The past month has been packed full of both science and at home farming. I collected my final round of samples for the 2013 field season early in October in PA over a four day period. After bringing my samples back to NH, I began processing the samples in my new lab space...the old swine barn at the dairy. This cement walled building still smells of pig feces even though there haven't been pigs in the space for years! I had the pleasure of hanging out in the barn for weeks extracting soil dwelling fauna from both my soil samples and litter decomposition bags. Why would someone do this? I'm so glad you asked :) I'm interested in reconstructing the soil food web so that we can model how the food web structure changes following various agricultural management practices like tillage and cover cropping. To do this I need to know not only who lives in soil but also how many little creatures are present.
David busily processes fauna samples in front of the Berlese funnels. We use these funnels to draw all the soil fauna out of the samples we collected.
Our agroecology lab studies more than just soil food webs. In fact, my dear lab mate, Tessa, is examining the effects hoop houses have on green house gas emissions. To do this Tessa has built gas chambers out of stock pots! Yes, scientists are very creative people :) She also put her sewing skills to use for her experiment. She sewed sand bags to help seal the skirt she added to her gas chambers. It's pretty cool to watch other projects in our lab develop.
The picture below is from our first attempt at a hoop house this year. Yes! We already built a second structure. Here's the story. We, unfortunately, encountered a relatively strong storm a couple weeks ago that had 20+ mph winds. Since our hoop house was fully covered with plastic at the time the storm hit the structure acted like a sail and flew across the yard. Whoops!
So Ryan and I put our thinking caps on and built another frame for the hoop house that not only weighs more, but is also secured to the ground. We also added two layers of plastic (for insulation purposes) plus one wall of black plastic to help warm the space. You've probably never seen a hoop house with a black wall, but the black wall will absorb more photons than clear plastic and thus retain more of the heat moving through the hoop house (It's nice to see Ryan put his knowledge of physics to use too!)
Finally, if you were wondering about how our chickens will fair this winter there is no reason to worry. We have put a lot of thought into designing our coop to protect them from the elements while also making our jobs of watering and feeding them a bit easier. Our efforts have proved to be successful so far based on the fact that all of our hens (10 of them) are laying nearly everyday. Currently, we're selling at least five dozen eggs a week to our colleagues. Everyone says they're delicious and we tend to agree.
Just this week we found our very first goose egg!! We ate it and were pleasantly surprised. It was like a super duper large chicken egg with a thicker consistency. Because our female started laying we've decided we'll spare her from the dinner table for now. The male, however, is another story. He's big and beautiful, but he will soon be featured at our Thanksgiving dinner.
As always, I'll leave you with a few snapshots of the boys. The seem to always end up in a dog pile after a long day in the garden.
