MOTHER EARTH NEWS June - July 2018

Nothing marks the onset of summer for me like making hay. In Kansas, we often get our cool-season meadows put up by mid-June. After the hustle and bustle of getting hay into the barn, we take a more relaxed approach to cutting the warm-season meadows. We use the hay to feed our sheep in winter and to move nutrients around the place. We still hay sheep in the corral so we can mix their manure with bedding and compost it for the gardens. Years ago, on our cattle farm in Ohio, thousands of small square bales of orchard grass and alfalfa would get cut, raked, baled, hauled, and tucked into our barns. The work was hard, but it got the cattle through winters. My daughters would work in the field, I’d…

I’ve been reading MOTHER EARTH NEWS for what seems like forever. I own just about every issue, beginning with the very first issue from 1970. Reading the articles in the February/March 2018 issue made me think I was reading MOTHER EARTH NEWS from years ago. I think it’s been the best issue article-wise to have come off the presses lately. “Masonry Heaters” and “DIY Wood-Fired Hot Tub” were just super and brought back so many memories. Since we currently have a greenhouse on our farm, I’m even implementing some of the practices cited in “Add Thermal Mass to Your Off-Grid Greenhouse.” In 1981, I was the head of our local MOTHER chapter — a group where people who shared the magazine’s ideals could network and build community. That same year, we…

Fermenting a Fondness for MOTHER My mom had a subscription to MOTHER EARTH NEWS when I was a kid. I admit I really didn’t pay too much attention to the magazines then, but I knew she read them cover to cover and had big homesteading dreams. I sure didn’t! But the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, as they say, and somewhere along the way I started reading them myself for gardening, preserving, and other tidbits of wisdom for living in harmony with our planet. For the past few years, I’ve been honored to be one of many presenters that help bring the pages of these issues to life, at MOTHER EARTH NEWS FAIRS across the country. It’s come full circle. Kirsten Shockey Applegate Valley, Oregon Readers, You can catch Kirsten or her…

“I’m a long-standing reader of MOTHER EARTH NEWS and have learned a lot from each issue.” Alternative Gardening Methods I purchased my farm 15 years ago, and I tried having a garden the first four years. Even though I amended the soil, I couldn’t grow a carrot to save my life. I discovered that I had loamy, white clay soil, which made growing edibles difficult. I’ve gardened most of my life, so this was disheartening. As a long-standing reader of MOTHER EARTH NEWS, I’ve learned a lot from each issue. Recently, I came across an older article, “Lasagna Gardening” (April/May 1999), and it inspired me to research alternative gardening methods. After that, I came upon an article about raised bed gardening. I combined the lasagna method (using cardboard to keep weeds out) with…

As atmospheric carbon levels inch higher each year and habitat loss reduces species counts and diversity at unprecedented rates, finding ways to mitigate the effects of climate change becomes ever more pressing. New research from Stanford University suggests that wild animals are doing some of the work for us — merely by existing. Trees are already credited with removing greenhouse gases from the air by “breathing” them in and storing them in their trunks and roots. The analysis, published in Nature in 2017 by Stanford University researchers, reveals that vertebrate animals are also efficient carbon sinks. Three years of environmental surveys and more than a million records of animal activity in the Amazon contributed to this research, which shows that carbon levels in soil are significantly higher in places where animal…

Genetic research unveils new truths about the natural world every year, but some genomes are notoriously difficult to crack. A small U.S. research team has finally succeeded in unlocking wheat’s DNA, a challenge that many crop geneticists considered almost insurmountable. The genetic complexity of wheat (Triticum aestivum) meant that it took more than a decade of global effort before the genome was successfully mapped. Between 16 and 17 billion individual nucleotides compose wheat’s DNA, and most of its genome is made up of repeating sequences that make it difficult for scientists to identify meaningful patterns using traditional DNA sequencing techniques. Likewise, a single copy of this DNA is more than five times the size of the human genome, and it contains six copies of every chromosome. Though the genome had previously been…