As I develop our gardens, including our prairie gardens, one of my goals is to restore a full and rich biodiversity to the land. I want a rich and active set of life forms in the soil and on the soil. Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis talk about the soil food web in their book Teaming with Microbes, referring to the panoply of organisms from bacteria to nematodes and protozoa to spiders and soil mites to beetles, earthworms and moles.
Bacteria are incredibly and invisibly small: the authors said that a quarter-million of them would fit into a period on the printed page; that a teaspoon of rich garden soil would contain a billion bacteria along with several yards of fungal strands, several thousand protozoa and several dozen nematodes. The latter are near-microscopic, hairlike roundworms (their name comes from the Greek nema meaning "thread"), some of which feed on plant matter, others are predatory on other small soil animals. And then there are the burying beetles, earthworms, moles and chipmunks.
All of these critters help mineralize the nutrients contained in the bodies of organic matter and living bacteria and protozoa: that is, they consume the organic matter and living organisms and then excrete the material in broken-down forms that include the pure (mineralized) nutrients that can be absorbed by living plants. The earthworms and beetles, etc. pull leaf litter down into the soil and break it down into degraded forms which then can be fed upon by bacteria, fungi and nematodes and other organisms.
This kind of soil is what I am striving for with a rotational diversity of crops, green manure crops, composting, and mulching. Kitchen waste is composted or buried directly in the soil of garden beds to decompose. Next year I expect to have chickens whose composted litter (wood shavings, urine, and fecal droppings) I expect to add to the garden soil. And part of the time I will run the chickens in the garden to add their wastes directly to the soil.
I've thought several times about having a hive of honeybees, but I prefer to encourage native bees. They are more important and also many times more efficient pollinators. The advantage of European honeybees is simply that they are live in large colonies: there are just so many more of them. But we need the native pollinators. So I grow not only vegetable gardens, but also prairie gardens with a variety of flowers and grasses that bloom at different times through the year. We have also planted fruit trees, we have a half-dozen crab apple trees that came with the property (which were just loaded with apples this year), and we have planted native wildlife plants around the property. Our cultivated area is surrounded by young to early middle-aged forest which provides nesting places for the bees. But I'm thinking that I need to put up some bee houses for the native bees. A project for this winter, I think.
So I'm striving for biodiversity in plants, soil enriched in organic matter, and hoping this leads to a richer diversity in animal life. One index of some progress is the number of snakes we observe. The last several years we have seen an abundance of garter snakes in various sizes, from small to some quite large. A year ago I watched as one snake slowly swallowed a large toad: it's truly amazing how widely they can stretch their mouths.
And this year I several times found small, pencil-sized red-belly snakes (kind of greenish-brown above). As I was harvesting potatoes in the south garden, I found two of them under the straw mulch around the potatoes. And a couple years ago I found a pine snake caught in some hardware cloth around the south garden. Unfortunately it was dead; I felt really badly about that. But I know they are around. In fact, they used to gather for the winter in an old well on the property before we bought it. Sadly, a condition of sale required by the county was that the well had to be filled with sand and a concrete cover placed over it.
But if the snakes are any indication, we are making some progress toward biodiversity. Certainly replacing large expanses of lawn with vegetable and prairie gardens and berry patches and the planting of wildlife shrubs must greatly increase the available diversity.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Monday, December 14, 2009
Historical Narrative Continued
In the spring of 2008 I worked on double-digging the garden beds in the new west garden, which measured about 20 ft. by 50 ft. That job was finally finished (more or less) by mid-June. I planted tomatoes, garlic (for the first time ever), potatoes, onions, peas, beans - bush and pole, squash and pumpkins, planted asparagus crowns on the north edge, spinach, lettuce, radishes, and beets. And sweet corn also. The total growing area (in the garden beds) between the south and west gardens was measured to be 833 sq, feet.
Some observations on that garden:
1) I spent an awful lot of time standing in the gardens - west and south gardens - with a garden hose in my hand and counting the number of seconds watering tomatoes, corn, onions, etc. I did it but it was a real waste of time. And I never really knew if I was over- or underwatering the plants. Midsummer at least I did try to make an effort to see how fast the water was coming out of the hose. Measured about 4 inch-feet/minute out of the south hose and 3 inch-feet/minute out of the west hose. [Inch-foot means one inch of water covering one sq. foot.]
2) I planted the potatoes in two adjacent beds in the W. Garden, each bed about 3 ft. wide, separated by an 18-20 inch path. They were two varieties: Carolas and German Butterballs, from Seed Savers Exchange. They were well-fertilized and reasonably well-watered. They plants grew fabulously large: by July I could no longer walk between the two rows, I had to sort of wedge my way in. The plants were assaulted by potato beetles so I tried brushing them off, picking them, looking for the egg cases and squishing them, finally resorted to a Bon-Neem insecticide spray at $10/bottle. Used up 3 bottles and said that's enough! Finally let the beetles have their way. Nevetheless we got a nice harvest of potatoes. Also planted Red-Golds and Purple Vikings in the south garden. They too got hit by beetles (though a bit less so).
3) The garlic were simply amazing. They were planted the previous fall. I bought bulbs from a local grower at the farmers' market in town, split them into their cloves and planted same in October, '07. By June-July the garlic was up to 6 feet tall and the ends were curlicued - circled around on themselves once or twice. Simply amazing!! We had never seen garlic before so Cathy and I were both astonished.
4) Onions were delightful. Just planted onion sets we had bought from Jung's in town. But greatly enjoy onions once harvested, pleasing additions to our food.
5) Generally had good harvests of the crops except for the corn. That grew quite tall but produced little in the way of eatable ears. Maybe too much nitrogen provided? The stalks grew to 8-9 feet tall, some fell over in winds, couldn't support themselves (lodging I think it's called?).
6) Rhubarb. In spring '07 I dug up some roots of week rhubarb that had been growing in this one spot for many years, since long before we bought the house. Divided the rhubarb and planted it in a bed in the south garden. Actually I planted one new rhubarb plant and also 2 divisions of an old, weak plant. All three grew well that year and in '08 we harvested some stalks and enjoyed rhubarb/strawberry crisps and other goodies. These three plants were planted in a bed about 3 feet wide and 9 feet long. Turns out they are really too close to each other. Nevertheless, they seem to thrive and we enjoyed them greatly in '08 and'09.
Some observations on that garden:
1) I spent an awful lot of time standing in the gardens - west and south gardens - with a garden hose in my hand and counting the number of seconds watering tomatoes, corn, onions, etc. I did it but it was a real waste of time. And I never really knew if I was over- or underwatering the plants. Midsummer at least I did try to make an effort to see how fast the water was coming out of the hose. Measured about 4 inch-feet/minute out of the south hose and 3 inch-feet/minute out of the west hose. [Inch-foot means one inch of water covering one sq. foot.]
2) I planted the potatoes in two adjacent beds in the W. Garden, each bed about 3 ft. wide, separated by an 18-20 inch path. They were two varieties: Carolas and German Butterballs, from Seed Savers Exchange. They were well-fertilized and reasonably well-watered. They plants grew fabulously large: by July I could no longer walk between the two rows, I had to sort of wedge my way in. The plants were assaulted by potato beetles so I tried brushing them off, picking them, looking for the egg cases and squishing them, finally resorted to a Bon-Neem insecticide spray at $10/bottle. Used up 3 bottles and said that's enough! Finally let the beetles have their way. Nevetheless we got a nice harvest of potatoes. Also planted Red-Golds and Purple Vikings in the south garden. They too got hit by beetles (though a bit less so).
3) The garlic were simply amazing. They were planted the previous fall. I bought bulbs from a local grower at the farmers' market in town, split them into their cloves and planted same in October, '07. By June-July the garlic was up to 6 feet tall and the ends were curlicued - circled around on themselves once or twice. Simply amazing!! We had never seen garlic before so Cathy and I were both astonished.
4) Onions were delightful. Just planted onion sets we had bought from Jung's in town. But greatly enjoy onions once harvested, pleasing additions to our food.
5) Generally had good harvests of the crops except for the corn. That grew quite tall but produced little in the way of eatable ears. Maybe too much nitrogen provided? The stalks grew to 8-9 feet tall, some fell over in winds, couldn't support themselves (lodging I think it's called?).
6) Rhubarb. In spring '07 I dug up some roots of week rhubarb that had been growing in this one spot for many years, since long before we bought the house. Divided the rhubarb and planted it in a bed in the south garden. Actually I planted one new rhubarb plant and also 2 divisions of an old, weak plant. All three grew well that year and in '08 we harvested some stalks and enjoyed rhubarb/strawberry crisps and other goodies. These three plants were planted in a bed about 3 feet wide and 9 feet long. Turns out they are really too close to each other. Nevertheless, they seem to thrive and we enjoyed them greatly in '08 and'09.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Of Tomatoes and Wire Cages
In the summer of 2008 I planted about 18 tomato plants, far too many for my wife and me, if they had all yielded fruits as they should have. "Fortunately" for us they did not. I planted mainly Brandywines and Moskviches, and a few grape tomatoes, but then added a couple Cherokee purples, John Bauer, and a Moonglow. Two lessons observed:
A) I spent too much time watering by hand, standing there holding the garden hose in hand, trying to guesstimate how much water I was delivering to each plant. Later in the summer I ran water into a bucket of known capacity several times, timing how many seconds it took, and then using that as a basis for counting the seconds I was watering each plant. I had problems with blossom end blight in many of the plants. Was I overwatering them?
In 2009 I installed a drip irrigation system that enabled me to better control the delivery of water to the crops under a layer of mulch.
B) These were all indeterminate plants - vines that grew and grew. I was using those wire cages you buy at the Big Box stores, and they proved to be entirely inadequate: far too small and flimsy. As the plants got larger they bent the cages over and I rushed to cut some poles that I tied to the cages to hold them upright, sort of. And the plants just plain outgrew the cages (these were the larger cages - about 4 1/2 or 5 feet tall). Some of the plants just plain bent over, the poles weren't sufficient to hold the cages. And the cage wires were cutting into the limbs of some of the plants.
Again, in 2009 I started the year by cutting some pole trees and trimming them 8- or 9-foot lengths and plunged them into the ground before planting each tomato transplant. I then tied the growing plants to the poles using lengths of cloth in a figure 8 pattern. That worked much better, but I still have to plant the tomatoes a little further apart next year. And work better at trimming them.
Of course this year while the east coast suffered from the "late blight", we suffered from a cool summer. My tomatoes (Brandywines and Moskviches, 3 grape plants) were almost all green even into September. Finally my wife and I went out and harvested the green fruits, put them in boxes, and covered them. Almost all of them ripened within 2 or 3 weeks, especially if we put a banana in the box with them. We wound up with a most gratifying harvest after all. And I also planted fewer tomatoes this years, and they still provided us with a plentiful harvest.
Next year, though, I want to start 4 determinate bush plants in late April in the hoop house. I'm hoping the early start will enable me to start harvesting tomatoes a month earlier, maybe by sometime in late July.
A) I spent too much time watering by hand, standing there holding the garden hose in hand, trying to guesstimate how much water I was delivering to each plant. Later in the summer I ran water into a bucket of known capacity several times, timing how many seconds it took, and then using that as a basis for counting the seconds I was watering each plant. I had problems with blossom end blight in many of the plants. Was I overwatering them?
In 2009 I installed a drip irrigation system that enabled me to better control the delivery of water to the crops under a layer of mulch.
B) These were all indeterminate plants - vines that grew and grew. I was using those wire cages you buy at the Big Box stores, and they proved to be entirely inadequate: far too small and flimsy. As the plants got larger they bent the cages over and I rushed to cut some poles that I tied to the cages to hold them upright, sort of. And the plants just plain outgrew the cages (these were the larger cages - about 4 1/2 or 5 feet tall). Some of the plants just plain bent over, the poles weren't sufficient to hold the cages. And the cage wires were cutting into the limbs of some of the plants.
Again, in 2009 I started the year by cutting some pole trees and trimming them 8- or 9-foot lengths and plunged them into the ground before planting each tomato transplant. I then tied the growing plants to the poles using lengths of cloth in a figure 8 pattern. That worked much better, but I still have to plant the tomatoes a little further apart next year. And work better at trimming them.
Of course this year while the east coast suffered from the "late blight", we suffered from a cool summer. My tomatoes (Brandywines and Moskviches, 3 grape plants) were almost all green even into September. Finally my wife and I went out and harvested the green fruits, put them in boxes, and covered them. Almost all of them ripened within 2 or 3 weeks, especially if we put a banana in the box with them. We wound up with a most gratifying harvest after all. And I also planted fewer tomatoes this years, and they still provided us with a plentiful harvest.
Next year, though, I want to start 4 determinate bush plants in late April in the hoop house. I'm hoping the early start will enable me to start harvesting tomatoes a month earlier, maybe by sometime in late July.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Empathizing with Pioneers
The sweat poured off me in the hot sun, running down my glasses, making it difficult to see as I tromped along in the dusty dirt behind my small tiller. Every day I had to take a shower to get the dirt and sweat off of me and the water would run dark. My wife would do laundry every other day as my jeans got dusty and worn.
I spent much time bending over trying to rip the narrow, dark brown, but extremely strong, tree roots out of the ground, sometimes to 15 or 20 feet, and cutting them off, or bending over many times as I cut off small roots, many small roots. Instead of chopping down trees, I was disentangling roots and weeds from the tines of my tiller. This would take anywhere from 20 to 45 minutes, digging at the mess, trying to pull one strand and then another free, using my pocket knife to dig at them or tease out one or another strand, maybe if I got lucky even to cut a few free.
The hours grew long as I tried to prepare this area for gardening next summer. The sun was hot and I would have to rest in the shade and swig on a (glass) bottle of water. Once or twice I developed cramps and had to stop altogether for the day.
I uncovered rocks and had to get out the shovel to dig around them, to see if the rock was big or small, if I could just lift up with the shovel or would have to get into the hole and try to lift it out with my hands. Sometimes I had to get the sledge hammer and just spend time hitting at the rock. Often the hammer would bounce back, leaving only a small scar on the rock. But every so often I would hit at the right angle and a crack would develop. A few more hits and a piece would crack off. Eventually I was able to reach down, sometimes below my feet to throw out the pieces of rock. Sometimes I had to use a crowbar or piece of 2x4 to leverage a large rock out of the ground.
And once the pieces were out, then I had to collect them in the wheelbarrow and trundle them over to a collection site. I didn't keep track of how many trips I made or how many hundreds of pounds of rock I moved.
Finally, there were several rocks that were so hard they wouldn't break up, and they were so large I couldn't dig them up. Very large bedrock boulders that I had to just let lay in the ground. So I plant my vegetables around them.
I thought many times that I was experiencing in a small way what the early pioneers experienced as they cleared the land to cultivation. An acre in a year was a good year's work in many cases. They had to girdle trees, cut them down, burn them, dig around the stumps and cut the roots and use oxen to pull them out of the ground. Or they would simply plant around the stumps and let them decay over the years.
But it took a lot of muscle power and effort and time and sweat and curses to clear the land. Now the land is soft, workable, productive, but only because of the immense effort of the original pioneers. They were a breed apart.
I spent much time bending over trying to rip the narrow, dark brown, but extremely strong, tree roots out of the ground, sometimes to 15 or 20 feet, and cutting them off, or bending over many times as I cut off small roots, many small roots. Instead of chopping down trees, I was disentangling roots and weeds from the tines of my tiller. This would take anywhere from 20 to 45 minutes, digging at the mess, trying to pull one strand and then another free, using my pocket knife to dig at them or tease out one or another strand, maybe if I got lucky even to cut a few free.
The hours grew long as I tried to prepare this area for gardening next summer. The sun was hot and I would have to rest in the shade and swig on a (glass) bottle of water. Once or twice I developed cramps and had to stop altogether for the day.
I uncovered rocks and had to get out the shovel to dig around them, to see if the rock was big or small, if I could just lift up with the shovel or would have to get into the hole and try to lift it out with my hands. Sometimes I had to get the sledge hammer and just spend time hitting at the rock. Often the hammer would bounce back, leaving only a small scar on the rock. But every so often I would hit at the right angle and a crack would develop. A few more hits and a piece would crack off. Eventually I was able to reach down, sometimes below my feet to throw out the pieces of rock. Sometimes I had to use a crowbar or piece of 2x4 to leverage a large rock out of the ground.
And once the pieces were out, then I had to collect them in the wheelbarrow and trundle them over to a collection site. I didn't keep track of how many trips I made or how many hundreds of pounds of rock I moved.
Finally, there were several rocks that were so hard they wouldn't break up, and they were so large I couldn't dig them up. Very large bedrock boulders that I had to just let lay in the ground. So I plant my vegetables around them.
I thought many times that I was experiencing in a small way what the early pioneers experienced as they cleared the land to cultivation. An acre in a year was a good year's work in many cases. They had to girdle trees, cut them down, burn them, dig around the stumps and cut the roots and use oxen to pull them out of the ground. Or they would simply plant around the stumps and let them decay over the years.
But it took a lot of muscle power and effort and time and sweat and curses to clear the land. Now the land is soft, workable, productive, but only because of the immense effort of the original pioneers. They were a breed apart.
December 11, 2009
This is a first-time effort for me, maintaining a blog. More for my personal use than any other reason. It will be an account of my efforts at maintaining a garden-farm in central Wisconsin. Well, really just a largish garden of about 2500 sq. feet. I wish I could be a farmer, but we own only about 7 acres of which 5 1/2 are wooded and rocked (hence Rockwood Gardens), about 4000 sq. feet are in prairie gardens, the rest in lawn, driveways, house and shed. So gardens it will be along with some orchard trees (apples, plum, cherries, and pears). I'm hoping to also raise some chickens this summer for meat and eggs (and fun).
Why this effort? I'm a retired (and reformed) professor of economics from the local university. I retired in 2005 and my wife and I started gardening in the smallish giardino the previous property owner left us, about 600 sq. feet. I found that I actually enjoyed it. My wife had tried a garden about 6 years before, the first year we owned this property. The deer came in and ate just about everything down to the ground. So we fenced the S. garden and planted and enjoyed a nice harvest of corn, tomatoes, beans, peas etc.
In 2006 we planted again. And that year I bought a copy of Ed Smith's Vegetable Gardener's Bible (published by Storey). Excellent book and that fall I set up and double-dug garden beds in that giardino. Hell of a lot of work! But I finished it in late November just as the flakes started to fall from the first snowstorm of the season.
We planted similar crops in 2007 (but now including onions) and we also grew pumpkins and squash in a largish area west of our house. Again good harvests, muchly enjoyed. And during this time I was also learning about and reading widely in foodie and farming literature. Grew hooked on trying to be independent of supermarkets, absorbed the virtues of organic farming/gardening and the value of chemical-free foods.
You might ask why do you bother, when there are so many good foods available in a supermarket? I heard a number the other day, that there are about 50,000 different food items in the average supermarket among which to choose. Well, chemical-free foods appeal to me, and gardening also reduces our carbon footprint (the average food item in the U.S. travels around 1500 miles from field to fork; the standard number tossed around).
But I also liked the reply Paolucci gave when Ferenc Mate' asked "why he bothers with his vegetables and fruit. In all the years I've known him it was the only time I've ever seen him look at me with disappointment. He took a long slug of wine. 'There are lots of women out there,' he said, 'and lots of kids. Why bother having your own?' " (from The Wisdom of Tuscany, p. 139). Besides it is an delightful challenge and I enjoy working with my hands, seeing in the end something definite result from my efforts and enjoying the taste of my harvest.
That fall (in 2007) I defined some garden beds on the west side of the house where the squash and pumpkins had grown and began double-digging those beds. I didn't get that finished until early summer of 2008. [Winter and freezing temperatures are an interfering aspect of life in Wisconsin, you see.]
During summer of 2008, which was fairly dry for long periods, I spent much time out there watering by hand with a garden hose. Royal pain in the whazzoo! In 2009 I installed a drip irrigation systems which worked wonderfully well. More about that later. Grew several kinds of tomatoes and learned some lessons; separate post on that as well. Lovely experience growing onions also.
But in 2008, I also spent a lot of time with our small, toy tiller working over a large piece of ground, about 20 by 60 feet. I encountered a lot of tree roots which I then had to get out of the tiller. Also a lot of the weed and grass growth also had to disentangled. So it seemed like about every 20-30 minutes I would have to shut off the tiller and use my knife for a half-hour to 45 minutes to untangle the tiller blades. I also wound up pulling a lot of long, sturdy tree roots, some as long as 10-20 feet. So a lot of bending and pulling as well as bending and sitting with the tiller.
And then I encountered rocks, a lot of rocks. Most of them I could dig out, with some considerable effort because they were large and heavy. Some were VERY large and I had to spend hours working away at them with a sledge hammer and then shovel. I extracted several hundreds of pounds of rocks from the area. Even then, I had to let some rocks remain - they were just too large and too hard to deal with. The Wolf River batholith underlies our property. In the prairie garden just few feet south of this vegetable garden, we have large ricks sticking up out of the soil. I understand they are something like 1.5 billion years old! I have trouble wrapping my brain around such numbers.
This is a first-time effort for me, maintaining a blog. More for my personal use than any other reason. It will be an account of my efforts at maintaining a garden-farm in central Wisconsin. Well, really just a largish garden of about 2500 sq. feet. I wish I could be a farmer, but we own only about 7 acres of which 5 1/2 are wooded and rocked (hence Rockwood Gardens), about 4000 sq. feet are in prairie gardens, the rest in lawn, driveways, house and shed. So gardens it will be along with some orchard trees (apples, plum, cherries, and pears). I'm hoping to also raise some chickens this summer for meat and eggs (and fun).
Why this effort? I'm a retired (and reformed) professor of economics from the local university. I retired in 2005 and my wife and I started gardening in the smallish giardino the previous property owner left us, about 600 sq. feet. I found that I actually enjoyed it. My wife had tried a garden about 6 years before, the first year we owned this property. The deer came in and ate just about everything down to the ground. So we fenced the S. garden and planted and enjoyed a nice harvest of corn, tomatoes, beans, peas etc.
In 2006 we planted again. And that year I bought a copy of Ed Smith's Vegetable Gardener's Bible (published by Storey). Excellent book and that fall I set up and double-dug garden beds in that giardino. Hell of a lot of work! But I finished it in late November just as the flakes started to fall from the first snowstorm of the season.
We planted similar crops in 2007 (but now including onions) and we also grew pumpkins and squash in a largish area west of our house. Again good harvests, muchly enjoyed. And during this time I was also learning about and reading widely in foodie and farming literature. Grew hooked on trying to be independent of supermarkets, absorbed the virtues of organic farming/gardening and the value of chemical-free foods.
You might ask why do you bother, when there are so many good foods available in a supermarket? I heard a number the other day, that there are about 50,000 different food items in the average supermarket among which to choose. Well, chemical-free foods appeal to me, and gardening also reduces our carbon footprint (the average food item in the U.S. travels around 1500 miles from field to fork; the standard number tossed around).
But I also liked the reply Paolucci gave when Ferenc Mate' asked "why he bothers with his vegetables and fruit. In all the years I've known him it was the only time I've ever seen him look at me with disappointment. He took a long slug of wine. 'There are lots of women out there,' he said, 'and lots of kids. Why bother having your own?' " (from The Wisdom of Tuscany, p. 139). Besides it is an delightful challenge and I enjoy working with my hands, seeing in the end something definite result from my efforts and enjoying the taste of my harvest.
That fall (in 2007) I defined some garden beds on the west side of the house where the squash and pumpkins had grown and began double-digging those beds. I didn't get that finished until early summer of 2008. [Winter and freezing temperatures are an interfering aspect of life in Wisconsin, you see.]
During summer of 2008, which was fairly dry for long periods, I spent much time out there watering by hand with a garden hose. Royal pain in the whazzoo! In 2009 I installed a drip irrigation systems which worked wonderfully well. More about that later. Grew several kinds of tomatoes and learned some lessons; separate post on that as well. Lovely experience growing onions also.
But in 2008, I also spent a lot of time with our small, toy tiller working over a large piece of ground, about 20 by 60 feet. I encountered a lot of tree roots which I then had to get out of the tiller. Also a lot of the weed and grass growth also had to disentangled. So it seemed like about every 20-30 minutes I would have to shut off the tiller and use my knife for a half-hour to 45 minutes to untangle the tiller blades. I also wound up pulling a lot of long, sturdy tree roots, some as long as 10-20 feet. So a lot of bending and pulling as well as bending and sitting with the tiller.
And then I encountered rocks, a lot of rocks. Most of them I could dig out, with some considerable effort because they were large and heavy. Some were VERY large and I had to spend hours working away at them with a sledge hammer and then shovel. I extracted several hundreds of pounds of rocks from the area. Even then, I had to let some rocks remain - they were just too large and too hard to deal with. The Wolf River batholith underlies our property. In the prairie garden just few feet south of this vegetable garden, we have large ricks sticking up out of the soil. I understand they are something like 1.5 billion years old! I have trouble wrapping my brain around such numbers.
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