I picked fruit as a student, olives in Israel, they have established a tradidtion of Europeans taking a working holiday on a kibbutz. They house and feed you but hardly pay you anything. I washed a traditional Palestines womans, long purple dress that i had brought for myself and dyed the floor of the room i stayed in purple,  which i feel guilty about to this day.
      I also picked strawberries in England and i would like to say not all jobs on a farm are terribly tough, I found picking olives agreable, you stand up to pick olives, we only picked till midday, we started at five or six in the morning but picking strawberries in England and i only did two or three hours strawberry picking, was hell, I have never been so exhausted in all my life as i was picking strawberries, I suppose you  have to develop the right muscles for spending hours squating at floor level before it becomes less absolutely terrible. I am the slowest of fruit pickers and I try, I wanted to get as fast as the others I felt competative about it, it wasm't just too laid back to try to pick fast.
the first day in israel we were sent to dig a dip out around some grapfruit trees, i am as fast digging as anyone esle nearly, the girl i had gone to Isreal with dug so hard and fast that i thought she was crazy to go at digging like that and it turned out i was right, back in our rooms she collapsed and burst into tears and accused the kibbutz of making her work to hard which was not very reasonable as no one had made her digg that fast. These are some of the things that can happen to amateur workers.
In the kibbutz i ended up washing pans in the kitchens of course, I  have always had to do a lot in the kitchen at home i was good at washing pans. agri rose macaskie.

  Sorry about the wint in, burra maluca is right , i have corrected it I have so much to say and am so bad at writing, and it is not that I dont correct what i write, i go through it three or four times sometimes more. I need a secretary.
JUst think about it, professional men have a wife at home doing all the tediouse work and a secratary in the office doing the writing and then they pretend to work hard, they are soo lucky. rose macaskie.

       A gardener did geranium cuttings with me when i was a child, it is great doing things with someone else it means that later you try it without all that nervousness and lack of confidence I have if i try things alone following a book.
        It is a bit stupid that things should be so much more stressful, the fear of faillure the fear that you are just wasting time because it will never work should be so much greater if you are doing things from instructions but that is how it is for me. I dissaprove of people who say learn to do it on your own every time you ask for help, sometimes you have to do things on your own but it is so much easier when you have some one doing it with you, even another beginer. If you can find company on a new task that is the best way.
       As a result of being shown how as a child I have ocassionally done cuttings ever since. I can't pretend to be a great sucess at them. If you put in a willow branch and it takes that can hardly be called success they take so easily but i have had a few cuttings grow for me. The one that suprised me most was that one bit of juniper, of all the bits i put in the box i have in the garden that is something like a cold frame but with shade cloth over it instead of glass, took. That was with no rooting powder or heating or lights but it was the only one of many attempts to grow junipers from th ebranches of the wild onews of the district that took. If i think of my own efforts to grow things from cuttings i would say try it with everything, you never know if they will take or not and then you will learn. I dont try it with enough things.
      I forgot, it is easy with currents. Of course if you have lots of money a shop brought plant is quicker, a cutting starts off pretty small, maybe i should try it with bigger branches.
      I did have a small propogation box but it did not seem to wrlk very well for me when I tried it, so years later i decided to trash it.  I am thinking of finding my self a bigger propogation tray. The light works wonders though. agri rose macaskie.
 

living wind,when i put in lots of pictures to something i wrote a friend laughed at me for not believing people can read and when i write a lot I get told off for writing too much.
    It is a bit long but i have got used to reading texts i used just to read literature and it causes reading text books books makes me feel awfull, anguished. I always think the text is going to lose me but in the end it turns out that i can handle it if i can bare to drag myself through it.
      It is undisciplined and impatient of me to write so much, it is much more fun reading the bits of the forum that come in little bits .

      I am sorry for all the information that had little enough to do with your question, I have since read an old post of mine elsewhere here, in a thread started by Travis Philip on whether of not to accept a whole lot of trees that the government offered cheap to farmers who would look after them and in which i write about how comfrey works  for hard pan and so i have information for you. 
I must have written my post just after i read that confrey has a spike root that will drive through hard pan because that is what i have said but i do not remember that bit of information now. I also talked about having read about the usefulness of planting alfa alfa and comfrey together as the alfa alfa with its nitrogen fixing nodules provides lots of nitrogen for the comfrey to take up.
    Yesterday I read, in a paper on companion planting from the company "golden harvest", that alfa alfa is capable of getting its roots through hard clay and even rocks, so that sounds like good for hard pan. 
    I have read of a man digging a hole through hard pan to put a tree through it, so you could plant a tree or a bush too that would probably lift and break the hard pan.  agri rose macaskie.

    I agree with Hugh H growing comfrey from seed is not yet working for me but other permaculture plants from seed are working, the purslane is doing very well as are other lettuce plants miners lettuce and  sorrel. Yarrow is doing very well from seed and so is rhubarb, marigolds and calendula.  Buying a packet of seed for 1,50 and getting lots of plants from the packet is a lot cheaper than buying small plants at I.50 maybe more each. agri rose macaskie

we are bad permaculturist on this site. A permaculturist grows quiet a frew trees that are not fruit and nut trees just to have leaves for compost or leaf litter, lots of locusts and other nitrogen fixing trees. Probably also not to have to many trees of one type together for biodiversity.
    Juniperus thurifera and oxycedrus have  a smell that insects dont like whichmay scare insects off your fruit trees and wood that you can use to put in your cupboards to put off moth and death whatch beetle and berries all winter for the fauna and they are very hardy trees for bad soil and rough weather. Oaks give you acorns for chickens as well as biodiversity among your tree types, chose the right sort, ever green oaks, or  holms oaks and it even gives you flour for making acorn bread with. Poplars give you fast but light wood for i dot know huggle culture amyube oaks give you good fire wood and so on. Some junipers give you very hard trunks that used to be the iron bars of house building in old Spain. 
Then there are permacultures prescrbed amny storeis of plants so tall trees short trees bushes and herbaceouse and creepers should be in the arboretum a winter flowering cherry for bees that are out late in the year and arbutus uneda for the same. agri rose macaskie.

leif kravis, would not you grow bananas and advocados and coco plams in Jamaica.

  My recent research into fruit trees has allowed me to know that you can get trees that fruit in different mounths of the summer. That is, an apple whose fruit ripens in July another in August another in September and another in October and another that ripens late and keeps till April when you can start eating your rhubarb. The same goes for pears some ripen late but are hard and uneatable till they have been stored for a while. You can have peaches and plums all fruit i sppose with fruit that ripen in each mounths of the summer one variety in one mounth and another in another if you chose the trees well, and figs that have a breva or breba crop, that is the figs of last year that never got very far, ripening the next year so you can look out for early ripening figs tree species as well as the ones that ripen as normal in September.
If you wanted to get this sort of usefull spread of fruit maturing times or want to have apples of your prefered flavour, you would have to plant an awfull lot of seed to find yourself with fruit that ripened in different mouths and had the flavour you liked because the trees don't come true to type from seed. That is an enormouse disadvantage to growing from seed.
   
I read a better idea for having a fruit tree growing on its own roots than growing it from seed that is to grow it from a cutting. I don't know how difficult that is but i came across one nursery that does this while I was looking up fruit trees, the Orange Pippin nursery. Having trees growing on their own root being one reason for growing trees from seed.
I read one scientific paper on roots that said that fruit trees have deep roots, it did not expand on this though. I wonder if the reason some examples have shallow ones is that we feed them and water them so well that growing deep roots is a bit beside the point for them. Darrel Doherty says that the grass of one farmers land was not making top soil to any great depth because it received too much good cow manure to grow roots to any great depth.
  Trees do grow sinker roots, that grow right down like tap roots they don't usually have many sinker roots but can have a few, so though you have cut through their tap root to sell them, bought ones  are capable of growing new deep roots.
  Another reason to have trees grown from seed would be to have a bigger genetic bank of fruit trees. If each apple tree is grown from injerto of an apple tree of the sort you like or from trees that have been njerted with that tree, then all those trees have the same genes which makes them more liable to being carried off by something like the graffiosis of elm trees. I read once that elm trees were usually grown from sucker of one tree and all elms in one county would originate from the same parent tree which would mean that elms had very few genetic differences and be less likely to find a way to survive disease.
If you buy lots of types of apple trees and crab apples to polinate them the you will have an enormouse gene banks and the seeds of your apples will be more likely to produce interesting new varieties. Ditto other types of fruit tree. agri rose macaskie.

  Hugh H. I used to grow seeds in the kitchen or sitting room it is only since i have got the grow lamp that I used the bathroom as the bathroom window is a bit high to give a lot of light withotu a lamp but the size of the sshower makes it easier to hang a grow lamp. This bathroom only has a loo and a shower in it, we never used the shower we all bath. The climate is very dry here so even in a bathroom things dry off quick.
    As i said, the fungi in the some soil i was growig seeds in last year on the kitchen table seemed to go right through the pot. I put a see through plastic tube in the soil, from top to bottom, so i could water through the tube and only wet the bottom of the soil, which i thought might help with the damping off. When i took it out later and it was covered in fungi, the whole depth of it was, inside and out, so I think it is the fungi in the soil tha tdoes for seedlings, and the soil is naturally damp as i water it, not that of the air. Even then some seedlings survived, that is why i thought the thing might be to get them strong fast enough and they grow even when they are surrounded by fungi and with the grow light they get quite big in two weeks, some of them do at anyrate.
    I know that lots of people grow seeds with out a lamp but it is the first thing that has worked for me.
    i have had sucess growing ginkos from seed that i picked up in the street fallen from some tree planted by the government, ditto locust trees and even an olive, by breaking open the seed case carefully in the case of the olive. You have to get good at breaking open the case of the seed, which in olives is very hard, without squashing the kernal to grow them from seed. I wonder if things with hard hooves like horses don't help olives to grow. rose macaskie. 

    Sounds like you have more seed growing equipment than i have. I have thought of buying a propagation tray because i would like to get trees from cuttings of my favourite junipers in the woods near my house and may be of maples, if i can get trees from cuttings of the maples that grow in the woods, then i would know what colour their leaves were going to turn in autumn. I do like the way one tree has yellow leaves another salmon another rose and another yellow, it woould be nice to get various maples in a  variety of colours. There are wild junipers thuriferas with a different growth habit from other ones, like there are weeping ones and ones with branches that spread out like a very spready skirt and there is a common juniper i llke with a very tight growth habit which is attractive.

NuTrac. I cant find potting compost, a good sterile mix for seeds here in the garden centres, though i did see those words potting compost in small print at the bottom of a soil mix mix for bonsais but then i began to doubt that the words potting compost meant what i thought they did, which was something suitable for seeds, as suddenly all the packets of earth had these words on them. I have looked for sorgum moss so i coud mix it with sand and make my own but i have not found that either, maybe i have to buy it on the4internet. In the end I rinsed the earth i used in plenty of water and then left it to dry to wash out nutrients so as to make it more sterile and less likely to fill up with damping off molds.
      Would the seedlings grow more roots if i had a heated tray under them?
      I  have never had much success before with seeds. It used to be a bit depressing buying them, I bought packets of seeds and they mostly did not come to anything so having most of the seeds grow is very exciting and the possibilites that spread before me of growing masses of things quickly and with very little cost is likewise exciting. Try, try and in the end a better way occurs to you. agri rose macaskie

 Living wind I know you know a lot about permaculture so i am using your question to say what might be important to new comers. You are only asking about a certain area and that absolutely surounnded by trees so what i say here is crazy but then it seems so important to say that permaculture is about planting a mixture in case any nwewby should get mixed up about the whole system that i am going to leave it.
  The permaculture way is a complete design plan, which means it is not about which plant  to plant but which combination of trees and all other plants.
 I told my brother in law about permaculture and how you combine trees and other types of plants and fungi and he said, "oh they create a ecosystem". Permaculture is about  planting lots of trees which is something you seem to already have in the background so maybe you just need the clearing in the wood for sunloving plants. The permaculture design is to plant lots of different plants and I bet they innoculate with mushrooms too so not only plants and they include animals taht will tidy up eat bad insects and provide manure. SOo plants fungi and animals.
    permaculture concentrates on producing food but as other plants can help with the fertility of the system, they also plant things that dont produce food but help with the fertility of the whole.
    One sort of tree they plant with fruit and nut trees is pioneer trees, which is to say trees that are so hardy they will grow in hard pan or the desert or the marsh or whatever the problem of that place is.
  Another type of tree they plant is nitrogen fixing trees which may also be pioneer trees. For a marsh or coolish place this would be alders for a desert, prosopis, for inbetween hot and cool places, locust trees.
  Pioneer trees that can fix nitrogen because they have nitrogen fixing nodules on their roots would fill both requirements that of living in a difficult place and of making the ground more full of nutrients because they fix nitrogen.
    Nitrogen fixing trees can usefull because they will grow where there is a shortage of the sort of nitrogen that plants normally need so they can grow in infertile soils like deserts, unless those deserts became deserts from too many chemical fertilisers that cause salting up of the land, in which case the desert may have plenty of nitrogen in it, but normally deserts lack nutrients.  
There is lots of nitrogen in the air but the nitrogen in the air is of the molecule N2, two nitrogen atoms stuck together and plants cant absorb nitrogen in this sort of partnership or molecule, maybe its not a soluble molecule. Some sorts of bacteria rearrange nitrogen molecules, plants like their nitrogen partnered in this weway NH4+, nitrogen with 4 hydrogen atoms and a + electro magnetic charge to it. NH4+ comes from ammonia NH3+ that comes from rotting organic matter, NH3+ broken down and built up by bacteria and actinomuycetes and fungi becomes the N4+ ammonium salts that plants like.
    Plants also like NO3- one nitrogen and 3 oxygen atoms stuck together with a minus or negative electro magnetic charge. NO3- comes from bacteria breaking down and building up the NH4+ molecule, first turning it into NO2- and then into the NO3- that plants like to eat.
    Recently scientist have found that plants wil take up amino acids too and these have nitrogen in them and you find more and more bottles of fertilisers that say they contain amino acids for sale in garden centres.
 
     
    The nitrogen rich leaves of nitrogen fixing plants leave the nitrogen on top of the soil when they fall which benefits surrounding plants. As rain is always washing nutrients down into the soil and off to rivers, you need mechanisms that bring back the nitrogen the rain is washing away and leave it on top of the soil to counteract the work of the rain and plants are the mechanisms that do this and that is one reason that having deep medium and shallow rooted plants is an advantage, they can recover the nutrients from many different depths of soil, and deposit them on th esurfacea again.
  Accumulators, plants that draw more nitrogen out of the soil than others do deposite may deposite more of this nitrogen they have retrieved in their leaves, plants such as comfrey, and so like the nitrogen fixing plants are usefull for counteracting the work of the rain.
    Comfrey is often used as manure, grown in one spot and its cut top carried to where nuitrients are wanted or thrown in the compost heap. Comfrey is an accumulator i presume, it takes up so much nitrogen that its leaves have more nitrogen in it, according to one chart i read, than manure as manure is just mashed plants maybe that is not suprising.
      I suppose Bill Mollisons idea of planting it everywhere instead of just in one patch, of planting it under each tree is good, the rain washes nitrogen into the soil everywhere and so we need the plants that complete the cycle pulling it up into their leaves that then drop on the earth leaving the nitrogen on top again everywhere.
    Plants also pick up iron, calcium, potasium, phosforus, and other microelements, all the things that the rain washes out of the soil and leave them on top again. So comfrey is used like the trees with nitrogen fixing nodules in their roots, to put nitrogen on top of the soil where the rain is going to take time to wash it away and save you the expense of buying in fertilisers.
    Plants are expensive but they are often not an expense you have to replenish every year as fertilisers are.

   You could plant trees that grow very fast like poplars, cotton woods. or pines that are going to put a lot of biomass in your soil with their roots and whose trunks will give you material for huggleculture beds without you having to wait too many decades for this wood. agri rose macaskie.

  H.Ludi tyler.I think that they would be best if they were made by potters. A potter could make a lid that held water too. A thick lid with a hollow inside it or a lid with a dip in the top or a wall round the edges in which you could pour water.
    In this effort I have photographed  to make a cool box. I used as a place to keep the fruit withiun the outsid epot  another and smaller pot but in the one I made in madrid I used a plastic basket part filled with stones to hold it down as i meant to put water between the two parts of the design. The trouble is the gravel soon got messy. I suppose you need a platic basket that is easy to wash with a false bottom a big compartment at the bottom full of stones or sand or concrete. If you think how many peoploe ther are in the world who might want such and object it should be a way of making money for a lot of people.
    Taling of businesses, my veiw of global warming is that there have been so many floods this year, in the Missisippi the an area the size of Italy flooded, now in thailand I think it is, an area the size of Spain has flooded, and Pakistan has had big floods again that are totally not your usual thing, as it did last year, and last year it was serious floods in china as well as pakistan, so that  havign  having solar panel factories that work at a loss must be a good thing it must be cheaper than paying for the flood damage and for the food that is lost through global warming not to mention less likely to leave people hungry and willing to revolt, maybe the revolts are a good thing though.  agri rose macaskie.

     There is in a permaculture magasine another version of this idea but i am going to post the photos of my version. This is to use the same principles that keep the water in the botija cool to keep food cool.  I have tried to make a cool box with pots but I have only once used one of them, it did work but there were a lot of problems like keeping the whole clean. I have been thinking of a good design for a lid to better the plan. 
   I dont like fruit that is too cold because it has been kept in the fridge this design would keep the fruit cool enough to stop it going off too quickly but would not make it too cold also it might be helpful to people who did not have a fridge. 
     Designing a really good cool box could be a way of earning money for some person, we need all the ideas we can get for jobs in these bad times. Here are the photos of  my attempts to make such a box.
  The first photos is of a flower pot with its hole blocked with concrete. I am not great about the different mixes of concrete for different jobs and how to set it really well so this may well leak.
I have put some bits of brick into the pot and under it. Into it so as to hold the second pot off the floor of the first pot, so water will fit between the two. I have also put some bits of brick under the pot so  that the damp pot does not mark the kitchen floo though i have photographed it all in the garden as ther is more light there like my door mat you might think its made of iron but it is made of rubber of old tires reused I guess, which is cool and much cheaper.
    I think i filled the bottom of the second pot with concrete to weigh it down when i put water down the sides of the whole, water that will keep the box cool. I just put plastic plate on top, the sort made to put under pots but a special pottery top with a hollow middle that you could fill full of water would be better i imagine.
    In Madrid i made one and decided to have a plastic container for the fruit inside the pottery one, so as to be able to wash it out, with gravel in the bottom to stop it floating.
    Meanness made me chose a slightly smaller pot which is silly, to be really usefull these should hold plenty of food and vegetables. Pots are much cheaper than fridges.
    If i buy the pot one size bigger than the bigger pot of the two in the photo then i wil begin to have a decent sized cool box. agri rose macaskie.
   

  THe botija.
In spain there is a great bottle used to take water out to the feilds or building site and know that it will keep the water cool. It is is a biscuit baked that is to say unglazed nearly totally closed jar that keeps the water cool because pottery is permaeble so the water albe it only a bit of the water is always beign drawn through the pottery walls of the jar and evaporating off it, so keeping the water in the jar cool.
there is a spout to drink from you dont put it in your mouth but pour the water into your mouth taht commes out of the spout in a thin stream. and another aperture in the bottle that is wider used to fill the bottle this aperture is meant to be corked oncce the botija has been filled but i have never bought a cork for mine.
     You are meant to fill it full of agua dente alchol to cure it before you use it. I hardly use mine and it taste so strongly of mud as for the taste to be suprising as it is a fired vessel.
  that you pour the water into your mouth means aht you an share the same bottle witheveryone even if you are a hygene freak and mayb eas this bottle is used for years this is a neccessary helth safe guard.
the water in the bottles of people who use them in the feilds doe nto taste of mud they know how to manage this sort of bottle. I am not sure if they an be used for wine as well as water or not. 
     I have taken photos of the botija. agri rose macaskie. 

     Another photo of clay wasps nests. These nest are all inside my house but no one has noticed them but me, I saw the wasps make some of them so i could not help but know they were there the wasp comes in and out so often you are bound to notice her.
     One remarkable thing about these wasps is that they did not get taken in by windows panes and try to find a way through them. They ignored shut windows, the first nest is made just under the frame of a window and the wasp making it went in and out the house by other means. So intelligent insects these wasps.
    I one read that wasps are sensitive to too much noise, it totally disorientates them, so if you want to drive them crazy play loud music.
     Also my experience in the garden is that if a wasp seems very menacing then I am clearing away weeds from near his or her nest, so i go away, if that is not the case they dont seem agressive so if you think this wasp is going for you move to another bit of the garden. Of course if you sit on them or some such they will also get agressive.
The paper nests are beautiful. agri rose macaskie.

  Here is a an apple tree, maiden they seem to be called when they are saplings, with a lot of plants around it. i cant pretend they are a guild, I planted most of them to take advantage of the drip my husband put in for the apple tree or it is there the seeds I threw around to copy Sepp Holzer grew. I did put in a ceanothus and problably some lemon balm but i dont know whats become of them. 
    The intereestign thing is that with all these plants round it, this maiden is the apple tree of all those I planted that grew best and it is the one at whose feet most plants grew. I don't know whether because of the companionship of other plants or because i told my husband it was called geneting because the fruit ripened on saint juans day, he is called juan and so he gave it a bigger drip. I meant to go round looking to see how much drip each plant had but in the end I did not, summer has me so busy, when i am there, just watering.
     The plants around it are a sunflower idid think that might be a good ocmpanion as it must have a deep root that might give the roots of the apple tree a lead through the earth. A tomatoe, some little cabbages, the small round dry seed cases are the seed pods of linseeds, there is a burdock next to it  there are several other things just at its feet but i cant remember what they were.
    This tree was testimony to how well tree grow accompanied, especialy if you could see how the others did though it has to be admited most of the others suffered from being the first things in the garden the deer seem to really like, they like english plants, they were not interested in the other older apple trees.  rose macaskie madrid.

Here is a foto as lavender as these herbs are meant to be good companion plants because their essential oils put off insects but their flowers certainly keep the bees busy all summer. The lavender is behind a wild lettuce i think its called. I like their leaves. agri rose macaskie.

 Here is a phto of the mimosa tree i planted among some young apple trees we have. I planted this and another one to the right of it, off photo as last springs effort of mine to plant some leguminous trees to fix nitrogen and find out for myself  if this works and hopfullly be alble to prove to others that it does.
    I have just brought some horticultural fleece to cover the mimosas  to protect them from the frost, though as they do have them in the village they should survive the frost but maybe not the first year of frosts.
 The two ceanothus I planted with my new english apples trees have not survived the summer i think, i can't find them. Plants that die sometimes seem to totally disappear.
 I am going to buy some peach trees, I have one type of peach whose peaches ripen in october i am going to try to get peaches all through the summer by buying trees that who fruit ripens in july and another in August and another in September. I hope to acheive the same with all the different types of fruit trees.
I have planted an iris at the foot of the apple tree. I think they keep the ground damp I have noticed they do but then I have not spent enough time looking into it to be sure, the ground was certainly damp in one place where I was cutting a bit of tree in the middle of the summer and not in a plase we water the plants. They grow easily in my garden reproducing themselves, their rhizomes, like crazy. Their leaves stay green all through the summer though they arent watered, incredible.
    I have read that if you store the roots in a dark place for three years they can then be used as a perfume, so they could make be a source of income because the roots themselves cost a bit in a garden center sold to produce a new plant and they could bring in a bit of income from the perfume trade. 
    These two apple trees are under my husbands domain so there are not many plants round them he does, on ocasion remove the plants and mulches from around trees in my domain.  Lifes complications. agri rose macaskie.    

Joop corbin, you mention valerianis officinalis in your fruit tree guild, I bought some last year because my nearest nursery garden was selling it and i think it is a medicinal plant, so it seemed interesting thing to have but I had no idea what it would be like and was pleasantly suprised as when  it flowered it smelt lovely and is a fine enormously tall plant, I like things a bit jungly. It gave my daughter terrible hayfever though.
    Seems that feverfew deals with hay fever and so does tea of mullien root by thickeing up your mucosities which stops the dust and pollen from touching the skin in your nose throat and lungs, which sounds like a good way of doing for hay fever, better than antihystemines. Mind you i read medicinal things once and the next time I look them up read something a bit different, so don't take my word for how to use mullen.
I have posted a photo of valerianis officinalis, the flower heads in fact no longer hold the flowers or seeds it is the little stalks that are a bit rust coloured.   agri rose macaskie.

Heres a photo of the purslane seedling groing in the bathroom.
  and below, of what I think might be miners lettuce and young yarow plants but i have not marked the places of the seeds I sowed so i am not sure of what i have got. agri rose macaskie.

The light has cost me a fair penny, more or less eighty Euros but if I can produce lots of small plants from seed and you can buy seed of plants you can’t find in the nurseries easily so that is worth it and it is also worth it when a packet of seed gives you lots of plants, pansies say and so without much money you can fill your garden full of seed. 
   I have set the light up in a shower, we never take a shower, we use the bath. I have lots of photos if my set up. I have hung the lamp off an extra shower curtain rail. Curtain  rails hold themselves up, you don’t have to make holes in the wall you just extend the rail more and more till it holds jammed between the two walls of the space for the shower.
      I have tried to grow things from seed often with such poor results that the results I am getting now are very exciting for me.
       I have also used mycorrhizal powder in the soil of the pots. So the seeds that are doing so well for me now have both the lamp and mycorrhizal fungi if the last has taken.
     The other thing that has changed about the way I grow seeds is that after failing so often to grow plants from seed I have started to look up the plant in the internet using for example the words, “daisy from seed”, or whatever from seed, to find out how deep to plant the seed and strange as the plant may seem, the internet seems to have accounts of how to grow it from seed and I am taking the recommendations seriously. agri rose macaskie. 

Heres a photo that i hope shows the size of the bulb. It is a long life, low energy, type bulb, like the ones we have at home but bigger. agri rose macaskie-

I have always had great difficulty growing plants from seed, i am no expert on seeds but now I have found a way that works for me. Maybe if i lived in the country all the time I could grow them from seed easily enough in the garden but i dont and cant look after them a lot in the ground but now I have found a method that works in Madrid.
  I have brought a growlamp an enormouse bulb and its fitting and the aluminium shade the shop sells with it that reflects the light back down onto the plants and now the seeds I sow grow too fast to fall victim to damping off that usually has them keeling over and dying after growing a bit. The Seedlings that grew from the seeds I used to plant, first used to stay alive maybe as much as a few weeks, only to disappoint me in the end and falling over and dying.
   
I put a see through plastic tube in one pot of seeds once into the soil at the top till it touched the bottom of the pot   meaning to water the seeds through the tube so the water would go through the tube and wet the bottom of the soil hoping that this would reduce the damping off syndrome and when I took the tube out of the soil the whole depth of it was full of fungi mycelium. The comments of people on damping off fungi make it sound as if they believe the fungi to be on top of the soil, the plants seems to be attacked from the bottom of the stem but if this see through tube is right, the fungi the plants are fighting to survive in goes right through the soil. agri rose macaskie.

>brenda groth, you have rhubarb under your fruit trees. Do you have a few dry mounths in summer? I wonder how rhubarb bares dry weather. agri rose macaskie.

   What about a list here then? I have just brought some small broom plants brooms are of the leguminouse family, I am stepping up my act on the legume plants front, I am trying to put my money where my mouth goes and plant lot of leguminouse trees and bushes. I have looked at their roots and they have small nodules on them.
    I looked up legume trees, googled them and it seems they are more likely to have nodules on their roots if they are in poor soil, if they are in a nitrogen rich soil they have less nodules.

   Locust trees and that is a north american tree are leguminouse nitrogen fixing trees. The wood can be cancerigenic i read in one place, so dont have a locust tree saw mill but i dont suppose occasional contact matters. It  is useful for handles if you dont mind it, according to some, being a bit cancerigenic.
    The cercis siliquastrum or judas tree, some say it has that name because it came from judea, that is after coming from further east. It  is also called by some, the tree of love, it has heart shaped leaves and called the buddha tree, is a tree of the legume family. It is happy with a mediteranean climate, that is a bit of cold and heat and drought. The one I have bought had nitrogen fixing nodules on it roots.

  Prosopis  trees, mesquite trees are part of this family are trees that do for drier places but are not cold hardy i imagine, certainly mimosas aren't, which are the other desert leguminouse tree.
 real acacias mimosas that are trees that grow on the borders of deserts are another legume family tree. Some of these desert legume trees maybe all of them, i have just looked up acacias and some can kill herbivores. I have not studied all of them, are good forage plants and the beans are food for humans.The prosopis cineria the prosopis of arabia and india is a forage tree with eatable beans too.
Many have very sweet edible beans for instance the algarrobo of Spain and the mequite tree of Arizona whose flour, mixed with wheat flour Brad Lancaster uses for pancakes as you will know if you whatch Brad Lancasters video on premaculture on you tube.  
  One reason that legume trees are good forage plants is that proteins are molecules that include a atom or two of nitrogen  so legume trees  are usefull to animals that have to grow plenty of muscle as leguminous tress fabeaceas,with their nitrogen fixing nodules have plenty of nitrogen in them.
    About freezing sensitive trees, I have seen horticultural fleece in the nearest garden shop to me sold to wrap round lemon trees, it lets in the light and air but protects from the cold, it will help my mimosas to get climatised now i have got myself to plant legume trees seriously and bought two mimosas.
   There are several legume family bushes that i have not mentioned here because i dont know the names of the ones i can think of and there must be lots of nitrogen fixign plants I dont know of, I am not a great expert on nitrogen fixing trees and bushes.

 None legume nitrogen fixing trees that i know of, the eleagnus, the variety fruticans is the one Geof Lawson talks about in greening the desert that he calls guomi which is its name, which is the eleagnus frutican that Ken Fern also talks about because grown as a hedge it makes a good wind break. It does not mind winds, he has a place in Cornwall the South of England, so not too cold but windy being by the sea and he talks of it because it has fruit in April, he is the big expert on edible plants,he is a cute ex-bus driver turned super expert on edible and medicainal plants.
    The fruit doesn't taste very exciting, sweet and alright but they are meant to be very good for you and are the eariiest thing fruiting, at least in Cornwall. Maybe how alright they taste depends on the type of eleagnus, people go wild about the fruit of the guomi, i have just chequed up on it, googled it.
   They can make a small tree and must be pretty as such as the underside of their leaves are nearly white, pale creamy colored and a bit shiny, I would like to look up into one. Their flower is tiny maybe this depends on variety too but makes everything round it smell of a flower shop. I  have brought one and seen nitrogen fixing nodules on its roots. Some say it goes rogue and gets all over the place.  
 
 The ceanothus is another none legume nitrogen fixer but is a bush not a tree and a californian plant. I have seen nitrogen fixing nodules on its, roots they look like small bread crumbs. I do have  photo of them that I have hung on a different bit of these forums.  
and, now i have to double cheque on these plant names, i am just terrible on names and spelling. agri rose macaskie madrid.


 

 You should talk about alll the information you have what ever it is, after all people can answer back, they are grown up they can take it and answer you back and everyone always know more than others on something or wil do one day so if you beat them today they will beat you tomorrow talking is sometimes frightening you dont want to squash others i think instead of being afraid of squashing them you have to teach them to be strong and they will also know more than you and others one day. If you dont work on the premise that everyone can take being contradicted you never dare pass on any usefull bit of information, i know, i have been there.
Is your thread a con? Everyone is too polite to you to say why are you throwing trees in a swamp? When was that ever permacullture?n amnd then you feel as if you have caught them out be3cause you have suggested somthign tha tis not a good idea and no one has corrected you and you take it that they are stupid. Filling swamps with trees is not even something i have ever considered so it more makes me think how would that work than have any sort of answer to your suggestion. If you think others are stupid is it maybe that you have not looked far enough into permaculture? It is a subject with a lot of ins and outs, do you maybe think that Austrians have a strange tradition of burying logs that does not work? Does not it make sense that they would not have such a tradition unless it did work.
There is not an idea of bill mollisons that you dont find comes from agricuiltural engineering or is now being studied by the specialists he  popularise the ideas of experts, so strange as they sound to you they are likely to be right if you knew more they would not get your goat so.
   I have spent a lot of time with men they give it by which i mean dollopings of criticism and say you can take it, i have learnt to give all the blows i could and may the best man win or may i stop the dirtiest player winning all, i say that because i have just been attacked and am still thinking of how a mental slight of hand got the better of me. There are so many people that beat you with a lie, by distorting things or by refusing to go through them properly so they can distort the outcome and then pretend they beat you in a fair fight. I hope to stop the dirtiest player winning all, though i cant say that with any confidence in my power to do as much, they still seem to beat me, at least now i get a few mental punches back at them.
     If you dont talk about what you know you are not helping anyone else and it is when you get it out there that others can put you straight if your wrong. Mind you they can also put you wrong and the bossy will look for holes in what you say without checking to find out if you knew what you were talking about or not.
    The essential favour you can do people is to give them information because you believe they can learn, it is not so much that people are geniuses now, it is that you know that if you give them the information, if they have the time to process it and collect more information from others and have the time to work on it, they can all be geniuses. All humans are very clever, have a lot of potential but without information they cant be right. If you dont give out everything you know you keep everyone back.
   When i said that humans level things and get stupid i was not thinking of you, I said what i think is a major problem for humanity in this thread  because it was here i saw the opportunity to say it and it is something i think should be said, it is what i believe we are so clever we don't see that our attention can be side tracked and that we can be stupid about sometihing because we go off on one track and dont control all the other ones because our very intelligence blinds us. If it was not so complicated we would be stupid.
      No one is all knowing at first everyone makes mistakes, you yourself cannnot possibly know it all. I have been writing on these forums for years and am always learning more, there are so many ins and outs, at first I criticised someone for talking about potatoe towers, i can't remember what they are called and later found out  they were totally right and i was wrong.
Being a leader is a very important topic, I suppose it is what bill mollison talks of as being a teacher, It is so important to a country, family or to any group. The methods used to bring on a project that include lots of workers can cripple workers except as usefull manual workers, that is make them do their bit but cripple them in every other way or they can get everyone working and get people to fullfill their potential in every way. Some people are so limiting to others. It is one of those topics that are long and totally necessary and totally complicated.  
 Swamps are always smelly and mosquito ridden and though they seem horrible are usually essential. agri rose macaskie.

Didnot someone recently start a thread about how scientist had found that the ground was damper were there where roots which is counter accepted ideas.
Bushes and trees normaly have deep roots and practice what is called hydraulic redistribution. We were taught to think of plant roots taking up water to feed the leaves of the plant, however scientist have been able to moniter the flow of water in roots with what has the unlikely m¡name of the bean pulse system unlikely as beans and pulses are vegetables not instruments and when the weather is dry the deeper roots of plants with a two root system, deep roots and shallow ones, feed the shallow ones so keeping the ground under bushes and trees damper than ground that is bare. Not only does the flow in shallower roots get reversed, in the day time, in dry weather, so shallow roots lose water to the ground and deep roots send water down to the tip of  the shallower roots, instead of water moving from the tip of the roots toward the stem of the plants not only does the flow in shallow roots change direction if htere is a thunder storm then the flow in the tap or sinker root can change and be from the top to the bottom of the sinker and tap roots. If there is a summer storm, the shallower roots take up the rain fall but it is passed not t hte leaves or not only to the leaves,but  it is also passed down the tap or sinker roots and stored at some depth. So, if you have trees and bushes the ground at their feet is kept damper than  it would otherwise be kept at least while the water at some depth allows them to keep their more superficial roots supplied with water.
      Also the hypha of fungi store water, they are like tubes that carry water, they store it and they redistribute it they will carry water from a place that has water to one that does not and they interlock with each other providing a big web of water carry ing tubes and all plants except a few varieties, the cabbage family, have micorrhythal fungi, so lots of plants, more micelium or hypha of fungi in the ground and more dampness and air the hypha also hold oxygen and they improve the texture of the ground.

    Another consideration is that not all plants take up the same amount of water, cotton woods, poplars  take up a lot and most dry place trees shut of their stomata at midday so they stop losing water through their leaves.Some plants live in wet places and some in dry ones and dry place plants might help keep the atmosphere damp for wetter place ones and so reduce their transpiration. Its sure as anything going to be cooler and damper where there are plants than in the middle of unshaded hot sand.

L8bloomer if your ground is as you say it is then that is just the time when you need permaculture and a wide variety of plants. permaculture is designed  to bad soils up and well again as fast as possible and with as little money ars possible it is cheaper to plant leguminouse plants that are only an expense once than to keep buying sacks of manure. It is all about the quickest way  to get the soil full of organic material such as having plants just for that purpose tha is why not lal the plants that geof lawton plants when he greens the desert are food producing plants, they are put their to cut and drop and often the plant they advise for this are luguminouse trees that fix nitrogen and so grow better than other trees in poor soils they can do without much nitrogen in the soil.
    Deep roots start to condition your soil at depth, so mix trees with vegetables and then things like dandylions and the japanes raddish daikon send roots conditioning the soil at a depth shallow roots dont reach so that you end up with more soil that nourishes plants for square inch because the depth of good soil is greater. Also permaculture advises the importation of vegetable matter, such as knewspaper and cardboard or bits of vegetation other gradeners or farmers throw away or burn if you have such wastefull farmers and gardeners around you.
    A woman in the town ships of South Africa got the sandy soils good enough to grow vegetables on with a lot of paper and cardboard, things that are availiable in towns. She started very sucessfull vegetable business that grew fast bettering the soil with larg quantities of card and paper. Maybe you can grow trees for their deep roots and just cut them down like you cut a hedge so that you get their roots working the ground with out gettign too much shade, if you dont need too much shade. agri rose macaskie.


   
   

   

dale hodgkins, you are a rip roaring sort of person. Maybe you have a a more efficient heart than others, the Spanish world winning cyclist Indurain was said to have a more efficient heart than men usually do so it may not be fair to compare yourself with your companion. You dont only rush out into the rain you  write masses too. Hercules.
 If you level out the ground, you were talking of filling in all your dips, you will be doing what humans have always done, level everything. When we aren't being amazingly creative we are leveling everything and making everything all the same, our abilities blind us to our blind spots.  Leveling out the land is one of the things that Bill Mollison mentions with some disapproval as having been done in Arizona in order to grow cotton, still with your hugglekulture beds, you ground wont be too flat.
There is also an Australian, I have been searching for him and not found him, to mention his name here, who talks of the importance of water and wet lands as the liver and kidneys of the land, and after reading about how cattails and the microrganisms at their feet digest things like detergent, break down the detergent molecules into their component atoms, mostly carbon and hydrogen and about how some mushrooms, maybe plants can  break down things that have phosphorus in them down and so are more complicated to break down and digest, soby  rendering bad substances good, i can understand why areas with a lot of water in them, rivers and swamps can be compared with livers and kidneys, so careful with what you are doing when you fill in the swamps: i supppose with your energy you will be able to undo what ever you do as fast as you do it if more time with all the ins and outs of permaculture type things makes you change your mind about some part of what you do now.
    Sweating can be a sign of diabetis, i think it is often more normal in older people too, and there are yoguis who can make sheets wet with sweat in the snow, so maybe you have just got the trick of controling your heat that is possible to adquire but that many people dont control at all. agri rose macaskie.

Its hard to know exactly how to take things from a different culture, like we have heard christian things criticised and defended through centuries,which makes it easier to evaluyate them. I have heard of times in history when confession was attacked as being abusive and I have heard of confession being upheld as a healthy process, I know a bit about how that one `ñays out if people gt very over excited about it and there are public confession it can start to hurt the population. With reality shows it looks as if confession is getting abusive again, psychology sort of put confession back on the map and I dare say people will find reason to wonder about how abusive psychiatrist are soon because not all of them are going to be good people and so they might make bad use of confessions but i have no idea how buddhist things have played out historically, under the march of time and the effects they can have if people take them too far, so buddhist ideas are very exciting but not easy to evaluate or to know what is going too far, what is taking it to crazy saint level and what to sensible usefull level that merely stops you being to hasty and makes you observe things more turns everyone into a scientist and makes them think before they act. agri rose macaskie.

that gets rid of the trees you could have used to do hugglkulture. rose.

Pam you have arthritis so cant dig but i have problems digging without arthritis and want to say, for others who dont have experience digging that i think people who do go at it slowly because though you can go at it fast you cant keep up fast for long in such a heavy job. It is better to work for a two hour stretch slowly than to go at it hammer and tongs and then give up you are so exhausted. We dont normally run around instead of walking  or swim as fast as we can, digging is  the same sort of activity, one we cant usually handle unless we take it slowly and for me it is hard to do this in an activity that is new to me. 
    If you have money enough to build a small pool build it. If you line it with black tiles it will be harder to see if its clean or not but it will get warmer in the sun than it would with pale ones. Black absorbs all the lights rays while light colours reflect a lot of them. 
     The sun does not heat water it heats objects in the water that then heat the water, the side of the po9ol maynot sem an object in the water but the sun will heat the sides of the pool and they will heat the water. Maybe if you had metal tiles that wereinsulted on the side furthest from the sun and so not passing heat into the ground, or back into the air the sun would heat the pool faster than if you had tiled edges to but metal would rust. A big enameld bath tub type pool maybe.
    A rocket heater could heat a pool too. Maybe Paul Wheaton and his crew of bicycling constructors could get it made for you and then they could patent a design for rocket heated pools for the arthritic.
      If even a tiny pool woud do then get one of those big plastic pools and a rocket stove to heat the water you fill it with.
      Do not fill it with water from you hydroponics system the plants may clean the fish doo in the water enough for you to recycle it to the fish or use it on the garden but i dont imagine anyone said that the plants turn it intodrinking water, and it seems to me that it would be better to have drinking water in a pool.
        If you have a coil of black water hose lying in the sun the sun will heat the water in the hose for you and you could run this into the pool. How much space do you have for coiled hoses lying on the ground? Black hoses are cheaper than stoves. Dan Rojas has done a video of this method for heating your water that you can see on youtube, he puts his hose on top of the roof he put up to shade his car, maybe you could cover the roof of your house or hydroponics place with hose and have absolutely masses of hot water for a pool, this would confine you to midday bathing in winter but still better than nothing i suppose.
the idea of a black coil is none you find in various you tuvbe videao a usefull one o¡is dan rojas's video which helps you think how to get the piping onto the roof of your car port as well as giving an airing to the idea of using hose to heat water with. Dan Rojas's videos are a hot house of ideas about clean energy.
     Maybe some one could design a plastic bag that you could run water through that would be easier to lay on rooves to heat  in the sun, sort of water filled lilos and by making them get some jobs for europeans and americans These lilos would be easier to lay on roofs than a lot of plastic tubing is. How many million people are there in America, each one buying the special plastic bags to heat water with would be millions in cash for the firm that made it. agri rose macaskie.

  Maybe i wisrtead somethign i am begining to feel really confused.
  I have been trying to find perrenial wheat seed and it seem impossible or any other perenail grain seed and then it seems there is russian perenial wheat i may be wrong though can you get lattavian perenial wheat seed? We will force you into beign a middle man. THhis thread has made me think the same think tha tyou thought, i started to think that  that price I could sell latvian scyth blades here in spain which lead to me thinking that i did not want to spend my whole time selling things. maybe it does not take long to buy a lot of scyths and then sell them to garden centers if you dont want to spend too much time on selling them. Suppose that adds to the middle men involved and the end price. Ccould be a job for  al lot of different people a person in every state.
i was brought up on stories of how bad the soviet union was, I met the occasional Polish person in London who talked woefully of how many hours you had to spend queuing for food and such in th esoviet union  and my mother was big on readign Solvhenitsken and talking about the soviet union and about faschist Spain for that matter, my parent generation lived in fear that communist totalitarianism might spread to them on one side and faschist totalitarianism on the other, it made htem carefull about mind washing somthing people seem to be very unwary about now, they seem to swallow what polititians say.
    The second world war did for faschism but communism was still a threat in my childhood, now it seem like a bit bigger doses of communist ideas would be no bad thing, we seem to have gone too far to the other side and to have forgoten marxes warning about the manipulations of the materialists and the religions, both the private sector and the religiouse can get carried away and do things they should not get carried away with as can everyone else in life.
    My childhood was full of stories about how awfull it was to be sent to Siberia as a punishment or killed and such if you did not agree with the state. Not to be able to talk to your own children about politics becasause the servants of the state would try to get the children to talk about their parents politics in school as a way of catching parents who did not believe in communist state, must have been awfull and  it must have been awfull to be scared of your own children getting you into trouble and even worse not to dare to bring them up right, as you saw it, because they might split on you.
    Also I read a lot of russian novels from Gorky to Tolstoy, Chekov, Dostoyevsky and such and reading about people of another country makes one feel sisterhood with the people of that country, so though i learnt to dread the soviet union and totalitarianism I also learnt to like russians. I used to read books about foriegn countries because i had been told that to do so was a safe guard against becoming prejudiced and now i hear people laughing at novels and i think that to do so is not good for our mutual understandign in the world. I did not want to be a racist, I am learning to be one now or at least, that everywhere you find people you should be careful of so dont let your desire not to be a racist let you put down your guard totally. agri rose macaskie.

    ¿Are there poison bugs? ¿Are they likely to appear in our gardens?
My mother had theories about how beautiful darning socks was and how we were losing such great experiences and i spent time doing such things because of a romantic idea that it was beautiful that she gave me but it made me bored and unhappy, such jobs keep women unecessarily busy a way of keeping them out of mischeif shackled. I would rather be up to mischief.
            One of these ideas of my mothers was that it was awfull that vegetables should be so clean and bugless now. That no one would eat a bug filled vegetable or fruit, that instead of washing then and cutting out the eaten bits we throw away all food that is not perfect and I dont so much mind cleaning vegetables and fruit, it does not seem to be such a long job as darning socks and it does seem bad that we throw away all food that is not perfect but absolutely, super perfect and that is the case, they had a short bit on it on a Spainish news channel not long ago the most incredibly good looking buty not absolutely perfect produce was thrown out into the grateful hands of charitable institutions, maybe our fussyness is good after all. As well as wasteful, some very tasty apples of yesteryear were not so very good looking as the ones sold in supermarkets, so not only is it shiftless to throw away so much, also we suffer from a more boring diet because of the uniform food we are so used to buying that anything smaller or a bit knobbley looks bad to us.
  Some gypsies turned up in the village last summer with some mellons and one woman did not want the one with a brown patch on the skin where the melon had sat on the ground. I knew that that type of scar is on the outside of the melon only, that the melon inside will be alright. I was taught to have a more complex appreciation of the health of fruit and vegetables, to judge the scars and know if they would or would not effect the taste, an appreciation  that is gettign lost it seemed, maybe she just liked making a fuss. agri rose macaskie.   

you an use the green algae as mulch, it seems to me an easy sort of mulch, it is easier to pull algae off a pond than pull up or cut plants. Ken Fern has an Asian sort of algae, it is one tha picks up a lot of nitrogen because it is acompanied by nirtrogen fixing bacteria or some such, azolla its called, that goes a pretty red in some seasons. It is a quickley replenishing easy source of mulch. There are people who consider it a pest but it seems it is not too much of one. I should check all that out before writing.

  Cattails are good if your water has pollutants in it they and the bacteria at their roots clean up pollutants.

  I wonder if they will serve in my torrent rapid mountain stream that disappears in the summer mounths to block it a bit so that it flows slower and gets wider, i am hoping they will serve as a damn as well as a water cleaner. trouble is get one nice effect lose another. The torrent rushing over stones is pretty. rose macaskie.

      Why shouldnt you be a middle man, whats wrong with that, handy for  latvia and handy for europeans or americans or what ever. If there aren't people around who spread ideas and even products, people become insular and slowly they have less and less products and less and less ideas. When you are getting lots of ideas from outside you are more likely to think of new ones your self you have more things to work on, to brign to gether. In the case of scyths the price is totally unfair and it would be goood to reduce it a bit.

    I don't see that making comments about a flag on a ship is racist, it is normally a way of asking what games the ships owners are playing, the reaction might have been  racist. There is a problem about not being racist if it becomes something that stops you having positive criticism of a country, if we dont question the tyranical use made of religion by some islamists, we encourage tyrany for example.
      Morality is always the tyrant's right hand man, tyrants look for some weak moment in their bretheren and then say, "look i have to take over your life for you, you fell down there" and it take a agile determined person to anwser, "yes but we are both human, it is not as if you have never made a mistake" i will not subject myself to your domination, thank you very much. Tyrants thrive in countries whose populations have a basic insecurity, who say we need a strong hand, instead of saying the people on mass are capable of chosing a good road and if they make a mistake on the way they are capable of straightening themselves out just as capable on mass or more so than any one group or man history has shown how wrong one group or man an go.
      What most helps racism to exist is not so much the propogation of stories of the faults of other nations as making sure its good points are unknown. You only tell people my faults and not my good points i start to look very silly and also though what you say might be true you are painting a picture that is deceitfull. You tell my faults and my strengths and you are not an enabler or a blackener you are an honest and useful person.
      The latvian blade looks a bit different from other blades and i like the look of it.
      If you kook up a product on google and go through all the different articles on that thing that google gives you as a reply to your search, you do start to come across wholesalers from many lands. I have not found a latvian scyth for sale but yes austrian ones, just as expensive as Spanish or American ones though. agri rose macaskie
     
   

    One place i bought trees from sends them by lorry, so they have the price the post office gives you for brining over parcels, it is not a normal shipping price you have to pay, you should look for the latvian manufactures and ask them how much it would cost to send them over to you, in a container maybe with a lot of other good other manufactures are sending over, you should not look up the shipping prices yourself. It maybe they are not new to sending stuff but you are, so they just know so much more about it. Ring them up and ask. agri rose macaskie.

 I dont know about peach tree roots, and i have just looked it up but it seems to be a big job to find out a lot about them one place talks of five foot deep, but what you say has made me think of these things to say about roots.
   I read recently that the quince, tree that is often used as a root stock for pear trees, has shallow roots,while the pear has deep roots, so i doubt that the roots of a tree wil be shallow because it has a root stock, i imagine that whether its roots are shallow or deep depend on whether the root stock used has shallow or deep roots. The perry pears i want to buy are grafted on pyrus communis and so have deep roots sccording to the nursery but the other pears i want to but are grafted on to a quince so they will have shallow roots.    
   As i said at the begining of this thread, the quince seems to manage the summer droughts easily so having a shallow root does not make a plant less likely to manage drought. Heidi Guildmeister who has a very good book on how to garden with little watering, says that many mediteranean trees have shallow rooots these collect the water of an occasional thunder storm, maybe they collect dew too.

 Also, i was going through Brad Lancasters videos, I don't remember why, to listen again about the small  basins which will hold water and stop it running off so as to  have damp spots for his plants maybe and somwhere he says that velvet mesquite has deep roots and chilean mespuite shallow ones, which struck me because maybe some members of a family of trees will have shallow roots and other members of the same family deep roots. I imagined that if one type of juniper say had deep roots another one would too but it seems that you can't bet on that being the case.
Another point is that trees grown in situ, from seed, has a chance when the seed grows to put their tap root down into the soil and that is what grows most at first, so the tree grown from seed, where you mean it to live, will soon have a long tap root, longer than that of maybe an older plant  bought in a pot and planted in the ground whose tap root has not been allowed to grow straight down or than a bare root bought tree whose tap root may have been cut off, so at first the plant grown from seed has the advantage of a long root that has dug way down into the soil that the others dont have but plants do grow new down growing roots later in life called sinker roots so in the end the pot plant or the bare root plant you have grown  wil have roots that go down just as deep as the one grown from seed.
   Another thing that maybe you have to consider is do the trees have plenty of water or not, in an orchard they maybe have so much water that they dont put down tap roots, i dont know if this is a factor but maybe it is. rose macaskie.
 

  Talking of olives and beauty, and at the same time to talk about hazel nut Kathleen Saunders mentioned. The colour of olive leaves is attractive, its greyness contrasts with other gerens of winter  and i always thought hazel nuts weren't attractive till i saw them in winter and then i decided they were a very decorative tree just what the doctor ordered among all the grey of that season. It was the scene of the second photo i post here that made me think they were very decorative in winter.
The first picture features the torquoisy green of a small olive tree and in front the catkins of a hazel, in this case a decorative one with curly twigs.
the second photo is of a whitchhazel in the fore ground that flowers in winter and a normal hazel in the distane with its yellow catkins. apparently you can eat the seeds of whitch hazel that must mean hens can too so it has a use though the truth is i bought it for its flowers and with the added thought of its skin alming abilities to excuse such a buy also permacuture is meant to include all sorts of plants, as you never know what virtues for other plants they might have and as monocultures are always a problem so diversity is a good thing. I now have a lot of apples on the slope too.  agri rose macaskie.

shipping prices seem to depend on how quick you want to recieve the product, to vary enormsly. If you buy enough of anything i think the shipping cost would disappear when i have bought plants there has been a cost for the parcel and no added shipping cost for adding to that parcel, only they ask you if you want more andd say ther is no extra cost for buying more, and then they ask you if you wnt more they are more anxiouse to sell a greater number of trees than to raise the shipping price. Most sellers seem to reduce or have no shipping costs if the order is big.
    I had a friend in the art business who is from india and who bought quite large peices of art or decorative objects from India and the shipping was suprisingly cheap. If you get in contact with those who make the blades they should tell you about shipping.
     There seem to be a lot of chinese people selling chiness type scyths, weed slashers whole sale too, so there is plenty to buy if you are looking for wholesale tools. It goes a bit against the grain to buy chinese stuff at the moment when it would be better to give the work to amerians and europeans.
       My spanish scyth cost what you said scyths cost in america, so i too could start a business in cheap Latvian scyths in Spain maybe.
    When i was small my parents had a small uncomplicated scyth, that if my memory serves me was maybe more useful in a garden than a big scyth as it does not need to be swung in a wide arc maybe it is the long handle and the handles that are unchangeavbble of my scyth that obliges me to swing in in a large arc and as there is not much room to get up any speed if the arc is wide, it will be hard to cut things with my enormouse and expensive scyth on most of my paths which is were i wanted to cut things, so i was looking for a simpler one and it seems they are called sythetttes and i found some but the ones i have found so far dont ship to Spain. It seems there is an Indian who manufactures some who shop has shut down and say others deal in them but there are no addresses of others so i think he is a wholesaler who is looking for thoose who will buy his stuff, i keep his page when i look up scythettes, so if you are going into the scyth market you could sell sythettes as well as scyths.  agri rose macaaskie.