1) Radical Gardening: Part II
2) Declaring Bankruptcy Will Get Harder
3) News Bits
a) Internet Search Engines: Google Still Leads
b) U.S. Taxpayers Sued for Rejecting Risky Canadian Beef
c) Personal Debt Increases Nation's Financial Vulnerability
d) Chips Coming in U.S. Passports
e) Plug-in Air Fresheners Cause of Some House Fires
4) Feedback
a) Blueberries and Grapes
b) Soil Life
c) More on Sexing Chicks

1) Radical Gardening: Part II
The Farmer's Market is a great thing for us. I'm selling chicks at $5 each, bunnies for $20 each, a rabbit hutch for $90, two for $150. Don took a dozen of his mouth-watering homemade cream puffs and buyers snapped them up at $3 each.

The garden is booming...with about 33 hours a week of hands-on attention from me. First, I'm out in the garden weeding, with my basket to save the weeds for chickens. I play a little game with myself. If I can dig out weeds in something resembling a straight, or a zigzag line, then I use the trowel to drag a trench down that de-weeded line. Next, I plant into that trench, just get those seeds into the ground anywhere, anyhow. Then, after their little green heads are up, I come back and more carefully scoop them up into my transplant basket, then replant each in a place where it will have its own square foot, or six inches (as needed by species) to grow. I let carrots grow as is, thinning by removing the biggest ones on a regular basis.
What about ROWS??? Naw, I don't do rows. I have a rototiller-free garden, therefore the whole thing can be a giant wide row. I do have a few footpaths beaten down through it, about every 20 feet. They are randomly geometric. For the inside work, in the area between footpaths, I go there seldom as possible. When I do venture in I weed, plant, transplant, and harvest in a single visit. I carry seeds in my garden pocket. I may temporarily stuff weeds and rocks into another pocket. I put plants that were overcrowded and need to be transplanted elsewhere into a little basket I bring with me. I put harvested vegetables in a big basket I have with me. Or I toss them into a bushel basket sitting in a nearby path. I tiptoe, positioning my feet carefully in bare patches between plants, stretching and holding that position like an adagio ballet dancer until I 've finished the weeding and planting in that area.

I grow a number of plants per square foot that would boggle the mind of a conventional tiller-style gardener. (This is also a good technique for gardening a small yard.) The combination of tiller free and keeping that ground rich with weekly applications of compost and manure enables that level of production.

This week I watched the making of a cannibal chick. I tried some of the feedstore chick feed on my batch. They quickly learned to love it. They loved it so much that when some of them somehow got some chick feed on their feathers a little Production Red noticed and ate the food-dusted feathers. She's been preferring feathers to feed ever since. I hate to wring her little neck, but I'm tempted. The good news is that I now know how that problem happens. Let's assume the store stuff has something comparable to MSG in it. They're eating faster and growing twice as fast as they did on the home-devised diet. They'll end up being the same size, only quicker. The store stuff also makes them remarkably thirsty. Have to be even more conscientious about watering them.

It was an interesting experiment. The bag of chick starter is used up tonight. Then I'm going back to their previous diet of soaked dogfood, soaked or ground grains, vegetables, weeds, table scraps, and alfalfa.

They are now about three weeks old and becoming able to hop out of the bathtub. Mostly, they don't. As if they somehow understand that they're supposed to stay in there. In a couple days I'm going to move 25 of the biggest and most heavily feathered out ones into their outdoor pen for night as well as daytime. For shelter they'll have a big cardboard box, opening toward the ground, with a little door cut in one side for them to go in and out. On top of that and on each side of it, I'll drape a plastic garbage bag, so that if it rains or snows, that moisture won't contact the cardboard.

We're getting lots of homegrown eggs now. Chef Don is delighted at how strong their shells are and how dark orange the yolks and tasty the results. We're getting lots of requests for homegrown eggs at the F.M. $3 a dozen is the going rate there for homegrown brown eggs.
That's what's going on around here...

2) Declaring Bankruptcy Will Get Harder
"The Senate is ready to approve a regressive overhaul of the personal bankruptcy law that buys into the banking and credit card industries' scheme to further squeeze the consumers caught in spiraling debt. .....Judges could order stiffer repayment plans than under current laws, which already allow the credit card companies to sandbag defaulters with compounded penalty fees and interest mounting higher than the original debt...as deep as the pockets of the high-powered lobbyists behind it. Even a proposal to exempt soldiers fighting in Iraq from the tougher bankruptcy rules was defeated, but the egregious "millionaire's loophole" still stands, allowing wealthy Americans in bankruptcy to shelter huge assets in safe-haven states."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/08/opinion/08tue3.html?th

3) News Bits
a) Use of a Tanning Bed Unhealthy
"Use of a tanning bed is not worth the possible longterm consequences of increased skin cancer risk and premature aging. Particularly during the teenage years, continued use of a tanning bed or sunlamp can be quite dangerous."

b) U.S. Taxpayers Sued for Rejecting Risky Canadian Beef Seattle Times: "Under an obscure provision of the North American Free Trade Agreement, Canadian cattlemen are asking the U.S. government to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to cover losses they incurred when the border was closed to Canadian beef after mad-cow disease turned up in Alberta. With the ban set to be lifted early next month, the case spotlights NAFTA’Äôs little-known Chapter 11, which allows companies to claim damages from governments if their laws or actions damage trading partners."

c) Personal Debt Increases Nation's Financial Vulnerability
Pioneer Planet
’Ä¢ Comment: "Given the number of people who have refinanced their homes with floating-rate mortgages, the falling dollar is a kind of sword of Damocles, getting closer and closer to their heads," Rothkopf said. "And with any kind of sudden market disruption ’Äî caused by anything from a terror attack to signs that a big country has gotten queasy about buying dollars ’Äî the bubble could burst in a very unpleasant way." Why is that sword getting closer? Because global markets are realizing that we have two major vulnerabilities that this administration doesn't want to address: We are importing too much oil, so the dollar's strength is being sapped as oil prices continue to rise, and we are importing too much capital, because we are saving too little and spending too much, as both a society and a government."

d) Chips Coming in U.S. Passports
While the European Union works to counter RFID privacy threats, the U.S. State Department continues to play ostrich about the issue, ignoring public concerns over spychipped passports. The agency has announced that it will not encrypt the data contained in RFID-enabled passport slated to be issued starting this year. This move puts travelers at risk for data theft, and could potentially jeopardize their physical security as well. (Do you really want people remotely reading your name and nationality?) Security expert Bruce Schneier says: "The only reason I can think of [for putting remotely-readable RFID chips in passports] is the government wants surreptitious access. I'm running out of other explanations. I'd love to hear one."

So would we. Meanwhile, get a passport now or renew the one you have before the chips start appearing. The government is accepting public comment on this issue through April.

Sources:
Wired New s, 2/24/05
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,66686,00.html

Federal Register:
http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2422/01jan20051800/edocket.access.gpo.gov/2005/05-3080.htm

Email address for comments: Deadline to comment 4/4/05
PassportRules@state.gov

CASPIAN: Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering Opposing supermarket "loyalty" cards and other retail surveillance schemes since 1999.
http://www.spychips.com/
http://www.nocards.org/

e) Plug-in Air Freshener Cause of House Fire

"The insurance investigator sifted through the ashes for several hours. He had the cause of the fire traced to the master bathroom. He asked her sister-in-law what she had plugged in there. She listed the normal things, curling iron, blow dryer. He said, "No, this would be something that would disintegrate at high temperatures". Then her sister-in-law remembered she had a Glade Plug-In in the bathroom. The investigator said that was the cause of the fire. He said he has seen other home fires started with the plug-in type room fresheners. He said they are made from a THIN plastic. When the investigator looked in the wall plug, the two prongs left from the Glade plug-in were still in there. Her sister-in-law had one of the plug-ins that had a small night light built in it. She had previously noticed that the light would dim and then finally go out. She would walk in the bathroom a few hours later, and the light would be on again. Th e investigator said that was because when the unit got too hot, it would dim and go out rather than blow the light bulb. After it cooled down, it would come on. That is a warning sign."

4) Feedback:
Blueberries and Grapes

Dear Carla,

...I have old pear trees, very young apple, peach, plum and fig trees, and grapevines and blueberries and blackberries. The blackberries are producing great, but blueberry vines are pathetic. Grapevines looked glorious and then some bug or blight made each grape have a brown spot and dry up. So disappointing...

Elece Hollis

Carla,
Elece should fertilize her blueberries with an acid fertilizer like an organic holly food. Also prune out the weak wood. The grapes with brown spots that mummify are caused by yellow Jacket/wasp stings. She should try one of the glass yellow Jacket traps near her grape vines.
Tom

Dear Tom,
Thank you so very, very much for sharing your expertise with us! I managed to save my copy of your e-mail content, but lost your e-mail address in the process of a computer mess-up that day, so I couldn't write an thank you.
Carla

Feedback: Soil Life

From Susan who is, I believe, living and working in Outer Mongolia:

New Question: We are starting a garden this spring hyere in Olgii. How do we test the soil to see what it needs added to it? We have bones and manure in abundance, but the soil is very poor. If we could do small kitchen gardens, the people would greatly benefit.
Sincerely yours,
Susan Alexander Bourke

Hi Susan. You can make any poor soil into good soil if you just add enough organic material to it: animal manure of all sorts, people manure (solid and liquid), and recycled plant material. Whether your soil is acid or alkaline, organic material moves it toward the desirable center pH. Whether you have sandy or clay soil, adding organic material moves it toward the desirable middle texture. Whatever chemicals for plant nutrition might be missing, adding organic material is the answer. A plant test kit could tell you what particular plant food chemicals are lacking, but if you're doing it the natural way rather than buying something in a store, the answer is still the same: Add more organic material. Believe it or not, the more you get growing in that soil, the healthier it will be. It needs to be brought to LIFE. Regular watering year-round keeps soil life going. In a desert, it's easy to forget that and let the soil life die out. Add life, add earthworms, add food for the soil life. Then it will grow food for you.
Your friend,
Carla Emery

More about Sexing Chicks:

Here is what Kelly Klober, the author of the Small Acreage Management column in Small Farm Today magazine (www.smallfarmtoday.com; 800-633-2535), had to say about sexing chicks in an as-yet-unpublished column:

Sexing for the large hatcheries is done by a relative handful of mostly Asian people. It is not a simple skill to master, which explains why many of the independent hatcheries sell only as-hatched chicks. Few methods...are...foolproof. With barred chicks, the spot in the top of the head may appear longer and more irregular in cockerels than in pullets. With two of the barred breeds, Marans and Dominiques, we have found the black coloring to be darker on females than males, also.

As the birds feather out, little pullets tend to feather quicker along the wingbows than cockerels. Pullets also tend to develop tail feathers more quickly in many breeds. In most breeds, the feathers in the hackle are shaped differently in the sexes. Cockerel feathers will end in a point and pullet hackle feathers are rounded at the ends. The exceptions are a few breeds such as the Sebright bantam that are said to be ’Äúhen feathered’Äù. In such breeds, the hackle feathers are rounded in both sexes.

There is another type of hen feathering that is quite rarely seen. In breeds where the hen has a different feather pattern than the male, an occasional male may emerge with a hen feathering pattern. The textbook example of this would be a Silver-Laced Wyandotte male with an overall laced pattern. Head features or comb and wattle development can sometimes be used as a sexing aid. However, with some growing groups, this type of development in some of the males may be suppressed due to the presence of one or two dominant males in the pen. Remove such dominant birds as they emerge, then sex the birds again a few days later. A number of texts are available with pictorial guides to vent sexing, but this is far from simple. Most people will find it difficult to handle the chicks in the manner needed for a detailed vent inspection.

Robert Plamondon also tells about sexing chicks in his book Success with Baby Chicks, and his newsletter; to subscribe to the newsletter, send an email to nortonckpress-request@plamondon.com and put the word "subscribe" in a line by itself at the beginning of the message. He mostly says it is very difficult except with certain breeds that have clearer differentiations between sexes.

It just isn’Äôt easy. Gook luck! Paul Berg, Managing Editor, Small Farm smallfarm@socket.net

Dear Carla, Thank you for taking the time to talk to me. I love everything in your book. Sometimes when the world (or actual people)tell me I should be decorating my house or driving the perfect car or whatever, I read something from your book and I feel refreshed and brought back down to earth.
Amy Beaupre