About a week ago, I heard a zinging-buzzing sound as a miniscule feathered missile (with a dangerously pointy beak) zipped past my head: the first of our Rufous Hummingbirds come home from wherever they hummer off to for the winter.
The little guy seemed kind-of ticked off, probably because he’d returned from sunnier climes to a depressing, soggy-gray April day in Washington. I could hardly blame him. And it probably didn’t help his mood any that I hadn’t put up a hummingbird feeder yet, or even remembered to replace the feeder broken last fall (oops).
Hummingbirds have the extremely high metabolism of a…well…hummingbird, so of course this bird was HUNGRY.
Red-flowering currant is a favorite hummingbird food source.
So off I went to town to buy a big new feeder, then dashed home, whipped up a batch of hummingbird sugar water (with expensive organic sugar, no less), and hung the feeder in front of our living room window.
Within fifteen minutes or so, I spotted the hummer (well, a hummer) sitting on the petite perch guzzling away, and I breathed a huge sigh of relief.
OK, I’m exaggerating here, but these deceptively adorable birds truly are tyrants—you don’t want to mess with them when they’re hungry, especially if you’re another hummingbird. In fact, I just learned here that our rufous hummingbirds are THE feistiest hummingbird species in North America.
But seriously, I love it when our hummingbirds return each spring, and gladly provide them with sugar water so I can watch these gorgeous, fascinating birds up close. While the females have a shimmering green plumage with white and orange, the males flaunt metallic red and orange feathers that make them look like burning embers.
On a few occasions, I’ve had a super close-up look at them when one of a tussling pair of hummers has stunned itself against our window. Usually I put the patient in a dark box until he or she recovers, but once my daughter and I took turns gently holding the delicate creature in our hands, marveling at its unbelievable lightness—like holding a feather—and glowing plumage. Before long, the hummingbird blinked, fluttered its wings, and shot away.
Feeding hummingbirds is easy, fun and inexpensive. You can easily make your own nectar by boiling four cups of water and stirring in one cup of sugar for a few minutes (no honey or sugar substitutes) until it dissolves (find tips here).
In Massachusetts, town selectmen are required to “walk the bounds” every five years, identifying town boundary markers and replacing any that are missing.
While such an idea might be considered quaint in this day of GPS locators and mapping systems, it is still a good idea on any propery. An even better idea is to make it a seasonal event.
If you haven’t walked your “bounds” of late, Earth Day might be an appropriate day to do so. How better to celebrate your connection with the earth than to get up close with your own piece of ground.
Renew your awareness of how it lays and how and where it connects to your neighbors. It’s a chance to identify situations before they become problems, fix things that need to be fixed and generally appreciate the land and its features.
With that in mind, add a few things to your pockets or pack before you start. A small notebook and pencil for lists and locations, a multi-purpose fence pliers and a few staples for on-the-spot fence repair and a good walking stick for pushing brambles aside are traditional tools for such a walk.
It might be advisable to leave behind distracting cell phones. However, adding a digitial camera for reminder shots is a good idea.
Of course, walking the bounds in the midst of spring’s plenty has short and long term benefits. Depending on your location, spring flowers, budding fruit trees and even magical morel mushrooms may provide immediate rewards. Knowing the location of those fruit trees and berry brambles may provide reason for future visits as well, not that a walk in the country isn’t its own reward!
There is something almost magical about pulling a fresh-sawn board away from a log after running it through your own sawmill. Maybe it’s the beauty of the fresh-cut wood or perhaps it’s realizing you may never again have to buy a piece of milled lumber. It could even be a desire to use 2-by-4s or 1-inch planks that are actually the correct dimensions. For me, it was the idea that I could add value to my trees—even those untouched by professional loggers.
“There is a personal satisfaction to being able to cut your own wood and then use it effectively,” agrees Eddy Whichard, sales manager of Lumber Smith, LLC. “Portable sawmills aren’t for the faint of heart, but they are a tool a good woodworker can use to supplement his supplies.”
In addition to trees in your own woodlot, quality logs are often free for the asking. When trees have to be removed or have fallen, homeowners and municipalities alike can face costly chipping or landfill fees. When storms hit, there are often no workers to handle downed trees, much less sawmills that will take them. Portable-sawmill owners are able to utilize these otherwise-wasted resources as no one else can.
If adding value by sawmilling on site makes sense for the pocketbook, it also makes sense for the environment, suggests Erik Granberg, CEO of Granberg International.
Most portable sawmills come in two basic styles: the chain saw with attachments and the mini band-saw mill. In both cases, the log is held in place while the saw rig passes over and through it, versus stationary mills where the log passes through the saw.“With a portable sawmill, there is no big equipment making tracks through a woodlot,” he says. “You leave a small footprint and no waste. The sawdust, bark and everything but the select lumber is left in the forest to decompose and feed new growth.”
Portable Chain-saw Mill
Granberg International has been turning chain saws into portable sawmills for almost 40 years. Its Alaskan MKIII works with chain-saw bars 24 inches or longer, while the Alaskan Small Log Milling Attachment works with bars of 20 inches or shorter. Add the Mini-Mill, introduced in 1973, and you can quickly turn a log into feet of lumber boards.
Chain-saw milling attachments are metal frames that help guide the chain saw in horizontal or vertical cuts. Initial cuts use guide bars to ensure an even cut. Subsequent cuts may use guide bars or rest on the flat face of the slabbed log.
Chain saws, depending on their power head, can be adapted to two-man milling rigs with extended bars. Granberg has custom-made bars and milling attachments up to 8 feet long for extra-large-diameter timber. Extended bars are also ideal for cutting curved logs and crotch ends to create structural arches or unique tabletops.
Cost was one reason I went the chain-saw mill route when I got the urge to make lumber. The Small Log Milling Attachment and Mini-Mill from Granberg only set me back about $250, and both fit the 18-inch bar of my Stihl 029 chain saw. Their metal frameworks added only a few pounds to the chain saw’s total weight. Carrying them to site by foot required a second trip for guide rails, but it didn’t overload my back, and it certainly wasn’t a problem for my ATV.
If you want to keep sheep but you don’t want to deal with wool, think hair sheep. Shepherds are flocking to hair sheep for many reasons, and not only because they needn’t be shorn.
Other advantages of hair-sheep breeds include their increased heat tolerance, parasite and hoof-rot resistance, increased lambing percentages, and outstanding mothering ability with above-average milk production. They are fine foragers, and they breed year-round. Best of all, there’s an array of attractive hair-sheep breeds to choose from, including heritage breeds like the sleek St. Croix sheep and ancient Wiltshire Horn sheep and the readily available Katahdin sheep and Dorper sheep—two of the fastest-growing sheep breeds in North America.
According to Dr. Charles E. Parker in “U.S. Sheep Inventory 2006: Some Hair Raising Statistics,” between 2000 and 2005, hair-sheep breed registrations increased by 83.5 percent, while all other breeds combined declined by 14 percent. Dorpers and Katahdins alone accounted for 15.6 percent of total sheep-breed registrations. Hair-sheep production, he adds, represents the only continuous growth segment in the U.S. sheep industry for 18 years.
Hair Sheep 101
Hair sheep fall into one of two categories: unimproved (true hair sheep) or improved (shedding) breeds. True hair sheep are sheep as nature intended them to be. The ancestors of today’s sheep were wild Mouflons domesticated in Asia’s Fertile Crescent more than 8,000 years ago (though an unknown ancestor played its part, as well). They, like early domestic sheep, were clothed with hair, not wool. They grew woolly winter undercoats to stay warm.
Humans, however, selectively bred the sheep for wooliness to the degree that by 3000 B.C., wool sheep were evident in parts of the ancient world. As woolly sheep evolved, their tails grew longer and woollier, requiring docking (shortening) for hygienic reasons; rams lost their impressive manes of hair and, in many wool breeds, their horns.
Some types evolved in parts of the world where heat and humidity made wool coats impractical, such as sultry West Africa and, later, the Caribbean. They kept the hair, manes, horns and short tails of their wild ancestors, and from them emerged breeds like today’s Barbados Blackbelly and St. Croix.
During the mid- to late-20th century, wise sheep developers crossed true hair sheep with wool sheep to create larger, meatier, faster-maturing, shedding breeds like Dorpers and Katahdins. These sheep grow woolly winter coats but shed them by June or July.
At the same time, ranchers bred European Mouflons to an assortment of horned wool breeds, including Rambouillet, Merino, Navajo-Churro and Jacob sheep, to create an array of horned hair sheep breeds like Barbados, Texas Dalls, Black Hawaiians and Painted Desert sheep. Primarily used for trophy hunts, these sheep breeds are also a productive source of mild-tasting lamb, striking hair-on pelts and massive horns of great beauty.
Hair sheep are, first and foremost, meat sheep. Ideally suited to low-input production systems, hair sheep lambs yield lean, delicate-flavored meat with none of the “muttony” flavor. Because their tails needn’t be docked and many producers choose not to castrate male lambs, they are favorites with Halal (Muslim food market) buyers who tend to favor unblemished ram lambs tipping the scale at 60 to 90 pounds live weight. Parasite resistance equates with reduced use of deworming agents, making hair sheep favorites with organic and grassfed lamb producers, as well.
Another potential market exists for hair-sheep leather. Free of the blemishes caused by the wool follicles in everyday sheepskin, hair-sheep leather is soft, strong and elastic and in such high demand that American leather companies import roughly 1 million hair-sheep hides each year. Companies manufacturing products for the United States Department of Defense alone import about 250,000 raw hides per annum to produce portions of gloves, fighter-pilot helmets and seat upholstery. American hair-sheep producers could instead supply that need.
And thanks to a propensity to browse weeds and woody herbage as well as graze grass, beautiful, easy-care hair sheep are among the finest organic lawn mowers.
Although complete coverage of every hair-sheep breed in North America is beyond the scope of this article, here are some basics to whet your appetite, based on each breed’s respective registry.
Barbados Blackbelly and American Blackbelly
In 1904, the United States Department of Agriculture imported four yearling Barbados Blackbelly ewes and one ram from Barbados. It was the only official importation from Barbados; although, additional imports may have followed, including one as recent as the 1970s.
The Barbados Blackbelly is listed as Recovering on the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy’s Conservation Priority List. Barbados Blackbellies registered with the Barbados Blackbelly Sheep Association International are never horned; small, loose scurs (rudimentary horn-like growths on the skin) are, however, allowed in rams.
American Blackbelly sheep are an impressively horned breed registered by the BBSAI, created by combining Barbados Blackbelly, Mouflon and horned wool-sheep genetics. Both horned and polled Blackbelly rams and polled ewes can be registered with the North American Barbados Blackbelly Sheep Registry Barbados and American Blackbellies are true hair sheep.
They come in colors ranging from the palest fawn to rich mahogany red with black under parts and facial markings. Ewes weigh 75 to 95 pounds; rams average 110 to 140 pounds. They are alert, elegant, deer-like animals and fairly energetic. Both breeds produce lean, fine-textured gourmet lamb and are favorites with herding-dog trainers. Ewes are highly prolific, averaging twins (or better) each year.
St. Croix and St. Thomas Sheep
St. Croix sheep are a polled, pure-white, true hair-sheep breed originating on the Caribbean island of St. Croix, where they were possibly developed through crossing West African hair sheep with British Wiltshire Horns. In the 1960s, Michael Piel of Maine imported “African Hair Sheep” (St. Croix) to use in developing Katahdin sheep. In 1975, Dr. Warren Foote of Utah State University imported three rams and 22 bred ewes; this importation provided the foundation for today’s St. Croix breed.
They are medium-sized animals, with ewes weighing about 150 pounds and rams in the 200-pound range. These sheep show marked parasite resistance and thrive in hot, humid conditions, though they adapt to northern climates, as well. They are noted for productivity and are less reactive than some other hair-sheep breeds.
St. Croix sheep are listed as Threatened on the ALBC Conservation Priority List. The breed is also called the Virgin Island White. St. Thomas sheep are colored sheep of the same breed.
Dana/Flickr
Mouflon, Corsican, Texas Dall, Black Hawaiian, Desert Sand and Painted Desert Sheep
These are strongly horned trophy, meat and ornamental hair-sheep breeds registered by the United Horned Hair Sheep Association. They were created by blending European Mouflon, Barbados Blackbelly and wool-breed genetics and differ mainly in coloration.
Mouflons are regal and deer-like in looks and nature. They descend all or in part from European Mouflons and have striped faces, white tail patches and underbellies, and body coats ranging in color from fawn to mahogany. Rams develop long, dark manes and white saddle patches on their sides in winter. Their tails are 4 inches or less in length; this is a requirement for registration. Another distinguishing feature is the Mouflon ram’s enormous, heart-shaped, arching horns. Mouflons are smaller than the other breeds this organization recognizes: Rams stand 27 to 35 inches tall and weigh 90 to 120 pounds. Ewes can be polled or horned and are smaller than rams, up to 30 inches tall and weighing around 77 pounds.
Corsicans have solid-colored or badger-striped faces and come in shades of fawn to mahogany in a variety of patterns, including blackbelly, lightbelly, mouflon and solids. Like the other breeds registered by this organization, Corsican rams have manes they may or may not shed during the summer months, and two to four large, strong horns. Ewes of these breeds may be horned or polled and weigh from 60 to 150 pounds; rams are heavier at 75 to 200 pounds.
Texas Dalls are slim, athletic sheep with snowy-white coats and white hooves and horns. Black Hawaiians may appear to be their opposite: coal black with black hooves and horns. Both breeds weigh in at an average of 70 to 100 pounds for ewes and 100 pounds for rams.
Desert Sand sheep range in hue from light champagne to light copper, some with lighter-colored faces, legs and bellies; hooves and horns are cream or light brown. They are sometimes called Red Dalls or Champagne Dalls. Ewes are an average of 70 to 100 pounds, and rams average 100 pounds.
Painted Deserts are beautifully spotted sheep in two or three and sometimes four to six distinct colors, one of which must always be white. Horns and hooves can be white, black or striped. Ewes have an average weight of 65 to 85 pounds, and rams have an average weight of 75 to 100 pounds. These beautiful sheep are also registered by the Painted Desert Sheep Society.
Katahdin Sheep
In 1957, noted sheepman Michael Piel of Maine imported a group of “African Hair Sheep” from St. Croix to his farm in north-central Maine. With them, he hoped to develop a hardy, productive, wool-less breed of sheep, and at this, he was uncommonly successful. He crossed his original imports with each other and an array of wool breeds, including Tunis, Southdowns, Hampshires and Suffolks, later adding Wiltshire Horn hair sheep and additional wool-breed genetics, then selecting for hair coat, meat-type conformation, high fertility and flocking instinct. In the early 1970s, when he felt he’d come close to achieving his goal, he selected 120 ewes from his large flock and named them Katahdins after Mt. Katahdin, the highest mountain peak in Maine.
The Katahdin sheep is listed as a Recovering heritage breed on the ALBC Conservation Priority List. Katahdins are docile, medium-sized sheep; ewes weigh 125 to 185 pounds, rams 180 to 250 pounds. They are shedders; in cold weather, Katahdins grow a thick winter coat that sheds spontaneously in late spring. They can be any solid color or color combination.
Dorper Sheep
Beginning in the 1930s, a group of South African sheepmen set out to create a breed of easy-care, shedding sheep capable of thriving in South Africa’s harsh, arid climate while still producing fine-grained, succulent meat. Parent breeds included ultra-hardy, fat-tailed Blackhead Persian hair sheep and wool-bearing British Dorset Horns. They completed their work in 1946 and established the South African Dorper Breeders’ Association in 1950. Today, the Dorper is one of America’s fastest-growing breeds and, numerically, the second largest breed in South Africa, with large populations in South America, the British Isles, Australia and New Zealand, as well.
Dorpers are registered in two separate herd books as White Dorpers (all-white) or as Dorpers (white sheep with coal-black heads). They are long, strong, square-built sheep. Mature rams weigh in the neighborhood of 230 pounds, while ewes range from 180 to 210 pounds. Dorpers are docile and adapt well to a wide range of climates; they are also widely used in crossbreeding programs with the other hair sheep breeds to boost the growth rate and carcass quality of market lambs. Twinning is common for Dorper sheep.
Wiltshire Horn Sheep
Wiltshire Horns are an ancient British shedding breed developed on the chalk-based downs of Wiltshire. By the beginning of the 19th century, there were 700,000 Wiltshire Horns in Wiltshire County alone. Like many heritage breeds, the Wiltshire Horn eventually fell out of favor and was all but extinct 100 years ago. Today, it’s listed as a Recovering breed on the ALBC Conservation Priority List. (The ALBC also maintains a North American registry for Wiltshire Horns.) Due to its rich background, Wiltshire Horns are among the rare breeds raised at Plimouth Plantation in Plymouth, Mass.
Both sexes are strongly horned. Wiltshire Horns are calm, meaty, white sheep that grow a coarse, self-shedding, woolly winter coat; rams sometimes grow a cape of longer fiber on their chests. They are productive (twins are common) and noted for their ease of lambing. Rams can weigh more than 270 pounds and ewes more than 150 pounds.
If you’re thinking of raising sheep, hair sheep are the productive, easy-care sheep for today’s small farm. With so many breeds available, there’s bound to be one—or more—that will fit your small-farm situation.
About the Author: Sue Weaver and her husband live on a ridge-top farm in the Arkansas Ozarks where they keep livestock, including sheep—among them an extra-special Dorper-Katahdin lamb named Mopple.
This article first appeared in the May/June 2010 Hobby Farms.
Lots to do in the garden these days. I’m growing red kohlrabi this year from seed for the first time and just sowed them yesterday.
Thankfully we got a bit of rain last night so they got watered in quite nicely. I have grown the green type in the past but hear the red ones look even more lovely in a salad.
The broccoli, cauliflower (I’m trying the ‘Cheddar’ variety for the first time too) and lettuce transplants have also found them selves a home in the garden.
‘Lolla Rossa,’ ‘Deer’s Tongue,’ ‘Green Oak Leaf,’ and ‘Black Seeded Simpson’ lettuce seeds have been planted (probably too deeply thanks to my 4-year-old helper) and watered well.
Plans for this week include sowing lots more seeds. Watermelon and French Breakfast radishes are family favorites so two rows will be dedicated to them.
We can’t do without carrots and I’m going to succession sow them every three weeks the whole summer long in order to have a continuous supply. ‘Purple Dragon’ and ‘Scarlet Nantes’ will go in (hopefully) this afternoon.
Then there are the beets. I don’t think that anyone should be allowed to say they don’t like beets until they have eaten them fresh picked from the garden. I was a beet-hater myself until about ten years ago when a good friend convinced me to buy some at our local farmer’s market and roast them in olive oil.
I am glad she was so persuasive! I think my anti-beet mentality came from the pickled beets my mother used to make. They made the house smell like dirt and they tasted much the same. But ever since I had them roasted, they have become a staple of my garden. The candy-striped Italian heirloom ‘Chioggia’ is my favorite with ‘Golden’ being a close second.
The peach, apple and plum trees are blooming now too. Spring is most definitely here and I am loving every minute of it!
Mom calls my newest babies “The Clones” because it’s so darned hard to tell them apart.
Their facial markings are each a little different; that’s all. My kids aren’t really clones. Most cloned mammals are created in the lab. But did you know that armadillos’ babies are natural clones? They are!
We have Nine-Banded Armadillos living on our farm and they are weird beasts. They have scaly, leathery heads and legs and armored shells made of horn and bone, but armadillos have soft, vulnerable tummies.
Feyza, the livestock guardian dog who protects us says they’re yummy to eat but it upsets Mom (a lot!) when Feyza kills one. The strangest thing armadillos do is this (Uzzi and I Googled armadillos, that’s why I know): at one point in her gestation a mama armadillo’s fertilized eggs splits into four equal parts and each part becomes a baby armadillo. So the babies are genetically identical haploid clones.
Human scientists have cloned lots of species. A famous Boer buck named EGGSfile (he’s in my Boer girlfriends’ pedigrees) was cloned in 2003. It cost $22,000 to create several handsome EGGSfile clones. Like other cloned animals they’re genetically identical, but they don’t look exactly alike!
Other cloned species include a camel named Injaz born in 2009; a kitty called Copycat in 2001; a dog called Snuppy in 2005; and a horse named Prometea in 2003.
However, the most famous clone in history was a cute Scottish sheep named Dolly.
Most people think Dolly was the first cloned sheep. Not so! First came twins called Megan and Morag born in 1995 at the Roslin Institute in Scotland. They were the first mammals ever cloned from differentiated cells.
Morag died of disease in 2003, but Megan lived to a ripe old age.
Dolly was the first mammal grown from an adult somatic cell and she was born at the Roslin Institute too. The cell was taken from a donor sheep’s udder, that’s why Dolly’s namesake is singer Dolly Parton. She had six lambs: a single, twins and triplets before dying of disease in 2003, lot long after her pen mate, Morag. BBC News and Scientific American called Dolly “world’s most famous sheep.”
I’ve always found a lot of plants for free, often laying in the gutter, other times available for the harvesting, and often while adventuring around old, abandoned homesites.
The first photo is of the Chionodoxa blooming in the potted plants section of our garden. We dug these bulbs up in the garden of an abandoned villa last fall. Seeing them all blooming now in their pots is nice, and I’m sure they’ll do well once planted into the garden.
Our garden includes a lot of things that were free for the taking. A whole lot of the decorative plants were free, the bottles used to construct the terraces were free, the construction lumber and bamboo canes were free, and even some of the edible stuff, like the figs, plums, mushrooms, horseradish, wild arrugula, beet greens and wild asparagus were all free.
I certainly have enough money to buy whatever plants and building materials I need for my projects, but finding free stuff is sort of like a sport. I imagine that finding free stuff used to be the primary means of gardening. Now in this time of global-super-shopping capacity, finding free stuff is more fun than ever, sort of counteractively political.
The winter garden construction projects are just about finished now, and it’s time to focus on spring planting and cutting back the jungle of weeds. I do still have one big project though, and that’s filling up the new lower bed, shown almost completed in the second photo for today.
Moving large amounts of soil around the garden is a daunting task. The new bed is quite deep and will need about five cubic yards of fill soil, all of which will need to be carried by bucket.
The dirt source for this planter is up at the very top of the garden site and is at least half rocks, so it will all need to be screened. It’s mostly mineral, so I’ll add as much organic material as I can round up in the way of cow and steer manure, old leaves and our home-made compost.
It takes about fifteen minutes to clean and prepare two buckets full of soil and carry them down to the terrace. I’m calculating it will take around 200 trips with a pair of full buckets to fill the bed. My back is aching and my waistline has diminished just thinking about the job.
I did finally plant the first tomatoes on Saturday, as that was the first day that the ground could really be worked. We’ve got 12 Datterino plants now, and these will be one of the three key tomato plantings.
The cherry and yellow pear bed will also be important, as will the sauce tomatoes bed. I’ve got a few big black tomato seedlings in the coldframe too. I got those for free from a friend, so of course, those will have to find a niche somewhere in the garden as well.
Courtesy PlaneMad Research shows that irrigation use in India is more widespread while the amount of rainfall from monsoons has decreased.
Man-made changes to landscape in India have affected the area’s monsoon rains, suggesting that land-use decisions play an important role in climate change, according to a study by a Purdue University scientist.
Monsoon rainfall has decreased over the last 50 years in rural areas where irrigation has been used to increase agriculture in northern India, says Dev Niyogi, an associate professor of agronomy and Earth and atmospheric sciences. At the same time, dense urban areas are seeing an increase in heavy rainfall.
Niyogi used rainfall data spanning back to 1951 that was collected by 1,803 recording stations monitored by the India Meteorological Department to determine different regions’ average yearly monsoon rain totals. While the mean monsoon rainfall for the entire country remained stable, Niyogi found that rainfall averages in India’s northwest region decreased by 35 percent—from 75 to 40 percent—from the historical mean during the past 50 years.
Analysis of soil moisture showed that before monsoon rains came, the northwest region had become as much as 300 percent wetter in recent years relative to the past 30 years, which has been attributed to irrigation from groundwater to sustain intensified agricultural production. This wetter surface causes cooling that weakens the strength of low pressure necessary for monsoons to progress into northern India.
Satellite data showed that northern India is greening sooner than it had in the past. That greening is creating a barrier for monsoons, which provide much-needed rain to replenish groundwater reserves being used for irrigation.
“In this case, you need a warm, dry surface to advance the monsoon,” says Niyogi. “Because of increased irrigation, you now have a wet, green area, which does not allow the monsoon to reach far enough north.”
Because that rain isn’t reaching the region, more irrigation is needed to sustain agriculture.
“Unless this is checked and controlled, the problem is going to become more and more severe,” Niyogi says. “With more irrigation, we will have less monsoon rain. With less monsoon rain, you will need more irrigation, and the cycle will continue.”
Urban areas, on the other hand, are being pounded with rain when it comes. Niyogi says there have been storms in some urban areas that drop as much as 37 inches of rainfall in a single day.
“You only see these types of heavy rainfall events in those areas with heavy urbanization,” says Niyogi. “The more urbanization spreads in those areas, the more of these heavy rain issues we’ll see and the more flooding will become a problem.”
Niyogi says there are two theories on why that’s happening. The first says that urban landscapes create heat, which extends into the atmosphere and energizes storms. The second theory is that pollution created in urban settings interacts with passing clouds and increases rainfall.
He says the results of his study could have land-use implications elsewhere.
“If urbanization is affecting the Indian monsoon season, it has the ability to affect patterns here in the United States,” he says. “This likely isn’t localized in India.”
He adds that India is hotter than the United States, and that may be exacerbating the issues. The next step in this research is to examine landscapes in the United States to see if development has affected weather patterns historically.
For many years we had a simple homemade wooden bin that served our worms and us well until the bottom rotted out. Building another one had long been on THE LIST, but never seemed to make it into the elite category of projects to actually be started (let alone finished), so we broke down and bought this one instead.
This ritzy worm condo consists of a bottom collection tray to capture the liquid leachate called “worm tea,” complete with spigot and worm ladder so worms can climb out if they fall in, and stackable trays for the worms to live, eat, and breed in, plus a cover.
It came with a 16-page instruction/worm care booklet that left me feeling a bit intimidated. I had no idea, for instance, that worms aren’t supposed to eat citrus peels or salty junk foods, or that you could cook them to death if you toss in fresh grass clippings.
Extreme hot and cold temperatures are a no-no, so the bin needs to be sheltered from summer sun and, in northern climes, brought inside during winter.
Apparently these squirmy little creatures need care, just like the rest of our menagerie.
Anyway, this weekend we finally set up our worm bin. Here’s what we did:
1. Put the first working tray on the collection tray base and lined it with wall-to-wall newspaper.
2. Soaked the comfy coconut fiber bedding in water, squeezed it out, and mixed it with shredded paper and a dash of compost on the tray’s floor.
3. Put a few handfuls of food scraps in and covered this with cushy shredded paper, then several sheets of moistened newspaper (I’m thinking these worms will be the most spoiled in the history of wormdom).
4. Rounded up our worms. The instructions advise us to purchase worms locally, but Brett had discovered a huge free worm colony in our horse manure pile. The instructions specify using red wiggler worms, and after careful scrutiny we determined the worms in our pile were reddish and quite wriggly and hence red wrigglers.
Now for the yucky part: we plucked the worms from the manure and put them in a bag. The instructions recommended starting with at least 500 worms, but squirmy masses of worms are not easy to count, so we just grabbed a bunch and called it good.
5. Deposited them in their new home-sweet-home under moistened newspaper, and voila, now I have several hundred more mouths to feed. Granted, they have teeny-tiny mouths and they’ll be converting our kitchen waste to nutrient-rich compost, but still…
I’ll keep you posted on how they do (unless you’d prefer less slimy subjects!)
It’s been a good many years since I finished my U.S. Army mechanics training. One lesson has stayed with me well throughout the years.
It was delivered our final day as we received our certificates of completion and orders for our next assignments. Our senior training instructor advised us to look around the motor pool that had been our classroom and lab.
“Look at all the fancy tools you’ve been trained on…wrenches, sockets and screwdrivers of every size and style,” he said. “When you get to your motor pools, you’ll be lucky to find a crescent wrench and pliers.”
He was being honest, if more than a little cynical. He knew that in our motor pools, what hadn’t been lost, stolen or broken was what would be left for our use. He was telling us that we would have to make do. The jeeps and tanks would still have to roll, whether or not we had a voltmeter to check a circuit.
The same is true in life. It would sure be nice if we always had what we wanted when it came time to do a job. What matters is what we do with what we have.
That’s why long before I ever bought a set of sockets or wrenches, I invested in a crescent wrench and a pair of pliers. If I had to choose today, they would still be at the head of the list. I would rather make do than not be able to do at all.
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Get Social: Share your dessert on social media using #FarmToTableRecipe and join the farm-to-table conversation.
