Kames, Kettles, Cobbles and Stone Meal

Ah, it's so good to be living in glacial country again.  I grew up in another glacial place, south central Wisconsin, near the small glacial gorge at Devil's Lake.  It seems like home, although the scale here is much larger...mountains rather than hills.

Our Methow Valley, and the adjoining Chewuch Valley, where once filled with massive glaciers that extended 1000 feet down below the current valley floor.  Those glaciers slowly ground the underlying rocks, ranging in size from a car to a marble, into rounded cobble shapes.  The ground up material made a sandy loamy soil with various amounts and different sizes of those cobbles in it, at different depths, depending on where you are in the valley.  The result was what is called glacial till, as if the glaciers had tilled the land, totally transforming it.

Cobbles Steve sifted from a car-sized dirt pile

The glaciers also left behind their own unique collection of landscape formations of all sizes, shapes and orientations, that were superimposed on the larger, framing mountains and hills.  At our place, we have a series of low rises and a deep, round hole big enough for a house just outside our property boundaries. The rises are called kames and the holes are kettles.  They can be arranged in ways that you wouldn't see in a non-glacial valley and make for a whole new way of finding your way through a place.  Drainages don't always end up, or start, where you might expect them. Lakes and ponds can lie in surprising spots.  Massive rocks lie on the surface, all alone, with no apparent explanation for how they got there.  For me, all of this just adds to the charm of exploring this place.

Steve standing at the bottom of our kettle.  This one has no pond in it, unfortunately.

Each kettle was formed by a giant block of ice, the size of the kettle, that was left behind near the surface of the deep glacial till as the glacier melted away.  Some were lying low enough that the bottom of the kettle is below the current day water table, making a lake or a pond.  For a view of one of the larger kettles across the road from our house that has a lake in it, Little Twin Lake, go to Methownet.com/grist/features/twinlakes.html.

The glacier left behind a huge storehouse of material to work with, if you have a mind to build a garden.  Or, you can look at it as an immense headache.  If you see it this way, I would advise setting up your garden in another part of the state, or looking hard for those places in the valley where the soil is almost cobble free.  (We wanted to live closer to the amazing trail network near Winthrop and Sun Mountain and were willing to put up with the cobbles.)

Looking back at our place from the kettle.  Look at all of those rocks.

For me, the most magical gardening component of this kind of soil is the fine "glacial dust" it contains, full of minerals from rock sources as far away as Canada.  (Which is only about 30 miles north as the crow flies.)  In the late 1800's, a German miller named Julius Hensel used the fine stone dust that came from his stone grist mill on his garden.  He found that plants responded to it with extra growth, vigor and health and provided more produce.  He called the dust steinmehl, or stonemeal, and promoted it as the next big discovery in improved farming and food quality.  His book Bread from Stones is still read today by those who are looking for the best way to produce nutrient-dense food for better human health (although he is missing out on the importance of the organic material in the soil, it seems).  Unfortunately, he was up against the emerging opposing view that plants only need water soluble nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus to grow better.  This approach did make for faster and larger growth but did not produce stronger plants or produce of higher quality.  It was easy to scale up production and easy to apply, and quickly outpaced the early attempts at mineralizing the soil.

The discussion about soluble chemical versus mineral dust approaches, among agronomists, farmers and serious food gardeners, continues today with growing interest in the importance of soils having dozens of different kinds of minerals and elements.  The push is on to understand how these components should be balanced in the soil to produce health-promoting food.  Today's term for this is "remineralization" and is even being researched by the USDA, as well as a number of dedicated private individuals.  One strong local northwest regional advocate is Michael Astera, who offers soil remineralization prescriptions based on your soil tests and provides needed minerals for sale in amounts  that are right for home and small production gardeners, farmers and orchardists.  Check out his web site at soilminerals.com.  You can also look at the "Remineralize the Earth" site for the bigger hype.

The exciting thing for gardeners living in post-glacial country is we have a lot of native stone meal to work with in our soils.  The glacier did the hard work of grinding the minerals much finer than can be done cost-effectively, commercially; and we just need to add in some of the minerals that the parent material has too little of.  In this area, that might be some boron, potassium or phosphorus in fine rock dust form, and other trace minerals.

Using Michael's prescription for my Rockchuck Ranch garden, I amended 1000 square feet of new garden beds before planting them this spring, and will see what happens.  The results can be measured by a new soil test this fall, or by nutrient testing that is becoming available for garden produce through a service related to the remineralization groups, or by testing the sugar content of the produce known as the brix level.  I'm going to be looking into how to do this and will keep you posted on any results I might get.

My freshly dug garden beds.  Thanks Steve for helping with the grunt work

Critics comment on the need to mine faraway sites to provide minerals that are in short supply in different areas.  They point to the cost and environmental damage of mining and shipping minerals.  But, I think this needs to be compared to the environmental damage and health concerns from NPK-based soluble fertilizing, and the benefits of nutrient-dense food from mineralized soils.  The goal is to have a broad supply of natural minerals in the soil that micro-life can work with to maintain the right balance for soil life and plants over many years.  (More on this to come.)

I've just touched the tip of the glacier here, but hope that I might have interested some of you in an important aspect of food growing, remineralization.  I'm going to continue to experiment with this exciting approach that is being rediscovered from the 1800's by people concerned with how to grow really healthful food.

Kate

A New Start

Here we are at our 5 acre place in the Methow Valley of Washington State.  It's been over two months since we drove the big U-Haul truck from Salem, Oregon, where we'd lived for 25 years.  The time has flown since we've been here and we have been busy, but I wanted to tell you all of our trip and arrival before I get into other things in future blogs.

We had a great send off from Salem.  Some of our neighbors, former neighbors and co-workers hosted a variety of get togethers.  Thanks so much everyone. Our friends, Linda and Jeff, gave us a great, little dinner party with Merideth and Ken, on the last evening in Salem.  Great food, great company and lots of congratulatory, bon voyage toasts.  Steve hit the wall early after a 12 hour day of heaving lifting loading the truck with everything we owned, except for a few things that wouldn't fit and an hour and half of help from some Willamette students. We left the things that wouldn't fit in the truck in our lovely neighbors' house and basement,  while they were away visiting their relatives.  Thank you Mark and Gill.  I hope you've found places and uses for those things.  Steve headed home at 9 and was asleep in no time.

I stayed on at the dinner, urged on by good stories and a wide variety of spirits from our generous host.  It was midnight before Ken and Merideth drove me home, but it was a wonderful time that I will not soon forget.

The next morning Steve was up at 5, very fresh and wired to get on the road.  I was up an hour later, with six hours of sleep and pretty hung over but happy.  My adrenaline kicked in.  With the help of some Ibuprophen, I loaded our car with house plants, art work and our bags.  We drove away before 7.

Steve took his first corner with the big truck a block from the house in front of the neighboring high school, with me following behind.  I learned from watching that turn that the long wheel span of the truck makes the back end turn tighter than the front, causing the back wheel to run up onto the curb, or whatever was on that side.  I made a mental note to warn Steve about at our next stop.

The truck was really overloaded.  It was packed to the roof and had lots of heavy oak furniture, 32 large ceramic pots, dozens of boxes of books and most of Steve's wood-working equipment and tools.  It turned out to be tough to handle the truck in that condition, especially as Steve tried to make his way through a heavy Gorge wind.  Just our luck.  I was blithely following behind the big truck, in our Subaru Forester, NPR on the radio, houseplants piled in the passenger seat and on the floor next to me with a few friendly sprigs jostling my ear, lost in a post-party daydream.  Just follow the big truck.

We stopped every couple of hours, mostly because the truck needed more gas. Those gas bills were pretty sobering.  On we drove, across the bridge at Biggs and up the steep climb on Hwy 97, out of the Gorge and toward Goldendale, and then over another pass to Yakima.  I saw smoke erupt from the truck as Steve shifted gears on the first climb.  I flashed my lights, honked my horn and swerved into the oncoming lane to get his attention, to no avail.  He was riveted on the road ahead and controlling the lurching wheel with his favorite tunes on the headset.  After a while the smoke cleared up and didn't come back, so I settled back into my revery.

At the far side of Yakima we stopped for gas and the restroom.  The county road we were pulling out onto had no shoulder and a 6 foot deep ditch. As Steve made the turn the back, right set of wheels (dual wheels) rolled out into thin air a good 18 inches from the pavement!  I only had time to suck in a horrified breath, see the truck sway toward the ditch, imagine it rolling that way and remembered that the only thing our insurance would not cover would be a stupid accident like this.  Everything we owned would be lost.  But the truck was soooo overloaded that it counter-balanced on the remaining wheels and swung back onto the road with a bounce as Steve completed the turn and continued down the road.  He never noticed.  At the next stop, he was shocked to hear what happened.  The rest of his turns were nice and wide.

We made it to our place near Winthrop in about 9 hours.  Not bad really, considering the slower pace of the truck.  We were tired, to say the least, but very happy to have come to our new mountain home. Our new neighbors, Kathy and Jim, came out to great us.  What could be better!

The next morning we got up early and began to unload.  By 9:30 everything but the heavy stuff was out of the truck.  Steve was going in high gear. By 10, Tyler and Tanner, two local high school guys we hired, came over to help us with that.  They were young and skinny, but so strong.  They got it done in 30 minutes and were on their way.  They had beat the Willamette football players we hired to load the truck by a good hour!

When we arrived at the house we had 6 inches of snow on the ground.  A week later it was all gone except for a drift on the north side of the house that we used to cool a batch of homebrew and a batch of kombucha.  To our horror, the melting snow exposed a quarter acre of cobble rock rubble that was left from last fall's new drainfield  excavation, covering half of what was to be our new garden.  The rest of the back yard was thick turf where the garden needed to be and denuded sandy soil where the lawn needed to be.   We had our work cut out for us.

The kitchen needs a complete remodel.  It hasn't been touched since 1984.  All the original appliances.  No bookshelves for our hundreds of books.  Old carpeting, bad paint.  The double car garage/shop has a ceiling of slumping insulation bats, mismatched plywood walls and the original overhead door, in rickety, drafty shape.   This time we decided to do it right.  Instead of working on the project of the moment, and not looking ahead to the full, final vision, as we did over 15 years of remodeling at our Salem house, we would prepare what we needed to get the rest of the work done, the shop, and build the future framework of the garden, before we planted anything and before we started to work on the house.  What a concept!  You would think two professional planners would have figured this out sooner.  But hindsight is 20-20.  After two months of hard work, we are getting major steps of that work done.

 It is good, honest, hard work and that is what we need right now.  We need to put our hands and backs to work again.

Our shack

So, we are gradually rebuilding and revitalizing this place.  We've named it Rockchuck Ranch.  Our motto is "practicing farming on a micro-scale"...but we are also building the place up in every sense...the house, the outbuildings, the fence, the garden and orchard, the pastures, our health, and social and creative lives.  We call it Rockchuck Ranch because this is serious post-glacial country with cobble rocks galore, of every size....and in honor of the large local rodent more often called a marmot, who makes it's home in the rocky ditches and banks.  The locals call them rockchucks...and rockchucks we are becoming... digging, moving and rearranging cobbles in every task on the ranch. How many rocks can a rockchuck chuck....

And, of coure, we are learning as we go.  We've done some of what needs to be done here before, but not all in one concerted effort.  So here we go...thought this blog would at least provide you all with some entertainment...watching our trials, errors and accomplishments...and showing you life at Rockchuck Ranch.

PS:  I am a novice blogger.  Wish I had a 14 year old around who could coach me.  But hopefully this blog site should improve as I become more familiar with using it.  I hope you like it.  Please send me your views.  Kate