"Brined baler twine" <LOL> I live inland. I'd love to try your potato technique. I wonder if wild grasses might have the same effect. May I forward your email to a friend is pioneers high-altitude (10,000 ft) organic small-scale farming?
Cheers, Lawry On Nov 30, 2011, at 11:15 PM, Mike Spencer wrote: > > 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 _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
