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[Entrance Music – electronic jazzy]
>>Lisa: Now one of the great things about building a hay bale is that it’s a pristine
environment for a while. Snails don’t really like to grow up the…I mean go up the side.
Because it’s very painful. But they eventually somehow…they get on a bird or something,
they get over, I don’t know. And then this decomposes over the season, and it gets pretty
lumpy and it looks like an earthquake. And then the next year it’s the perfect environment
for strawberries. Even when this is no longer physically recognizable, this whole bit of
carbon has broken down and gone into the soil. And so the soil is transformed underneath
and you didn’t break your back doing it.
[Pause, with music in background]
>>Lisa: So the idea here is to put this down underneath the hay bale. The gopher wire comes
up the sides about 6-8 inches. And then you get big erosion control staples, which you
can get from Scotts Valley Sprinkler, and you kind of pin it in. It’s like a giant
bobby pin. Cuz the gophers will come overland and go right into the bale.
>>Lisa: So I’m going to let you guys do all the work here! So, I need 4 people to
pick up a bale and make that picture frame!
[Pause. Music plays while Dreemers create]
>>Lisa: So you guys go ahead and just sprinkle a bunch on the top. Why are we putting fertilizer
on these hay bales?
>>Students: To get them to start decomposing.
>>Lisa: Right!
>>Student: What can we use as a nitrogen source? Like the bat guano you were saying?
>>Lisa: Yeah, bat guano…um chicken manure, llama poop…what else?
>>Student: Worm casting?
>>Lisa: Worm castings. You can use your own urine. High nitrogen – get out there to
the nature range. So this means that there’s a nitrogen source for this big piece of carbon
to use so that it doesn’t have to rob nitrogen from the soil!
[Pause]
>>Lisa: So then the idea is that you’re supposed to wait for a couple of weeks, and
you water that nitrogen fertilizer in. Cuz, in order to have the breakdown happen with
the nitrogen and the carbon it…you need moisture as well.
[Pause]
>>Lisa: So now Dustin, I know you’re ready to…put soil in the middle! If you were concerned
about where you were going to get the soil from, you could actually – before you put
the gopher wire down – you could dig into the soil a couple of inches and stock pile
that, in a couple of wheel barrels, or these 15 gallon buckets, or whatever you have on
hand. And that would give you the soil that you would then use on the top. So then you
put about 6 inches, and that gets filled up too. And then you just kind of smooth it out,
and you do have to sort of pat it to have, kind of an angle on the side so that…because
if you make it straight up all the way to the edge – that soil falls off anyway.
>>Lisa: You could put a picture frame of wood – 2 x 6, which is 5.5 inches tall – you
could put that around it to keep the soil from falling down all the time. You could
put stones around the edge. What else? What else could you put around the edge?
>>Students: Bricks.
>>Lisa: Bricks! Right!
[Pause]
>>Lisa: So they suggest you wait a little while, like a couple of weeks, before you
put the plants in…but I’m never that patient. So I just go ahead and say “just sink or
swim”.
[Student laugh]
>>Lisa: Because you’re putting mostly warm season things in there. But do you see how
much more soil volume you have in the center for the watermelons, the bell peppers, the
cantaloupes, the eggplant. They get to send their roots down really deep. This you just
do 6 inches. So out here you could put Basil, loves this idea of warm soil…um bush beans,
not pole beans. If you’ve never been able to successfully grow tomatoes because you
have a shady, you know, afternoon of redwoods or something…then this is a way to get the
warm soil without using the sun. You’re using the natural decomposition of the carbon
and nitrogen.
[Pause]
>>Lisa: Yeah, Fondon?
>>Student (Fondon): Do you only want to do this if you’re having problems growing warm
season crops and veggies?
>>Lisa: It’s an easy way to deal with a difficult soil that’s heavy clay. Let’s
say you had a really sandy soil, you would bring in a top soil. You would get clay soil
from a friend, because sandy soil doesn’t hold on to nutrients. So this would be your
opportunity to concentrate your efforts into fertilizing this area right here, and having
some clay that holds on to nutrients and that microorganisms enjoy.
>>Student (Marianne): Can you do this on top of asphalt?
>>Lisa: yes, you can do it on top of asphalt or concrete.
>>Student: No gopher wire.
>>Lisa: No gopher wire, exactly!
>>Student: If you only have room for the one bale, would one bale – just like the one
you guys did – will that be enough critical mass to warm up that soil?
>>Lisa: Yes. Yeah, you can still do this. But don’t expect, in 6 inches of soil, to
be able to put the bell pepper and eggplant that kind of thing. But you might be able
to do serrano, habanero, jalapeno.
>>Lisa: It’s a fun experiment to try – is to just see…grow beans in the ground and
then grow beans here. Grow basil in the ground, grow basil here.
>>Student: Is this going to be too hot for tomatoes that grow pretty well?
>>Lisa: If you can grow tomatoes in the ground, grow tomatoes in the ground. If you have trouble
because of being really close to the ocean and having the fog of the summer or you have
limited sun access during the day…then put tomatoes on. Otherwise, put them in the ground.
>>Lisa: There ya go, Juan?
>>Student (Juan): Are you planting stuff on top?
>>Lisa: Yep! Yep! Basil, bush beans…um you can, you know, you can dress it up and do
flowers.
>>Student (Juan): And they’ll root themselves into the hay?
>>Lisa: They do, the hay begins to decompose. And, it is a pretty water intensive thing
– because you only have 6 inches of soil around the edges.
>>Student: How many squash would you put in the middle?
>>Lisa: No squash! No squash! No squash! Zucchini at the base. cantaloupe, watermelon – the
melons.
>>Student: So how many melons, and then like 1 pepper, or 1 tomato?
>>Lisa: Ok good. Um, I would put 4 peppers and I’d put, in a clump – 4 watermelon
plants, 4 cantaloupes.
>>Lisa: and you know what’s great to do in here, is to do some direct sowing in the
middle of the summer. Like, direct sow beets in there underneath the foliage of the other
plants. Because beets are a root crop and their not all that thrilled with root disturbance.
You want to sow carrots, sow carrots in there in the middle of the summer. Again, it’s
a controlled environment. You’re not direct sowing something that’s a great big long
bed that the birds can, you know, move through. You could put floating row cover over the
whole thing for the germination time – but it will be super fast. It wont be the 14 days
that they need to keep that moist in the organic farm, it will be 5!
[Pause]
>>Lisa: We talk about respecting the soil layers and not turning the soil like a pancake.
And then we do this where we turn the soil all over the place. But then we don’t disturb
it after we’ve disturbed it for the first time. So you do it once and you say your apologies
to the microorganisms that die in the process. You know that’s the thing about flipping
the soil like a pancake – there’s a relationship that all the microorganisms have with the
surface. So there’s the ones that live in the top quarter inch, the top inch, the top
two inches, and different organisms life 6 inches down. So if you flip everything then
the ones that are used to living six inches down are at the surface and what happens to
them? They…
>>Students: Die.
>>Lisa: Die!
>>Student: I get tons of wind where I am. So will that retain more moisture in there?
>>Lisa: In the center? Yes. But this will dry out. What I would suggest to you is that
you get some weed cloth or some shade cloth, and actually build a wind barrier on the windy
side.
[Pause]
>>Student: How would you keep cats out?
>>Lisa: Oh!
>>Student: Hot Pepper Flakes!
>>Lisa: Hot pepper flakes, that sounds good! Because they love this kind of super soft,
well broken up soil, as a cat litter box. You can put little, cheap, bamboo steaks that
are 2 feet tall, sunk in here every like 4 inches – so there is sort of a barrier.
And it’s cheap.
>>Lisa: So I want to talk about why chicken wire isn’t gopher wire. Chicken wire is
not hot dipped galvanized. When you say something is hot dipped galvanized to protect the metal
– they use zinc. And zinc is that coating. And gopher wire has that coating, and chicken
wire does not. And chicken wire – the holes are big enough for…a baby gopher to go right
through. So if you had chicken wire around and you wanted to use it, you could even do
what is going on right here – and that is to double it. But, um, I would recommend that
you buy Gopher Wire!
[Exiting with music playing]