Oh Roger, you open a can of worms and I'm trying to find common ground with
Randy. I doubt if anything I could offer him would make the slightest
difference to him. He's the envy of his peers because of the prices he
gets. He had just come back from a trip to Moscow, Idaho, where the
University of Idaho is. He had been asked to lecture a class on growing
trees. His blue spruces looked beautiful, though his ponderosa pines were
stressed. I offered a suggestion of spraying CT on the the pines as a
foliar spray, but Lord knows I know nothing about raising pine trees and
what the ingredients should be.
I wasn't clear. Randy claims that he can spray Escort when the trees are
dormant and they don't die. Whether they are stressed by it he didn't say.
I was glad my husband was along and they could talk about things like elk
guiding. This was a PR run for me and I wasn't trying to debate him on his
methods. But what he meant was that the weeds growing around the trees
affected the growth of the lower branches, not the herbicide. These were
trees that would be planted as focal points in perfect lawns.
Your story about the grazier/shearer of Merino sheep setting fire to the
place next door and getting five-fold renewed growth of serrated tussock is
human nature, isn't it? Randy offered to show us all his equipment. He's
very proud of his place, his methods and his equipment. It was getting dark
so we demurred on that. His place shows the results of a lot of work in a
paradigm we don't share. He also doesn't understand that he's raising trees
in agricultural, not forest practice. The things we care about don't matter
to him when it comes to making a living. I may send him the article on
ramial wood chips, though. He seems to be interested in some organic
practices, like green manuring and if he pursues the ponderosa's dis-ease,
he may learn something. Next time I see him, I'll ask about those two
problems he showed me.
He has offered me some hard fescue seed for Rapid Lightning right-of-way.
Should I take it? I was thinking of using it on some of the bare ground to
try it out.
I did get some dirt from our county road from a knapweed site and from bare
ground, but it was all frozen and I had to chip it up. I have it in some
plastic bags which I left open. I'm still interested in having you dowse
paper dipped in its mud. I read the Acres USA catalog and they have a lot
of books on dowsing and radionics. I'm reading Richard Gerber's book on
Vibrational Medicine and it's a good background book for me. Still, it's
hard to get started. I'm in the information gathering stage, I guess. I
have all sorts of unpleasant work like cleaning and ordering that haunts me.
Best,
Merla
Roger Pye wrote:
Merla Barberie wrote:
Your nemesis, Randy, seem to exemplify many good, as well as
misguided, qualities. His land is in his family and farming is in his
blood. He is open enough to share with you what he is doing and he
really believes in it, works hard, makes it pay, pays his bills
thereby, etc. He uses a spider and cover crops, for crying out loud.
I was surprised at how much I liked his place, but it bothered me, I
guess because it wasn't a small farm growing vegetables organically,
but rather just large fields of beautiful perfect trees, exactly
spaced...little monocultures of various tree species planted and
harvested in different years. It might be valuable to compare an
organic tree farm with Randy's farm.
The organically grown trees will be happier and know how to compete with
other species for precious nutrients and therefore better able to resist
disease and decay in the long term.
My husband tells me he heard Randy bragging about how he and some
other farmers sneaked onto an organic neighbor's land who wouldn't
take care of his weeds and sprayed it with herbicide...I guess it's
his personality, not necessarily his farm.
A year ago I visited a one thousand acre property in the southern
highlands of NSW whose owner was allowing it to revert to bush and
naturally regenerate. He was helping it along the way with tree
plantings of friendly native species, had planted several hundred. The
farm had a lot of serrated tussock, Oz's number one 'noxious' weed
(noxious to stock, of course) which is under permanent sentence of death
by the authorities. The owner lived in town, no one lived at the farm.
About half the property was accessible by vehicle (4-wheel drive), the
remainder by mountain goat.
Access was through another and much bigger farm. The grazier (I use the
term loosely, he was in fact a shearer) ran Merino sheep and little
else. He used toxic chemical weedkillers and superphosphates like they
were going out of fashion. Every time a 'weed' (ie, anything other than
grass) poked its head up, it and the area around got hit by a toxic
blast. The average grass height was about an inch and colour a vivid,
sickly green.
On a particular
