Mount Nittany Sunrise.

Monday, April 30, 2012

Fleur-de-P-word


OK, so I’m in bed watching Suzy Bartels’ YouTube video on hay bale gardening during the wee hours of the morning.  She’s talking about adding high nitrogen fertilizer to the bales during the third week and I’m zoning off. Then she says: “Peeing on them is the best thing, or you can go to Agway and buy somebody else’s pee. They call it urea. It’s still just pee.”

I practically fall out of bed.

When I was a kid, I was taught to say,  “I have to tinkle.” As I got older, “I have to go to the bathroom.” I remember in high school, my cool friend Meggie called it “piddle” which is cute if you are talking about a puppy. But the word “pee”? Nice girls didn’t say that.

So, let’s just call it urine, for the sake of science, and figure this out. I start Googling again.

·      One site explains that urine is a natural source of agricultural fertilizer with negligible risks. In fact, urine treated and disposed of is more of an environmental problem than when it is used au naturel as a resource.
·      At the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, researchers have been studying urine recycling for 15 years. Our digestive system strips the “waste” down to basic mineral forms that plants just suck up.
·      An article in Scientific American magazine reports that in Finland researchers are growing beets, cucumbers, cabbages, and tomatoes using urine as a sustainable fertilizer.
·      Each year the average human produces 500 liters of urine, full of nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus, all craved by plants. Five hundred liters would fill three bathtubs.
·      Urine is practically sterile. Astronauts on the International Space Station drink the darned stuff after it has been purified.

This late-night research is boggling my mind. Memories flood in like high tide.

Flashback: We are in Avalon, NJ, for a summer vacation with several families. A friend is visiting. One of the moms thinks the girl is ill mannered because she “forgets to flush”. It turns out her family was conscious of our limited resources before ecology and recycling became household words. She taught us this little water conservation ditty: “If it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down.”

Flashback: I’m studying at Penn State’s Marine Science Consortium at Wallops Island, VA. I’m chasing after my duck-footed professor as he dashes off into the dunes. I don’t want to miss the family of ghost crabs or a tasty patch of salicornia I think he is racing toward. He stops, spreads his legs apart, his hands busy in front of him. “The pose.” I turn and scamper in the opposite direction, laughing at my naiveté.

Flashback: Just the other day I’m giving my son “the lecture” after spotting him outside the house in “the pose”. He is aiming at the rhododendron, but tells me he is looking for groundhogs.

“We may be outside the borough, but this is a college town. The police call that open lewdness or indecent exposure or, at the very least, urinating in public. You’ll get in trouble. And what would your grandmother think?”

“Maaaahommm.”

Back to Reality: A new day is dawning. I’m enlightened. I still won’t say the P-word but I do have a plan.

“Hey Richard, are you doing anything the third week in May? I’ve got a job for you…”

Laurie Lynch

No. 2 Thought: “There is no doubt about it, the basic satisfaction in farming is manure, which always suggests that life can be cyclic and chemically perfect and aromatic and continuous.” –E.B. White

Sunday, April 29, 2012

Fleur-de-HayBale


There is a certain danger in having a laptop when negotiating mid-life divorce insomnia.

The other night I woke abruptly with a solution—hay bale garden. I’m still not sure where it came from but it melded a series of unrelated items on my to-do list into one project.

1.    Need to get rid of the stack of two-year-old dusty hay bales taking up room in my mother’s barn.
2.    Decide what to do about two grassy patches inside my newly fenced-in vegetable garden. The grass would be a hassle to mow and could have been turned into garden space had I the foresight to smother the grass with cardboard last fall, readying it for spring tilling.
3.    Figure out what to write on my next blog.

If I were still relying on my old clunky computer, I would have gotten out of bed, put on thick socks and a robe, and headed down to the basement to the dank depths of the “office”.  Instead, I switched on the light, reached for my laptop, propped up my pillows, fluffed up the comforter, and Googled “hay bale garden”.

I clicked and tapped through a bunch of straw bale gardens then I hit pay dirt, so to speak. There was a video of Suzy Bartels speaking on Hay Bale Gardening to a group at the Plumsteadville (PA) Grange. And that’s where this story started taking twists and turns.

Future Fingerling Potato Patch
Bale gardening is an elevated form of raised-bed gardening. (A brief pause for an agricultural teachable moment. Straw is dry stalks of wheat or oats, often yellow in color, has no nutritional value. and is used for bedding; hay is dry grasses or legumes, such as alfalfa or clover, with a greenish color, nutritional value, and therefore used for feed.)  

With bale gardening, there is no weeding, no tilling, and not a whole lot of bending. If your soil is poor or poorly drained, bale gardening solves those problems too. For me, lining my two grassy areas with bales (on their sides, bristle-side up, so the twine is not touching the ground) and then filling the interior with loose hay would help smother the grass while providing planting room this season. And, it cleared a space in my mother’s barn.

Nonna: "What's she doing now?"
With my trusty wheelbarrow and 15 trips from the barn to the garden, I created two pocket gardens between my dad’s original raised-beds with 30 bales of hay. In the larger garden, about 12’x14’, I’ll plant pumpkins, squash, and cucumbers to tumble down into the inner hay-covered courtyard. In the second narrower bed, 6’x14’, I’ll plant peppers and eggplant up above in the hay bales and in the lower section, I’ll line the bottom with soil and plant my fingerling potatoes, covering them with more soil, and adding soil as they grow.

With May Day approaching, you too can design a bale garden and plant by Memorial Day. After arranging your bales, you soak them daily with water for two weeks. The third week you apply a cup of high nitrogen fertilizer on each bale to get composing action going, repeat two days later, and two days after that. Each time, you water the fertilizer in, but you don’t water it through.  By the end of the third week, if you put your finger in the bale, it should feel hot, which means it is composting. On the fourth week, keep bales moist and let them cool. By then, your bales are prepped and ready for planting. Use your hands to make two holes in each bale and fill with a little compost or soil, and insert your seedling. Water in.

If we don’t get enough help with rain from Mother Nature, you will have to water plants occasionally, as you would for any garden plant, but hay helps retain moisture better than straw does.

That’s it for today’s simple bale garden lesson. Tomorrow’s blog, the twists and turns of frank farming. Laurie Lynch

May Day Special: Robyn Jasko, Kuztown resident and co-founder (with husband Paul David) of websites Dine Indie and Grow Indie, has written Homesweet Homegrown: How to Grow, Make and Store Food, No Matter Where You Live. The book is available at bookstores and on Amazon.com May 1 for $9.95.

An Apology: Yesterday I attended another writing conference and learned that as a blogger I'm supposed to respond to all blog comments. I promise to do so in the future.