Ending and Beginning

Fertilized the tomato and other seedlings with Miracle-Gro today for the first time. There’s quite a forest of them now, we have to think about thinning. Clearly, I am not a “pure” organic gardener. I believe that the benefits of “chemical” fertilizers outweigh the costs, especially when the plants are still inside. I think arguments against fertilizing vegetable seedlings you’re going to transplant to the garden are arguments for ideological purity and have little to do with practical reality.

I don’t fertilize the whole garden plot, but feeding individual heavy-feeding plants is worth the cost. I think the best way any gardener can have a better garden is to improve their garden’s soil using organic methods.

Barring emergencies, I draw the line at chemical herbicides and pesticides.

Naturally, after I used the fertilizer, DW told me that she had been planning to sell them as organic tomatoes to her employer, where she  works in the kitchen. Oh well.

I think the echinacea is starting to come up today, and there’s probably a pepper coming up. I’m not sure if the stevia is up or not. There are some seedlings in their pots, but they could be weeds.

I cut down that big elm tree I’ve been dreading today. It had about a 24″ diameter where I cut it, 4′ up (bigger lower down). It came down exactly where I wanted to, so that was good. I was a little nervous about it — that’s a lot of tree, and if I had messed it up there wouldn’t have been anything I could do about it except fix whatever it broke on the way down. You should have heard the boom when it hit the ground! We’ll get a lot of bad firewood out of it.

I want to try cutting up at least some of it with a bow saw. That makes more sense to me with lower-quality firewood — cutting it by hand means less of an investment in fossil fuel and money in the firewood.

I cut down several small- to medium-sized elm trees today. I don’t know what kind they are, but they’re not American elms and they are weeds in our yard. I cut them down because they were getting big enough to shade the garden, especially the new parts I dug up last summer. So the garden gets more sun and we get some low-quality firewood.

We also got a bunch more brush to add to our ever-increasing brush pile. It amazes me how much unwanted woody growth that’s too small to bother cutting up for the woodstove appears in our yard and has to be removed every year.

I’ve read about terra preta lately and have been thinking about turning that brush pile into charcoal for the garden. I don’t know exactly how to go about that yet — get my hands on a steel barrel, make a masonry oven, or just burn it in a covered ditch in the ground. Seems like all those things ought to work, it’s really just a matter of finding the time and energy and doing it.

Every time I do tree work I think of what it must have been like to heat with wood that you had to cut yourself, and especially without a chainsaw. That’s an almost unimaginable amount of year-round, never-ending work. Whoever heated their house with wood in the old days must have been in incredible shape.