Word: loam
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...earliest memories was of "the light -- light all around." Georgia O'Keeffe spent her life trying to recapture that elemental radiance on paper and canvas. The quest began obscurely on the loam of Sun Prairie, Wis., and ended famously in the desert of Abiquiu, N. Mex. O'Keeffe was the daughter of an Irish-American farmer and a Hungarian American of aristocratic descent. As art historian Roxana Robinson discloses in this romantic but insightful biography, both strains were apparent from the beginning. The child had six siblings, and she could be highly social and convivial. But it took great effort...
...tropical Pacific's El Nino and the North American jet stream will keep behaving, so that eventually rainstorms will be lured up from the Gulf to drench the croplands. Kentucky and Tennessee last week got a bit of that action. But many more downpours are needed. Iowa's rich loam has only a third of the usual subsoil moisture. Hydrologists have warned New York that if reservoirs do not fill soon, the city could have water shortages this summer. With California reservoirs at 42% capacity, farmers are being told to expect only 60% of their water needs, and even less...
Iowa keeps 93% of its rich loam in farms, the heritage of a century of building a special culture on that treasure. There are in Iowa eight cities with populations over 50,000 but none with more than 200,000. Crowding is almost nonexistent, and so the attendant evils of crime and hopelessness are minimal. The core of the population also has some link to those people who first halted on the tallgrass prairie and sank their plows. Writes Author John Madson, an eloquent native Iowan: "Grassland of such magnitude was wholly alien to the western European mind. It diminished...
...alarming rate. When the Adair prairies were broken some 150 years ago, the topsoil was 12-to 14-in. thick. Today it averages 6 to 8 in. And from a small plane in those glistening skies the fields show telltale fingers of light green to yellow, where the loam has cascaded down the gullies and ditches and headed off to the Gulf of Mexico...
...attention. In the simplest hydroponic systems, the plant roots are anchored in gravel or perlite, through which the gardener periodically shoots water and inorganic nutrient solutions. Thus for outdoor hydroponicists there is no digging, weeding, composting or spraying. The indoor gardener is spared the necessity of messing with loam in the home and, if careful, can avoid the danger of bacterial infection around his plants...