[TheForge] [OT] Re: Nightshade and conservation, and oops! OT

[Mike Spencer]

> Mike, what kind of seaweed, and is it chopped up? Rinsed? Salt 
> buildup on the soil?

In good years (good for me, that is) ptilota [1] washes up in
mid-winter to early spring, sometimes in banks 3 to 4 feet deep at the
high tide mark.  It's light and sort of fluffy and easy to fork onto
the truck.  For a decade or so past (good years, they tell me, for the
sea urchins which eat ptilota) it's been mostly desmarestia, a brown
stringy weed.  Much harder to load by hand but still worth the
trouble.  In the last couple of years the ptilota's been coming back.
In either case, there's always varying amounts of rockweed (the stuff
with little bladders you can pop), kelp, eel grass and some green
stuff I don't know the name of mixed in.  (I used sometimes to get
straight eel grass from another beach but they made it a bird sanctuary
and closed it to vehicles.)

I almost always get it at low tide from around the high tide line so
it's not dripping with sea water.  The amount of salt seems not to be
a problem and, OTOH, it has numerous trace elements in trace amounts
that typically get leached out of our soils by seasonal heavy
rainfall.  That same leaching probably prevents harmful buildup of
plain ol' salt as well.

I can see kelp would pose a problem but this stuff doesn't need to be
chopped or anything like that.  I just fork it right onto the potato
patch, sometimes on top of snow, about a 8" to foot deep.  By spring
it's settled down to a couple or three inches deep.

> When i lived at Piedras Blancas, the first big swells of winter 
> would rip up the luxuriant summer beds of giant kelp and heap 
> them up on the beach...sometimes yards thick. Then the waves 
> would cover them with sand...

Yeah, well, sometime the seaweed gets all churned up with sand in the
surf.  I make periodic checks from mid-January onward watching for the
right conditions.  Beach is five miles away and a nice place to
bird-watch and walk anyhow.  The sand cover poses another problem,
too: it can completely bury and hide a 2 foot layer of seaweed.  If
you drive on that, you sink in like quicksand and even a 4x4 with 16"
tires is in trouble.  I always take a walk on any potential such spots
before driving on them and so far I've been lucky.

> ... after a while and they'd stew.  The smell was such that the
> tourists were no bother at all that time of year.

I also bring home a couple of loads that I just pile up and to use
later as mulch or mix with half-rotted household garbage and manure
for compost.  That's a pile that starts out 4 to 5 feet high and does
occasionally spread a kind of seaweedy, iodine whiff about the place.
Never so noticeable, though, as the year when I prevailed on a nearby
fish plant owner to dump 40 tons of fish offal and salt bones in the
lower field. :-)

> Gaaaak! I hate finishing!...pf

I always have to remind myself that planning, design, drawings,
forging and fit-up take about half the time of a project.  Cleaning
and finishing take the other half.  Gak indeed.

Ooop!  That last paragraph is actually back On Topic. 8-)


- Mike


[1] Red, ferny stuff, pic at http://seaweeds.uib.no/?art=839
    where there are also some pics of desmarestia.

-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                                           /V\ 
mspencer at tallships.ca                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^