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Lathyrus tuberosus

Last year I got some tuberous pea from Elzo, a local gardening friend.  I posted about this before.  Because it tends to send its tubers very deep, he suggested growing it in a container if I want to eat it, so the tubers would be more confined and easier to harvest.  As an alternative to eating it, it is a native plant (for me) and it is nitrogen fixing, so it’s also possible to ‘set it free’ in the garden, as a green manure plant.

Anyway, last year in the container, I noticed it was growing, but not very much.  Just a few shoots, and lots of weeds.  I didn’t pay much attention to it, and didn’t take very good care of the weeds, and didn’t even think of harvesting it because I didn’t think I was going to find many tubers.

Look at the container this year!  It’s gone wild.  I guess this year I’ll have enough tubers to make it worth harvesting…

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Stumped

One of the advantages of having a garden with lots of water in the ground is stump removal!

Over the last few years I’ve taken on a total of three plots at the community garden, and ended up with a lot of fruit trees.  At one point I had five plum trees, three of them full sized, and I just needed to get rid of a few.  The plum tree that used to be part of this stump was also too close to the greenhouse, and its roots had worked their way into the greenhouse and were sucking all the nutrients out of the ground.  One of the previous gardeners also planted a number of trees too close to each other, and so some of these needed to be removed.

Anyway, I’m done cutting down trees for the moment, and on to stump removal.

The picture above is the second full sized plum tree stump I’ve removed.  I learned a lot from the first tree.  Most importantly is plum trees, and I hope the other fruit trees I have stumps for too, don’t appear to like their roots to be sitting in water.

Here’s a close up of the stump.  Do you see how all the roots go outwards, and are at about the same level?  None of the roots go down into the water table.

All I had to do was go around with a pruning shears (secateurs) for the smaller roots and a saw for the larger ones, and cut them off.

Then I could just roll the stump out of the hole.  The picture above is the loose stump just sitting on the ground.

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Local Superweed — Horsetail

I always find I have nothing in common with the management of our community garden complex.  They are as far from organic minded as you can get, and they have no sympathy for organic gardeners either.  At the same time, they think I have an interesting garden, and recognize me as an experienced gardener, so they always seem to have lots of questions for me that I just can’t answer or mostly just really don’t care.

At the moment everyone’s attention is focused on Horsetail.  It’s really everywhere right now.  Everyone’s garden is full of it, as well as all the untended open space around the gardens.  It’s everywhere that is, except in my garden.  I don’t have a sign of it anywhere.  Every once in a while it pops up somewhere in my garden, but then goes away on it’s own.

The cause of horsetail is pretty clear.  Anywhere you spray with Roundup, you get a serious infestation.  Everywhere else the surrounding plants out compete it, and it goes away.  Horsetail likes very poor soil, which is how most fellow gardeners do their gardens, with as poor soil as possible, then added fertilizer and other chemicals as needed.  Fertile soil promotes weeds, don’t ya know…

So now it’s this urgent problem!  Everyone wants to know why I don’t have the problem, and what they can do to solve the problem so they can keep using Roundup.  The more serious gardeners have switched to more expensive and toxic weed killers, but other gardeners are too thrifty for this and don’t want to spend the extra money.

The other urgent issue is whenever I have canola/rape weeds in my garden, because I guess those all have the Roundup ready gene by now in our area, and they want to make sure I pull them out as soon as possible before they go to seed!  What they don’t know is these are really mustard weeds…

Anyone have any ideas for explaining to my fellow gardeners that I just don’t care what kinds of special weed problems they have after using Roundup?

Anyone with an established organic garden have problems with horsetail?  Anyone with an organic garden have problems with other Roundup ‘superweeds’?

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Monsanto Lawsuit

It’s been mentioned now by several people, and I haven’t posted about it yet.  This is big news, especially for those of you in the US I think.

Most major OP/Heirloom seed companies (more than 60 plaintiffs) in the US have gotten together to pre-emptively sue Monsanto to prevent being held liable if genes from Monsanto’s new GM varieties should end up in seeds belonging to others.  In addition, they are challenging the validity of some of Monsanto’s patents.

Notable in their absence is the Seed Savers Exchange, who has better things to spend their money on then suing Monsanto (with about $800,000[updated] cash on hand according to recent financial filings):

I appreciate the discussion here. As a non-profit, Seed Savers Exchange uses its limited resources to maintain our collection and seed bank here at Heritage Farm and promote participatory preservation through our membership. This is a full time job. We leave advocacy and policy work to other organizations, such as Organic Seed Alliance and ETC Group, two groups that we often partner with. We believe our mission speaks for itself and offers a counterpoint to the agribusiness model, which is at the heart of the litigation you speak of.

John Torgrimson
President and Executive Director
Seed Savers Exchange

Have a look at the page Baker Creek put up about the lawsuit for more information.

What do you think?  Is it going to help?  Will they win?

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Inkassing

This is a Dutch word to describe what they are now doing on the foundation work.  If I look up the word in an online dictionary, it says ‘recess’, but I don’t think that’s quite right.  Anyone have a better translation?

Anyway, in the picture above, you can see they have made some holes in bottom of the wall, 50cm every 50cm to be exact.  They will make these holes all the way around the house, and in each one put a jack like you see above.  In this way, half the house will be supported by means of a jack.

In foundation repairs jacks are always used.  This is because you somehow have to move the weight of the house from the old foundation to the new one, and jacks are always needed in some way.  I think the way they will do it with my house is a little unusual however.

What will happen is they will pour a new concrete floor and entomb the jacks, as well as fill the spaces in the walls.  The concrete floor will have a complex reinforcing structure, and will be supported by the piles that were driven earlier.  The new foundation will then be in place, and capable of supporting the house.

Over time, the old foundation will continue to degrade and sink, and in this way the weight will gradually be taken up by the new foundation.  The construction engineer mentioned he included in his calculations that the old foundation will continue to provide a degree of support for the house into the future.