Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Debbie McDonald <lbirke1@yahoo.com>]

Thank you John, I was rather afraid that the time had passed:(.  I'm seeming to be becoming resigned and I don't like that feeling:(

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From: John D'hondt <dhondt@eircom.net>
To: Healthy soil and sustainable growing <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Tue, December 28, 2010 1:21:09 PM
Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Cities of Light/weather and effects

I have never noticed chemtrails here Debbie. Then again we have extended periods of misty grey sky at all times of the year that one could use to spray anything at all in the sky without anybody on the ground being able to notice a thing.

And I can't advise you on what to do in Texas. In my experience our winter crops have to be in place by October at the latest to have a chance of producing anything worthwhile or even surviving our winter. Our Spring crops we plan to start end of March or April for traditionally we can still get very bad conditions until then. Things can go wrong at all times here for there is not one month to be certain without night frost. It is a matter of luck in many cases. Same as when to cut for hay. Year before last we made good hay with just five days of dry weather but this year we got two days of rain while we were turning and we had to make haylage instead. A really good farmer here gambles more right than wrong.

 

October planted turnips and kale survived the extreme cold but November planted crops (we were still digging potatoes then and we plant as soon as soil comes free) have almost completely disappeared. If the frost had held off for another month or two-three as is often the case we would have been grand.

Texas is completely different, sorry.

John

John,

  I am curious if you noticed the presense of chemtrails in relation to what is happening. We've been in a drought here in E TX since late last spring? and have basically had really rare rain. I have lived here over two years and before this it was daily assaults of chemtrails and then NOTHING. We got some rare rain last week, miraculously after a short time of trails and then nothing and today some starting and we are forcast rain some days this week. No one got their winter cover crops seeded as they waited for the rain forcast. I want to seed some oats, which will cost me to hire them drill seeded but it is always a freeze coming after the rare rains in recent times:( I was hoping to bale the oats for hay next year. I don't know if I am totally out of luck, did they need this much time to grow roots enough to grow a crop in the spring or am I still able to try for it?

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From: John D'hondt <dhondt@eircom.net>
To: Healthy soil and sustainable growing <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Mon, December 27, 2010 1:06:49 PM
Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Cities of Light


> I wish I knew what would spark people's interest--a larger percentage of
> people, I mean. I read somewhere that gardening was the fastest growing "hobby" in the US in 2010. A hobby, of course, doesn't feed your family, but certainly some of those people will continue to grow at least some of their food.
>
> I'm afraid I think the only thing that will make a real difference is skyrocketing food prices, and when that occurs, we'll probably be close to the end of this year's growing season again, months from when growing your own would help. I can't even get my own daughter interested in gardening. She says she has "too much to deal with right now." Translated: it's easier to buy plastic-wrapped dinners to put in the microwave.
>
> Believe me, if I had any idea how to get people seriously interested in growing their own food, I'd be shouting it from the housetops.
>
> Liz

Growing food is not so simple it seems. We have been doing it for twenty years and more and normally never buy vegetables. However this year we had two periods of more than a week each where we got snow covered and temperatures dropped to unknown lows for Ireland of -16 where I live and lower than -20 C in other places. Thaw for this second period started yesterday and today we got more than 15 inches of rain so far. It looks like a fair disaster. Most of our winter staples suffered badly even in the poly tunnels partly because all our water sources froze solid and even propane gas bottles refused to give gas.
And the birds that do not plow and do not sow dropped dead in their hundreds literally. In the past week we must have had ten thousand migratory copper-wing trushes from Scandinavia on our fields and many hundreds of small waders and even when we did what we could to give them something to eat it was not enough. Also with the food freezing solid too fast.
We still have to get through a few bad months before Spring arrives here and if we get another bad period it will be worse. The roads in our part of the country were completely impassable for the last week and the frost made many new pot holes under the ice. This evening there were plates of tarmac being ripped up and floating downhill with a 4 inch deep stream that was a road.
john