Elisabeth Tea

Jerry Ward wrote:My goal is to be able to raise one head of beef cattle at a time to supply my family. I'm in S.E. Michigan, can anyone tell me how many acres of pasture I would need to do this? I was thinking about one of the smaller breeds like a Dexter. My hope is to spend 2013 building up the needed pasture and get the animal in the spring of 2014.

I'm a fellow dreamer/planner. This is a good site for determining how much land you would need to support your herd/family cow. I'm calculating needing 1.92-2.88 acres of land just for 1 Dexter to have winter pasture, and an additional 0.688-1.032 acres for summer foraging. If you want a cow and her calf, you'll need to make adjustments. http://www.caf.wvu.edu/~forage/paddocks.htm

I love it. I wonder how it works for other animals. Thinking of the critters that fit best into suburbia, this might work better for rabbits (harbivores) than for poultry (omnivores who also need worms and bugs).

BTW, if I knew how to edit my earlier post I would, but I don't so I won't. I do know that those aren't the world's oldest olives. That would be ludicrous. They're the world's oldest Mission olives. It's an idiotic detail, but I hate to leave it hanging out there.

paul wheaton wrote:Nature is going to try and take out a monocrop. It is nature's design. Orchards are monocrops.

You're right. Orchards are monocrops.

paul wheaton wrote:But if you take out 90% of the trees yourself, and fill the spaces with a variety of other species, then the remaining trees can have long vibrant lives with no care. In alignment with nature.

You're right about that one too.

paul wheaton wrote:Granted - taking out a very old and productive tree is a painful thing. Probably the most painful thing to give advice about when a permaculture designer encounters an orchard. And most orchard owners will not do it. At the same time, at least if we project the message, then when there is a new field and somebody says "orchard!" hopefully somebody else will now say "how about a food forest instead?"

Right again.

At my home, we have a tradition that when you realize that you were wrong you do an interpretive dance called the I-was-wrong-and-you-were-right dance. I'll spare you the moves, but I will be grown up enough to realize that this probably means I still have some growing up to do. I have no problem cutting down a tree that doesn't provide food for man or beast, but I still find it very painful to cut down productive food trees.

I probably should have listened better when you said this to begin with:

paul wheaton wrote:When I visit a lot of places, it's kinda painful because they have a long ways to go to get to what i think is good. But these guys were most of the way there.

Because of the way that they are predator friendly, because they see the value of water, because they take a long-term approach to the land, because they use animals to do work instead of relying on petroleum products, because they don't pick fruit until it's ready, because they plant in such a way that each fruit ripens in succession, I found their way of doing things comfortable and was willing to stop at most of the way there instead of going through the last few painful steps.

This got me thinking. I wonder what it would look like if they took the same variety of trees that they already had and replanted them in a mixed orchard. As it stands they have about 20+ varieties of fruit, but each is segregated in its own orchard. It would take the same amount of space to plant the same varieties in a mixed orchard. However, the insect predation on the orchard and the disease in the orchard will go down. It would not be the food forest you're looking for yet, since it misses out on the other six layers of the forest and on trees that provide resources other than food, but it is a step in the right direction that we know is do-able since they're already producing that in the same amount of space.

This family used flax and birch bark--neither of which would be my first choice. In some ways, they seem to lack the preparedness for the life they chose, but they do prove that where there is a will there is a way. http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/01/30/russian-family-so-isolated-for-40-years-they-hadnt-even-heard-of-wwii/

paul wheaton wrote:When I visit a lot of places, it's kinda painful because they have a long ways to go to get to what i think is good. But these guys were most of the way there. The two suggestions I made were: more texture in the landscape (the land is too flat); move away from "orchard" and toward "food forest" (convert from 100 olive trees to 10 olive trees, plus 20 other species)

I respectfully disagree. I think it would be a terrible loss to cut down the world's oldest olive trees just because they're set up in a monoculture orchard. One of the tenets of permaculture is that we want to set up agriculture that we pass down to our children and grandchildren. They've done that not only with 100+ year-old olives, but also with 50+ year-old stone fruits. When I plant my own food forest I'll put more of a variety in a smaller space, but I can only hope that 5 generations from now my legacy will still appreciate what I've grown for them.

LOL There's always this year. I'm buying seeds now and I have a big spot of bare earth that looks tempting.

I've never grown chamomile or thyme, but I found that information here while doing research for a letter to the editor. They didn't include details about varieties. http://www.organiclawncare101.com/history.html

BTW, on the subject of grass substitutes, I read that the original lawns were chamomile and thyme. That sounds like it would smell lovely when you walked across the yard.

How many mounds do I need to plant per person who is eating? Corn dries well, so if I wanted a year's supply for one adult (perhaps only eating corn once per week) how many would I want to plant? I know that results may vary, so let's just say that my average production will be the same as your average production.