Still Stage One

The temperature at 10 pm was 16 and at 7 am was 23. Geothermal running on stage one set at 68 degrees totally comfortable and running in a normal on-off cycle. Family will be home as of today for Thanksgiving; can't wait to give them a tour of the geothermal.

Tracking my geothermal use

We just fired up (wrong metaphor) our new ground source geothermal heating system. I will now start using this blog to track its performance. Sorry, this will be all numbers from now on.

7 pm stage 1 temp 35

curious

sorry for the absence. I have been having trouble with my password so I couldn't sign on. And Amelia and her fiancee and his mother are staying with us this weekend, so there's not much blogging time. Soon. Soon.

Extreme gardening

Sometimes things just work out. We had a prairie burn yesterday when no one thought there would be a burn and things just seemed to be going the wrong way all week. As Yi-Fu Tuan notably said, we rarely think it's unfair when good things happen to us. Maybe it was unfair, but yesterday was a good day.

It rained Thursday. Friday was windy. Today it's snowing. But Saturday was an ideal burn day. Low temperature, moderate humidity, light winds. Northwest Airlines managed to deliver Bonnie to Madison Friday night only a few hours late. We managed to get the truck out of the mud Friday afternoon so we didn't make that mistake on Saturday when we should have been burning.

And we got an excellent burn in the woody corner where Bruce and I cut away the brush three years ago, so maybe now the prairie grass will start to re-colonize that corner. It once was oak savannah as is evident from the few large oaks still standing. But it probably had no fire or other attention for over 100 years until we started clearing and now burning for the past two years. Will it come back? Maybe yes, maybe no. It's a mightily hard thing to restore a prairie. You really understand the tenacity of life when you try to extinguish one kind of life in favor of another. Prickly ash, choke cherry, honeysuckle all want to live just as fiercely as do Indian grass, little bluestem and lead plant. We can only tip the balance a little.

This is one difference between gardening as we ordinarily understand it and extreme gardening of the prairie variety. You don't control the landscape, you only tilt the balance of power and depend on time and persistence to make a difference over the long run. The scale is so vast and the forces so large that change can only be incremental. This week we will plant some prairie seed in the areas we burned. Maybe next year some of it will come up. Maybe it will take three or four years.

Maybe some year we will see a profound change. In the meantime, it is the effort and the intention that count. And the glorious hours spent doing nature's work.

Fair and balanced my ass!

Talk about fair and balanced. FOX Business interviewed Bruce Nilles yesterday on the topic of CO2.

Well, not really. Actually, there was no interview involved. It was an interrogation. They set him up and blasted away at him with all guns to try to make him and the Sierra Club look as bad as possible and they used every dirty trick short of waterboarding to do it.

To set the "fairness bar" at a "balanced" level, the interviewer started off informing his audience that the decision to regulate CO2 "sets the stage for massive new government regulations and power over business." I guess you didn't have to watch the rest of the segment to know what you were supposed to think.

This guy was the most argumentative, opinionated and dishonest so-called journalist I have seen in a long time. Bruce held his own, which is saying a lot. If you don't watch FOX (and who does?) this bald-faced exhibition of venomous ill will is enough to angrify your blood for the week.

Worshipping the fire god

We are coming up on the high holy days around here. It's time to burn the prairie and the weather looks perfect on Saturday "the good lord willin' and the creeks don't rise" as Hank Williams used to say. It's hard to believe. We still have snow from Monday's blast. There's standing water everywhere. We'll probably get the truck axle-deep again this year if we try to drive it anywhere near the burn site. Last year we had to drag the truck out of a mudhole with the tractor and nearly got both mired. The weather report for the next couple of days can't decide between rain and snow.

But underneath it all, the European grasses are greening up and before we know it, it will be too green to burn. The big bluestem and the indian grass on the south-facing slope are just begging for fire. And the honeysuckle and prickly ash could use a good dose of it too. The prairie looks dead for sure, but the little bit of burning we have done over the past few years has encouraged species that we never saw before. The indian grass is especially a surprise because we never saw any before.

On some prairies you might expect to see pasque flowers, dwarf buttercup and prairie smoke starting to bloom in the next few weeks. We don't have any pasque flower, but hope we can find a little of the dwarf buttercup or prairie smoke. This will also be a good time to knock down some of the brushy stuff that's always just one step ahead of the chain saw and the drip torch. We may be able to burn just a bit in the woods this year if all goes well. We have about 10 acres that really should be oak savannah and all it would take is a few years of fire.

More prairie thoughts to come.

More money down the same rat hole

In today’s Times, Secretary of State Clinton at least acknowledges that the drug problem is not Mexico’s drug problem, but the USA’s drug problem. However, her solution is to throw more money down the rat hole and further militarize our southern neighbor. Three helicopters are a token. 300 wouldn’t make a difference. Drug runners aren’t the problem; drug buyers are the problem. Middle class white males. Politically untouchable. The only solution is to take the money out of the drug trade.

March 26, 2009
Clinton Says U.S. Feeds Mexico Drug Trade
By MARK LANDLER
MEXICO CITY — Seeking to ease a cross-border relationship strained by drug trafficking, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived here Wednesday and offered the clearest acknowledgment yet from an Obama administration official of the role the United States plays in the violent narcotics trade in Mexico.

“Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade,” Mrs. Clinton said, using unusually blunt language. “Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border to arm these criminals causes the deaths of police officers, soldiers and civilians.”

Mrs. Clinton’s remarks were coupled with a pledge that the administration would seek $80 million from Congress to provide Mexican authorities with three Black Hawk helicopters to help the police track drug runners.

(I support legalization of drugs as a policy. I do not use drugs or advocate the use of drugs.)