Natural Deer Repellent Recipe

(Courtesy of Carol Cupp, High Desert Gardening Club)
In the spring as soon as the buds start coming out use this spray weekly. The deer won't touch the roses.  But in the fall quit spraying and the deer come in and do the trimming for you.
                         
                    Mix in a blender:
            1 cup water
            3 eggs
            1/3 cup tabasco sauce
            1/3 cup liquid dishwashing soap
 
                    Pour into a gallon sprayer and fill with water.
               Spray thoroughly once a week.
 
 
            You can also add a cube of beef bouillon but you may not need it. Recommend you wear gloves and goggles when spraying because the tabasco sauce can be painful. 

Master Gardener Spring Fair This Weekend

For the 31st straight year Oregon State University's Master Gardening extension program is sponsoring this two-day event at the Jackson County Fairgrounds (the one you see from eye 5 on the right north of Medford at Central Point). Admission is cheap ($3), there are six free gardening classes each day, plenty of food vendors for lunch, and lots of plants and books to buy.

Rather than go through too much detail, go to www.extension.oregonstate.edu/mg which is the Master Gardening's spot on OSU's website. On the right side under Upcoming Events click on the third one down and the show information will appear.

Maybe we'll see some of you there!

The Carbon Bathtub

This is the illustration on page 26 of December's National Geographic. It accompanies a short 3 page article and I am taking excerpts from it for this post. I doubt anyone can read the notes on the graphic so here is the story:

Almost twice as much CO2 (9.1 billion metric tons per year) is being poured into the tub (atmosphere) than the drain can let out (5 billion) so the level in the tub is rising. The "drain" is where the CO2 naturally goes.....absorbed by plants (30%) and oceans (25%). 45% as you see is unaccounted for, the amount that is building up in the atmosphere.

The focus of the story is a concern by an MIT professor: the public seems convinced if we slow down the growth of emissions we'll solve the problem. CO2 currently measures 350 ppm (parts per million) in the atmosphere and growing at the rate of 2 or 3 ppm per year. Even if we somehow stop the increase, stop the invisible hand that keeps opening the tap more and more, the tub is going to overflow because more is flowing in than draining out even if we quit opening the tap more each year.

The oldest air bubbles in Antarctic ice samples show that the atmosphere has not had this much CO2 for at least 800,000 years and probably a million. Before the Industrial Revolution (roughly at the time of America's independence in 1775) CO2 levels stood at 271 ppm using the same ice cores, so CO2 levels have increased 42% in 234 years, about 2 ppm per year. To cap the level at 450 ppm, a level most scientists consider dangerously high, we would have to cut emissions by roughly 80% by 2050.

Once again the source of confusion, not cutting the RATE of increase, cutting the flow from the tap by 80%. THAT is the challenge; getting the public and the politicians to realize how dramatic that is.

For the full story go to http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/big-idea/05/carbon-bath. There is even an interactive site where you can play around with the effects of different emissions at ngm.com/bigideas.

"Stak Blocks"; From Bio-Waste to Building Material

Two inventors in Goleta (outside Santa Barbara, California) are developing what sounds like one of those too-good-to-be-true concepts in eco-friendly building materials; Lego-like blocks of rice straw. The company, Oryzatech (oryza is Greek for rice straw) is a start-up, struggling to raise funds for mass production of the product which presently costs too much . .. about $30 per block.

California grows a lot of rice but the silica-rich straw (about a ton and a half of it for each ton of rice grown) is considered a waste product; too hard to gather for composting and not suited for animal feed, farmers burn thousands of acres of it each year, creating dangerous air pollution in the Sacramento Valley and other rice-growing regions of the state.

But, compressed into molds at 300 degrees and mixed with a formaldehyde-free glue the waste product becomes an ideal building block material for housing construction. Rice straw blocks have many advantages over stud wall framing; as tested by Cal Poly the 12" thick blocks have 3 times the insulation value of a 2 x 6 stud wall, are fire and sound proof, and much faster to assemble.

As you can see in the picture above they stack and interlock just like Lego blocks (each is 12" thick, 12" wide, and 24" long which makes them very easy to use) and threaded rebar rods anchor them in place from the top plate (wood member on top of walls that rafters and trusses rest on) down to the foundation for seismic strength. Wood framing is used for windows and doors but the blocks themselves are as workable as wood; sheetrock can be directly attached for example so new construction tools and methods do not need to be developed in order to use the product.

On the ecology side of things the material is almost carbon-neutral, coming as it does from sustainable, organic rice crops. This means it will likely qualify for LEED points (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, the green building rating system that certifies buildings as responsible, green construction). This may lead to tax credits or other monetary incentives for builders, I'm not sure as I have not researched this yet.

And one final, sensible note; the product can (and should) be manufactured on or near the rice farms themselves, right at the source. Production is scalable, big factories operate just as a garage-size one does, so any farmer could also become a producer, using his main crop waste as an added income stream.

For more information go to www.oryzatech.com. They're looking for investors!
They are stacked

Heliostats and Other Solar Stuff

(Excerpts from "Plugging Into The Sun", Sept. National Geographic)

120 quadrillion watts of sunlight are constantly hitting the Earth, that is 6,000 times what we use and it eclipses (excuse the pun) the power generation potential of all other renewable energy sources like wind, hydro, tidal, and geothermal. For perspective, we generated 19,000 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2006. One terawatt-hour = 1,000 gigawatt-hours = 1 billion kilowatt-hours and one kilowatt-hour keeps a 100 watt light bulb glowing for 10 hours. 975,000 terawatt-hours could be generated using just the renewable energy worldwide, 51 times what actually we use.

Because of this government subsidies for solar power are very high, especially in Europe which leads the world in solar technology. This is especially true in Spain where, outside Seville Abendoa Solar's PS10 vast array of mirrors aim sunlight at a "power tower" to make steam for the generating plant's turbine.

Solar One near Las Vegas uses a similar approach for what engineers call solar thermal generation (versus photo-voltaic panels or PV for short). Long rows of curved mirrors called parabolic troughs focus the sun's heat on an oil-filled pipe that runs the length of each row. The hot oil is then run through a heat exchanger to again turn water into steam for the turbine.

Andasol 1 & 2, another Spanish solar installation on the plains of Andalusia use molten salt to store some of the heat generated during the daytime in order to continue boiling water for up to 7-1/2 hours after the sun goes down.

Germany is pioneering an economic incentive called a "feed-in tariff" to drive solar energy research. Anybody who installs a photo-voltaic system on their home can sell their surplus energy to the grid for a guaranteed above-market price for 20 years. That comes out to about an 8% return on investment.

At the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems outside Freiburg the next generation of PV research uses Fresnel lenses (like the ones used in lighthouses) to concentrate sunlight 500 times, raising the efficiency of a standard PV panel as high as 23%.

Solar panels are getting thinner and even bendable, allowing their use on more and more structural shapes. PV is less efficient than solar thermal though (the record panel so far converts sunlight at 40.8% capacity and it costs $10,000; average PV efficiency runs 10% to 20%), and storage has been a problem. Germany and Alabama however have been using compressed air for decades to store surplus daytime energy by pumping it into underground caverns and releasing it at night to spin the turbines.

PV has two big advantages over thermal solar energy; it can be placed at the point of use eliminating costly transmission facilities and it has no moving parts, just solar photons knocking electrons off of silicon atoms and generating a current. So if efficiency can be raised and effective storage designed PV might win out. One line of research is aiming for liquid PV if you can imagine . . . paint your house with it and switch on the power.

And MIT researcher Daniel Nocera has discovered a cheap, self-renewing catalyst which splits water into hydrogen and oxygen which are then stored in a fuel cell for nighttime use. According to Nocera the PV panels on your home's roof which power your home during the day generate enough surplus energy to drive this system with enough left over to sell on the grid. He claims your home can become a power plant on its own.

Lasagna Gardening & The Master Gardener

Some of you may watch the weather on channel 12 in Medford and will remember the segments the weather people do with Oregon State's Master Gardener. I called the number (541-776-7371) and since it was after their telephone hours of 10am-2pm, was given this email address: jcmga.sorec@oregonstate.edu. I did not get a name when they responded but the point is you can get really, really professional gardening advice and it's all free.

So while their instructors validated my sawdust, grass clippings, and horse manure amendments their soil and compost mentor advised against rototilling. And another person from a worm farm referred me to the book shown above which advocates layering materials rather than mixing them.

I just got the book (from Village Books in Mt. Shasta for $17.95) so I do not have content to report yet but from the introduction the author seems to have a great number of ideas apart from the layering concept . . . bordering a planted area with certain plants to ward off pests and other natural approaches to enhance the garden.

So having just bought a Mantis rototiller I'm of course a little reluctant to go this layering route fulltime. And in fact a little of each might be the answer, like mixing all the goods up in fall and layering over with grass clippings all winter to seep.

Anyway, more later when I finish the book.

Saving Money in the Garden

This is a Mantis cultivator, the one you see on TV all the time churning up soil so fine it looks cosmetic. Well, for once the TV ads are true, We bought one at the Medford Grange and it works as advertised. This article is not a testimonial for Mantis, however but how a combination of things we are doing with our garden that are not only working well but saving us much of the money we had planned to spend on the garden in the first place.

First, we can get free horse manure which is great fertilizer. We don't have a horse but my daughter-in-law does so we filled her horse trailer with the stuff and Terry Brown at Terry's Nursery in Yreka says the older the better because the weed seeds get cooked out as the stuff ages and decomposes. It's pretty easy to find a horse owner in these parts and most would probably be very grateful to have you haul it away.

The next ingredient was going to be soil conditioner but I learned that Rich Linden at 523 Ski Village Drive in Mt. Shasta (926-3504) has a sawmill and he produces custom-sized lumber and large timbers for local people. He hauls a lot of sawdust and shavings to the dump every single week and he said he is delighted if people come by to pick them up and save him a trip. Bring your own garbage cans and trash bags.

Fine sawdust decomposes readily in the soils here and if the dirt is nutrient-poor like we have here in Lake Shastina and needing amendments such as soil conditioner, this is a free amendment that the Mantis can mix into the dirt along with the manure.

The cedar shavings Rich gives away can go between beds for walkways and they help repel bugs in the process. Cedar smells nice, too but is decay resistent so that's why you don't want to till it into the beds.

Finally we add grass clippings to the mix. We had our own pile to work from but it's not hard to talk a neighbor out of his collection. I even saw a small mountain of cuttings by Hoy Park that we may be able to borrow from, too.

The point is, make the mix 1/4 dirt, 1/4 manure, 1/4 sawdust, and 1/4 cut grass. When tilled several times and deeply the result is a fine, soft, and nutrient-rich soil ready to grow whatever you put in it. And all the ingredients are free for the hauling.

(By the way, I have to run over the beds several times with the Mantis in order to break down the manure clumps and mix everything up well enough and I have learned it is very helpful to have a friend spraying water behind the Mantis. An awful lot of dust is kicked up and that's not good for the air cleaner filter or for you. Be careful whom you ask to do this however, my darling wife got carried away with the hose more times than I could put off to inattention or carelessness.)

The last ingredient is going to be worms. We plan to buy the red wiggler variety the next time we go to the Farmers Market in Medford. It is going strong at this time of year and happens every Thursday on South Pacific Highway just south of the Harry and David mall. As long as we keep the beds wet over winter he little guys should thrive in this mixture and their castings are rich in nutrients which is the idea behind having worms in the first place.

This concoction is going to age over winter and when we plant in the spring I'll sprinkle ground up eggshells into the hole for each tomato, pepper, squash, and others that are subject to the blossom-end rot that got many of our plants this year.

If anyone would like to drop by and inspect our project please feel free. Our phone is 938-0385 and you are welcome to call ahead.

Grassoline

I read about this subject in Scientific American while I was waiting in the doctor's office, the only place I have ever found this brainy magazine. It is very interesting to read and I used to contemplate a subscription but it is SO cerebral that I fear it will surely cause headaches or permanent damage to my head.

Anyway, the story was about the so-called second generation of biofuels ___ those that use non-food crops like switchgrass, ag waste (corn stalks, etc.), chipped logging slash, and so forth. Without getting into the details (which is just as well as I'm not sure I could) the idea is to produce cellulosic ethanol.

The article explained that cellulose is much harder to break down into sugars (or separate from the sugars, I'm not sure) than corn or sugar cane. Apparently the same molecular structure that provides strength for a blade of grass to grow upright also makes it hard to work with.

See how well I did in chemistry? Guess I'd better stick with the broader implications . . . the upshot is that cellulosic ethanol takes more work and energy to produce. And will thus cost more. And thus will not be on the table soon, at least until the technology is discovered to reduce its cost and make it competitive with the "easy" ethanol. This is like the oil produced from deep wells or oil sands in Canada versus the cheaper Arabian imported stuff.

It seems hard to sell the public on the idea of spending more on gas to help the environment. Gas is already expensive and while ethanol reduces the carbon output it does not eliminate it like a plug-in electric car might (but only if the generating plants were nuclear or solar or wind-powered).

In a depression is this the time to invest in the environment? Or, as a reader in another magazine wrote about a story on Canada's (hugely destructive) mining of oil sands: "I work in one of those mines and it lets me feed my family. Which is more important?"

Deer Me

When I went googling for black tail deer most of the photos were bucks with huge antlers. And some photos were of those same bucks in the arms of the shooter. But this lady is the type we see more of here in Lake Shastina, feeding in our yards and gardens.

So here's how I armored my vegetable plot against their certain onslaught.

First we bought a seven foot tall net fence rated for deer. Hard to see as it is (black in color), I tied bright orange flagging tape randomly along the top to draw the attention of any browser who might be thinking "that's not too high, I can jump that". Kind of pretty when the wind blows but if I get tired of it I may weave small branches into it that are natural in color.

Another thing we're trying is piling brush along the outside. I'm hoping it will make it difficult for a deer to get close enough to the netting since they seem to spring upward from a standing point to get over a fence rather than taking a running start. This also helps to camouflage the posts and the box shape of the garden as a whole.

By using green six foot U-shaped metal stakes I attached 2 x 2 wooden extensions reaching upward enough to support the netting. (With green spray paint they would blend nicely with the lower metal part). The stakes have screw holes in the "U" and because of that, the 2 by 2 fit nicely when snugged in with a 2" sheetrock screw.

Hint: rent a post pounder to drive these stakes. $5.50 for 24 hours takes a lot of work out of climbing up and down a ladder using a sledgehammer to set them.

This netting came in a seven foot high roll. On one side of the garden I have an existing fence three feet tall so I ripped some junk 2 x 4's and measured off 48" from one end. That is how much that has to stick up to get the seven foot total height to attach the netting. As long as I have 18 to 24 inches left to work with it should hold so they don't have to be 8 foot studs. Even six footers will work. I use 3" self-drilling Torx head screws to get it onto the fence post.

But if I staple the whole 7 foot webbing to these from the top down, I'm wasting the lower half because my fence is already 3 feet tall and the netting just hangs unused over that part.

So I cut along the fold of the netting and now my 100 foot roll will cover 200 feet. But there's a 12" gap (36 inch tall fence minus seven foot desired height = 48 inches).

I think deer perception of barriers is mostly visual though, so if I can "fill" the opening they may not try to stick their head through.

So I'm going to weave string from the metal fence mesh below to the vinyl netting above, back and forth in a zig-zag design the whole length. I may add a horizontal string and / or flagging to draw more attention.

The big thing this extra length means is that I might also be able to enclose our rear yard that already has the 36" fence on three sides. A 100 ft. roll of this deer netting ran us $70 so it would be a meaningful savings. Sally loves to have flowers there for color but the deer regularly eat them. Sometimes I think we're just buying deer food when we buy the flowers.

I forgot to mention that these wooden uprights are great places to hang light flower pots, humming bird feeders, windchimes, etc. Easy to attach things like that. Since my garden is only about 30 feet wide we may also run baling wire from one post top to another across the expanse for more hangings although the weight of anything would have to be much less than on the sides.

We also made the area large enough so we can put a potting bench along the north edge, a compost bin, a source pile of topsoil, and storage for tools. We'll even move in one of those (painfully heavy) cast iron sitting benches that is now on our front porch. So we can sit and admire the birds and plants.

Remember Cold Fusion? Well . . .

This is Dr. Randell Mills, the CEO of BlackLight Power in Cranbury, NJ. Mina Kimes on CNNMoney.com this morning reports that this entrepreneur with $60 million in venture funding says he's found an endless source of cheap energy. Trouble is, it violates the laws of quantum physics.

Here is some of what she reported:

Such skepticism doesn't daunt Dr. Randell Mills, a Harvard-trained physician and founder of BlackLight, who recently claimed that he has created a working fuel cell using the world's most pervasive element: the hydrogen found in water.

"This is no longer an academic argument," Mills, 50, insists. "It's proven technology, and we're going to commercialize it as quickly as possible."

For the first time in his company's 19 years of persistent trial and error, Mills says he has a market-ready product: a fuel cell that produces a chemical reaction to alter hydrogen atoms. The fuel cell releases heat that turns water into steam, which drives electric turbines.

The working models in his lab generate 50 kilowatts of electricity - enough to power six or seven houses. But these, Mills says, can be scaled to drive a large, electric power plant. The inventor claims this electricity will cost less than 2 cents per kilowatt-hour, which compares to a national average of 8.9 cents.

While his business has been working on the "BlackLight Process" since its inception almost two decades ago, Mills developed the patented cocktail that enables the reaction - a solid fuel made of hydrogen and a sodium hydride catalyst - only a year ago. (He recently posted instructions on the company's Web site, blacklightpower.com). Now that the device is ready for commercialization, he says, BlackLight is negotiating with several utilities and architecture and engineering firms, but he won't disclose any partners' names until the deals are finalized.

(Editor): I'm hardly the one to ask about physics ___ particle,quantum, or basic. But the idea that he is beyond the conceptual stage and now at the point of going commercial with this caught my eye. Note that he hopes to have one or more systems in place by Fall 2009. I think it is particularly significant that he plans these fuel cells for power generating plants, the ones that burn coal and contribute so much to our pollution and warming climate problem. Will coal states or coal interests in Congress block this? Stay tuned.

HeroRATS

(adapted from an article in the October National Geographic)

Some people cringe when they see a rat but Bart Weetjens smiles. A Belgian product designer, Weetjens devised a way for these often reviled rodents to help solve a global problem: how to locate land mines, some 60 million of which are scattered in 69 countries.

Dogs are often deployed to sniff them out, "but I knew rats were easier to train," says Weetjens, who bred them as a boy. Rats are also light, so they don't detonate the minesthey find; they stay healthy in tropical areas too, where many of the explosives are buried; and they're cheap to breed and raise.

In the late 1990's Weetjens chose the African giant pouched rat, with its very sensitive nose, for Pavlovian training: if the rats scratched the ground when they sniffed TNT, they got a reward.

More than 30 trained sniffer rats, aka HeroRATS, have started sweeping minefields in Mozambique, where they've cleared almost a quarter square mile. Weetjens also trains rats to screen human saliva for tuberculosis and is mulling new missions, such as finding earthquake victims in rubble. Lives saved, health improved, mines defused__ nothing to cringe about here.

Highest and Best Use

Plastic makes things work and even eco-terrorists would be hard pressed to deny that. Unfortunately plastic comes from oil so there's a problem there. In real estate appraisal the term "highest and best use" means what a property would be worth if it were put to it's best use. An example might be if we were appraising a home in the center of an industrial area. It's value would be much more if it were turned into an industrial use.

So if you toss a 2L coke bottle, a landfill destination is not it's best use. Even if you recycle it, that's ideally not good enough either. They smush them into bales, melt them down, and reform them into what they were in the first place. That all takes a lot of energy. It's like turning the plastic bottle back into a plastic bottle with a lot of costly stops along the way.

But if you apply the highest and best use it comes out like this: the coke bottle gets refilled. End of story. Same product. Same bottle. Endless reuses. THAT is what highest and best means. The label stays. The cap gets resealed. No tossing. No landfilling.

But this solution is so labor-intensive that it is uneconomical. I have two suggestions to overcome that: a) put a $1 refundable deposit fee on each plastic container (not just the current CRV, but milk, yougurt, butter, etc.) to pay for hiring people to separate this material at the landfill or, b) take Sheriff Joe's example and have inmates do this work. Pay 30 cents an hour which applies to their room and board costs at the jail.

But how does this work in real life? Well, until we get sophisticated enough to separate our recycles at the curb we have to do it at the landfill. It's dirty, time-consuming work and not limited to plastic. Think about steel, aluminum, cardboard, glass, etc. Again, inmates make sense here.

Until somebody in Washington or Sacramento gets on board with recycling there are no options other than the old wax-coated milk containers. At least they are biodegradable.

Vertical Farming

This is Dickson Dispommier, a 67 year old microbiologist at Columbia University. In the September issue of Popular Science he argues that agriculture as we now practice it, is broken. Using 40+% of the available land it is the biggest polluter on the planet and consumes vast amounts of energy and resources.

He proposes instead vertical farms that would solve many existing issues because to start with, they would be located in the centers of our largest cities, thereby removing the huge energy issue of not only harvesting each crop but also transporting it to market.

His 30 story city-block tower would generate enough food and water to feed 50,000people and use the city's sewer supply for not only the water for the plants but fuel to heat them (it is essentially a greenhouse after all). A process has already been invented and tested for separating sewage sludge from effluent and drying it for fuel while purifying the water by using zebra mussels and non-edible plants.

A core concept in this self-sufficient farm is "aquaponics", a combinating of fish farming and hydroponics whereby dirty fish water is used to feed the plants and the plants return clean water for the talapia fish which live in the water beneath them.

Gone would be pesticide runoff and the need for massive doses of fertilizers and pesticides. The building would be self-sufficient and even have a market on the ground floor level where the goods would be sold, including "meat" grown from stem cells from sheep, chicken, and beef. No more slaughter houses and inhumane chicken farms.

Enough of these structures in large cities would support the entire city population and eliminate the mega-corporate farms now occupying so much of our landscape. Dispommier claims one 30 story prototype could easily be erected and tested for the price of one year's farm subsidies now being paid out.

Editor's note: I apologize that I have not provided more detail, I did this piece from memory so to get more, just get a copy of the September issue of Popular Science (as I plan to).

Doggie Pre-Wash, Going Green

I heard somewhere, sometime that dogs help heal their own wounds by licking them. If true might there be some heretofore undiscovered sanitary ingredient in dog spit that can benefit mankind? Then I read that it's wasteful to rinse dishes before putting them in the dishwasher......... then, aha!

Spot can do the pre-wash for you!! Not only does he gain the joy of pleasing his master but, if one can believe the holistic articles on pet diets, he can gain substantive nutritional value by disposing of limp salad, soggy peas, and other leftovers that really look disgusting in the refrigerator the next day.

This must be what they mean by "going green", right? No only do we ourselves save time and hot water but we benefit our pets both emotionally and nutritionally. Wow, I can do this!

(No author name for obvious reasons)