Icky Situations

The latest Rock Garden Tour podrocket just launched today. In case you missed it on SD Public Radio Sunday night, you can check out chunks of my conversation with Flowerman. Hot Sludge just won’t die. My apologies to overall-wearing county commissioners for blowing your cover.

sick 'mater

As I peered into the tomato/pepper raised garden bed this beautiful evening, I could only think…WTF!? Any tomato doctors in the house? Never seen something like this on the end of a vine. What gives, master gardeners of the blogosphere? I need to use the force to fix this one, cause worm poop tea–the cure-all of plant cure-alls–hasn’t done the trick so far.

And finally, a question. I’m not really watching the bartblog stats like a hawk, but couldn’t help noticing a major GWB-sized dip in the ‘ol traffic the past several days. We’re talking near three-year lows on daily visits. Can’t think of any reason people would be staying away from bartblog, can you? It’s not like my last post was scary or anything…

Happy Auntie

Love you Nancy. Happy 50!

Community Gardening

The Montrose Community Garden is different than most. No plots you can rent. Just a group of volunteers who plant and nurture veggies out there, and harvest them every early Saturday morning to share with the whole village. Donations are accepted, but not expected.

This past weekend, the bounty was beets, carrots, onions, monster cabbage and zucchini. All wonderful. We were too late to grab some carrots, but Uncle Ray invited me to come down any evening and dig a few up. I think I will, but it’ll be more about digging stuff up with Ray than about wanting carrots.

Because of all the beets, there were a whole lot of greens piling up around the garden market on Main Street. The community gardeners sent all the “waste” home with me to turn into compost. It took two trips, and I found about a dozen beets in the bottom of one container that were missed (I brought them back uptown).

trimming beets

ready to compost

Faces in a Weekend

Sand Buddha

Kid Pretenders

More Candy Please

Beached

T

K

Hold on

happy 50

happy face

12 seconds

So I started a profile on this new-to-me site called 12seconds.tv. It’s pretty simple: share video, in 12 seconds bites. Check out Mesa and Zoey at the Sport Days carnival here: http://12seconds.tv/channel/joebart.

(I can’t seem to get the code to embed from 12seconds.tv, so here’s the video on youtube. Come on WordPress!)

More Hot Sludge

Footage from the big Sioux Falls Wastewater Treatment Plant tour, where we discovered the nuances of anaerobic digestion, hot sludge sundaes and SiouxperGrow fertilizer. Not in the video: an announcement by Lyle Johnson that the whole grounds around the wastewater joint will soon become restored short and tall grass prairie. It just keeps getting better…

One beat

A friend just shared this verse with me. It echos my heart, so I share it with you…

This harsh and splendid land

With snow-covered rock mountains, cold-crystal streams,

Deep forests of cypress, juniper and ash

Is as much my body as what you see before you here.

I cannot be separated from this or from you.

Our many hearts have only a single beat.

-from The Warrior Song of King Gezar

Rock Garden Tour Blows Up

Straw hats off to the dudes of Rock Garden Tour. The best radio show on the prairie just went global. Well, statewide anyway. Flowerman, Oil Can and the RGT Family Band made the leap from small college radio to South Dakota Public Broadcasting. Boom!

What?! You don’t know how to turnip your radio? Rock Garden Tour is this fun little program and podcast celebrating some of creations’ greatest achievements: rock n roll, rural life and gardening. The podcast is great, the live show is better. Now you can catch it on SDPB Radio Sunday nights at 10, or download the podcast.

The Rock Garden Tour interview at Michelle's Coffee

Now that’s a big accomplishment for RGT. But there’s something even bigger: Flowerman just wrapped up an exclusive interview with me about my big trip to the sewage treatment plant yesterday. We talked about the guy who operates the Hot Sludge lake boat, and bib overalls. You’ll have to tune into the show to check it out.

Update: Poo Lake made the cut.

Hot Sludge Sundays and Landfill LeachAde

Mmm, mmm good.

I hosted a group of high school science teachers and some sustainability interns on a garbage and recycling learning journey yesterday. It was great, and exhausting for some reason. We hit a high school lunch room, the hazardous waste facility, Millennium Recycling, a couple of green buildings downtown (this one and that one), and the big ugly Landfill. We also toured the City of Sioux Falls’ Wastewater Treatment Facility, where we learned what’s green in the sewage business, and were introduced to a little taste of heaven: “Hot Sludge.”

The Hot Sludge Lake Boat.

After the little micro-organisms eat up the poo and other nasties in an anaerobic digester, the remaining “solids” (which the dudes at the wastewater plant affectionately call hot sludge) get pumped over to Hot Sludge Lake–a settling pool. On this yummy lake is a boat, which operates a dredge that stirs up the hot sludge (which by this time is now just your average warm and soupy sludge) and scrapes some off the bottom to be turned into SiouxperGrow. Yes, the sludge eventually becomes a brand-named fertilizer for Minnehaha County corn and soybean fields. It’s injected by a fleet of honey wagons. Oh, one more thing: not only is there a guy who’s job it is to drive the Hot Sludge lake boat, but they also have to do maintenance on that sucker. Underneath the boat. While it’s still floating on Hot Sludge Lake…

And at  the landfill–which I learned is not a hole at all, but a gigantic mountain of compacted, decomposing garbage and earth that rises from the prairie at an alarming rate–we were shown the “Leachite Pond” (which for quite a few minutes, our group thought was called the “Leachade pond”). This is the holding pool for the “solids” left over from a literal mountain of decomposing garbage. The hot sludge of the landfill, if you will. It’s one of two byproducts (other than the mountain). The other is methane gas, which the Sioux Falls Sanitary Landfill is now piping to a nearby Poet ethanol plant to be used to make corn fuel.

Beautiful compost in the making.

The pipeline thing is pretty cool, and of course I was fascinated by the stretching piles of composting grass and leaves (get yourself some free compost–all you can scoop). But overall, the Landfill sucked all the energy out of me.  Witnessing rolling cornfields and precious wetlands in the process of becoming a giant garbage mound the size of Madison is tough stuff for me. Imagine this: you take the valley that Montrosians call home, and you fill it to the top with layers of garbage and dirt. Then you continue building up a mound that buries the water tower on the hilltop. Do that from the ballpark north of town to the south end of the Horstman Addition out by I-90. Now you’re mental visual is close to the real thing.  At least our tour guide Pearl was shining with hope and enthusiasm.

There are a couple of new “cells” ready to be filled up and mounded, with plans for up to five more on the land the Landfill already owns. These cells are about the size of Montrose, and take 5-7 years to fill up, based on the current five-county population the Landfill serves (which is estimated to more than double in the next 20 years).

We are wasteful creatures. But hey, we’re really getting good at helping nature make hot sludge and leachade.

Farts and Old People

A couple fun things to share from Mesa’s mouth recently…

This morning we walked to daycare, and the Catholic church is on the way. As we passed the church, several ladies were streaming in–all elders. “It must be time for old people church, right Dad?” Mesa said as two ladies walked by and said ‘hello.’..

This weekend, in the midst of our girls’ backyard performance of the fabulous circus show, Zoey was making a tumbling pass and passed some gas. Without skipping a beat, the ringmaster (Mesa, of course) announced, “And, ladies and gentlemen, that is a ‘Fart Flip.’”