Jae Gruenke

Salt Laker here wondering if you're coming to SLC to speak, and if so, would love the info!

Thank you everybody! Based on the advice here, I've washed my hair, my bedding, and every shred of clothing I wore for this project. I'd showered last night but hadn't washed my long hair, and I assume it's contaminated everything else. I'll hose my shoes off tomorrow.

I also had a long soak in an Epsom salts bath, which helped with the aches and probably some detoxing.

I've been taking activated charcoal, and though I don't have any glutathione, I do have NAC so I've started taking that. The fatigue is just amazing, I'm the sort of person who still works when they're sick, but today I can sit upright for about 15 minutes, then I have to lie down. That said, I am feeling better than this morning.

I will definitely use an N95 and be very cautious in moving the rest of the pile. I've noticed that the chips I put down in one part of the yard a couple of weeks ago don't bother me, but going into the area I was putting chips down last night makes me feel lousy. I think the very hot, dry Utah summer weather (100 degrees today) disinfects the chips when they're in a thin enough layer. So I'm thinking I'll just scrape a few shovelfuls off the top of the pile at a time and gradually move the rest of the chips out onto the ground, rather than digging at the bottom of the pile where it's been damp and dark and trying to do it all at once.

Thanks to the folks who suggested soaking moldy mulch, it makes sense, but dry heat is currently available in abundance... water, not so much.

I'll tell you, this experience does cool my enthusiasm for wood chips. Hats of to those of you who still use them despite being vulnerable. Impressive.

I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm feeling ill from mold toxins or something like that after spending a couple of hours last night shoveling wood chips out onto my land. I always sneeze and cough a bit when moving wood chips around, but this is another level.

The chips are from a linden tree my neighbor took out of his back yard. The pile has been sitting around on our patio for a couple of weeks, and the wood may have been sitting around a couple of weeks before being chipped.

Here's what happened: I shoveled, wheelbarrowed, and crawled around on hands and knees spreading the stuff until well after dark. When I came in, I blew my nose a couple of times and the snot was brown, and I ended up wiping my nose out for surprisingly long until the tissues were no longer brown. (Sorry for the gorey detail.) I could tell I had it in my lungs too, and I was coughing a bit and figured it would probably take a couple of days to work itself out. Otherwise I felt 100% fine.

But then during the night I woke up with a high fever--not sure exactly what it was, but I felt hot and freezing at the same time and was shaking, so I knew it was bad. It gradually improved but now, in early afternoon the following day, I'm still feverish and crushingly exhausted.

I would think I had just come down with something, but this same exact thing happened to me a couple of weeks ago, and although I can't be 100% sure, I think it was the night after shoveling the wood chips from the trailer to the patio. I recovered pretty quickly--much better the following day, though it took a few days to get back to normal.

So I'm wondering if anyone else has experienced anything like this. Am I crazy or could this be a toxin issue rather than a bug? Unfortunately we still have more wood chips piled on the patio, so if that's what made me ill, I'm going to have to work out how to deal with them safely.

Greg Martin wrote:I try not to uncover mine until I know it won't get colder than the 20s.

Wow, Greg. To be honest, I don't think we've gotten below 20 at all this winter. So maybe it's not that big of a deal whether it's wrapped or not. My thinking was to preserve as much of the aboveground tree as possible so it could direct its energy into fruit rather than growth this summer.

Jason Barnes wrote:How difficult is it to unwrap an re-wrap it?

I just planted some figs last year, and I've uncovered and recovered them once, and I'm uncovering them again tomorrow.

I use banana boxes with plastic bags over the boxes and bricks to hold them down, so it's not too difficult. I won't know if it worked until spring, though.

I think keeping them covered too long can cause them to come out of dormancy too early, which makes them more sensitive to milder cold snaps.

Good point about the re-wrapping. It's kind of a pain, because it's blankets on a framework of sticks, but it is totally doable. I can just keep an eye on the weather.

I planted a Chicago Hardy fig tree near our patio last spring, and I wrapped it up in a couple of layers of frost cloth and insulation for the winter.

Here in Salt Lake City we're having what appears to be an early spring rather than just a warm snap, and the buds on my other trees are swelling and I've got some currant and rose bushes already opening their leaves.

Should I unwrap my fig tree at this point, or hold on a little longer in case of a cold snap?

C. Lee Greentree wrote:There have been a few mentions of fungi already, I think, but I just wanted to say that nothing turns wood chips and straw into lovely rich soil faster than mushrooms, with the bonus if you get an edible crop! I'd recommend seeking out wine cap spawn to inoculate those beds; I've heard of people who don't care for mushrooms cultivating them just for the amazing compost.

Hello Jawad!

Thanks very much for the suggestion! I will do that.

(somehow the quoting function isn't working properly here, but this is a response to Jay Angler's comments)

"That said, mycorrhiza work with plants too, so if you can't get plants to grow in the chips, you loose out on some of the teamwork that microbes and plants do."

Interesting, Jay. I like the idea that my plants are helping the decomposition, and it makes me feel a bit more optimistic about working to grow things in the hugels.

"Do you have some extra seeds you could do a test with?"

Yes, that's my plan. I thought I'd wait till spring, though, as I don't yet have a good seed-starting setup indoors.

Timothy Norton wrote:Was the compost in bulk? I have had a delivery of compost that was still a touch too hot and it really hurt me one growing year. The following year, I had explosion of growth assumedly from the compost now being bioavailable.

I'm thinking a similar discussion found here might be beneficial for your viewing?

Now towards my opinion - Don't try to adjust all these different variables all at once trying to find a root cause. Methodically start working out the most obvious issue to the least obvious. I would let the chips/compost mellow together. The fact you are seeing slime molds mean there is activity happening! I never had slime molds take out plants so I'm wondering if they are just a result of a dying plant or if they in fact took them out. I think a good early season crop to gauge if things will grow in the plot are peas. They also can help fix nitrogen in the soil for later crops. If things are still goofed up, then I'd start being suspicious of the manure and straw. If you have the ability to test either of them for peace of mind that is great but don't scramble around and stress yourself out with it at first.

We're on the same page, Timothy. I know nitrogen is a problem, so that's the part I'm wondering if I can do anything about now, as we go into winter. I'll explore the possible contamination issues next spring.

The one thing I can rule out is the compost being too hot. I got a soil thermometer and through the late summer into fall found the hugels consistently 5-7 degrees warmer than the ground, but that's it. And whenever I watered a struggling plant with diluted urine, it recovered literally overnight, which wouldn't have happened if heat was the problem.

As for the slime molds, they literally swallowed up seedlings. I'd mulched with straw but left holes around seedlings, and slime molds would erupt through those holes (I guess they needed the light) literally overnight and be so large they simply swallowed the seedling. I learned to identify the signs that a slime mold was about to erupt on my evening walks, and grab the surface woodchips and toss them on the paved path, and that would prevent the mold from developing and save the plant.

Joe Hallmark wrote:Where did the straw and compost come from? I found out the hard way with straw this year mine was actually hay that was leftover but same applies. Killed everything. I planted a cover for winter after removing hay and it has broadleaf growing so it didn’t seem to damage the soil as I cleaned it up as quick as I found out.

Where I live if you’re buying “organic” compost it’s from dairy farms. 99.9% of hay where I live is sprayed with weed killer. So that will still be in the compost.

The straw was from a small farmer--a friend's neighbor. I suspected it of herbicide contamination for a while, but then I heard this could happen with compost too, and that makes a lot more sense. I used compost everywhere I used the straw including places besides the hugels, and although seeds didn't really come up very well, I didn't have the problem of plants not growing, turning white, or dying. In fact I got tons of tomatoes and cucumbers (in a non-hugel bed), for example.

However, everywhere I used the compost, even if I didn't use straw there, I had almost no seeds come up. Bean plants that did sprout quickly died, and the nasturtiums had cupped and bumpy leaves for a month or two. So maybe the straw was contaminated, maybe it wasn't. But the case is stronger that the compost was contaminated.

Or, since I'm new at this, I might have screwed things up in some other way, like over-mulching and/or not watering enough. And maybe the nasturtiums were having some other problem. I'll test the compost and the straw to find out for sure, since I still have a lot of both left. It was a commercially available organic turkey compost. My memory was Oakdale Farms Organic Turkey Compost. I bought it from someone else who had overbought, but I looked it up online beforehand. So it wasn't from a dairy farm, and my recollection (though I can't find it online now) is that the only manure in it was turkey.