Not to mention the gold in chicken breath. Chicken breath?
"They're
producing CO2 , which plants need because carbon is their basic
building block," said Ms. Edey, a 53-year-old Swedish-born weaver who
raises her own sheep for wool. "So if you add more CO2 , the plants will
grow more." The carbon dioxide content in the greenhouse is about three
or four times as high as in the air outside, she added.
"So even
with shorter days in winter, the plants grow faster than outside in the
summer garden," she said. Considering that many commercial growers use
bottled carbon dioxide to bolster production in their greenhouses,
chickens might become a hot commodity.
The chicken breath gets to
the plants via a solar-powered fan that draws the air from the chicken
coop into a series of perforated pipes that lie beneath the soil of the
growing beds. The carbon dioxide then simply rises up through the soil
particles and into the air of the greenhouse, where it is absorbed by
the leaves.
On Tuesdays, Ms. Edey and a crew of three harvesters
pick enough greens, leaf by leaf, for about 200 one-ounce salads a day.
The combinations, complete with edible flowers like nasturtiums, red
salvia and borage blossoms, which are electric blue and as sweet as
honey (bees love them, too), are rinsed in a big tank in the middle of
the greenhouse, dried and bagged, and then sold on the island or shipped
to restaurants in Boston. The greens are grown without chemical
fertilizers or pesticides. Compost and seaweed beef up the soil, and if
the aphids and whiteflies get out of control, Ms. Edey just orders more
ladybugs and parasitic wasps.
Meanwhile, there is no burning oil to pollute the atmosphere.
Ms.
Edey learned about the body heat and carbon dioxide of animals from a
newspaper article that her ex-mother-in-law had sent her about 10 years
ago, when Ms. Edey was experimenting with growing plants in the solar
house that she built in 1980. The article told of a nurseryman in Oregon
who had traded his oil furnace for 450 rabbits, which saved him $750 a
year. (The annual oil bill was $1,000; rabbit food cost $250.)
"