Tending the rambunctious garden
November 10, 2012
Author Emma Marris posted the following twitter comment two days ago:
Emma Marris @Emma_Marris Sitting down to write a piece about hipster hunting. Are the hipsters near you taking to the woods with (vintage) shotguns?
Today Emma Marris’s young brother-in-law Vanya Rohwer showed up at the farm with pal Martin Mallet. Clutching vintage shotguns, they pressed Charlie into a photo shoot to illustrate Emma’s forthcoming article in Slate, the online magazine.
Quite a bit had already gone on this Saturday. Tony had stopped by early to use the hoist to put on his winter tires, so I backed Charlie’s 968 out and we put his car up. That went well until we bogged down trying to find the oil filter on a Lexus IS350. No luck. Finally I checked online. Unlike my ES which takes a conventional spin-on filter, the IS has a replaceable internal cartridge filter. Problem solved. Impressive car from the underside.
By then Rob had arrived with his Jetta for a brake job, only the service station which repaired a flat tire for him a couple of months ago hadn’t given him back his little wheel lug key, so he had to run back to Kingston to get it.
Meanwhile Charlie’s Audi pulled in with a bad miss. While the cars scurried around, Tony and Roz contented themselves digging carrots and beets from the garden. Between meal preparations Bet and Cagney worked their way through a pile of pine and spruce boughs, arranging the outdoor Christmas decorations. My mother conscripted me to an hour of curtain hanging in her upstairs bedrooms.
Rob returned with the recovered lug nut key and worked until his brake job ran up against a VW stud shaped like a torx screw, only with 14 teeth. No way to get a wrench to fit something like that on a weekend. Rob’s car went back together and off he went.
Charlie and I grabbed computers to diagnose the problem with his faltering Audi. I found the trouble code with my trusty reader: P0171. Something about the air/fuel/crankcase vent. Armed with similar information from an Audi forum, Charlie beat me to the car, traced an air line to a broken plastic valve, duct taped it into place and solved the problem until he can get a replacement part. No surprise then that I had shattered the handle of the dip stick on this 2003 car when I replaced it today. Audi plastic seems to have an expiry date.
Then Martin and Vanya arrived and the photo shoot commenced. Everybody loaded everything (including several changes of clothes, various firearms, a bag of frozen squirrels and a random cow mattress out of the shed) into the Ranger and headed for the woods. What bugs me about ex-skateboarder Vanya is that he can step into the back of the Ranger. I can barely climb in over a tire.
Dressed in his bright orange windbreaker, Charlie took charge. Roz played the role of BOGO, essentially a mobile shadow to keep the sun off the camera’s lens during shots. Martin and Vanya wheeled out various props, the most impressive of which had to be the vintage Browning 12 gauge automatic Vanya brought. The entire barrel cycles back when it fires, an impressive sight, though there was no ammunition in evidence on this “hunting” trip. Martin made do with an elderly single barrel twelve for the vintage shots, but brought out his ultra-chic camouflaged Italian semi-auto at first opportunity. It is a fine shotgun and I would be proud to own it, too.
So the hunters became models while Charlie posed them at the edge of a field of corn and in front of an old walnut tree. Endless shots, setups and discussions ensued. The crew got away from me when they drove the Ranger to the other side of the woodlot to catch the setting sun and I came back to the house on my little tractor. Well after dark they arrived, grinning and hungry. Martin and Vanya reportedly spotted a large clump of oyster mushrooms halfway up a dead maple, so the modelling deal was off until they had finished collecting bags of these huge fungi. The oysters are very large this year.
I asked Vanya about the sister-in-law who is writing the article in question. Roz mentioned that Emma had spent many years as a staff writer at Nature magazine and currently has a book out. So I looked up Emma Marris, discovered that Amazon still had ten copies of Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World, and I ordered one. If she is as good a raconteur as her brother-in-law, the book should be a treat.
<a href="” title=”My snapshots” target=”_blank”>
Here are the professional shots:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/charliecroskery/sets/72157631978729754/with/8173946563/
C-38 and your new dock
May 6, 2012
Keith Ashfield in a speech in the House of Commons on May 3, 2012 made the following comments:
We would clarify situations where development poses the highest risk to fish and fish habitat and those areas of limited risk. We would establish a new framework, in conjunction with stakeholders, to make it easier for people to comply with the Fisheries Act while working in or near water. This would include identifying classes of low-risk work, such as installing a cottage dock, and classes of water where project reviews would not be required. For medium-risk projects, standards would be established allowing Canadians much-needed clarity while they carry out those projects.
Ashfield’s comments sound reasonable as such comments often do. What worries me is not the shift of focus toward allowing cottagers to put their docks in with less restriction, but the apparent removal of regulation from ditches and flood plains, the source of the majority of pollution to enter the fisheries system. From a cursory reading of the debate it looks to me as though farmers will no longer be held accountable for runoff from their fields (fertilizer, pesticides) unless there are actually fish in the ditch.
Pesticides are the major pollutant in fish in the Rideau Waterway. Allowing the market to decide whether a farmer cleans his sprayer in a puddle next to a ditch (Roundup is expensive, eh?) doesn’t seem o.k. to me.
More research is needed here. Please feel free to offer clarifications as comments.
Morels, 2012
May 2, 2012
My latest theory involving the morel hunt: you don’t find them. They find you. These were around the roots of a couple of young elms which were cut out of the flower beds last year after they subsided to blight.
If some brilliant biologist or organic chemist would isolate the chemical released by dying elms which triggers morel growth, I would like a litre of it.
The Legacy of Edmund Zavitz
September 6, 2011
It’s hard to believe as one drives through the lush Ontario landscape that it was not always this way. That’s why the photos in John Bacher’s Two Billion Trees and Counting: The Legacy of Edmund Zavitz (Dundurn, 2011) come as such a shock to the reader.
I looked in amazement at pine stumps standing on skeletal roots high above the drifting sand below. In another photo a sand bank gradually engulfs an apple tree. In 1885 a main road near Picton was buried under 30 metres of sand. A brick factory had to be abandoned due to the sand invasion.
In other photos the Oak Ridges Moraine appears as a vast, sand wasteland, fissured with deeply eroded gullies. The photos show the gritty reality of what happens to a rich landscape when it is plundered without care.
At the turn of the twentieth century, unfettered logging driven by the railroad led to the destruction of much of the forest which covered Ontario. Slash from the timber cutters was left where it fell, turning to tinder in hot weather. Sparks from steam locomotives caused fires of such frequency that the topsoil burned or blew away along the railway lines. In the Canadian Shield the land was burned right down to the rock. In Southern Ontario the underlying sand became a desert over large tracts.
But the loggers and the locomotives were not entirely to blame. The myth of the Ontario pioneer shows the immigrant struggling with his axe to fell the tall trees, then burn them for potash to provide income prior to planting a first crop of wheat in the few acres of the homestead tract the family was able to clear each year. According to Dr. Bacher, over vast tracts of Southern Ontario and on into the Canadian shield, the reality was one of reckless burns of the forest for the ashes left in the wake of the fires. There was more money in supplying the soap factories with potash than in subsistence farming on marginal land, so the squatters would often move on to another patch of virgin forest and try again.
It was a war against the landscape. Railroads, logging companies, prospectors and squatters raced to gobble it up. Politicians looked upon the receding forest as an impediment to progress, and the market in its products as a patronage opportunity.
Catastrophic floods, droughts and fires followed. The history of pre-1925 Ontario is one of devastation.
In his book Bacher traces how a single man, Professor Edmund Zavitz, convinced Ontario that there was a better way. Zavitz was a bureaucrat who used the technology of the time to convince landowners and legislators alike that the future lay in controlling the waste caused by degradation of the environment.
His friend J.H. White’s photographs documented the “railside burning of forests down to bare rock (108)” which led to federal regulations on railways in 1912. “In 1915 Zavitz’s inspectors found 36 fires which were caused by settlers starting fires in dangerous seasons and not controlling them… Such dangers, they believed, had to be accepted as the price for living in Northern Ontario (109).”
The Matheson Fire on 1916 burned twenty townships across Northern Ontario with 243 deaths. Cochrane burned out for the third time. 89 died in a sudden firestorm in Matheson. In all, 6% of Ontario burned. The Haileybury fire of October 4, 1922 caused 40 deaths and destroyed 6000 homes.
Through the use of air power, tougher laws, and changed public attitudes, Edmund Zavitz pioneered the control of loss from forest fire in the Canadian north. Working with Premier Drury and later Premier Ferguson, he ended the threat of uncontrolled forest fires in the north.
Zavitz brought similar stability to Southern Ontario with reforestation programs which eventually ended the threats of drought, flooding and spreading deserts as the consequence of deforestation (144).
Fire protection and reforestation programs pioneered by Edmund Zavitz over his life have largely shaped Ontario’s landscape and climate. Bacher’s book details the stages by which this Ontario Agricultural College professor and visionary public servant created and preserved this rich legacy of tree planting on private lands.
After it had been severed by the lack of understanding and subsequent cutbacks of the Rae and Harris governments, the link to Zavitz’s tradition was reestablished in 2007 by the McGuinty government. With minimal funding and support from a wide variety of organizations and individuals, the 50 Million Trees Program has quietly restored the link to this proud tradition in Ontario.
UPDATE: October 29, 2011, The Globe and Mail offered the following concise review by William Bryant Logan:
Two Billion Trees and Counting: The Legacy of Edmund Zavitz
By John Bacher
Dundurn, 274 pages, $26.99
John Bacher, an environmentalist and historian living in St. Catharines, Ont., has rescued Edmund Zavitz (1875-1968) from undeserved obscurity. Zavitz was appointed Ontario’s chief forester in 1905, when vast stretches of Ontario were deforested to the point of desertification. Beginning with the Oak Ridges Moraine, which was rapidly becoming a dust bowl, he instituted reforestation projects all across to province, establishing tree nurseries and bylaws and educating politicians and the public about the dire consequences – flooding, erosion, sandstorms – of over-cutting. He went on to become Ontario’s deputy minister of forests and director of reforestation. One month before Zavitz’s death, Ontario premier John Robarts planted the billionth tree on Zavitz’s watch, and more than a billion have been planted since.
A profoundly humbling moment
March 14, 2011
The tsunami which swept over coastal areas of Japan this week will rank in our memories as the defining moment of many lives. All over the world humans recoiled in shock, then oozed forward in fascination at this enormous, uncaring power before which we were powerless.
On video we watched the best of buildings — designed and built to protect their occupants through massive shocks – perform their roles well, only then to be swept away by the wave of black water and debris.
We saw the most common symbols of Japan in Canada, small gray and white automobiles, tossed around like marshmallows in the dark chocolate torrent which swept ashore.
Our hearts went out to the people in the vehicles in the path of that tidal wave, people very much like us, whose fear and will to survive we could well understand. In the face of devastation that massive, and the cold, hungry nights of the multitude of survivors unprepared for such hardships, it’s hard even to think of what to hope for them.
It is in the aftermath of the disaster that the grim reality of life and death on this planet unmasks itself. When thousands of bodies drift ashore at the same time, crematoria cannot accommodate them, and cherished notions of order break down. Nuclear generating stations don’t stop producing energy when damaged. Demons unleashed, they continue to erupt radiation and explosive hydrogen, tormenting survivors for the foreseeable future.
Damian Grammaticas of the BBC wrote of the devastation of a small town in Japan: “As you gaze over the wrecked landscape, it feels as if the natural order of things has been shaken, and nobody knows when it will settle down again.”
But we must not make this more than what it is. This is not the end of the world. It’s a routine adjustment of its skin by the planet we inhabit. Earth’s a rough place to live at times, and human intervention had absolutely nothing to do with the initial disaster. That’s a humbling thought.
But it may well lie in the recovery efforts from the flood and the nuclear demons which man has unleashed where we humans distinguish ourselves, and show that we may indeed have some claim to our self-proclaimed title of stewards of the earth.
Back to school
December 6, 2010
Last summer Roz suggested that the course of Dr. William Newcomb, known as “Dino Bill” to his students, would be a good fit for me. Trees of Canada, Biology 529, is a seminar offered to fourth year Queen’s undergraduate students.
During the introductions I probably shouldn’t have mentioned that this was my first university course since 1980. The comment led to the first of a series of blank looks from the seven women and three men in the class. They appeared to have no way to comprehend a creature from this era.
What’s more, this artifact insisted upon making comments in class. Perhaps no one in the room was more discomfited than Dino Bill. When my prof told me he had his own portable saw mill, I reasonably asked him for the make and model. His mouth dropped. I don’t think one of his students had ever asked him that. Same thing happened when he mentioned his skidder. I had seen one of that model for sale on Kijiji that morning.
Dino Bill assigned a short seminar on tree-cutting rules in their home municipalites, so the students reported from Montreal, Winnipeg, the Ottawa Valley, Ottawa, Bermuda, England, Australia, and three boroughs of Toronto.
Unlike graduate students who seem to have quite a bit of flexibility in their schedules, these undergrads seemed very pressed for time. When I invited the class to the woodlot for an afternoon walkabout, a couple of members of the class did the math and came up with a total time commitment of five hours. They reluctantly concluded that it couldn’t work this semester. There just wasn’t enough time.
The 8:30 class had perfect attendance. The only slightly-late arrivals were those who had seminars that day, who often came in showing the effects of very little sleep. But the handouts, graphics and oral presentations were of the first order.
After three decades of trying with limited success to teach students how to write good point-form outlines, I was delighted to see the quality of the outlines these guys produced. I asked Eric how he learned to write this way. “Uh, I sorta watch what the other students do, and then try really hard to match it.” Well try they do, and they succeed. Over the course of a full semester of written materials, I did not notice a single error of spelling or grammar.
I told Eric and anyone within earshot that in the outside world their writing and presentation skills alone are a very marketable skill, regardless of their scientific knowledge.
As Roz anticipated, the content of the course proved highly interesting to this veteran tree-hugger. The chemistry was way beyond me, but the rest was just fine. The big surprise was the lack of a textbook for the course. Most of the seminar material came from Internet websites devoted to tree cultivation and biology.
For the most part this worked well. The only weak spot in the data seemed to be the trap of a popular map marking the range of each tree species: it must have been designed by a politics major, for it painted the whole province or state green if that particular tree was found in it.
At 8:30 on a Tuesday morning it is hard to look at an illustration of the entire province of Ontario painted green to describe the range of the sugar maple. This error made its way through most of the seminars, which illustrated that while these are bright young people, they have little real-world experience yet. The image of maples growing on permafrost along the shore of Hudson’s Bay — I just can’t get it out of my head.
But the students were in their element on the biochemistry of cancer-fighting compounds extracted from British Columbia yew and red cedar. The history of the willow tree parallels the evolution of modern medicine.
Bill assigned me a seminar on the managed forest, a program for privately-owned woodlots in Ontario. I showed up with a 16-page handout of our management plan and a reprint of a Review-Mirror column on the subject. I started off by asking the students the following question:
“Assume you have been put in charge of a substantial woodlot. Please list in order of preference the following benefits you would like to receive from the property:
ecological benefits, recreation, wildlife habitat, money, wood products, aesthetics.”
A glance at their papers showed money at the top of almost every list!
Another surprise came when I finally realized that these were not English literature students. For years I have observed print-fixated English majors in meetings latching onto the first available thing to read and rudely ignoring the speaker. I thought my current classmates were extremely polite to resist the temptation of the printed page in favour of the talking head, but I gradually realized that reading is work, not fun, for biology students.
The best thing about the course, undoubtedly, was the young people in it. Dino Bill said they are an uncommonly good lot, and I would have to agree. If they are Canada’s future, we’re in pretty good hands.
the Walnut Diary 