Yes, Millipedes can be Pests

In general, millipedes are considered beneficial soil animals that help break down decaying organic matter. Outside of greenhouse environments, they just plain don’t cause crop damage that has warranted consideration. But when I harvested my rutabagas this year, I noticed dark tunnels running through many of them. This was not typical of wireworm damage, which tends to take chunks out of the surface. Rather, this was a black tunnel that went several inches into the rutabaga. After carefully — very carefully — dissecting a rutabaga and following a tunnel slowly with a very sharp knife, I unearthed the unlikely culprit.

This wee beastie was very small, much smaller than the typical millipedes I see in the garden. It was so small I couldn’t see any legs with my naked eye, but some antennae were evident. It’s behavior was also atypical of millipedes which usually curl up into a ball when disturbed. It acted more like a nematode in that it would hold the front half of its body up in the air and seem to be looking around.

So like any curious farmer, I put the beast under my microscope unharmed on special slides intended for observing small living creatures. There, the legs were abundantly evident: two pairs per segment. The head was blunt, and it lacked the poison injectors or jaws of a centipede. (It also moves too slowly for a centipede.) Though I have not yet identified the specific species, it is very clearly and unambiguously a very tiny millipede. As millipedes grow by adding segments, this species is distinct from the millipedes I usually find curled into a little spiral in the garden.

It also has rutabaga radar. When placed on a plastic plate several inches from a freshly cut piece of rutabaga, it first sticks its head up in the air and then heads for the rutabaga. Given about 15 minutes it burrows into the rutabaga and leaves behind a black trail into the flesh of the root.

This is a very interesting development.

In doing research, I have found that in Ontario, not very far North of here, millipedes have been busily damaging sweet potatoes and carrots, especially during times of drought. The three species they have identified are not the species that is damaging my rutabagas though. Incidentally, we have had a drought here all summer.

This is the first I have been aware of millipedes being a pest of root crops outside of greenhouses, but this is very definitely the case and not a fluke. As I find more information, I’ll keep you updated. I found no damage in carrots or parsnips in other beds, but have not yet harvested turnips — a closely related crop — and will be interested to see if I find the same problem there.

 

What are all those Instruments?

I received an email recently from a reader of my fermenting book who had noticed musical instruments in the background of one of my photos.

No, I’m not a musical instrument store, though it may look that way! I enjoy composing and playing music and have played various instruments since my father started teaching me when I was nine. Over time, when I haven’t been too busy with other things, I’ve augmented those skills.

I’m by no means a pro, but when a guy doesn’t enjoy TV very much and his mini farm only requires an hour a day, he needs something to do when he isn’t writing books — a hobby.

Here is a small composition I did recently while experimenting with separating instruments in a recording:

Bluestar, by Brett Markham

For folks interested in the nitty gritty details, everything was done on a Linux distribution called Ubuntu Studio.

Turn Your Property into an Income Producing Asset

Residential property is treated like a hotel. That is, it is primarily used as a place to sleep, eat and watch TV in the time spans between working. And if you look at the pricing and what the mortgage and property tax payments add up to, you’ll discover that the daily price of residential property is about the same as that for a hotel in the same neighborhood.

Think about that for a minute. You are paying as much as if you were living in a hotel, and you don’t even have daily fresh linen.

At some points in history, this could at least be justified by insanely appreciating prices that would allow you to flip property at a profit in no time. But for most of us, those days are over and depending on where you live about a third of homeowners owe more to the bank than the property is worth.

Though real estate can certainly be a good investment in some cases, again, right now, for a great many people it is a poor investment. At least, it shouldn’t be considered an investment. Rather, you are paying for a place to live, and paying about as much as you would for a hotel except without maid service. In this role, residential real estate is just a living expense. What to do?

It is easy to turn your residential property into an income producing asset by using your lawn to grow vegetables instead of grass. You’ll spend, on average, an hour a day — but that’s an hour you are taking away from TV rather than an hour you are taking away from paying work, so you aren’t losing anything.

What are the vegetables worth? Using MiniFarming methods, you are really growing organic food, so your apples-to-apples comparison should be to the prices of foods in the organic food aisle or at the health food store, rather than to mass-market commodities. My own experience, plus that of many others including experiments done by Mother Earth News, is that on average you can produce $5 worth of vegetables per square foot of raised bed annually.

If you plant blueberry bushes in place of ornamental (and toxic) yew trees and apples in place of maples while growing grapes and raspberries in place of ivy along fences, you will grow thousands of dollars worth of fruit every year. And don’t forget a couple of black walnuts or a blight-resistance American chestnut.

You can easily produce $5,000 worth of food with a few fruit plantings and 700 square feet of garden, and that is really a low-ball estimate.

Have you ever checked out the price of organic whole chickens? Oh yeah — as much as $20 each. I raise them in batches of 14. Two batches a year. That’s $560, minus the modest cost of feed. I keep them in a chicken tractor I built for less than $60.

How about organic eggs? $4 or $5 a dozen? While I am currently winding down my farm in hopes of moving, at peak I kept 20 laying hens that free ranged. I routinely collected seven dozen eggs ($35!) weekly. I’d resell them to coworkers at the day job and never had enough to meet demand. $25×52= $1820. I DID spend about $500 on supplemental feed, bedding and so forth. But still, that’s $1,200 a year. And that’s just in eggs. That doesn’t count the fact that their prolific droppings turn my compost pile into organic gardeners heaven.

So you have a house that you bought for $150,000. If you sold it and put that money in a CD, you’d get back maybe $2,750 per year for it. If it is mortgaged, you’re paying $1,250 month for it, and it is an expense. (And don’t forget all the utility bills.)

But adding it up, with a year round investment of an hour a day on average, maybe two hours if you are slow and enjoy it so you take your time, you can get back over $7,000 year by turning your property into something that PRODUCES something, instead of just a hotel. That’s like getting half your mortgage for free, and you don’t even pay taxes on it while still taking the mortgage interest deduction.

Turning your property into a MiniFarm is a financial winner.

Medium for Compost Organism Culture

A few days ago I was discussing my upcoming book on composting with a friend, and he asked a very worthwhile question: since you can’t actually see what is going on in a compost pile, how do you know?

The answer is that I have a laboratory and I have extensively cultured the organisms in compost and differentiated their populations by incubating at various temperatures and so forth. I can’t afford to equip a modern laboratory, but you may be surprised to discover that with just a few minor variations, the equipment and techniques of 100 years ago work just as well today and at trifling cost accessible to anyone.

For a very good introduction to all of the techniques necessary for sterile culture, separating organisms, and differentiating them through medium, incubation, growth habit, staining and more, you can refer to the free e-book on the Project Gutenberg website entitled The Elements of Bacteriological Technique. The information in this book is 100 years old and some of it is certainly out of date. So you should already have modern high school biology under your belt to correct errors.

Thankfully, with very little change, a lot of what is in that book is still in use and remains useful today. The materials used 100 years ago are still used today and can be purchased over the Internet. And, like I said, with a bit of creativity you can outfit a respectable and useful laboratory for hundreds of dollars rather than thousands or tens of thousands. A big bonus is that modern stuff is of higher quality due to improvements in manufacturing. Some of my gear is pretty non-standard. For example, my incubator is a drink cooler equipped with a Peltier junction and controlled via an Arduino. But bacteria don’t care how fancy your gear looks.

Anyway, to the nuts and bolts. My friend wanted to know what I use as a medium for growing bacteria from compost.

The medium for culturing bacteria should be as close as possible to the natural environment. What I do is pressure can compost tea made with distilled water in quart jars to keep it handy. I pressure can it for 30 minutes, more than assuring the death of all organisms, but retaining the other elemental constituents. When I am ready to make my medium, I use this sterile compost tea as a base, and incorporate:

  • 20 grams of agar
  • 10 grams of dextrose (I use the stuff from a home brewing store instead of the $pricey$ stuff from the lab company)
  • 500 mg of Ammonium Phosphate (Again, from the home brewing store)
  • 200 mg of Magnesium Sulfate (Epsom salts from the grocery store)
  • 500 mg of Peptone (from the lab supply company)

There is a special trick to incorporating the agar. Agar is a seaweed product that will turn the medium into something like gelatin. Mix it into a slurry with one cup of the compost tea, then add the slurry into the rest of the medium.

After this, bring the whole mixture to a boil over a water bath while stirring. This will let the agar dissolve completely and sterilize it. I then filter it through several layers of cheesecloth while hot and use it in my Petri dishes.

This is what I use for examining aerobic compost organisms and facultative anaerobes.

But, as you can see, there is nothing here that can’t be done by anyone familiar with canning. Science is not mysterious!

Book Signing at Yankee Magazine, 7/21/2012

I will be signing books at Yankee Magazine in Dublin, NH on Saturday, 7/21/2012 from 9am to noon.

In honor of my friend Sue Wentworth who was very active in Rotary, profits from books I sell at this event will be donated to the Monadnock Rotary.

Meanwhile, I have been very busily tending my own Mini-Farm, and have harvested a ton of mustard greens, broccoli and other goodies that are now safely stowed in the freezer!  I am also working on the fifth book in the Mini-Farming series, which delves very heavily into composting and soil management.

I won’t be giving any speeches at this event but, as always, if you have any questions — I’ll be happy to be as helpful as possible!

I hope the drought ends soon!

Maximizing Your Mini-Farm is Here!

Or, rather, it is available from Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Indie Books and other sources. To get a copy from an online source, just click on the image in the right-hand column.

I am really excited for this book to be out.

Maximizing your Mini farm is NOT a new edition of Mini Farming: Self Sufficiency on 1/4 Acre. Rather, it is an addendum or a sequel. Maximizing your Mini Farm adds new information that will help you short-cut the experience curve and get more productivity faster. I assume, in this book, that you have already read its predecessor, and dedicate all of the space to new information.

I got my author copies a couple of weeks ago and Skyhorse did a great job with the layout. I spent all last summer taking pictures in the garden for this book and some of the pictures are pretty nice, even if I do say so myself!  (*grin*) My favorite picture is where I captured two cucumber beetles mating!

Anyway, this is a great book. I have compressed a tremendous amount of information in it, and between Maximizing and its predecessor, you’ll be hard-pressed to find more information in any ten books on self-sufficiency. I’m proud of this work, and Skyhorse has done a great job of making it look great and bringing it to market at a price that is accessible to everyone.

Interview with Virginia Prescott

Earlier this week I went up to New Hampshire Public Radio to be interviewed by Virginia Prescott on her Word of Mouth program.

Though I have a small home studio that I use for recording musical compositions, I had never seen a real professional studio before. The sound-proof doors, sound-deadening panels and so forth were really interesting. Naturally, as a ham radio operator, I found the equipment interesting.

But there were two aspects I found really fascinating.

The first was that everything is timed down to the second. I got to watch the producer time everything from the cueing of music to the beginning of statements. There are big clocks with digital by-the-second countdowns in the control room. The producer speaks into the host’s headphones, letting her know how much time she has left and so forth.

The second was the host. Well, certainly she was well-informed and friendly, but I sort of expected that. When listening to talk radio, they make it sound so easy, but watching it live I learned a real appreciation for someone having a live conversation with you while having someone talk in her ear and timing her words down to the second. That is an amazing skill and it was fascinating to watch!

The interview went well, and if you would like to listen, you can find it here.

Rain, Rain!

Gabriel García Márquez wrote 100 Years of Solitude. As a sequel, I might write “Three Weeks of Endless Rain!”

It has been raining here off and on for nearly three weeks, making it difficult to get my frost-sensitive crops in the ground. However, I managed to do it in an interval between showers so the squash, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and melons are on the way!

As a bonus, the second round of carrots and parsnips are planted. In normal weather, these require daily watering for as long as three weeks, but I never had to water them once as Mother Nature took care of that task.

Usually, this sort of rain could lead to problems of waterlogged roots and disease. But when you use raised beds, that is not a problem so everything is healthy and robust! The weather forecast says nice weather will arrive for Sunday and I’ll use that opportunity to trim around the beds.

Happy mini-farming!

Reminder: Hoppy’s Country Store Tomorrow!

I will be giving a speech and signing books at Hoppy’s Country Store on May 19, 2012 at 2pm.

Hoppy’s Country Store is located in the NeWest Mall, 800 Turnpike Rd. New Ipswich, NH 03071.

This is a very intimate setting, so if you haven’t had a chance to meet me and ask questions, this would be a good opportunity.  I usually answer questions for about an hour after speaking.

Fun with Lumber

A lot of my raised beds are getting long in the tooth so to speak, and I’ll be replacing rotted timbers and so forth this weekend.

Kids come in handy!  My daughter Hannah and her friend Caitlin have agreed to assist. Being that they are teens, there is naturally one string attached: they have to get paid.

Can I pay them in onions or will they require cash?

(*grin*)