Here it is almost 10/10, and the 10/10 people are having many hundreds of events, and I wish all of those people the greatest of luck, even though they may occasionally make an over-the-top video and post it on YouTube.
I myself live where there are no 10/10 events planned (I checked the map on the 10/10 site.) Lubbock, Texas? Yep. Las Cruces? Yep. Cd. Juarez? Yep.
That last made me think. Cd. Juarez but not El Paso?
Not Carlsbad, New Mexico, either, or anywhere around here. No, intrepid readers, I am not going to go around trying to foment and otherwise run environmental events in Carlsbad, NM. I'll leave that to people like Steve West, an intrepid local who is involved with the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance, and actually goes around organizing people and attempting to encourage them to do useful environmental things around here, like run yearly bird counts, and generally be aware of the fact that this really is a beautiful and environmentally rich area, even though it's a desert (sort of). Good on him.
But town pariahs such as myself are a bad bet for trying to organize events. What you need, to start out, is a core group. That way when you start organizing your event and doing outreach; if you get only one respondent, you don't wind up with that one person sitting on the County Courthouse lawn all by your lonesome, sign aloft, trying very hard not to feel like fools.
They laugh at you a lot around here when you do stuff like that.
Of course, they laugh at environmentalists around here a lot no matter WHAT you do.
Thus, since I haven't read anything from Steve West (I appear to be on his mailing list); my plans for 10/10 are to continue my ongoing efforts to get my fall garden going. Over the last few days, I've done carrots and potatoes. Sounds like soup!
The potato project was inspired by a variety of garden bloggers, whose suggestions about potato container gardening I've read over time. First there was the tire thing, but tires have toxic stuff in them, and they catch water and breed mosquitoes.
Then there was the suggestion about doing the tire thing, except with chicken wire circles. That was interesting. Much simpler, too. Good for damp climates, since it would dry out a lot. But you could line it vertically with something to slow that down...hmmm.
Then there was potatohead, on Daily Kos, who told me about a family member who did it with five gallon buckets. Why didn't I think of that?
So I used this and that from all of these ideas, including how to work the substrate, and my current potato project went like this:
Trim out the eyes from a red potato, but leave a good bit of potato attached. Let them sit out to dry on paper towels for a day or so, cut side up. You want to cut potato to dry and seal, to decrease the chances of rot. The potato will be food for the sprouting eye until it gets going with roots.
Drill about fifteen evenly spaced half inch holes in the bottom of three five-gallon buckets. One inch might be better, but I don't have a bigger drill bit, and actually I found this one on the street - good score! but half inch should do.
I trashpicked all the buckets. Okay, I admit I stole a few from the recycling center on Sunday when there aren't any staffers around. I don't care. Reuse trumps recycle, especially with plastic, and especially with a good tool like a five gallon bucket, that can last ya for years, properly managed. Then, of course, one properly disposes of it. After it falls apart entirely, I mean.
Layer in about an inch or so of broken terracotta potsherds and small limestone. Terracotta pots have their limitations, but they are good for drainage when they crater. Limestone rocks of a wide variety of sizes, shapes, and aesthetic qualities are to be had for the looking for around here.
Layer in several inches of cut hay from the easement (I wrote about the easement the other day).
Layer in a few inches of rough finished compost. That means I didn't sift it, but picked out the big sticks & stuff.
Repeat until about four inches below the top of the bucket, with the last layer compost.
Set in now-dried potato eye/sets, with the eyes up.
Put in several more inches of grass/hay.
Find a shady spot with some morning light (note: it's still getting up into the 80's here, but not quite the 90's).
Put two bricks down for each bucket.
Set buckets on bricks.
Water moderately. Don't let it get too wet or the potato sets will rot.
That's how far I've gotten with the potato project. I'm trying to create an environment that will keep the plants warm, during a time of year when the daylength will be decreasing for some time yet (which should encourage new potatoes), without the potatoes rotting, while at the same time keeping them away from Bad Things For Potatoes.
Potatohead learned this trick in the PNW, as I understand it, where bad things for potatoes include slugs & stuff that comes up from the ground and gnaws upon various parts. He commented that what he likes about this technique is that is so clean...and you can also tip over the buckets a bit and stick in a hand to feel around and check to see how the potatoes are doing, and when you eventually dump the bucket and harvest the potatoes, the substrate can go as mulch, back into a compost pile, whatever. Slick.
Here, Bad Things For Potatoes are the soil. Potatohead wrote that he used a mix including compost and local soil, but I bet I'd get scab here if I did that. Potatoes like low pH.
I'd previously read about people doing potatoes in raised enclosures using straw, and even newspapers (soy-based ink; hard-core organic people are okay with this, in my experience; not cardboard though, it can have formaldehyde in the glue).
So I thought I'd do a mix of what might work..easement hay cuttings and rough finished compost.
I've set up three buckets and will likely keep doing this until I run out of appropriate plastic containers I don't want to reserve for rain catchments. It's looking like it might be another one of those warm falls here, where it doesn't freeze substantially until December. La Nina can roll that way here.
I'm also thinking that if hay works, why not just garden weeds? When I throw green potatoes into the compost (because they are toxic from the solanine) they often sprout. Why not expand this idea?
It's like a worm bin...except for potatoes.
Next project: carrots.
I had a mulch pile all the warm season this year, where I was growing fairly big stuff last year; corn, squash vines, tomato plants, various and sundry other interesting plant people I allowed to invade, and the end result post-frost was a big pile of plant detritus.
I can be a pretty lazy gardener at times, and I just kind of let it sit there for quite some time.
Somewhat later in this last year, or maybe early this year; I forget; I got to where I had more dead plant stuff that needed to go somewhere. Oh, pecan leaves. This started last fall.
Mind you, I have a real problem with giving any of it to the trash-collectors. It's similar to my problem with allowing more than the absolute minimum of water to go down the sewer line. Heck, I pay for all of this - in water and in energy. Why on earth would I want to give any of it back?
So I'm always trying to figure out ideal uses for dead plant stuff, whether it dies on its own or it's just getting too out of hand and I have to beat it back, especially during heavy monsoon years like this one, after El Nino winters with a lot of snow. Really, it's been astounding. Like Kentucky, I figure. Except five times as fast. Three inches a day. Scary. 100 Years of Solitude.
The obvious place for the new dead plant stuff was on top of the old dead plant stuff, the cornstalks, the squash vines, all of it. I had a huge holey tarp I'd trashpicked some time back. Great score! HUGE tarp. Holes not a bug; holes a feature for compost; lets in air.
So the tarp went over the compost, except part of it got cut off and went over the OLD compost, that I'd moved over to the corner of that part of the yard; that's the compost I'm using with the potato buckets now.
A dark tarp will heat your compost and help kill weed seeds, etc. Even in the winter, it will help speed things along, though it's a good idea to get some moisture in there. Also you will get mice living under your compost if you don't turn it enough, which I do, and this entertains my dog no end. I set traps in the house. Mea culpa. They're just house mice, though. No biggie.
Okay, where was I? Oh yeah. Now it's early fall (this year) and I have this ever-increasing pile of mulch, and I'm thinking more and more about fall/winter/spring vegetables, and about having to dig up all of that Bermuda grass that grows everywhere it can in town. Pernicious stuff. They should plant it where mountains are eroding from deforestation; I bet it could hold its own compared to the trees. It's perennial, too. Spreads by runners. High-maintenance.
An upside of Bermuda Grass is that it goes dormant when the weather freezes, quite obediently. The other upside is that even though it's pernicious, spreads by runners, goes down for feet...it doesn't like having mulch piles cooking on top of it for months on end, one bit.
I dug up that patch today, where the mulch pile was; the mulch pile that I'm doing other things with now. I sharpened my shovel first with my rattail file. Always helpful.
It's a small patch. The horrible Bermuda was coming in at it from the fringes, but it didn't get too far. I didn't find much in the way of roots. I was only digging a shovel-length down, so prolly they are down further below. But just nothing in the top ten inches or so. Yay!
And...it's going to freeze sooner or later, heh, heh. Take that, Bermuda Grass!
Piece of cake shoveling job. A pleasure, with the nice compost bottom. And that's where I planted the carrots. The soil was lovely; the bottom of the mulch pile had decayed nicely. I did put a fair amount of water onto it this year, though. Ran a sewn flexible nylon drip line under the tarp. Started it at the top and than curled it in a spiral down around it, because the water always comes out most at the top of a drip line, unless you tweak it endlessly.
I haven't used the whole patch yet; have some interesting heirloom broccoli seeds to put in yet, too.
The carrots should get a good start before it gets too cold and be harvestable in the spring. The broccoli should hang in too; cole crops are very frost-resilient. I've had cold winters here where they'd all just wilt like they'd given up hope, and then perk up soon as the sun warmed things up again. Just amazed me first time I saw that. Vegetative anti-freeze.
That's the vegetative news from Carlsbad. Hope all you ten-tenners have a great time. Don't ever think this kind of thing is useless; demonstrations and all. You may get ignored by the PTB, but by Dog, you'll have fun. You'll get to meet people you never would have, otherwise.
And that, dear friends, is revolutionary all by itself.
Don't let 'em grind you down.
And pray for rain.
But not too much, in any one place.
Update:
Further Thoughts.
I don't do holes for compost anymore. They are hard on one's back. I'm diversifying. I mulch a lot more than I used to...let the stuff TCI! (take care of itself). I use a plastic trash bin for rodent-friendly stuff. And yes, it would be possible to build one out of rock. If I had a lot of rock handy, I'd likely build a lot of stuff out of rock. If there were no high-quality plastic containers being sent to landfills, that I could snag, I'd likely go out and gather rock, bicycle and all.
But there is nothing at all wrong with composting in holes, if one is willing to do it. It's actually a brilliant way to do it.
If you have enough land to work with, a way to do it is with shallow broad holes. That's much easier. It works just fine. You also design urine collectors and everybody puts their urine on the compost.
Voila!
I'm going to make a urine collector soon. My place has benefited a lot from my good management, but I could do even better with utilizing my piss.
You do it by hotgluing a cutout bleach bottle cap to a plastic tube and then the tube to a cut-off bleach bottle, which thus becomes a kind of funnel. Bleach bottles are very well made; they are strong bottles. Will last a long time.
I've peed over cans, I've peed over a lot of things, but my joints are getting tired and what I need to do is make something I can pee into from a comfortable position.
You can also use them on boats. Or in cars. Think of the possibilities!
I have a whole book on this, published by some brave woman in the UK. "Liquid Gold," it's called.
It's best to dilute urine with water about ten to one, and sterilize your urine collectors with bleach. Great nitrogen fertilizer. You have to dilute it because it is so good; otherwise it will burn your plants. However, if you just want to use it on a mulch pile, it won't be dangerous to anything, although it will smell upfront. Thus, good to dilute.
Oh, and guys? If you want to piss on the mulch pile, have at it. You're not dangerous. Your bladders are larger than ours are, but not that much larger.
Back to shallow compost: what you do is rectangular piles. I'd say about eight or ten feet across would be optimal, and maybe thirty inches deep. They could be very long.
You'd keep the rough stuff out of them, no wood or heavy seeds.
They would run in parallel; several of them. There would be about ten feet between each. Several people could work at the same time without feeling cramped.
The first one gets the rough stuff. It gets turned into the next one after a few weeks, and then into the next one. By about the fourth one, it's finished.
People put their urine from their urine collectors, onto the piles, as needed. They can tell when any given pile is getting overly nitrogenated, from the ammonia smell.
Mostly it should go to the earlier piles. People will figure that out soon.