Jonathan Ezell

i did an experiment with chicken hearts and other sources of phosphatidyleserine. it convinced me that it is brain food. as strange as it may sound, i felt i went super saiyan briefly, like my creativity was raging in a completely new way. i couldn't continue with the trials as all my animal sourced PS-rich foods disappeared.

[quote=Maieshe Ljin]It surprises me that I have never heard mention of making an earth sheltered cold frame[/quote]

maybe everybody's too busy going to the grocery and big box stores. thanks for sharing a good idea. i'm wondering if it would become the chipmunk sauna around here.

Vanessa Smoak wrote:I can’t start the chainsaws.

sounds like you need a chainsaw see-saw. you could then kick start your saw. or skip the see-saw and put the kick starter directly on the saw.

Vanessa Smoak wrote:a driveway installer over the summer ... quoted me a charge of $50,000.

$50k would motivate some checking into alternatives, like renting or buying grading equipment yourself or calling someone else or buying a mule and making due.

disaster maybe, but very cool to a beginner (me). you probably just need more arms and eyes in the back of your head. and a clone army.

has anyone has seen anything like the jet black stain pictured below? i mixed up and strained some random worm / compost / liquid gold type brews (some with ashes & a much higher ph & some without), then left them for some months.

i was digging in the early spring into some bleak clay and i'd say no earthworms were getting through that. you certainly couldn't find any. its a nearly level grass yard area and there had been plenty of rain, but even the water hadn't made it through. it was eerily dry not far below the surface. i've started digging post holes over a cubit deep all around the place and stuffing them with partially composted organic matter. hopefully water will start being able to infiltrate and the critters will have something on which to chew.

after the willow is cooked you could throw liquified soil at it. or build weeping forms, hire a concrete truck or two full of soil slurry, and cast the wood pile in soil.

i threw some oats out that i thought were ruined. they grew. after squirrels ate all the harvest, i went back to digging and noticed the oats produced a mat of amazing fine roots. i think oats would be worth checking out for your potting soil experiments.

is it a tough crowd here? anyway, ron's methods will surely fare better than my seed vault mega catastrophe, but here's some info that may be interesting to someone, to possibly help when it's time to bring things out of a vault: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7952943/

hi jen, iirc from some of your posts i figured you were living the epic gardening life. is there trouble in paradise?
i'll recall some of my own suffering now. for starters, my gardening adventures began with horrible very bad soil and i always always leaned on the absolute cheapest or free natural inputs. on top of that i was tight fisted with what little i had managed to scrounge together. the result has been that i've spent years incrementally increasing inputs thinking "maybe this year" something will actually grow. failure can't go on forever right?

last year was kinda a breakthrough for many things and with tomatoes i learned they love 'liquid gold' and ashes. what i witnessed seemed almost miraculous. i should've kept better notes, but a good low starting point might be 6-12oz LG and 1/8c of ashes mixed into 2 gallons of water. something like this would probably stack well with some of the compost and worm tea you mentioned.
p.s. i'll mention that what sent the tomatoes soaring had the opposite effect on my free orange daylilies. i'm still trying to sort out what recipes work for what plants around here, but butternut squash also doesn't seem to be a fan.