Small Town News

Poor mans fertilizer, ketchup and the Oyster Eat

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BAREFOOTIN'

Kenny Hopkins is like a mature chestnut tree, only with legs. He stops by the office now and then and kernels of wildlife observation and homespun wisdom drop naturally through his conversation.

This week is a good example. He stopped by to talk about a Ducks Unlimited event for kids coming up this spring at Owens Station and we got off on the topic of the recent storms.

"My grandfather always said that snow is a poor man's fertilizer."

That's one I had never heard. Kenny's grandfather was James Hopkins, one of many generations of Hopkins who have worked the soil of Sussex. "He always felt that minerals and whatever in the snow helped the crops."

A day later I was talking to my old friend Tom Herr. I mentioned the poor man's fertilizer notion to him and he paused in the conversation

"It's funny you mention that. I was in the barbershop yesterday and Dean Burke said the same thing. He said it's because snow captures nitrogen in the atmosphere and lays it on the ground."

Bob Raley, Kenny's father-in-law and mentor, has farms up and down Delmarva. "It's because the moisture from snow seeps into the soil real gentle and takes nutrients from the surface to the roots."

Based on quick Internet research, Raley's notion has popular legs. It seems that rain and snow both contain nitrogen from the atmosphere. Nitrogen spurs growth in plants. The difference is that rain often runs off the soil to waterways as opposed to snow which, as Raley said, seeps slowly into the ground taking all of its nutrients with it. An article from an early 1970s Pittsburgh Post Gazette talked a little bit about poor man's fertilizer. It noted that French farmers have a saying that goes along something like, "February snowfall is as good as manure on the land." It also mentioned that rain and snow are thought to carry as much as two to 12 pounds of nitrogen to an acre of ground, depending on the amounts of precipitation The columnist also quoted a reader who recommended piling buck-etfuls of snow on flower and vegetable gardens. "A bucketful of snow makes two pints of water and hauls a lot of soot down from the air."

Bud Ritter, who farms land out near St. George's Chapel in the Fairmount/Hollyville area, said he's heard the poor man's fertilizer saying for years.

"My father, William Ritter, used to say that if you have 10 inches of snow you've got a ton of lime on the ground. It sweetens the soil, he said, makes a crop grow better. We've sure had a lot of snow this year haven't we?"

"No doubt about that."

"A fella I was talking to the other day said there's going to be one bigger in March It's in the almanac."

"Oh boy."

Ritter said he believes snow has a fair amount of nitrogen in it too. As spring nears, he will test his fields for lime, nitrogen and other nutrients to see how much needs to be spread this year - hopefully, because of the snow lying on the fields, not as much as in past years. "Nitrogen is high - everything is expensive."

Ritter will probably start with a Utile bit of nitrogen on his fields, along with potash and phosphorus, to give the plants an early start. "Then, when the corn's up about a foot or so, we'll take a leaf sample and figure out how much more nitrogen we need to spread."

Southeastern Sussex farmer Danny Magee said snow is not only good for cheap fertilizer, it also keeps his five acres of strawberry plants chilled at a steady 32 degrees. "You don't want those cold northwest winds bringing zero-degree weather on your plants."

If ever there was a good year to test the poor man's fertilizer theory, this will be it. Between the sputtering economy and snowstorms ripping their way through our winter festivals, everyone's feeling poor. It would be good to find some positive out of these storms. We'll keep an eye on the fields.

Oyster Eat on its way

Mentioning Tom Herr earlier in the column put me in mind of the annual Georgetown Oyster Eat at the county seat fire hall. Herr's family moved down to the peninsula in the Chester-town, Md. area when he was still in diapers, more than half a century ago.

The good Pennsylvania Dutch culture from the Lancaster area made its mark though, and there's no dream Herr enjoys more than wading through a snow-fertilized field of blooming ketchup plants.

Heinz ketchup is one of the big sponsors of the Oyster Eat, always held from 8 to midnight on the last Friday in February. The sponsors love to see their ketchup being mixed with cold horseradish to make a fine cocktail sauce for the steamed and raw oysters.

Arrangements are already in place to cover the fire hall floor with sawdust, anticipating a thousand blue-jeaned, fiannel-shirted, baseball-capped men jostling for beer, oysters, hot dogs and egg salad sandwiches, dancing to the Orange Blossom Special on four-by-eight sheets of plywood seasoned with spilled drinks and cigar ashes.

If Herr attends as he has occasionally in the past, he will no doubt wax poetic about the virtue of a perfectly grilled cut of steak slathered with the kitchen's finest bottle of ketchup.

There's a T-shirt rack in the store of the Long Neck Car Wash on Route 24. On it hangs the perfect shirt for the Herr man. In big black and red letters, it boldly brags: "I put ketchup on my ketchup."

Don't miss the Oyster Eat!





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