Han Kop

Okay my apologies. it's true that he really recommend direct seeding for almost everything, but then adds that because he has billions of tomato seeds laying dormant in his fields, he needs to replant the tomatoes to be sure that it's the right variety. A lot of this is also very specific for each place. For example, i'm next to a river in a very moist place with a lot of snails, so i can't direct seed cause they eat everything. I need to plant the plants out when they're bigger and able to withstand a few slug bites.

he has a course, which i have done the basic module of and i thought it was quite entertaining, pretty good. it's in French though.
https://www.formationpotagerdesante.com/

I think work in very much in line with a lot of permaculture principles, it's kinda that he (claims that) he just naturally learned to work like this. bit like Sepp Holzer.

Where are you located, in Spain? where in Spain? Edit: ah Alicante. Yes that's getting pretty dry. In that case just check out some of the stuff of Geoff Lawton (greening the desert etc), david holmgren, etc who often write from Australian perspective with very dry seasons. geoff lawton is doing a course in Morocco soon I saw somewhere. There is Tamera in Portugal.

he grows 10 hectares so he doesn't have beds etc. he doesn't seed directly because he needs the plants to be certain of a variety. he is a seed grower. Did you read everything above? doesn't look like it. first read a bit further, look at the links and the videos on google.

Hi all, okay let me explain a bit more. First about the climate, we're 1 hour from the sea and at the southern most feet of the massive central mountains. An unpredictable climate in a way, but we have a lot of rain in the winter (Like 1000ml) and in the summer it can get very very dry with Mediterranean summers: last year we didn't have real rain for 3 months from mid june till mid september, with clear skies most of the time.

To explain Poot's method a bit more, he works about 10 hectares with very little machinery. He does use tractors to make didges in the land I think, then he puts loads and loads of compost: 100 or 150 tons per hectare. As I mentioned he makes the compost with 1 part manure and 5 parts BRF woodchips (that amounts to 10 or15 kilo per m2 if I'm correct) in those ditches, and then in there he transplants his tomatos. Himself he prefers much more direct seeding, whenever he can he will direct seed, yet he says because he only grows vegetables for seed, he needs to be sure that the tomatoes are of the right variety, and so he has so transplant.
He does weed a bit, because he says as the saying goes "one time hoeing is ten times irrigating". The weeds they use a lot of water he says.

Then if he direct seeds then he irrigates really well until the plants sprout, after that he doesn't irrigate any more, or perhaps once.

He also has some interesting theories about hard crusts on the soil. he says that under the ground the water evaporates but is than kind of blocked by this hard crust on the soil and condenses down again.

I'm sure there is much more to say even, but I find his work quite interesting. Sepp Holzer says similar things, he says he doesn't irrigate because if you start irrigating you'd need to irrigate all the time! also it would wash away nutrients. Of course Austria is not so dry as the south of France.

Also while saying all of this, myself for my vegetables I prefer to do bio-intensive like Jean-Martin Fortier and so I irrigate regularly! But for some broadacre things I think this method is great.

I'm living 15 minutes from this interesting figure called Pascal Poot, who grows tomatoes and other things without water. Really it's true. It works because he puts a lot of compost with BRF (woodchips) and also his specially selected seeds. I can very much recommend buying seeds here. Probably among the best seeds in France. You can order from other countries also.  According to a quick search he was mentioned twice on this forum, but deserves more mention!

His website:
https://www.lepotagerdesante.com/

Some article about him in English (you can find a lot of youtube and Facebook videos also but it's mostly French)

https://www.livingcircular.veolia.com/en/eco-citizen/pascal-poot-grows-organic-tomatoes-desert


https://www.livingcircular.veolia.com/en/eco-citizen/pascal-poot-grows-organic-tomatoes-desert

Also I think there is something about his selling these seeding being illegal, which we don't give a s**t about of course. It's a complicated thing in France (or EU or the world for that matter) and involved a lawsuit between one of France's biggest seeds producers, Baumaux, and Kokopelli, an association founded to bypass the need to register each variety in some catalogue before you can sell them. (If someone can clarify this or explain it better than I have please do)

https://www.infogm.org/5725-kokopelli-vs-baumaux-une-victoire-en-demi-teinte?lang=fr

Thanks everyone for all the replies. When you google for "denoyauteur prunes" you'll probably get a whole bunch of suggestions. This one looked most interesting.
https://www.tompress.com/A-308-denoyauteur-double-2-cerises-1-prune.aspx

On the tartness of the plums, there are so many kinds of plums, especially here in France, and most of those which I tasted are not tart at all, even the semi-wild ones. But I have tasted one very bad Damson plum, very astringent and very different from the delicious Damson plums that grow in the next village. So I guess first of all just get the right plums.

Hi all, plum season is starting in the south of France and I'm looking forward to many jams again this year. We would like to make it a bit easier by buying a pitting machine (home kitchen size, budget maybe a few hundred max, we're not buying a 10.000 machine). Does any experience on this?  Any recommendations?

Dear all , thanks for all the advice. I suppose I might need to wait another winter then, and I will also try to grow them outside in the soil.

Someone said that cold stratifying in the fridge seems silly, but for example Martin Crawford says he does that because were he lives (south-west England) the winters just aren't reliably cold anymore for stratification to work properly; it's a controlled environment.

Hi all,

Silly question here, I gathered plums last year from good trees, 1 yellow variety (probably reine claude) and one blue one (probably a damson plum). I also collected apple seeds. I cold stratified them all in sand in the fridge and planted them like two months ago in a big container with potting soil. All the apples sprouted nicely but the none of the plums are sprouting. What am I doing wrong? It's July already so shouldn't they be sprouting?

Dear all,

After more trials I can confirm what other have said, the trick is really to get them to swell. I have been able to get near 100% germination rate with swollen seeds.
I have trialed the swollen VS not-swollen seeds and you can see the result in the image attached: one with near 100% sprouts and one with zero.

>Poor boiling water on the seeds and leave them for the night.
>The next day, pick out the swollen ones and plant them. For the non-swollen ones, again poor boiling water and leave for the night. Just keep repeating until they are all swollen.

Before they are swollen my seeds are slightly greyish with black dots on then, When they swell they become bigger, slightly greenish and seem to loose their black spots. (see the two images attached: the swollen and non-swollen ones have been separated)

Other tentative conclusions to this experiment:
-All my seeds had been stratified with sulfuric acid as instructed by Mudge and Gabriel's in Farming the Woods  for 1.5 hr. This does not seem to do much for me.
-I see no reason to believe cold-stratification would have any influence. No need.

I have not been able to find these detailed instructions anywhere in the literature.

Hope this works for others as well, let us know!

PS. I had grown the swollen seeds in a small yoghurt container and after they were about 5 cm high I transplanted them to a bigger container. I might have done something wrong, but in any case they didn't like it and about 50% didn't make it. So I can recommend to seed immediately in a larger container or directly in the soil in a growing bed or it's final location. The snails might get one or two so just plant a couple. If the snails get to them when they only have their first 2 leaves they ight not make it (although some recover even from that). Once they grow to 10cm and have a bunch of leaves, snails might nibble on a few leaves but that doesn't matter much and they quickly grow new ones.  

okay, first of all,  just let nature take its course and stop worrying

if they're struggling,. don't replant them now since you might kill them of by doing so. and if they are already dead, you've wasted time. First let them sprout and do their thing. chestnuts are very hardy [once established] and can be coppiced to the ground back and will happily come back.

if you than later decide to replant, which i think the chestnuts will not like, then the only thing that would make sense to me is to dig out one cubic meter of clay, mix half a cubic meter with sand and then put back, and put them on a mound of like 30 cm to help drainage. but that seems like a hell of a job. it's all about drainage with chestnuts, which is why they don't like stagnant valleys but grow mid-slope.  

you see in EU there is a lot of disease, mainly the blight and the ink disease, and chestnut groves in clay soil they are completely wiped out. on their natural turf they have much more resistance. whatever you may have heard, there is no such chestnut that is 100% resistant to blight or ink disease. At least this is what the Aveyron Conservatoire Régional du Châtaignier, which seems to be the only conservatory in the EU (although you would have thought there would be some in the Ardeche or Cevenne), told me when i visited a few days ago.  

by the way, I'm assuming you are talking about some american/chinese hybrid?

Also, I'm talking from the point of view of my knowledge of the european chestnut, the sativa, and their japanese hybrids, but I'm assuming the information would equally apply.

A final point, sometimes trees just don't work out, maybe it was the plants, maybe your place, maybe some untimely event. Don't worry, just try again and investigate what might have been wrong.

edit: okay now i see, they are leaving out already. good, don't move them now. normally comfrey really won't be a problem for a chestnut, but you can always cut comfrey back for some mulch.