Gardening with Kim-Tre-Els

After the coldest night in seven years, zero degrees F, dawn looked to be sunny and warming.  But the sun revealed a barrage of jet plumes that darkened its light.

It was hours before the greenhouse gained the light and warmth it should have gotten at dawn.

Gradually over the last twenty years people have gotten accustomed to seeing long smoky trails following the course of jet planes in our skies.

Some days there are none. Other days the sky is crisscrossed with the smoky white plumes.

These plumes are so common now that people under the age of 40 think nothing about them at all.  They are never mentioned by TV weathermen and almost never by any media source except the internet.

I am about to turn 71 years old.  60 years ago I was about to enter my teenage years when jet engines were first used in commercial passenger planes.  I was intensely interested in this powerful expression of modern technology.  I studied aviation and I loved going to Houston’s Hobby airport where I watched these huge new planes take off and land.  I knew about contrails; that they were ice crystals formed in the extreme cold of the stratosphere, a vapor which quickly dissipated, but left a marker illuminating the flight of the jet.

Since my adult life has been spent in horticulture, which must respond to the weather, I developed the habit of always noticing the sky and clearly remember the afternoon in 1998 when I first saw a jet plane emitting a trail which did not dissipate, but hung in the sky, gradually broadening and slowly thinning.  This was not a contrail.  It more resembled crop dusting.
 No engines whether internal combustion, jet, steam or any other type emits an exhaust that lingers in the air.  In a great smoky fire or volcanic explosion what lingers in the air is unburned particulate matter not the product of combustion which is invisible, CO2 and water.  

Over the years since then I’ve seen these plumes more and more often they form grids in the sky.  I’ve seen the trails do U-turns and once even a perfect circle.  Often the planes are flying lower than passenger jets fly.  On clear days and when the plume is close one can observe it rolling out from the center like the dust from the collapsing World Trade Centers.  But nothing, absolutely nothing is said about it, except on the internet, from people with nothing to gain by talking about it. 

There are thousands of photos, analyses of plume samples, and pictures of the tanker planes smuggled out by military whistle blowers.  The number and total of internet testimonies, photography and commentary is an amazing collection of damning testimony. 

What kind of sheep are we, to allow ourselves to be fumigated and pretend that that is alright.  Some analyses of the fumigant indicate that if is often coal fly ash from the scrubbers of power plants.  This ash, like the fluorides from phosphate mining, aluminum production and the nuclear industry is a major environmental concern and very expensive to deal with.  What a great idea to just spread it around everywhere!  Who’s to say or notice if the people behind the fumigation decide we should be dusted with anthrax or some other powder concocted in their chemical weapons division?

In Congress, high ranking spokesmen for the perpetrators have admitted to “geo-engineering” without any specifics or rationale.  Our congressmen do not seek any more information about it…it’s a subject they prefer to avoid.  Two popular singers who mentioned chemtrails, Merle Haggard and Prince suddenly died shortly after those songs were sung.

I'm going to print and copy flyers which say “Look Up…those plumes are chemtrails.  Someone is spraying us from above.”  I’m going to set them under my wiper blades when I park at Walmart on the days when the spraying is obvious.  Maybe people who think my vehicle is for sale will take a sheet and support the revelation for sheep who never look up.

Last year at this time

Winter into Spring at the Nursery

It wasn't a cold winter, so I burned less firewood.  The greenhouse still spent all its winter nights with freezing temps barely in abeyance.

Leaves had been hauled

 and cracks had been filled with mud for sealant

 Sprouting and malting happened

Along with all the winter greenhouse greens

Using the horse manure from this pile I turned this cold frame into a hot frame

And in Early February I filled it with seeded flats

With a 110 degree bottom heat many of my seeds sprouted within a week.  Good news except that mice were eating the seedlings as fast they sprouted.  I lost all my early peppers and half my ginseng seed.  I had to move all the seed containers into the cold greenhouse and they went into "take forever to sprout mode"

Finally now in mid-April I am seeing good germination.  At least I do have an early crop of tomatoes.

Christmas Greenhouse 2016

For any new readers, or forgetful older ones, I’m going to describe my greenhouse and its operation anew.  It was built in sections between 2010 and 2014 and totals about 600 sq.ft.   It is glazed (covered) with used window glass and twinwall polycarbonate.  The structure is partially sunken and heated with a wood stove.  Here’s a picture of it taken from above December 2016.

Since I worked in horticulture  (and its industry) for 45 years I came to realize what a horrible pollutant and killer sheet plastic is and have not purchased any for years.  I’ve covered the sunken cold frame in the bottom left of the photo with a large piece given me by a friend.  My polycarbonate will also become toxic for Nature.

The greenhouse is oriented to the east and behind it is a fencerow which shades the western sun and screens the northwesterly winds.  Here's a summer picture.

 In the summer windows open and panels come off.  The greenhouse is operated all year is never shaded and there are no fans.   A small amount of propane is burned on the coldest nights to support the woodstove.  Winter temperatures inside are maintained just above freezing and no fuel is used on winter nights when ambient temperatures don’t threaten a freeze inside.  The greenhouse has outstanding ventilation,  completely passive and completely dependent upon and responsive to the operator. 

                                             I've got a lot of firewood this year.

Hogs

Hogs

I have long been interested in the use of pastures for domesticated livestock.  So, recently, on the way to visit a new friend, I drove by a field of pastured hogs.  On the way back, and a couple of times since, I observed the hogs and their pasture.  About fifteen hogs were lounging on ten acres of creek bottomland.  The fencing was heavier and presumably more expensive than cattle fencing.  The pasture was in grass which the hogs were not eating.  At the farmhouse end of the pasture the hogs had made a single circular depression of bare dirt about 30 ft. across and a couple of feet deep.  Is it called a wallow?  We’ve been dry and the bottom was only moist.

My thoughts are these.  Plow the field and sow legumes, wheat or barley in the fall.  Graze with cattle, plow under, or harvest the crop and then spring sow a substantial quantity and mix of root crops, mangels, daikons, turnips, rutabegas, radishes and carrots.  In fall let the hogs in.  Every few days, come behind them rake and sow more daikons or begin to sow for the development of a permanent pasture.

Once the hogs have worked the field over, pen them or sell them.  The field goes back to the rotation for cattle, horses, sheep whichever.  In the meantime you have a different field being prepared for the next hog pasture.  Perhaps your hog wire could be moved from field to field.

It seems to me that the kind of “cultivation” that hogs can achieve is unique and beneficial for the pasture and with minimal tillage over a loosened top soil this pasture can be re-established with the certainty of plant vigor.

As a footnote I would like to add that the grain required by your hogs can be barley instead of corn.  Both the hogs I raised many years ago were fed rolled barley soaked in nutrients.  Sprouting barley has been very easy for me to do and the hogs benefit even more from that. 

Barley appears not to be gmo, is not likely to be heavily poisoned and is half the price of organic feed.

A Letter to the USDA

I included this letter as part of my "mandatory" response to a USDA survey of my business.

Dear Department of Agriculture employee,

I am including this short letter per your request for comments on the U.S.D.A. survey.  This is only my opinion of course…but I consider you to be an employee of a criminal organization.  I believe that the leadership/management of the USDA functions, on behalf of a group of the world’s wealthiest people, to establish and maintain chemical rather than biological agriculture.  I believe this to have been the case since Henry Wallace, a knowledgeable supporter of biological agriculture, was removed as FDR’s vice president in 1944.  I was a two year old Texan in 1947 when an early shipment of ammonium nitrate blew up the town of Texas City.  All of the new synthetic fertilizers of that day came from ammunition factories owned by these same wealthy men and they all had to have this new market or shut down. The world was at peace.

Along with these destructive synthetic fertilizers of have come all the other toxic synthetic products of industrial agriculture. Their use has spread environmental poisoning and devastation for 70 years.  It’s like we fought WWII all over again on our own soil.  Those of us with cancer are the “wounded in battle”.  The profits of agriculture have been taken from the farm and moved to the owners of the factories.

Your employer has allowed, even encouraged, industry and ranchers to manufacture and use Grazon ™ in order to turn manure, a necessity for biological agriculture, into a toxic product.  USDA sponsored industrial agriculture has turned our country into an eroded poisoned swamp instead of the healthy rich land it should be.  Do not let me get started on the hideous fluoride pollution from big agriculture’s phosphorus production.  Over a 45 year career in agriculture I have come to know the exact truth of what’s going on.

In the meantime our farmland needs men in the pastures and forests doing erosion control, establishing  and clearing vegetation, protecting springs,  and managing co-operative grazing.  We need work in seed production and the legalization and establishment of hemp production.  Did you know that Russia is now establishing organic agriculture everywhere and that Putin says Russia will be the world’s center of eco-agriculture.  Good for them, they are showing you the way. 

Of course you know that you will not be promoted to higher levels in the USDA if you state that you prefer a return to biological agriculture.  It is past time for lower ranking employers who still have a conscience to demand control of the department from the current paid off members of management who are running it now.  The nation is waiting and hoping for this to happen.