy and ready. Of course, they will also be affected by all the surveying going on, but as long as we yet have some richness of choices, there are hopes for pollination solutions, till we find out where we are at on the honeybees.

Meanwhile, I guess we are stuck with the broad array of other winged, stinging pollinators, which are often referred to simply as the bees. Let me cringe for a moment. See, the term 'Bees' to most people refers to honeybees, bumblebees, hornets, wasps and even some non stinger pollinators that are not even that closely related to the previous hymenopterans, like hoverbees or orchard mason bees. The reason I cringe at this general use of the term 'Bees' is because it is most often heard by those who know better, the pest control companies. They are catering to fears of Jim and Joan regular citizen, those who are uninformed about these various 'bees'. When Jim or Joan encounter anything that could vaguely bee called a be, their gut reaction is to wonder whether they have a 'bee' poison tucked away tucked away on the garage shelf, or if they used up the whole spray container in their previous encounter with 'the bees.'

Now don't go thinking I am a 'bee hugger'. Nope, not this guy. I am not painting a picture that all is rosy with the various hymenoptera members. For instance, I am not particularly fond of ants or termites (other hymenoptera species), and I cut no slack with yellow jackets, even though they do kill a lot of pest insects. (In the book 'The Social Biology of Wasps', one author points out that yellow jackets are the only wasp that actively attacks people to take bites out of them. I have had that happen many times to me). But most of the other members of the bee family are good folks, sometimes just great as can be, like with the bumblebees. Even most wasps are a big help and not that much of a problem. For instance, supposedly the most painful stinger locally, the bald faced hornet, has never stung me, even though numerous times I have unaware approached within a couple of feet of 1000 member nests.

I've also only been stung once in my life by a bumblebee, my fault, when I accidentally grasped one on an indoor window ledge, me not even knowing it was there. And I have spent thousands of hours around bumblebees, dozens of times in clouds of them, and frequently near their nests. In fact, I have probably spent more time around bumblebees in my life than I have around people. Truth be told, they are all flannel and no fang.

So why should we care? One big reason to like bumblebees is that they have not yet been domesticated to the point of being both indispensible to agriculture and bred so much that they have lost parts of their gene pool that helps them fend off crisis. As the honeybee loses ground, these other pollinators, like bumblebees will help pick up the slack in pollinating everything, including our food crops needing such help. So all we can do is hope that we have natural reservoirs of these extra pollinators handy in our neighborhoods. It won't be possible everywhere. In some vast stretches of monoculture, the bumblebees are already gone, so in those places, the scientists have their work cut out for them. But in places where species diversity exists, bumblebees, and these other pollinators will continue being friends to those who know the difference between the 'bees'.

I prefer such places. Here in one of these more remote undomesticated parts, a few times a day lately the big bumblebees would buzz, then crawl through the under door crack, mornings in and out sizing up the cabin for its potential for summer quarters. I figure they were testing me, taking count of how long it takes before I finally came and got them and escorted them out into the cruel cool world. Finally after about a week, they quit doing that for a day or week or two anyway, but I know it will happen many more times this year and future ones. Maybe they finally quit doing it because I got lazy, figuring either they can either figure out the door crack was also an exit, or they'd finally get tired of motel life and find some nice high dry ground. I think they did. I haven't had moved seen any for a spell now.

I don't know where they got set up yet. Could find out quick as I wanted to wait an hour or two some day , I suppose.

Don't know where that could be yet. Haven't seen any little firewood smoke fires. Matter of fact Haven't seen any bumblebee garbage piles. That's the problems with many of these uncivilized species, they just don't have landmarks like garbage piles so you can figure out where and when they are home. Bumblebees are just too tidy. Could call em quiet at home mostly, except that I wonder if they think of themselves that way, listening to all that wing noise. First light to first darkers, or until more than their flannel coats can keep moving.

They don't actually take over indoors too often, unless its mostly unused, like an abandoned attic or outbuilding. They do get curious though, and the glass jar and cardboard or such are UFOs to them more than a few times through the year. And they are pretty impressive, for somebody not having a discernible religion. Besides not chewing up the countryside, most bumbles have take up chastity for the greater good, running their special delivery mail service for a few food tokens here and there while they run around gluing up the gardens, pastures and woods. They are selfless, most of them will see only this years doings..

They don't ask too much. The overwintered matriarchs get right to work soon as the first flowers out. Although the cousin honeybees out volume them in flowers visited, bumblebees visit a larger variety. Once motel life is done, overwinter matriarch shelters up for a while. She will build, furnish, have kids and repeatedly round trip for ever changing grocery stops days on end, living out of this out of the way rough to grow anything place that hasn't usually broken down enough yet for anyone else to covet.

Add up enough summers to match a couple of elephants lifetimes and bumblebees and other pollinators will have helped rebuild devastated areas back to rich activated carbon worlds. Even the long term economist could find possible reason to smile at this, for in millions of years, such areas will be oil.

About the time the tree frog rehearsals are over and the concert series begins, the bumblebees are livening up the breezes.

Most every spring I spend some time in clouds of dozens as they live collect on shoulder high brassicas spilling hundreds of bright flowers. Later in the veg garden they will be the main pollinator of curcurbits, the squash, melon, cuke and zuke clan. Many will sleep all nite on leek flower heads. I guess once the weather is warm, they don't even want to crowd the hive, only delivering food.

Maybe that is why its hard to figure out their nesting. I haven't had much luck with getting bumblebees to coloninze in pre-made houses. But I have seen their colonies in out of the way hay bales, or hay stacks, under brush mounds, or other untidy weedy areas. One of the biggest colonies, about the size of a basketball, the author encountered in the loft of an abandoned building, woven in some of the fiberglass batting. They seem to like dry rises in pastures, where maybe there are some old rock piles. The kind of places garter snakes like to overwinter if there isn't some dry cover to crawl under.

Some scientists, especially in Europe, are figuring out ways to try and raise domesticated bumblebees, but personally, I think they are just fine the way they are. All us gardeners can do is to help keep flowers going as much of the year as possible. Just like the honeybees, we'll be much better off if we hold off on the pesticides. Pesticides just have to wide a shotgun pattern. Beside's, some of peoples biggest weeds are some of bumblebees favorite foods. I like leaving red-dead nettle around in late winter, as the bumblers don't have too much to choose from at that time. Red dead nettle weeds out easy later. I also have always been a fan of one of bumblebees favorite mid-spring foods, dandelions. Not only are dandelions unbelievably rich in nutrients and vitamins, they are valued in folk medicine for spring tonics for livers and stomach. And beside that, dandelions have often saved whole communities of people in times of drought and famine when nothing else would grow.

Which brings us back to Thoreau's comment, "I am lord over all that I survey". For those who are unfamiliar with him, he was an actual surveyor by occasional profession, but he held no paper title to vast estates. No, he was simply commenting on this moments great reach for each of us.

Which reminds me of another saying I am fond of, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci.

"The greatest misfortune is when a man's reach exceeds his grasp."

Except when you might have grasped a bumblebee... or a spider.... or a red hot pan on the stove.... Hummm. I better buzz out of here.....^^^

out there gardening 4-14- to 4-21 the moonflower and the sphinx

2007-04-14T13:15:00.001-07:00

The other day I caught myself smiling.

I patted a green small rosette of fuzzy leaves emerging alongside some broken off stalks from last years garden. This plants appearance now informed me to expect an extra early serving of garden goodies of the unchewable kind, a different kind of garden dessert enjoyed in dusk to dawn garden strolls from late spring through to late summer.

As it had many times before, this species was informing me of the garden world. In this specimen's case, it was telling me that this particular site was warming up unusually early. Both in the my neighborhood of diverse microclimates and in the wetside Northwest, most of the times this sometimes perennial doesn't burst through until May sometime.

This was one of those anticipation smiles that brighten up any time. I was imagining when all of this plant's ilk began flowering in late spring, when their dusk to dawn fragrances would begin riding the night breeze chariots throughout the neigborhood until summer's end. Several other white flowers are betsown with the title of 'Moonflower', but in these parts, this is the one that deserves it the most, and yet lacks the title. No matter, this plant has a wonderful sounding name itself, plus many other welcome qualities.

Actually, the fun begins with the pronuciation of the plant's name, 'Nicotiana gradiflora alata'. Since the plant originated from Brazil, named after a French explorer (Nicot, whose name is found in the tobacco genus of which this one is sometimes called 'Flowering Tobacco'), I include both the name and the proper pronunciation which is in the Portuguese manner: Nicotiana (Nee-coh-shee- ay (as in day) -nuh. 'Nicotiana grandiflora alata' has a continually enriching presence in the garden which I will briefly alight on, but then story here will continue about hidden rooms and mysteries yet to to investigate.

As a warmup to the main story, let's do a quick look at its' specific garden virtures. First, Nicotiana grandiflora alata is a rarer type hereabouts, one of those special ones that few of your friend gardeners grow but tend to admire. It likes to make rambunctious plants up to 8 feet in diameter, so most of the nicotianas available in the trade are other types of nicotiana : smaller, more manageable, some various colors, and usually less fragrant than this one. N.g. a. plant is one of those treasured sometimes perennials that can often reseed throughhout your garden until it becomes abandoned, but I have not yet seen it become invasive. By the way, this handy self-seeding and sometimes perennial habit is a quality I appreciate more as the gardening decades whiz by. It also can compete with the weeds to some extent in new rough sites. Planted along the garden edges its sticky stems trap flying aphids invading from the neigborhood. Against a dark background like corn plants it offers a pleasing contrast landscap architects value. It flowers for many months, often into the fall, and the broken-off flowering stalks can fill up indoor rooms for days with fragrance. It can help fill in garden screens, and is superb en masse along garden walks especially with candles on dark nights. With any glimmer of light, and especially moonlight, it marks where garden paths are. It is also surprisingly popular with hummingbirds once the shadows fall. But of all its virtues, its quality, quantity, and duration of fragrance are why I write here, and thus come to the main event.

According to various garden historians, including Roy Genders in his classic book, "Scented Flora of the World", fragrance in plants was much more prized by Old World gardeners than visual qualities were, up to the 1600s. Only in the last half century has fragrance begun making a resurgence in gardening circles. A good example of this is the longtime disappearance of strongly fragrant roses from rose gardens, as breeders and collectors were long obsessed with form, color, size etc, only recently rediscovering fragrance (through the likes of those such as David Austin and his interests in fragrance exemplified in his lines of 'English Roses').

Yet fragrance has long been important in the plant world, both for repelling and attracting. Fragrance is often a key way to attract nighttime pollinators, and many such flowering plants have white flowers also, to be better seen at night. In todays 9-5 world where many only can experience their gardens in the more shadowy hours, fragrance and this nighttime brightness can sometimes illuminate hidden garden rooms, both natural and our own.

These hidden rooms are in the countryside all around us, seldom visited, but plants like Nicotiana can illuminate them. To what extent actually which plant is actually best, I have yet to ascertain, but I can say that Nicotiana grandiflora alata does seem to have a mysterious allure for a rare visitor to wetside NW gardens. This moonflower attract sphinx moths better than any other plant I know.

What is a sphinx moth? Hundreds of species exist throughout the world, and in various places some are known as hawksbill moths, or hummingbird moths. In some places, some species are known as pests, especially in the subtropics. Some GMO tomatoes have been developed to even kill off this species in monoculture agricultural endeavors. Yikes!!!

In Colorado, as a young boy on many summer eves around the 4-o-clocks, over the years my brother and I would catch, or try and catch these fantastic moths, bewildered by the size, shape, and same flying behavior as a hummingbird. So I have always know it as a 'hummingbird' moth. Yes, their larval form, the tomato hornworm caterpillar, devoured my treasured tomatoes and moms lilacs, but I never had the heart to kill the adult moths. We only wanted to see this amazing flyer up close in our glass jars, and when released they would buzz away into the night, rarely to appear again.

As an adult when I moved to the wetside northwest in the mid 70s, I didn't see these moths for years, and thought it beyond their range. It wasnt until the mid 80s when I began growing large patches of nicotiana grandiflora alata that I was suddenly surprised to see them occasionally appear. At first, in those dimming twilight walks, I thought it was my imagination. Upon confirmation on other nights, I began dragging friends out. Finally, after growing 4-oclocks in earnest again and seeing the sphinx's preference for nicotiana , I realized I could help bring back my far away childhood.

To be honest, even in these years these moths are elusive in these parts. That is somewhat comforting, as I don't think that I am encouraging an agricultural pest. To be honest, what is a pest to monoculture or commercial agriculture is rarely something I perceive as a pest that I have to directly kill off indiscriminately en masse. But like I say, locally very few wetside gardeners have seen hummingbird moths. In fact, in one island where I have large-gardened occasionally in a couple different places for a decace or so, the only place I, or any of my friends, had seen these moths was in my garden nicotiana. In addition, after looking at lepidoptera sites on the web, these particular species had never before been reported in this island county. The answer why, leads back to one of the many biological discoveries in the last 200 years, a discovery that is still being fleshed out in science, and occasionally in these summers' garden strolls.

In the late 1800s of Southern France, a poor peasant, (not Nicot) spent hours, days, weeks, months and years studying insects. Most in his community thought him touched, as they would see him sitting by a roadside studying the dirt bank in the morning when they went to town and again at sundown when they returned home, still studying the dirt bank. The names of all those citizens are forgotten, but not his. Today biologists consider this peasant, Henri Favre, the father of entemology.

Henri Favre made many many discoveries about insects, but the one that applies to the story here begins not in the day, but on one summer eve, not on the roadside where he studied wasps, beetles and such, but this story begins in his tiny house. Henri was perplexed. He had a captive female moth of a rare species, which he usually only saw singly every couple miles apart. Yet at his closed windows, several other moths of the same species were beating against the occasional small panes of salvaged glass. How could they have found their way here, and what secret communication technique with his captive brought them here, he wondered. He began experimenting.

After many trials, he still didn't have the answer. Did these moths communicate by some unheard sound, some unseen trail, or some visual ability beyond the range of human sight? He began considering various theories, and when he had eliminated most of them, he began thinking of what he would need to do to test the one theory remaining. But to test it he would have to make a risky decision. He would have to release his captive moth and then capture another far from his home. It was already becoming late summer, and due to the scarcity of this species, he might not find another one this year.

But Henri was determined, and released his captive, and a couple weeks after the crowds had subsided at his window, he went out to capture another moth. After much looking he finally got lucky and caught another moth a mile or so away. He brought it home, keeping it in a screened container on his table. He had already fastened makeshift screens, and opaque curtains, over his all his windows, so was able to open the windows for the air to blow in. Nurturing his captive female moth in the screened jar on the table, all he had to do was wait.

On the next evening, a curious assembly of fluttering wings had assembled at Henri's windows.
Henri smiled. His experiment was a success. The only way the moths could have been led to his window was by smell. He was the first to discover this.

Henri Favre, a dirt poor peasant, had discovered the beginning of what today has led to of billions of dollars of investment in many human endeavors. Henri had discovered pheromones.

The captive moth was a female. Although humans couldn't smell it, her attractant scent had traveled for miles, roundig up the court of males clamoring at the window.

Today we know that pheromones are not simply relegated to insects but to many, perhaps most of the members of the animal kingdom. Not only are pheronomes used in sexual attractant but also in communication, as seen in ants, and are currently being studied as possibly involved in plankton chemical communications. Among our own species, people have found extensive application for pheromones in the personal products industry. Pheromone applications are increasingly becoming valuable in agricultural pest control, as in mating disruption, pest monitoring, and pest traps.

Although reductionist scientists tend to define pheromone activity as being resticted to animal communication, dynamic scientists are less anxious to draw such lines in scent attraction, realizing we are at the cusp of understanding the complexities of scent activity between the plant and animal kingdom. Fragrance, and pheromones, have long been a way of life for the biological world.

From my various observational posts, I can simply contribute that Nicotiana's strong scent is drawing in the locally rare sphinx moths from long distances. I believe this because in some of my remote gardens miles from other gardens, where I have had large nicotiana patches, no neighbors or lepidoptera experts have noted these species incidence locally. These gardens have been in remote valleys, or on an island where these moths may be traveling several miles across saltwater to arrive at my nicotiana borders.

By now you may have ascertianed that fragrance is one garden attribute I am fascinated with. Actually, I like to weave strands of many themes to weave in the garden, including fragrance and all the senses. But as I said with nicotiana, fragrance is its finest virtue, and when I have occasioally replenished my seedstock, fragrance is something I search for. I thought I had a pretty good handle on it, but a sphinx moth would not only prove me wrong, but also teach me a lesson I am sure I will learn much more about as long as I garden.

When I recently did a quick review of how many linear row feet, (each row about 5 feet across or so), that I have grown in the last 25 years of nicotiana, I realized that the total length is somewhere between 1 and 2 miles. Numerous gardens have had maybe 250 lineal feet of this plant growing in it. Every few years when I would grow to collect seed, I would go through all these feet at various times and tag all of the most fragrant flowers with ribbons, and later harvest seeds from those plants. But now, due to a spinx moth, I realize my selection process needs considerable improvement.

One recent summer dusk I watched for about an hour as a sphinx perused the 150' long flower patch. It would only visit certain nicotiana flowers, and those for varying lengths of time, perhaps one second, 5, or occasionally 10 or rarely 20 seconds. Every 5 minutes or so though, it would find a flower that it would drink nectar from for a half a minute or longer. As I have noticed since childhood, the moths would often leave the garden for many minutes occasionally, taking a break I assume. During these absentee times, I decided to take different colored ribbons and tag the flowers it visited for various lengths of time.

After tagging several flowers among the thousands in the garden, it got too dark to see the moth anymore. So I continued my experiment. I went around smelling flowers.

Every several minutes I would have to take a break for a while and go eat some bread and drink some water, attempting to clear my nose from fragrance inundation. Then I would go back and start smelling the flowers again, of all types. I smelled the ones the moth had visited for long periods of time, the ones for short times, and the ones it ignored. After various approaches, I came up with a stunning observation, at least to me.

By far the strongest smelling nicotiana flowers were the ones the moth spent the longest time at.
Each of the next nights I continued like studies.

I discovered that the strongest smelling flower each night was only ordinary on other nights.

At this time it has only raised further fields of inquiry, and hopefully some other scientists will pursue this line of inquiry further. Could this mean that each flower is most fragrant at the exact time when it is most ripe for pollination? If so, how could this sexual attaractant behavior be common in fragrant flowers relationships with pollinators? Could it mean that pheromones in the animal kingdom are most active at the height of sexual receptivity? I don't know the answers to these questions. But I do know that in my various selection of various fragrant plant species, I need to not only smell different plants repeatedly, but also many flowers on the same plant.

Perhaps I will discover that the pollinators have always been doing this, and the most fragrant plants are the ones that get pollinated the most. Perhaps I will realize that flowers lose their fragrance not only because of the complex investment the plant makes in producing the fragrance but also so that other flowers on the plant can also get pollinated once each has had its zenith of fragrance.

Although most humanity has gladly abandoned the garden world because of perceived drudgery, for me I continually find learning among all of the arts and sciences.

Early April is a good time to start nicotiana from seed. The seeds are tiny, and best started in small pots, with finer potting soil. Often, with tiny seeds, it is helpful to cover the seeds with a fine dusting of sand, perhaps 1/16th of an inch, instead of potting soil, as sand provides quick surface drainage Once the plants are up, they grow quick, and can be set out in the flower borders on about 2-4 foot spacing. In some gardens I use nicotiana plantings at garden corners, around garden activity centers or alongside house, gazebos, or garden sleeping places.

My favorite thing to do is in large open on both side garden borders. These long garden borders are usally about 8 feet wide with paths 5 -8 feet wide on each side. On the north side I plant all of my tall plants, especially sunflowers for the birds, but maybe also some of my flour corns I breed , or double hollyhocks I use for the best face sponges. In front of that goes the nicotiana, and then comes gradually the shorter plants towards the sun.

That way there are sides for the sun, the moon, the sphinx, and of course you, the gardener.