Meet Walter "the Weeder" - Chemical Free Weed control - automated!

Walter has arrived!  Walter the little sprouts weeder robot!

If you remember last year, we toyed with the idea of heat based biological safe weed control . And those tests were quite successful! You can browse through the blog post and see our test plot of using heat to treat the ground before planting.. and the huge difference it made in subsequent weeding.  The use of heat killed sprouted weeds, but also weed seeds, so that the newly planted veggies have little competition during their critical first few weeks.  It is a great no chemical way of weed control!

But ... the down side, our first attempt was VERY labor intensive. So much so  that we actually gave up half way through. We had mounted a propane infrared heater behind a metal 4 wheel wagon and manually pulled it along. Way too heavy, way to slow. Not practical even for the weeding savings.

So.. this year.. we made WALTER! we gave him a name because watching this little guy work is like watching a robot. He slowly plods along burning the weed seeds in the ground as you sit back and watch . Its a BEAUTIFUL thing!

So here is how he works.. We have a few pictures and a couple videos to explain the design. The basic setup is :

• Pulling engine
• a 120 volt winch mounted to a pallet
• a long metal cable (340 feet!) of a very thin diameter
• some safety switches
• Burning platform
• a 120,000 btu propane heater mounted on metal skids
• a wooden cart on skids to hold the propane tank
• some safety switches
• Safety features
• the pulling engine has a pipe that works to kill the winch when the burning platform gets close enough
• The burning platform has a pipe that hits the pallet when it gets close and kills the propane burner

That's Walter! Just line him up, turn him on, and for the next 35 to 40 minutes he patiently burns the ground on a 340 foot row.  The ground is hot, very hot, so hot that a foot behind Walter, you can not hold your hand against the ground. I have not measured, but suspect it is about 120 degrees , and probably about 150 to 200 under the burner.  Hot enough to penetrate a quarter to half inch and kill many weed seeds, but not hot enough to kill the subsoil organisms underneath. 

Some pictures of "Walter the Weeder"

The burning platform, first run. As you can see below, we actually had to change the pull method from the sides to the middle back, becasue this one caught too much dirt by digging in too low in the front. The changed version below worked much better

Propane tank on the holding platform with skids. There is room for two tanks, but used only one today.  The cable attaches on the right of the picture to pull it. The rod at the bottom is the burner safety setup. AS the platform approaches the pallet of the pulling engine, the pipe hits the pallet, slides through the pvc housing, and hits the switch, which turns off the propane burner.

Closeup of the burner safety switch. The pipe gets pushed from the left, through the pvc housing, and the end (wrapped in duct tape) hits the switch (covered with a pad of duct tape). The contact is enough to flip the switch, but then the pipe keeps pushing back without breakinging anything. This allows the burner to turn off long before the winch quits pulling, making synchronizing the two easier. 

View of the burning platform from the front.  The plywood plate on the bottom right of the pic is where the winch safety switch hits the platform to kill the winch. 

Walter in operation! This is the full 330 foot row.  Can you see the pallet??

The updated setup. Instead of a wire down both sides, we put a eye hook in the center of the wooden platform, and ran a wire from the two burner skids through the eyehook That keeps everything going straight and adds just enough up pull to keep the burner from digging into the dirt. 

Closeup of the updated pull system. 

This is a closeup of the winch safety switch on the engine platform. The pipe is inside the pvc housing going to the right, and the end of the pipe is a big ball of foam, wrapped in duct tape. As the rod gets pushed inside the housing from the approaching platform, it slides in  and hits the switch mounted in the brown housing. That switch kills the winch. It takes a few seconds to come to a stop, so the end of the pipe is about 3 inches of foam, plus the actual switch is mounted with a half inch of foam between it and the housing. That provides enough play to keep everything stable, but let the winch come to a halt without breaking anything. 

Engine pallet platform from the burner side That cable going off the bottom is 340 feet of 1/16 inch metal cable. Safety strength is about 100 lbs, enough to pull the burning platform but small enough to fit all that cable on the winch pulley.  The rocks are added weight to keep the pallet from moving towards the burning platform. It takes about 50 lbs to keep the pallet stable. 

Another view of hte pulling engine. The original winch controller is still attached and works, to manually pull the cable in when necessary.  the plywood plate on the upper right is the plate that the burner safety switch hits to kill the burner when it approaches the pallet. 

And now the fun part! a video of Walter working away!

This first video is the burning platform moving. It takes about 40 minutes to complete the 340 foot row. The speed changes of course as the winch winds up the cable, which is a problem to be solved next year.  This is the speed at the far end, when it is just starting. 

The next video is the winch engine pulling. The cable actually wrapped up quite nicely! The motor didn't get too hot running that long, since there is only about 50 lbs being pulled. 

The last video I tried to capture the safety switches running at the end of the row to safely shut Walter down. First the burner safety switch activates to turn off the burner, then the winch switch activates to shut it down to a rest.  I started the video a little late, so its hard to see the first switch activating, but its there in the first 2 seconds. 

UPDATE! Here is a better video of the end of a row showing the safety switched working

Overall we are VERY pleased with Walter... He performed beautifully with only the one small change. I would love to get some temp readings if we have time.. but the priority now is getting these seeds in the ground. 

We may be making Walter available for rent, to anyone local that wants to use heat weed control in your own garden. If you are interested, contact us and lets talk. 

How to judge hay or alfalfa quality

Ever wonder how to gauge the quality of hay or alfalfa? Here is one quick easy way- a shovel. While the ground is wet but not waterlogged simply pull up a shovel full of topsoil where the hay grew. Now count earthworms. The more there is... The more valuable the hay grown is.

This works because the ultimate test of grass quality is nutritional content. The higher the nutrition per blade and the more balanced... The better feed it is. Nutritional content is built primarily by soil microbes. Applied fertilizers have little to do with it. The soil microbes are responsible for making nutrients available to the plant. Things like bacteria and fungi create the elements that plants can use.

One way to judge how healthy the microbes are is by the quantity of earthworms living with them. More earthworms mean more microbes. So ultimately how many dozen earthworms are in a shovel full of dirt tells you how healthy will be the animals living off plants grown in that dirt.

As a side note... Ever wonder why it is necessary today to feed animals direct minerals? How did the animals survive without that? The answer is... We must supplement today because so few hay and alfalfa growers understand that the minerals present in their hay is not from fertilizer... But microbes. The hay and alfalfa commonly available today is so low in nutritional content that the animals fall to malnutrition without supplemental minerals. How much better to give them natural grass grown in ground teaming with tiny unseen life that feeds us all!

Gardening Mistake 1- Timing of planting and building up

I have been reading a very good book called "ECO FARMING". I recommend it to anyone who wishes to seriously understand the chemistry and biology of soil building and plant producing.

The first lesson leaned in this book is that I have committed a cardinal sin in my garden, thereby severely reducing yields and hampering nutritional value. That is the sin of bad timing.

What I have done for 3 years is this cycle..
When winter dries out enough to work the ground, I add as much organic material as I can gather (shavings from chicken coop, scrape the pig pen, clean out the barn stalls, grass, etc). I applied that to the garden and tilled it under a couple of times, then plant. I  assumed that organic material was good so it could be added anytime. WRONG!

Organic material is good, it is in fact the only way to increase soil fertility. Chemical bagged fertilizers do NOT increase soil fertility, in fact they reduce it. The mirage is that plants seem to grow better with chemical fertilizer, for a while, but its not real. Over time more and more fertilizer is necessary to achieve the same effect until finally we realize that the land is.. dead.  No, organic material is the ONLY beneficial soil building process in the long run.

However, you can not add uncompleted (green) organic material when plants are growing. Green organic material must be added at the end of fall, when it can sit and compost in ground over the winter before spring planting.  Adding green material in the spring right before planting has a detrimental effect on plants for that year.

The reason behind this is that the organisms in the soil that compost the material USE the same nutrients that plants need to grow, so for the time that the ground life is composting the green material in the soil, the plants are left without nutrients and actually starved.  It is only after the soil life (bacteria, fungus, etc) has finished composting and then dies itself, that the nutrients they consume in the organic material and produce in themselves are deposited in the soil for plants. So here again is a cycle of nature. Organic matter added to the soil is consumed by bacteria and fungus, then the bacteria and fungus die and their remains are higher in nutrients that the original material. Plants can then grow in this and excel in nutrition and hardiness.

Composted organic material ( to the point that it looks like dirt)  is ok to add anytime of course.

So, this spring I wont be adding any additional organic material that is not composted . Next fall I plan on adding everything I can find right after harvest, till it in, make mounds to drain the water better, and let it sit for the winter.

Is grass truly the basis of life?

One  of the pages above on this blog is about grass and how grass is the foundation of life. As odd as this sounds, it is in direct opposition to commonly held and taught beliefs in the agricultural world. Most of the agriculture world recognizes corn as the "perfect food" and the basis of life, even for animals that do not naturally eat anything but grass. I suspect this is due to the fact that the US government has and still does subsidize the corn crop of America to such an extent that no other crop can compete. For whatever reason, the government pays for corn to be planted so that it can be sold below production cost.  I'll stop here on corn since that is a separate blog post.

My purpose in this post is to state that my own views are evolving, and today I would offer that grass is at the foundation, but is not the foundation.  Something even more fundamental supports the growth of grass. My thinking in that post did not go far enough.  It is not enough to point to grass as the plant that provides the basis of the food chain, rather it is the soil that the grass grows in. The soil, its chemical and biological makeup, is the basis of life.

I'll be updating that blog post as soon as I can (and when the research on this is complete).

Land, Sea, Plants, Animals ...

In my researching methods for sustainable farming (farming here encompassing animals and plants) a fascinating sub world has come to light.  We all have seen "exciting new discoveries" from time to time that seem too good to be true. Only occasionally do they stand the test of time.  This discovery seems very interesting.

A respect PhD, Dr Maynard Murray, deceased, conducted some experiments all the way back to 1938 with fascinating results. Inspired by the extraordinary resistance of sea animals to degenerative disease, Dr Maynard explored what would happen if the qualities of sea water were applied to plants and animals on land.  The results are nothing short of astounding.

To summarize, virtually all degenerative diseases  tested were cured or significantly reduced through simple application of the trace minerals in  sea water. This was even the case for animals specifically bred to produce genetic dispositions to cancer. In this case, the genetic disposition to cancer was reversed in two or three generations.  the list of degenerative illness is amazingly long, surpassed only by the list of cures shown through sea minerals.

There is no magic bullet here, no single element or compound that affects this health change. It is the balance of minerals that seems to provide benefit. Changing the concentration of a few, even while leaving the components complete, makes the application ineffective. That, sadly, is probably one of the reasons that this knowledge has been all but forgotten in the modern world. It is only within the last few years, when people are finally realizing that we are killing ourselves through our food supply, that notice is being given to this amazing discovery.

The method is simple, sea water or the minerals evaporated from it, or added to the soil. plants grown in this soil are inherently more disease and pest resistant. Animals then fed on these plants are also amazingly disease resistant. It is as if restoring the soil to the balance of ingredients in the sea is a magic process for restoring inherent life to plants and animals.

We have not tried this out for ourselves yet, but I am hoping to implement a sea mineral application before next springs' garden and pasture growth. We will report here any findings. Until then I encourage to read through this amazing excerpt from Dr Maynard's book:

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/SEA.html

Weeds - Friend or Foe?

Weeds... those little nuisances that seem to grow like magic anywhere, faster than anything productive, more healthy, more prolific. They should be eradicated at all costs! Or should they?


Learning more and more about nature has begun to alter my views on .. weeds. Perhaps they are not the incessant evil I have always believed. Perhaps they actually serve a purpose. Perhaps... they are good for the earth.


Nature, left to itself, will always seek a balance over time. When there are hills and valleys, the rain and wind weathers the hills and fills in the valleys to seek a balance. When a forest becomes overgrown the storms send lightening to start fires and remove the excess brush and seek balance. There are dozens or hundreds of these situations in nature where one force offsets the other to re-establish balance across all. This is nature's way of sustaining itself, keeping the planet healthy. It has worked from the beginning of the earth, generation after generation. It is only recently when man started altering this balance, that the earth suffers (but that is another blog post)


What part could weeds possibly play in some sort of master plan for maintaining balance? Consider the nature of weeds. They grow faster with fewer nutrients and less water than "productive" plants. They are hardy, resistant to disease and blight. They are unattractive to most bugs. They only real fame they seem to have is their ability to live in the harshest of conditions.


A related point to consider here is that nature resists barren soil. Any piece of ground left to nature will soon be covered with growth of some sort. Tilling the ground does not leave it in a natural state, since tilled soil is rarely found in nature. Aside from recently man made chemicals that are capable of truly killing a plot of land irreparably, any open piece of land will spring to life by itself.


Put the two thoughts together and... weeds suddenly serve a very important purpose. Weeds are in fact natures instrument for restoring life. The ability to grow in the harshest conditions match perfectly nature's need to restore life where life can barely exist. without weeds, nothing could grow in the barren ground and it would lay barren and lifeless indefinitely since "productive plants" cant grow in the conditions of the soil.


Now lets take a step further and ask... what is actually happening here. If land is barren and lifeless, how does the growth of weeds  restore the ability of productive plants to prosper? I am no biologist nor chemist, but what I do know is that life expands life. Weeds as they grow conduct all the normal processes that plants use to turn sunlight into usable energy. In essence plant life is natures solar energy plant. The energy in sunlight is used to create plant life, which then eventually dies to create mulch and compost, which give life to bugs and bacteria and fungus that gives nutrient and life to the soil.  Weeds are in fact the first step in this chain of restoring the ability to support life into the soil itself.


Another interesting point is that it is possible to tell the nature of the soil condition by which weeds grow in it. each weed prospers in a particular soil condition. not only this, but when that plant subsequently dies, it gives back to the soil that very thing that it lacked which encouraged the type of weed that grew. what a beautiful  cycle!


I have noticed just in the last 3 years that the weeds in our garden are different each year. as the soil matures and gains health, the weed content encouraged changes to follow. this tells me that perhaps the weeds that are growing each year are exactly what is necessary to heal the ground! therefore, removing all weeds would prolong the healing process nature has in place, and although immediate gains might be seen, the long term health of the land suffers.


So there are benefits to weeds. They certainly produce organic material that builds the health of the soil. They provide cover from the harsh sun to make life more hospitable for the good bugs and worm and fungus. They provide shelter from the elements to new seedlings.  It would seem as though the weeds are actually a positive as long as they are kept in "balance".


One might say , as I have, that weeds take more from the soil than they produce. But is that really true? I read recently of an old experiment where a plant was grown in a protected tub of soil, and the soil was carefully weighed before, during, and after the plant's life.  After adjusting for water content, the weight of the plant was much greater than the loss of weight of the soil that produced it. Therefore the plant did not deplete the soil nearly as much as it created new energy to be redeposited in the soil as compost.  That is a fascinating thought... the plant CREATED more soil more then it consumed.  Now, I do not know if all plants have this ability, but I strongly suspect so.

 Hopefully I can research and experiment to prove this theory over time. Its difficult to accept the fact that weeds are a friend as much as a foe. I cant yet say that weeds should grow freely in a garden area, but at the same time, I can no longer say that weeds should be eradicated at all costs.


Stay tuned for the development of this theory.

Moving deeper into understanding plants

Now that our animals are mostly settled and growing nicely, it is time to turn some attention to the growing of plants, specifically fruits and vegetables. The Farm that we ultimately wish to create will be based on both plants and animals in our own controlled ecosystem where all species are interdependent and coexisting in a set of symbiotic relationships.  This seems to be the true nature of a successful farm.

The growing of plants is perhaps even more important than the raising of animals, since animals life fundamentally relies on plants for existence. The health of nutrition of plants is one step below the health of animals in the food chain.

My research so far has been into the history of modern farming of plants (which seems wrought with as much problem as the modern raising of animals). There are fundamental problems that I see already in the commonly accepted and taught approach to raising plants. At the root of all the problem is a similar problem as that seen int eh raising of farm animals, shortsighted and narrow vision of nature by man. I am becoming convinced that the last few generations of mankind (at least in America) are suffering from a sever case of more information than we have the wisdom to apply.

Here's some of the problems in plant growth discovered so far:

1. mono-cultures - raising an abundance of one crop without the offsetting influence of other species
2. belief that plants only take 3 nutrients from the soil (NPK) and nothing else matters
3. hybridization of plant genetics to suit man's shortsighted goals (genetic inbreeding of plants) at the expense of nutritional value
4. lack of application of the system nature has to renew and preserve the soil
5. application of chemical pesticides to control the bugs that nature sends to attack unhealthy plants
6. removal of weeds intended to help regenerate the soil

That's just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.  In future blog posts I will be sharing what I learn as we go through this journey. For now let me just peak your interest in the goal:

A generation ago, valid science conducted by a respected scientist virtually proved that many of man's ailments could be cured through the proper treatment of the plants that provide for man's existence. Serious health problem such as cancer, hardening of the arteries, even genetic dispositions to particular diseases were corrected through careful and natural raising of plant food. Although published, this information has gone mostly unnoticed in today's "modern world" for whatever reason, but it is still as valid as ever.

To heal America, we have to heal her land. It is truly that simple.  At Little Sprouts Farm we are dedicated to rediscovering these truths and learn to apply them in today's world to make a positive impact on our health, our environment, and have a wonderful life while doing it!

Stay tuned for more!