Hello Friends,
In our previous article we described exploring a hemp crop's ability to reclaim saline seeps in the region. The article made references to an aerial photo of the seep, however the photo wasn't able to be printed in The Mountaineer that week. We think the picture gives a little more life to the story. So this week, we are posting that photo here with excerpts from the article that referred to the photo. Look out for more news from the Institute coming soon!
Your friends,
Bob, Josh, and Erynn
"This season, we planted three varieties of hemp in our saline seep-one for fiber, one for oil seed, and a dual-purpose variety. We also planted strips of barley and alfalfa for comparison. These crops were planted in 32 foot strips in groups of four, seven times across the seep as you can see in the photo. We wanted to surround the seep but also cross it to see how the crops responded to the increasing salt concentrations as they neared the breakout are of the seep in the middle which you can see is white in the photo and where nothing was growing."
"What we saw so far is that the fiber hemp had the most salt tolerance. The fiber hemp can be seen growing further into the seep than other varieties. We had trouble with alfalfa emergence so did not get a good stand of that. Grasshoppers attacked the dual-purpose hemp first and ate it down to the stems before it produced any seeds. They then attacked the oil seed hemp and ate all the leaves but not before some seed heads formed. After that was gone, they then ate most of the leaves off the fiber hemp. Over the winter we will analyze the data and determine the plans for the next season."
