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Grass Art
Overfertilising circles in lawns and crops as art | |
Instead of destroying patches of crops in beautifully designed patterns of circles use high nitrogen fertiliser instead.
The crops grow markedly better in the fertilised areas. Bright green fractal patterns of wheat 6' tall would look great against the background of a normal crop.
Make them big
enough and they might be visible from space.
(?) Stan the man
http://www.stanherd.com/
[PotatoStew, Aug 27 2001]
Grass Art would be a useful technique for punk landscapers.
http://www.halfbake.../Punk_20Landscaping
[beauxeault, Aug 27 2001]
Mandelbrot's Lawn
http://www.lboro.ac.../ma/gallery/mandel/
[UnaBubba, Aug 27 2001]
Two artists who work in grass
http://www.gardnerm...kroyd_harvey_ex.asp
I saw this show bout a year ago...real neat [gniterobot, Aug 31 2002]
Turin turf
http://www.streetma...archp=newsearch.srf
Fertilizer or footer practice? [baconbrain, Mar 24 2005]
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Annotation:
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Fun idea ...Now I'm going to show my ignorance for all things agricultural, but I have a genuine question. High nitrogen fertilisers make things grow 'markedly better', no doubt. But wouldn't farmers use them on the *whole* crop? |
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Yes, but if they use too much nitrogen and not enough phosphoros and potassium they get enhanced leaf growth at the expense of fruit or seed development. You have to balance the mix to get enough foliage growth without it being to the detriment of the production of the crop product. Increasing the nitrogen value makes plants bigger and greener. This sort of detail would be available in Kaggo's gardening manual to explain NPK ratings on fertiliser containers. |
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Oh. Perhaps you could use a combination of high nitrogen fertiliser and weed killer to create images in various shades of green. You could create a giant croissant which can be seen from space on a clear day as a tribute to the 1/2B. |
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'yes', like the Optus logo island.| — | UnaBubba,
Aug 27 2001, last modified Aug 28 2001 |
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Back in the days of my youth, my pals and I engaged in an activity known as 'pre-crap circles'. We were serious minded idealists -- yet nevertheless, there were times when we couldn't give a crap. And thus the idea was born. We started using a mylar magnetic tape typically wound in devices known as 'cassettes'. We would unspool the material to see its glossy effect. |
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Unfortunately, the material was rather insubstantial in appearance. Then my buddy, going under the alias 'Rick' discovered this substance composed of a cellulose compound, bleached white and stored on cardboard tubes. The material was magnificent. As broad as your hand - and starckly white. We would unwind lengths of the material as large as football fields over various trees that commonly adorned peoples yards back then. |
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And from thence forward, we called the activity pre-crap circles. The best thing about the activity was that with each of these rolls of cellulose, no harm was done to any crops. |
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Anyway, our notions of 'protest' are surely antiquated by the newfangled crap they are trying to pull these days. |
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UnaBubba, a truly great idea. Croissant. Just be sure to share a morsel with sdm for that inspired suggestion! |
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Anybody know a farmer who'd volunteer his field? |
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My friend's back lawn has patches of 'markedly better' grass growth in places where his dog has peed, perhaps due to the nitrogen content of the urine. As this idea strikes me as one that would be best carried out on the way home from the pub anyhow.....Maybe the next time I stumble home drunk, I'll pilot this with some creative doodles out the back. |
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That's the urea doing the fertilising. CO(NH2)2. It's the major nitrogenous compound present in the urine of mammals, especially those with high protein diets, like dogs. It's also known as carbamide, if memory serves. Many commercial fertilisers contain it. It is easily synthesised from CO2 and NH3 (ammonia). |
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Post some photographs of your doodlings! |
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This is a much better idea than what I imagined from the title. |
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my dogs know all about crap circles and don't have the dignity to make them at night in a stealthy fashion - they they just do it whenever the fancy takes them |
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Suggest a better title then, please people. I thought of Lawn Art or Lawn Circles, but I'm not so sure. |
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This would work just fine; I've seen very clear patterns in grass fields where fertilizer was applied unevenly (Willamette Valley farmers grow a lot of lawn grass seed). Use an otherwise fallow field and you won't be damaging valuable crops. |
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If you've ever seen a prairie grassland that has been grazed by cows, you see little tufts of very green grass wherever a cowpie was deposited, surrounded by scraggly dry scrub. |
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Based just on this, I think that cowpoo would be the best material of choice. It grinds up nicely, spreads evenly, and usually contains viable seeds. |
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Oh - inspiration - (a) program the flocking road cones to dump cowpoo according to a pattern, or (b) GE the cows to defecate in pattern. |
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Preferable to have the road cones herd the cattle into patterns. Should be a simple matter to imbue them with enough processing power to produce Mandelbrot images on the scale of the Atacama desert images, if we give them enough cows and some sort of IR interface. |
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When I was student we discussed a scheme for writing subversive slogans in lawns using mustard and cress seeds. The idea being that nothing would be revealed until the lawn was mown and then the white stalks of the m & c would spell out the message. I don't think it was ever tested as later we were usually overcome with an all-enveloping sense off drunkeness and apathy. Also you'd need quite a lot of m & c and that would have required spending too many drinking tokens. |
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Do it now, Gordon! The good citizens of your tax haven could do with a little livening up, surely? |
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gordon+una: Baked. I'll try and find a link but i read about some crims in the UK who were on community service, and planted a rude message with bulbs which was clearly visible the next year. |
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There's also the giant swastika in East Germany, planted using deciduous trees during WWII in an evergreen forest. |
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Yes, decoy ponds. In times of drought they attract other passing ponds, which can then be trapped and forced into local aquifers. |
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I just knew PeterSealy would turn out to be an Essex boy. I wonder if he's blond(e)...
My dad used to mow my name into the front lawn so that I could see it from upstairs in the playroom, then do the back garden and come round to finish the front. In dry weather the ends of the grass were much greener than the light beige dusty soil. I know I have a photo somewhere... |
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I thought these would be a device used to lure unsuspecting ponds into the clutches of kiloponds. |
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Would it be too sick to grow crops in graveyards? |
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Ha! We'd have to be buried like those cheer leaders who spell out words. Go team! |
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Pray gravediggers can spell if you are a pedant. |
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I suspect that the scribes and gravediggers thing got a decent run in Egypt several thousand years ago. |
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But, given an unlimited supply of corpses and a big graveyard, what would you spell out? I assume you'd have to get people to sign consent forms agreeing to your planned message. |
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Be a bit late by then, wouldn't it? |
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Ancient Egypt was a lot greener and more fertile than present day from what I've read on the subject. Deforestation and goats may have been responsible for the degradation. |
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hippo: //But, given an unlimited supply of corpses and a big graveyard, what would you spell out?// |
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It's about 4am here, at the moment my brain is telling me nothing would be more elegant than the complete works of Shakespeare... Using dead people instead... I think I'll go back to bed. |
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Wow an idea so deceptively simple that I'm suprised we don't hear about it all the time. You my friend get a croissant. |
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Hamlet's soliloquy in the graveyard of a hamlet. |
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If you had a limited number of corpses, and wanted more, the appropriate message might be: "POS TION AVAILABLE" |
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Worse still: limited corpses and you're advertising for a director of communications. |
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. DIRECT
. COM
POS TION
AVAILABLE |
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Apparently field archaeologists use exactly this technique to pick out land features from the air, but kind of in reverse. Basically where there are rocks close to the surface, the grass doesn't grow as well. Building remains have the same effect. This allows them to see outlines of long-gone buildings on sunny evenings in late summer, before the hay has been cut. |
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There are quite a few places in England where this phenomenon is clearly visible to the naked eye when you're flying at about 500', either early morning or late evening. No special skill or equipment is needed, and the outlines of buildings and even whole villages (which disappered during the Black Death) are eerily ressurected. You can also see where ancient hedge boundaries have been moved. |
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To go back to the main idea, cow past have the same effect; you always get a bigh clump of dark green grass on a former cow pat site as the vegetation sucks up the nutrients. Based on this, one could draw patterns on fields using a slurry tanker, but for cereals(which bleaches as they ripen) the patterns would slowly disappear, apart from the aforementioned shadow effects. |
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the ghost of cow past - eerie. is there a cow present and/or a cow future? |
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I found this (Turin turf) link in the archives of the James Randi Educational Foundation. There is some discussion about causes, but it could be that a groundskeeper has selectively fertilized this playing field. |
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[BaconBrain] That's Crystal Palace's home ground. At this stage of the season only divine intervention is likely to keep them in the premiership. |
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Maybe they could get Uri Geller to intervene for the other teams -- I gather that every team he's every "helped" has gone straight down the loo. |
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Is that the moaner, Lisa, on that football field? |
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Belated suggested alternate title: "Lawn d'Art" |
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My lawn has a number of such circles in it now, which get bigger each year- the largest is about twenty feet across now. They are caused by an underground fungus which grows in a ring pattern, and somehow promotes grass growth |
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