Flame Machine

I went to ZZ's Krasnoborki near Sztabin to see this working prototype machine for scorching the earth. The pioneering ZZ had previously been busy making a machine for making 'raised beds' which worked much better than my last year's efforts. His is 'active' and much heavier. This results in the compacted long mounds which you can see. One or two rows of seeds or bulbs are planted on the ridges. The flame machine is to be used twice. Before sowing and a critical time after sowing. The idea being to kill unwanted plants and seeds in the top centimetre of soil without damaging the as yet un-emerged crop.

There will be various onions and carrots growing here soon. Some nice people from an institute of environmental science somewhere in central Poland brought this prototype that they have been working on to try. Here you can just about see the flames. They show up better in the photograph than to the eye. It worked pretty well, the only serious problem is one of refrigeration! The gas leaving the bottles causes them to cool down like a fridge and when their temperature drops too much, the gas pressure drops too low... There are several potential cures for this.

Unfortunately flaming doesn't completely replace weeding, but should help quite a bit. It is widely used elsewhere, but we are learning. Growing organic vegetables on a larger scale than for personal consumption is only beginning here. You can see that quite a few people were interested enough to make the effort to have a look.

Otherwise the sun was shining and the birds were singing. I got a few more attractive shots of the birds (swifts, martins,stork and some small ones I don't know) but this is the one.