Has New England been lost to the Ents?

[james_davis_nicoll]

Feral plants swarm across lost farmland: has the lesson of Day of the Triffids been lost on the Americans?

Comments

[movingfinger]

...I was reading books and articles about that in the 1970's. This seems like a strangely delayed reaction.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

We built that!

(Old news in Maine, which has been going back to forest ever since farmers discovered that Ohio, etc. had dirt that wasn't 75% glacial rocks.)

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I've mentioned that you can kind of predict where the Germans and Scots settled in Ontario by looking at the rock fraction of the soil?

Graydon has a nice routine about Scottish farmer confronted with rock free soil for the time.

[montedavis.livejournal.com]

Our place in Maine was ~30 miles from post-glacial Chamberlain Lake (named for Joshua, of Gettysburg/Bowdoin/state governor fame). When I took my sons to Gettysburg and they saw the rocky, scrubby slopes of Little Round Top, we concluded that the staunch 20th Maine had said: "This is choice farmland -- damned if we'll give it up."

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Sounds about right.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Some people think our field-stone walls are quaint. Reality is, the farmers were just getting rid of the damned things.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Funny; we had to go rock picking before each planting season but for the life of me I don't know what happened to the rocks. They were not turned into walls; land was divided with wire fences of varying degrees of electrification.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

We have some significant rock-piles on top of exposed ledge at the top of pasture areas and in the woodlot.

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

That's like what happened to our ash pile, the cumulative result of maybe fifteen years of dumping the residue from two wood stoves, two fireplaces, and one Franklin stove. When I went looking for it twenty-odd years later it had up and vanished into thin air.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Well, potash IS rather soluble (and a fertilizer, to boot.) It probably dissolved away.

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

Where did the new rocks come from each year? (This is a genuine question btw, I'm so urban I fart dubstep, surely once you cleared a field of rocks the field would be rock-free until another glacier came along)

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

From below. One of the side effects of winter is that buried rocks move up to the surface.

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

I thought rocks were sessile? (anyone got a link to a wikipage explaining this process? It is for realsies totally counter-intuitive to me)

[dsrtao]

Suppose you have a bowl full of loose grapes and small oranges. You shake it. The grapes can fall into spaces that the oranges don't fit in. A little bit of shake energy, over time, can cause all the grapes to be on the bottom and all the oranges to be on top.

The grapes are dirt and the oranges are rocks. The shaking comes from frost cycles, mostly.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

There was a seminal paper on this in Physical Review Letters.

1. Rosato, A., Strandburg, K. J., Prinz, F. & Swendsen, R. H. Why the Brazil Nuts are On Top: Size Segregation of Particulate Matter by Shaking. Physical Review Letters 58, 1038-1040 (1987).

[poletopole.livejournal.com]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frost_heaving

Key terms for future reading (Wikipedia seems rather thin on this subject, perhaps I could contribute) include patterned soil and patterned ground, pingo, stone run, and the amusing troll bread.

[nojay.livejournal.com]

My uncles who owned (along with the local bank) a hill farm not far from town swore to me that there was a mother rock under each field that would spit out a fresh crops of stones every spring to be harvested by the plough and that's why I had to pick them up. Later they bought a stone harrow, a large rake-like object they towed behind the Ferguson tractor, dumping piles of stones in the field edges where we loaded them into wire baskets by hand.

[(Anonymous)]

Huh. I (shame, shame, yes) have been watching the new "My Little Pony" series, and on one episode there's mention of a rock farm. Seems like there is a real-life equivalent.... :)

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Don't farmers now deal with rocks by using a rock crusher? Turn the rocks into small fragments and let them oh so slowly leech minerals into the soil.

BTW, it's quite interesting (at least to me) how little energy is needed to crush rock to a fine powder.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

A surprising number of rocks will fracture when hit by another rock, with not even that much force behind it. When I found that out, I felt like Thor for a minute. "What are you DOING?" said my boyfriend's friend. Then he called out, "Don't mess with [ethelmay] -- she breaks rocks for FUN!"

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

This is news!?

It's just as bad a problem in the southern US, where, as Bailey White puts it, vegetation does not know its place. Even if there is no kudzu.

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

Unsurprisingly it only takes two comments to get to, "Overpopulation! Disaster! Sterilization!" However, that does lead to this interesting tidbit:

Little known fact about Sweden, that supposed bastion of liberal idealism: If a Swedish transgender person wants to legally update their gender on official ID papers, a 1972 law requires them to get both divorced and sterilized first.

Sweden is considered extremely gay-friendly, with one of the highest rates of popular support for same-sex marriage, and more than half the population supports gay adoption. Arguing that the current law is both unpopular and abusive, the country's moderate and liberal parties want to see it repealed. In response, the small but powerful Christian Democrat party formed a coalition with other right-of-center parties to join in upholding the requirement for sterilization. End result: a proposal for new legislation that allows trans—a preferred term for many people who undergo gender reassignment—to be married but continues to force them to be sterilized.

When trans people can't present official identification matching their preferred gender presentation, they can suffer "frequent public humiliation, vulnerability to discrimination, and great difficulty finding or holding a job," says Boris Dittrich, advocacy director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Program at Human Rights Watch, in response to the law.

http://www.motherjones.com/mixed-media/2012/01/sweden-still-forcing-sterilization

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

For irony's sake a sex change operation in Iran requires... nothing really; Tell the authorities that you're getting a sex change, you'll then be able to schedule a date for the operations and once you have that the authorities will update your birth certificate appropriately without any real fuss, due to the hard work of Iranian trans-activist Maryam Hatoon Molkara (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryam_Hatoon_Molkara), who managed to get two fatwas from both a pre- and post-revolutionary ayatollah okaying it and thereby giving Iran one of the most liberal transrights laws in the world.

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

That's certainly not something I expected.

[rfmcdpei.livejournal.com]

The problem is that gay is assimilated into being trans in Iran--if you're biologically a guy who's into other guys, well, you must be a woman. Else, y'know, stoning.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

That's a very interesting way to solve the Obvious Problem that Everyone Must Be Straight.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

No, it went from 'humans crowding out animals' straight to Horror Oh Noes Forced Sterilization(tm) Would Be The Only Way!

Nary a nod to letting all these 'sluts' buy contraceptives through their insurance plan, or other, yanno, practical VOLUNTARY things.

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

Because if they have access to birth control, they'll stop being pregnant all the time and have time do science and look at the rocks and realize how to extract lunar He-3 from them

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Has anyone tested those New England rocks for 3He? I THINK NOT!

And I'll point out that the Adirondacks are largely made of anorthosite, just like the lunar highlands.

[rfmcdpei.livejournal.com]

::like::

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

Were overly fertile transgendered people a real problem in Sweden?

[(Anonymous)]

One wonders: if the mid-west and SW gets wacked hard enough by global-warming derived drought, will it become profitable to farm in New England again? (Where, IIRC, the latest models show things should be OK for a while - well, aside from the hurricanes... :) )

Bruce

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

Ah, the joys of living on a moraine. Here in western Washington state, you have two choices when it comes to where you can live. You can live in a flood plain, or you can live on a moraine. Throwing rocks over my fence into the horse pasture is a time-honored pastime in my garden.

[jwgh]

A few years ago I was leafing through a geology book and found that early settlers of New England had a concept of 'seed rocks'. The idea was that if, when you were turning your garden you didn't get every single little rock out of it, then over the winter the remaining rocks would grow and multiply and when planting time came around your garden would be full of rocks again.

Anyone who has gardened in New England can see how this idea could take root here.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I have to admit that sounds suspiciously like the New England sense of humor in action to me.

it's our old friend Razib Khan

[(Anonymous)]

and his writing isn't getting any better. "This does not mean that people should avoid nature, but, they could experience it when they chose to experience it, instead of living within it."

as others have noted, old news to anyone from the region.


Doug M.