Hines Farm - Fruit Tree Planting, 6-23-2012

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- 7 Dwarf Fruit Trees ( 2 Peach, 3 Apple, & 2 Pear) Planted in less than 2 hours
- After 41 years of marriage, we still are enjoying the farm together...
- "Jack Of All Trades" Eileen inspired background music choice...
- "Go Anywhere" post digger, http://hines.blogspot.com/2012/05/hines-farm-go-anywhere-post-hole-digger.html made the job much easier and faster in the very dry soil...

Regards and Respect to All,
Monte & Eileen

Credit Music:
http://brucespringsteen.net/albums/wrecking-ball
Bruce Springsteen

Wrecking Ball (2012)
Jack Of All Trades


LYRICS "Jack Of All Trades"

I’ll mow your lawn
Clean the leaves out your drain
I’ll mend your roof to keep out the rain
I’ll take the work that God provides
I’m a Jack of all trades
Honey, we’ll be alright

I’ll hammer the nails
And I’ll set the stone
I’ll harvest your crops when they’re ripe and grown
I’ll pull that engine apart and patch her up
Until she’s running right
I’m a Jack of all trades
We’ll be alright

A hurricane blows
Brings a hard rain
When the blue sky breaks
Feels like the world’s gonna change
We’ll start caring for each other like Jesus said that we might
I’m a Jack of all trades
We’ll be alright

The banker man grows fatter
The working man grows thin
It’s all happened before and it’ll happen again
It’ll happen again
They’ll bet your life
I’m a Jack of all trades
We’ll be alright

Now sometimes tomorrow comes soaked in treasure and blood
Here we stood the drought
Now we’ll stand the flood
There’s a new world coming
I can see the light
I’m a Jack of all trades
We’ll be alright

So you use what you’ve got
And you learn to make do
You take the old, you make it new
If I had me a gun
I’d find the bastards and shoot ‘em on sight

I’m a Jack of all trades
We’ll be alright
I’m a Jack of all trades
We’ll be alright


Very few artists can write ballards of such human intensity that when you hear it and in this case see it delivered it cuts you to the bone and hits you like a sledgehammer... the violence of the ending is as harsh as this song is beautiful ...

Wow. I cant believe just how deep and powerful the Boss has been able to create music thru the decades. I am just as blow away here as I was when I heard 'growing up' or 'Jungleland' or 'The River' for the first time.
"Here we stood the drought, now we'll stand the flood
There's a new world coming, I can see the light
I'm a Jack of all trades, we'll be alright "
Right on Bruce, right on.
imaginativeloginname

Related Links:
http://www.permies.com/t/14644/homestead/Go-Anywhere-Post-Hole-Digger
http://youtu.be/k1zj9LdesNU

Home of the Original "Bike Night" - Ducky's Lagoon, June 21, 2012, Mississippi River, Andalusia, Illinois

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Home of the Original "Bike Night"
Biker Fun and Entertainment On The Mississippi River

Related Links:
Video Playlist
Ducky's Lagoon Bar & Grill - On The Mississippi River - Web Site

University of Massachusetts Amherst proudly announces the Permaculture Your Campus Conference

The University of Massachusetts Amherst proudly announces the Permaculture Your Campus Conference held at the UMass Amherst campus June 20-22, 2012 with special keynote speaker Frances Moore Lappé, author of 18 books, including the 3-million copy Diet for a Small Planet.

Full Details: http://www.umasspermacultureconference.com/

How to Keep Deer Away From Tomato Plants | eHow.com

Discover the expert in you.
How to Keep Deer Away From Tomato PlantsBy David M. Murray, Jr., eHow Contributor

Deer love to eat tomato plants, and it takes some guile and ingenuity to keep those big, beautiful animals out of your garden. And don't think your garden is safe just because you live in a subdivision. The deer population continues to rise, and deer can be seen just about anywhere these days as more land is developed. Many gardeners prefer not to use chemicals to deter deer. Poisons can get in the water system, or may harm children or pets. Fortunately, there are alternatives to poisons, including environmentally safe products and homemade deterrents.Difficulty: Moderately Challenging
Instructions

Things You'll Need
Fabric softener sheets
Deodorant soap
Eggs
Wind chimes
Foil tape

Keeping Deer Away
1
Repel deer by introducing smells in and around your garden that they don't like, such as deodorant soap, rotten egg solution and dryer sheets. Rotten egg solution is a mixture deer hate, but it is not offensive to humans. Mix 9 eggs with 2 1/2 gallons of water. Spray it on your tomato plants. This recipe produces enough solution for 1/2 acre of plants. Hang the dryer sheets on a tree or a post. Nail a bar of deodorant soap to a tree or to a post, or put it right on the ground around the garden.
2
Introduce a noise element around your garden with wind chimes or by hanging foil tape, which produces a twinkling or flapping noise whenever there is a slight breeze. This will scare the deer away.
3
Apply an environmentally safe product designed to deter deer.
Tips & Warnings

Change your noise and smell elements from time to time. Deer will grow comfortable with your defense system if it is doesn't change.

Add water to your dryer sheets to refresh the smell every so often.

Fencing is a more expensive deterrent. However, you would need a fence at least 10 feet tall to keep deer from jumping over and still getting in your garden.
Resources
Deer Control Products

Also heard... Hammer some stakes around the perimeter of your tomato garden, 15 feet apart. Cut a few pairs of pantyhose in half. Place a bar of strong-smelling soap in each foot and tie the pantyhose off. Tie one wrapped soap bar to each stake. The soap will keep the deer away.

Read more: How to Stop a Deer From Eating Tomato Plants | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/how_5900756_stop-deer-eating-tomato-plants.html#ixzz1yXRRmruq

Group looks to turn forest waste into fuel for jets : Missoulian: News and Resources for Western Montana

LINDA THOMPSON/Missoulian
Wood waste from a thinning project is pushed into piles in the Bitterroot National Forest. The Northwest Advanced Renewables Alliance is looking to help the science and the infrastructure develop to produce jet fuel from such waste.

Related Links
Northwest Advanced Renewables Alliance website

The future of Pacific Northwest forests may lie in the stuff loggers now leave behind.

That’s the bet the Northwest Advanced Renewables Alliance has made in networking a roomful of professors, business leaders and government officials to turn wood waste into jet fuel. They’re working through a $40 million federal grant to envision all the mills, pipelines, refineries, outreach programs, permits and spinoffs the industry could create.

There’s just one hitch: Nobody has yet figured out how to economically make isobutanol fuel out of tree tops.

“We know that figuring out how to break cellulose down into sugars is the big gridlock,” said Montana State University extension forester Peter Kolb. “But you can’t afford not to pursue wood. Producing bioenergy from forests is the only agricultural practice in the world that also provides clean water and recreation and doesn’t compete with food production.”

Last week, about 20 NARA members and an equal number of interested stakeholders met in Missoula to hear the effort’s progress. Washington State University engineering professor Michael Wolcott acknowledged the program was a little like planning a city on Mars before anyone has a rocket to get there. But he argued there were plenty of good reasons to prepare for the rocket’s arrival.

Alternative energy ideas come in dozens of flavors. With cars, designers have promoted plug-in electric motors, hydrogen fuel cells, modified diesel fuels and mass-transit alternatives. But the aviation world is different.

“We can’t fly planes on electricity,” Wolcott said. “They’re going to be depending on liquid fuels for quite a while. Nothing else can match the energy density.”

That’s the amount of work a given technology can wring from a given amount of fuel. Nuclear power can move an aircraft carrier, but its reactors are too heavy to put in an aircraft. And so far, no one’s come up with a better plane-pusher than the internal combustion engine.

So NARA’s organizers feel safe betting that some scientist will crack the secret of turning wood into jet fuel. And when that breakthrough arrives, a lot of other things need to be in place.

“We need to understand the whole ecology of this industry,” said University of Idaho education coordinator Steve Hollenhorst. “There are decisions to be made about business locations, supply chains, how to develop the work force. We need to get people more literate about the implications.”

The concept resembles the old description of a good butcher who makes use of every part of a pig except the squeal. Kolb said traditional logging and present-day hazardous fuels reduction both produce huge amounts of now-valueless branches, needles, bark and skinny trees that can’t pay their way out of the woods. A biofuel industry would turn that material into a valuable resource supporting forest conservation as well as community jobs, he said.

Scientists already know ways to turn wood into jet fuel. The current methods can’t compete with conventional petroleum-based fuels. But anyone shopping for a plane ticket knows how much the airline industry gets whipsawed by the volatile nature of fuel prices. Adding a new supply source of jet fuel, even if it only met a fraction of the demand, would stabilize those price swings, according to Paul Smith, a NARA member from Pennsylvania State University.

“Just that stability is worth a premium,” Smith said. And both the private aviation industry and the U.S. military have committed to biofuel blends as a way to control their fuel costs.

The industry would need infrastructure that doesn’t currently exist. It takes people and equipment to haul the slash out of the woods and prepare it for fermentation that would turn the wood fibers to sugars and then alcohols. Fuel refineries would need capacity to process the wood fuels into forms that don’t corrode pipelines or engine parts, the way ethanol from corn now does. Those plants and processes might differ greatly between the wet Douglas fir forests of western Washington and Oregon and the dry pine forests of Montana, Wyoming and Idaho.

Kolb added that a host of environmental concerns needed attention, too. While harvesting slash could reduce the amount of waste burning in the forest, collection could affect water quality, wildlife habitat and forest health. The still-unclear effects of climate change and beetle-kill must be considered.

“This doesn’t mean vacuuming up all the woody debris in the forest,” Kolb said. “But in Montana, we’re looking at piles of thinning debris we’re spending $2,000 to $3,000 an acre to clean up. In this dry climate, they will persist for 50 years, unless they burn, in which case they burn so hot we get soil sterilization issues. This is a gold pile nobody’s using.”

NARA formed two years before winning its U.S. Department of Agriculture funding. It now wants to have its roadmap for industrial development ready for review by September. Then it will spend the next four or five years researching the ways that roadmap can become reality.

“I don’t want to see another study sitting on a shelf that I can’t use,” warned Tracy McIntire, the current president of the Montana Cooperative Development Center. “Who’s going to find the business models to run with this?”

“There are six companies in the hunt for this right now,” Wolcott responded. “They don’t start lawsuits over technologies that aren’t worth fighting over. We know cracking softwood is the hardest one to do. But if we’re able to crack that nut, the larger potential infrastructure is already there. That’s our big challenge.”

Reporter Rob Chaney can be reached at 523-5382 or at rchaney@missoulian.com.

Hines Farm Coal Creek - 2008 Storm Damage Cleanup

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Hines Farm Coal Creek - 2008 Storm Damage Cleanup reaching conclusion. Damaged tree debris and brush being burnt and turned into biochar... to be used with composting materials...With Heat Index today at 96 degrees, glad we finished up around 2:00 PM...

Marsh Marigold at Merwin Nature Preserve Illinois - YouTube

Published on Apr 4, 2012 by illinoisbay
March blooming Marsh Marigold in cold seep.

Marsh Marigold
Caltha palustris
Buttercup family (Ranunculaceae)

Description: This native perennial plant is about ½–2' tall; it branches regularly. The stems are hairless and hollow. Basal leaves are produced early in the year, while alternate leaves are produced along the stems. The blades of these leaves are up to 4" long and 4" across; they are orbicular-cordate, finely crenate along the margins, and glabrous. Their venation is palmate. The petioles of the basal leaves are up to 6" long, while the petioles of the alternate leaves are shorter than this. The upper stems produce small clusters of bright yellow flowers on short petioles. Each flower spans about ¾–1½" across; it consists of 5-9 petal-like sepals, a thick ring of abundant stamens, and a cluster of carpels in the center. There are no true petals. The sepals are bright yellow, well-rounded, and slightly overlapping. The blooming period occurs during mid-spring and lasts about a month. There is no noticeable floral scent. Each of the carpels matures into a seedpod that contains several seeds. This seedpod is flattened and recurved; it splits open along the upper side to release the seeds (technically, it is a follicle). The root system consists of a short crown with fibrous roots. This plant spreads by reseeding itself. It occasionally forms loose colonies at favorable sites.


Cultivation: The preference is full or partial sun, wet conditions, and mucky soil. Shallow standing water is tolerated. Growth and development begin early in the year.

Range & Habitat: Marsh Marigold occurs primarily in central and northern Illinois, where it is occasional. In southern Illinois, it is uncommon or absent (see Distribution Map). This circumpolar species also occurs in Eurasia, where it is native as well. Habitats include various wetlands, including vernal pools in low woodlands, swamps, soggy meadows in river floodplains, marshes, fens, seeps and springs, and ditches. Marsh Marigold prefers sunny areas where the soil is consistently wet from underground seepage of water, although it occurs in other wetlands as well.

Faunal Associations: The nectar and pollen of the flowers attract flies and bees primarily. This includes Bombylius major (Giant Bee Fly), Syrphid flies, Halictid bees, honey bees, and others. Two leaf beetles are occasionally found on the foliage of Marsh Marigold: Plateumaris nitida and Hydrothassa vittata. It is possible that they eat the foliage. For other herbivores, specific information for Marsh Marigold is lacking. Because the acrid foliage contains toxic alkaloids and glycosides, it is usually avoided by mammalian herbivores. The seeds of plants in the closely related Ranunculus genus are eaten by the Wood Duck, Sora Rail, and some upland gamebirds. The seeds of such plants are also eaten by the Meadow Vole, Eastern Chipmunk, and other small rodents.


Photographic Location: Near the Collinson Marsh in Vermillion County. Several colonies of Marsh Marigold were growing in a ditch along a field where there was underground seepage of water from a neighboring bluff.

Comments: In sunny wetlands, Marsh Marigold is one of the first wildflowers to bloom during the spring. The flowers are showy and conspicuous because of their bright color and relatively large size. The foliage is an attractive bright green. This species is not a true marigold of the Aster family, in spite of its common name. Instead, it is closely related to the many Ranunculus spp.(Buttercups) that occur within the state. The various species of Buttercups have smaller flowers (less than ¾" across) and they usually bloom later in the year.

PERENNIAL MAXIMILIAN Sunflower - Seeds Forever

Uploaded by cookingupastory on Aug 17, 2007
A field of shimmering sunflowers; a flock of hungry birds feeding , and a farmer who shares some of his stories about his sunflower fields.

Maximilian's Sunflower
Helianthus maximilianii
Aster family (Asteraceae)

Description: This adventive perennial plant is 3-8' tall and largely unbranched, except where the flowers occur. The central stem is stout, round, light green to light red, and densely covered with short white hairs. The leaves occur alternately along the central stem, except for some of the lower leaves, which may occur oppositely from each other. These leaves are up to 12" long and 2" across. They are sessile against the stem, and narrowly lanceolate. Their upper and lower surfaces are light green and covered with fine white hairs. The margins of the leaves are smooth, or they may have widely spaced small teeth. Furthermore, the typical leaf folds upward from the central vein, and curls downward from the stem on account of its length. From the axils of the upper leaves, there are short flowering stalks. Each of these stalks is more or less erect, bearing a single composite flower and possibly 1 or 2 leaves. Each composite flower is about 2–3½" across. There are 20-40 yellow ray florets, which surround numerous disk florets. Behind each composite flower, there are green bracts that are lanceolate or narrowly lanceolate; they are covered with fine white hairs as well. The blooming period is late summer to fall and lasts about 1 month. The achenes are linear-oblong with a pair of awns on top. They are blown about by the wind, or distributed by animals. The root system consists of fleshy, fibrous roots and rhizomes. Like other perennial sunflowers, this plant can form vegetative colonies.

Cultivation: The preference is full sun and mesic to dry conditions. The soil can contain clay-loam, rocky material, or loess. This plant appears to have few problems with pests or foliar disease. It can grow tall and spread aggressively, and may flop over while in bloom if it is grown in moist rich soil.

Range & Habitat: Maximilian's Sunflower is an uncommon plant that occurs in NE Illinois, west central Illinois, and SW Illinois (seeDistribution Map). It is adventive from the west in most, if not all, of these areas. It is possible, however, that Maximilian's Sunflower is native to a few of the western counties where it occurs in high quality natural habitats. Habitats include rocky upland prairies, loess hill prairies, ledges of rocky cliffs, areas along railroads and roadsides, and waste ground. This plant is more common in states that lie west of the Mississippi River.

Faunal Associations: The flowers of this species probably attract many of the same insects as other sunflowers, including long-tongued bees, short-tongued bees, butterflies and skippers, and beetles. These insects seek nectar or pollen. The seeds of sunflowers are an attractive food source to both birds and small mammals (see Wildlife Table). The caterpillars of the butterfly Chlosyne nycteis (Silvery Checkerspot) feed on the foliage, while the caterpillars of several Papaipema spp. (Borer Moths) bore through the stems (see the Insect Table for additional species that feed on sunflowers). The foliage of young plants may be eaten by rabbits and groundhogs, while large plants are eaten by livestock.

Photographic Location: A city park in Champaign, Illinois, where a colony of plants occurred along a small lake.

Comments: Maximilian's Sunflower is named after an early botantical explorer of North America. This plant has attractive foliage and flowers, and it is easy to identify because of the unusual leaves. These narrow leaves are longer (up to 12") than the leaves of other Helianthus spp. in Illinois, and they have a distinctive light green or greyish green appearance because of their fine white hairs. Two native species, Helianthus grosseserratus (Sawtooth Sunflower) and Helianthus giganteus (Giant Sunflower), also have narrow leaves, but they are not covered with dense white hairs. Another species resembling Maximilian's Sunflower is Helianthus salicifolius (Willow Sunflower), which occurs in the southern Great Plains. The Willow Sunflower has narrow leaves that are even longer than Maximilian's Sunflower, but they are only ½" across or less. The Willow sunflower is not known to occur in Illinois at the present time, although a colony of 500 plants once existed in Cook County before it was destroyed by commercial development. These plants were undoubtedly adventive from the west

Coal Creek "Arch" - Hines Farm

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"Arch" - Looking North - 2008 Wind Blown - Downed Cottonwood Tree


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"Arch" - Looking South - 2008 Wind Blown - Downed Cottonwood Tree

St. Louis, Mo. has "Gateway Arch" and we have "Coal Creek Arch"... (-:

Wild Wood Duck Hen and 8 Babies Hiding From Camera - Hines Farm Coal Creek

Published on Jun 18, 2012 by HRT87

After being surprised by Wild Wood Duck Hen and 8 Babies swimming in Coal Creek, we attempted to video. Eileen was able to film 8 cute baby ducklings being called away by Mother Wood Duck Hen...
Nature is amazing....

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Korean Ginseng, Learn all about it's health benefits

Published on Jun 17, 2012 by overlander

Interesting story about how this interview came about. On Wednesday last week I decided I would like to do a story on Korean Ginseng after reading about it's benefits on the internet. So I put out a message on South Korean Facebook and couch surfing groups. Within 10 minutes someone replied to me on Facebook with a contact from the USA, the son of Shi Keum, the chairman of the Korea Ginseng Association. Only problem was Mr Keum did not speak English, so I needed a translator. I put out a call for anyone wanting to help with translation on couch surfing and that day Minji took up my offer. This is the english version of the interview with Mr Keum, with Minji providing translation ( I will upload the Korean version also)
We discuss the health benefits of Ginseng, why Korean Ginseng is considered the best in the world, what varieties of Ginseng are available, such as Red and Mountain Ginseng, how Ginseng can be taking and who should take it. This coming Wednesday I will be visiting the Geumsan province, which is the main area where Ginseng is grown to film how Ginseng is farmed and manufactured.