Lawry wrote: > I gathered from your discussion that the use of seaweed on your plots > was labor intensive but "worth it".
Yeah. I load the seaweed onto my 3/4T flatbed truck with a dung fork. (Like a pitchfork but with 5 tines.) A load takes about half an hour or so of steady work in a gloriously beautiful location, often in the *very* bracing air of Feruary. For the potato patch, it's also unloaded by hand so as to spread it out uniformly around a foot deep. By spring, it's settled down to 3-4 inches. But the truck has a dump box so what I'm piling up for later use as mulch can be dumped in a heap. The work of putting the seaweed on the potato patch is more than compensated for when "digging" potatoes consists of crawling through the patch, just raking the seaweed away and picking up the clean, undamaged potatoes off the surface of the ground. Applying mulch is labor intensive, too, but done a little at a time. More typical mulch material -- leaves, hay, grass clipping, wood chips, sawdust -- all have shortcomings that seaweed lacks. > Do you this within your family, or on a coop basis with neighbors? Not a coop. But several other families do it on the same or a lesser scale. We're fortunate to have a beach that traps seaweed in great quantities and where driving on the beach does no harm and has been an acceptable practice forever. A second beach where one might collect eel grass for the same purpose has been closed to vehicles to protect a piping plover community and also because vehicular damage to the dune grasses threatened the survival of the beach itself. > My sea survival manual says that all seaweeds are non-toxic and > therefore fair game for eating, though some must be pretty inedible. I guarantee that (what has been identified [1] to me as) desmarestia will have the palatability of brined baler twine. The others might be worth a try. The "red moss" [2] (which seems to be making a comeback after a decade of decline) *looks* like it should taste of iodine. Guess I should try it. - Mike [1] What I see looks like D. aculeata as seen here: http://www.mbari.org/staff/conn/botany/browns/desmarestia/thalliphoto.htm [2] Not absolutely certain of its taxonomic identity but it looks rather like this: http://seaweeds.uib.no/?art=839 -- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~. /V\ [email protected] /( )\ http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
