Keith Addison wrote:
Hello Robert
Thanks for this, nice read!
You're welcome. I thought things were sounding a bit grim on
this forum lately!
Too much reality? It does tend to be a bit grim at times.
Equisetum arvense?
Yes, that's the one. It's toxic to colts and lambs when it's
dry. I've read that its tubers store food reserves, which, coupled
with an extensive creeping rhizome system, makes the plant very
persistent. I've dug up rhizome leads better than a meter in length,
but the plant will regenerate from even a tiny bit of root left in
the ground. Thank God the fertile stems don't remain active for very
long!
Interestingly, equisetum arvense has medicinal uses.
It's widely used in traditional medicine. Also, it says here, "Romans
always used horsetail to clean their pots and pans, not just to make
them clean but also, thanks to the silica, to make them nonstick. In
the Middle Ages it was used as an abrasive by cabinetmakers, to clean
pewter, brass, and copper, and for scouring wood containers and milk
pans... This herb has been associated with various goblins, toads and
snakes, and the devil."
I guess you'll agree with the devil bit. :-)
Actually it said "in the Meddle Ages", LOL! But that'd be now, not then.
The dried herb aids in the treatment of urinary and prostatic
disease, repair of lung and pulmonary tissue, among others, but its
high inorganic silica content makes ingestion dangerous for children.
Ancient plant. Midori picked a whole bunch of them two days ago and
stir-fried the tops according to Japanese traditional practice. Not
bad!
My loving wife, who is a very good cook, wrinkled her nose
when I told her you'd written this.
Give it a try, the shoots are tender, good! Makes a good medicinal tea too.
Horsetails indicate acid soil and drainage problems.
This is certainly our situation. It rains a lot in this
climate, and acidic soil loving blueberries grow well here.
Probably it's acid because of the poor drainage.
When we built our house, the excavator removed 17 loads of soil from
our property, leaving us in a sea of grey colored muck; a
perennially wet clay in which very little that's useful to us will
grow. We stopped several trucks that were removing dirt from the
properties around us and asked them to dump their loads back on our
lot, simply so we could get proper landscaping done. (And worse, we
got a bill from the excavators for taking our dirt away!) Now, as
the area around us develops, the same thing is happening on other
properties.
The trouble is they so often mix up topsoil with subsoil. Of course
they shouldn't remove it at all. Wantonly destroying topsoil has to
be a mortal sin, IMO.
Right now, we have a very lumpy front yard, mostly in grass,
that is doing marginally well. Our front flower beds are
flourishing, but we've conditioned the soil extensively with barn
litter and compost, so we have very little trouble with horsetail at
the front of the house. I had a vision for the western slope of our
property that involved a combination of fruit trees, shrubs,
evergreens and aspens that was supposed to provide shade as well as
food. (Our house gets very hot during the summer because we're a
corner lot and there is NO shade around us during the long daylight
period. R 50 ceilings trap heat very nicely!) After grading by
hand (agonizingly) to minimize run off (which had been a REAL
problem when we first moved in), we planted the trees, shrubs and
covered the ground with cedar bark mulch in the hope that creeping
ground cover would eventually occupy the slope. So far, the
creepers we've planted have hardly taken a foothold.
This is where our horsetail problem is dominant.
The north end of our property is the sunniest place during
the growing season. This is where we've built four raised beds and
where our crops of lettuce, cabbage, beets, purple beans, broccoli
and carrots thrived last summer. On the eastern side of our
driveway, a long, narrow strip of land serves as our area for corn,
squash, potatoes, eggplant and other large plants. It's been
extensively worked, the topsoil there is about half a meter deep,
and it's literally crawling with living things!
Horsetail doesn't grow there.
We subsoiled one of our fields today, thin layer of topsoil over
really sticky clay, with, indeed, severe drainage problems.
Tomorrow we'll compost it and rotavate it lightly, since we can't
lay our hands on a disk harrow. Then what would be ideal would be a
deep-rooting grass mixture and a two-year ley, heavily grazed by
livestock, along with several hay cuts. But we don't have the grass
mixture either, nor can we get anything suitable here, but we'll do
what we can.
Getting a thick layer of well drained topsoil seems key to
controlling the horsetail.
Key to just about everything. You can build it from nothing - what
you start with is just the raw material, you can turn any soil into
rich topsoil, even a heavy clay subsoil when all the topsoil's gone.
We can't have grazing animals here because we're in a subdivision,
though I've thought of miniature goats or miniature horses.
How about Dexters? Nobody takes them seriously because they're so
small, they're regarded as pets, but they're excellent cattle.
http://journeytoforever.org/farm_animal.html
Farming with animals
I wouldn't have anything to do with goats, soil destroyers, and
horses on their own are not good for pastures.
Have a look at this Robert:
Ley Farming
http://journeytoforever.org/farm_library.html#ley
This is the key to it all.
I have to come up with a better solution for our western slope than
the one I planned originally because I'm a slave to weeding right
now. At present, my home business isn't exactly thriving, so I have
the time to work outside. I'm hoping, however, that things will
pick up soon. . .
I've solved this problem before without subsoiling, just by growing
weeds. I had the best weeds in the valley, taller than me! Sunn
hemp, it ended up being at the end of the succession, and it sure
fixed the drainage problem, excellent field that was, though it was
useless at first.
My neighbors ALREADY think I'm crazy. If I start growing
hemp, that would remove all doubt!
:-) It's not that kind of hemp, nothing to do with cannabis, and it
doesn't look like cannabis.
http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/proceedings1996/v3-389.html
Crotalaria juncea: A Potential Multi-Purpose Fiber Crop
It's a legume and fixes a helluva lot of N. Nice plant. Weed, you know. LOL!
Yes! There's nothing better. I was reading someone who said that
any health problems that don't vanish after a day's gardening
should be taken seriously. I think you have to add the mind and the
spirit to that too.
I agree. There's something very cathartic about working with the soil.
We got out the old Yanmar rotavator (two-wheeled tractor) to work the
subsoiled field, after Midori (helped by the chickens) covered it
with a couple of inches of compost, and quite a lot of wood ash. You
have to be careful with wood ash and clay, it can help to compact the
clay, but this will be fine with the compost, and it needs the
calcium and potassium. The Yanmar's old, about 25 years or so, a
diesel, made to run on fuel oil. There are a lot of them round here
but most people use tractors now. We have a tractor too, but that's
the next job, or one of them... We checked the Yanmar over, topped up
the oil, filled it with biodiesel, unjammed the water drain, filled
with hot water, topped up the oil in the air filter, sprayed some
WD40 into the air intake, I cranked it and it started first time,
nice! Just as well, I haven't got any puff at all since I was in
hospital, slowly getting it back but no use pushing it. So Midori's
rotavating the field now. She's used these old machines before, but
had to get used to it again - hilarious when it tipped up on its nose
on that rough ground and left little Midori dangling in the air from
the grips! But she quickly got the hang of it, doing a nice job.
It'll be good, that field. Yeah, that's right, she does all the work,
or most of it - she's the one who's learning, it's the only way.
Cathartic? Hm, maybe - the biodiesel helps, no filthy diesel fumes,
very uncathartic!
For them that hasn't noticed:
http://journeytoforever.org/garden.html
Organic gardening: Journey to Forever
That's the best part of the site for those of us who don't do
biodiesel and can't legally distill ethanol.
Agh! For me it's the best part of it anyway. Boring old biodiesel! :-)
Regards
Keith
robert luis rabello
"The Edge of Justice"
Adventure for Your Mind
http://www.authorhouse.com/BookStore/ItemDetail.aspx?bookid=9782>
Ranger Supercharger Project Page
http://www.members.shaw.ca/rabello/
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