Well, it was the first day of the moon in Aries yesterday and I was as ready as I would ever be. It was also the day my husband decided to launch his new sailboat in the lake, the one he has been building for six months and it was the day to vote in the Library Election--the levy lost last time they tried and we lost the bookmobile and the ability to buy new books and the library went on restricted hours.
My husband estimated that he would be ready to start on spraying at 5 PM after he had launched the boat. (He has helped me with all my projects for many years, and he's not a BD grower, but comes along with feet dragging and brain incredulous at homeopathy, because he is my husband and I need his help. We are opposites. At 5:30, he finished the launch. The wind did not cooperate. Then there was the library--we hadn't done that yet. We went and there was a long line of people who had just gotten off from work. We got home and ate something. Now my story starts: We used two 40 gallon drums and Herb got out the kayak double-paddle with a half for each of us as a stirrer. The drums have to be filled and stirred in the borrowed 1973 Dodge van. Herb filled them with the hose from the water storage tank at the top of the tower. It had been a warm day and it was a good temperature. We decided we needed a cup each of BC and 500. I went to my BC cache and it was teeming with creatures--very young earthworms and rolly-polly bugs, as we called them in my childhood. I loved to play with rolly-polly bugs--Their little bodies are shaped like half of an oval sphere and are segmented with lots of little legs. They roll up with you touch them. I dug out two cups and tried my best to put all the creatures back into the hole since they would drown. That went in the barrels. With Herb's help in locating our horns, we took a large one and emptied it into a stainless bowl with a wire to get the contents in the tip. I divided the clay plug and the contents into two parts and that went in. We figured we needed 4 gallons of D-7 spotted knapweed pepper for each barrel. I had my dilutions/successions in quart jars. You're going to laugh now. I figured in pints. 4 gallons is 32 pints of D-7 that we needed for each barrel so we needed 1 2/3 quarts of D-6. So I took the D-5, potentized it again for good measure and potentized 3 more jars of D-6. Then poured 1 2/3 qts into a 4 gallon white bucket and carried it out to the van and filled it with the hose and just lifted and dropped the bucket on the ground 39 times. I just decided the number as I was doing it. The bucket made indentations in the packed soil. That went in and we each stirred a barrel. Herb's idea of the paddles had to be modified. We used the handle end instead of the paddle end. It was very hard to stir 40 gallons sitting down in the van with not much headroom to manipulate the stirrers. My husband failed me on the stirring. It just got to be too much for him. He doesn't have the deep inner motivation to do this. We drove down our 1 1/2 mile hill to the county road and I was able to get him to stir again, I don't know how long it was... but my intuition told me to accept the gifts I had been given and not to make a scene. It was dark by now. Herb turned the van around so we could start at our driveway and go to the the intersection at the beginning of our road. We have a gerry-rigged sprayer out of a Sure-flo pump on a piece of board with a hose that goes into the barrel and another longer one with a professional trigger sprayer-head like the Forest Service uses that shoots 30 feet. I sat in the passenger seat and sprayed out the window, waggling the sprayhead to cover the width of the right-of-way. Herb could see better than I where the spray was going and he would correct my position from time to time. We did about 7 miles (3 1/2 miles of road on both sides). When we got home, there was stuff left in the barrels and Herb maneuvered them out of the van, then dissolved into the cabin and into bed. I got my little flashlight from my handbag and took our wonderful, large saucepan that we found on the free table at the dock in Port Townsend which had been an old pressure cooker...it was very heavy gauge steel, and dipped the precious liquid out of the bottom of the barrels and onto whatever plants were near the parking area and even carried some out to the garden and to our Sweet Sixteen apple tree that the pocket gophers had eaten most of the roots of and used it all. I finished at 11:30 P.M. That's it folks. We did the best we could. Today, at 6:30 A.M. Herb left for a fishing trip with a friend and promised to come back today in time to do the second spraying in daylight. Thank God, he is willing to help me. He won't let anyone else drive the van as he is afraid they will accidentally go off the side of the road in his friend's van. I'm going to stir the 500 by itself for 40 minutes, then divide it into two barrels and stir the BC and pepper with it for 20 minutes, which should be about as long as Herb can stand to stir. Do you think it would be O.K. to use the aerator and our Bitti-O-Later to stir with? Seems like it would do a much better job of aerating the microorganisms. Is the ritual vortex stirring more important than the aerating and mixing? Blasphemy!!!! Blasphemy!!!! What would RS do if he were alive today? Peace, Merla _______________________________________________ BDNow mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can unsubscribe or change your options at: http://lists.envirolink.org/mailman/listinfo/bdnow
