Pearl Sutton wrote:Eating the seeds depends on how small you are willing to crack. I have some seeds that are just huge, the Turban had small ones, not much to them. All are edible, it's a matter of how much work you want to put into them.
Really all of them? Also the seeds of bitter tasting cucurbitae, whose flesh is poisonous to us?
A friend of mine recently started working for a company that builds such houses (Timber frames for the structure, straw bales with clay as walls).
The costs are just around the same as for conventional building... the materials may be cheaper but the amount of manual work offsets that.
As for building it yourself: Sorry you can't
The people who started that company had years of trial&error to build up their knowledge, because when they asked old people for recipies it failed miserably because the soil composition differs from location to location. The other reason why is difficult to build by youself, is that in most climates you have a very slim time-window to finish the job, so you need people to help you.
If you want to build it youself, i highly recommend you to not rely on knowledge from Books and the Internet, but to get in touch with people who offer hands-on workshops so you can gather practical experience before starting you project.
Also when you use his system (you cover everything with sawdust) you can just close the bucket and store it indoors until the weather allows you to go outside to empty the bucket.
Also i personally do not believe in the "Composting toilets" that compost in place... a compost pile should be big(>1m³) and have contact to the ground.
M Waisman wrote:. Yes, we have lots of water- in the garden, nearby livestock pens, etc. They are not attracted to the spigot or nearby watering cans, cat's water dish, etc at all
What exactly is your lots of water? The things you listed is water that is changed/used on a daily basis, and are also hard to access for them.
How is a wasp suposed to drink from a watering can? Those usually have smoth surfaces that are aligned at a 90° to the water surface.
Also fresh/regularly changed water sometimes contains clorine...
Do you have something like a small pond? During the summer i sometimes observe 10-20 Wasps at the same time drinking from a sunken 50 gallon plastic pond...be sure to throw in some branches to provide good access to the water (and for animals to get out of the water...a dead rat in a pond is a rather nasty thing).
M Waisman wrote: My son got stung 3 times on his ears and neck just walking through the garden after a sweaty bike ride.
They are clearly looking for water, i guess you do not have any permanent water features, right?
In my experience they get docile when they have enough water.
Once i had a plastic container that i threw my used platic pots into, and they made a nest in one of those pots.
The container would partially fill with water so they were on an island.
They did not even bother when i moved their nest when i took pots out of the container.
So just try to give them enough access to water, and they won't bother your family or your tomatoes anymore.
Please update us here, if that worked out.
PS: You do want yellow jackets in your garden! They are not after you, they are after the mosqitoes!
i have a mediterranean climate (Zone 9a, so i do get frost), and i currently mulch all my beds heavily with hay,
because loss to evaporation during the summer is crazy here (High clay content in soil, so capilry effects pull moisture to the surface).
I am on a slope and during the winter i have strong down downpours (which washed my woodchips away last winter) and also heavy wind
tens to blow stuff away/break plants.
Now as the summer season approaches its end, i have to put something into the beds to keep it all together and pump some exudates into the soil.
As i already mentioned, I mulch a lot, so direct seeding may work with some legumes, but i feel safer starting those as transplants.
Now transplants are a lot of work compared to direct seeding, so the less transplants i need for a bed, the better.
Ideal characteristics would be:
- requires large spacing in between (so less work to fill a bed)
- grows/photosynthezizes during the winter ( we do get some sunny days with up to 20C°/68F° , but on most days it's cooler)
- can be terminated easily (ideally by cutting the stem) around March/April
- grows a lot of biomass
- provide a usable crop (tough this is low priority for me)
- They are not in the family of Brassica or Amaranthaceae (because of crop roation)
What comes to my mind are plants like : Buckwhat, Rye, Barley, Fava beans, Peas. I still lack experience, this is my 2nd year grwoing annuals, and so far i am not very successful, so i ask you for help.
To keep this more formal, it would be really cool if we could put the anwers in table like this one:
I will update this first post with your answers, so that at the end we hopefully have a good overview of plants that are suitable to be used as transplanted cover crops for mild winter regions.
Abraham Palma wrote:
In what conditions does the clubroot prosper? How can these conditions be prevented? What outcompetes it? How can it be promoted?
I tried some research on that topic, the only thing i found is that acidic soild favours clubroot, whereas alkaline soil somewhat inhibits it.
Also warm wheather favours the patogen, so one should plant them as overwintering crops rather than summer crops.
(makes sense anyway, because there are so many other things to grow during summer, while winter veggies are almost excusively brassicas)
Also there are some brassica cultivars (conventially bred, not GMO) that have resistence agaist clubroot, however the intensive usage of those resisent cultivars on clubroot infested land led to the emergence of new clubroot strains that can infect the resistent cultivars.
most books on permaculture do not even mention crop rotation (in the sense of not planting annauls of the same family on the same bed for a couple of years).
Some practices - like not even having divided beds/blocks but instead just putting plants where a gap appears - seem to make crop rotation virtually impossible.
Permaculture is about observation, and I observe that many gardeneres in the mediterrean plant their winter brassicas in the same beds every year,
on the other hand farmers have developed crop rotation based on observation/insights obtained by several generations,
and those conclusions made it into the conventional gardening/farming books.
When asking other permaculture people IRL about crop rotation, they say that they don't really care about it.
They also bring up examples where people have been successfully ingoring crop rotation rules for decades,
because everything will be fine if you put enough compost on the beds every season.
While this argument seems feasable for nutrients, it is the diseases that are concerning me.
Let me elobarotae with the example of Clubroot( Plasmodiophora brassicae ). If someone plants brassicas on the same spot for 2 decades
and finds his plants free of Clubroot, i cannot take this as a proof that you can plant brassicas in this way without risking loosing your crop and infesting the soil with clubroot.
My argument is, that if there is no clubroot spores, it will not manifest out of nowhere, no matter what you do.
So if someone wanted to prove to me that just by using sufficent compost you can circumvent the clubroot problem,
he would need to inoculate the soil with clubroot and keep growing.
Now my question is, has anyone ever done such an expermient?
My focus/issues with crop rotation centers around brassicas because they seem to be the staple annual vegetable in the temperate climate
especially during the colder season (Don't forget Turnips are brassicas , they used to fill the niche potatoes took over) and most of the profitable market gardet crops are brassicas too (Asia salad, arugula, radishes just to name a few).
Dave Pennington wrote:
Would love to see them succeed,
Me too. Their ideas sound good.
(Except for their plan to irrigate everthing with well-water, even filling the ponds with well water. This is just not sustainable.)
But asking for 7.5 mio $ without a business plan is something i would expect from a bunch of unexperienced teens,
but those people behind the project look experienced enough to do it properly, so i am wondering why they are not doing a proper transparent campaign?
They need to be open with how munch from the money that they make with selling the plots goes into the community projects,
and how they want to ensure that said community infrastrucutre will be maintained after everyone put down their initial payment.
I just see red flags:
- The way the initial post is written
- the lack of information on the linked website
- obvious usage of stock photos on the videos the website has
- no Photos of what is actually happening there
- the implication that things exist, that are just planned
Biggest red flag is probablby the price. 30k for 2 acres of desert and the promise that there will be a community.
It just screams scam at me.
Not the type of scam where someone takes your money and gives you nothing, but the type of scam where you find yourself on barren plot in the desert.
I mean what do the people get for their 30k?
The guy probably paid 30k for all plots together and now subdivides and sells with an image of a community that will probably never exist.
I would also go with different varieties, with the main argument being different ripening times.
Usually people here do not want all of their fruits at once, but more evenly distributed over the season.
So make sure to get early and late varieties...this way they also don't compete for the same nutrients at the same time.
Pearl Sutton wrote:If it's watertight, use it for any kind of dry storage. I always have things that I don't want inside the house but that need to stay dry.
Right - dry and away from critters!
Please be aware that rats can chew through plastic and depending on the geometry even through metal.
Maybe use it for what it was inteded: to collect residual waste.
I like the pond idea, have done similar things, but the issue is that you generally to not want to bury plastic(who will unbury it after you pass away or leve the place?).
Maybe use it as rainwater storage for later irrigation?
But then again it is a container that has been used for waste, so maybe you don't want to irrigate from it, because who knows what has been disposed in it before.
Susan Mené wrote:ICome to think of it, the bed did well with string beans last year, but everything else flopped.
According to the internet, beans/peas don't do well in beds that had beans/peans in the previous year.
I have read individual reports that claim peas will grow happily in a bed that had peas the years before,
however this might have been the reason.
Faye Streiff wrote:Could it be that they had too much plant food and the salts in it are burning the plant?
This should only be an issue with chemical fertilizer, organic material should decompose slowly so this is not an issue.
I do not think people on this forum use chemical fertilzers...if you do, please read the soil food web by elaine ingram.
EDIT: In that books she explains how the chemical fertilizers actually kill soil life via osmotic pressure, releasing a lot of nutriens for a short time (most of those wash away), leaving the soil in a worse condition than it was before fertilizing.
i have a lot of Rumex spp. seedlings that i need to get in the ground asap...However i ran out of free beds, so i need to squeeze them between
existing plants. I could not find any info on the internet which plants are good and bad neighbours for it.
John C Daley wrote:
Its not a simple single ansawer there is more detail involved.
Details like your location (how munch sun?), the soil conditions, and most importantly what are your goals?
You want the fruit trees come up ASAP? How tall do you want the fruit trees to get? Do you want to grow veggies in between? If yes, for how long?
Do you want a closed canopy or more svanah-like? Do you want to harvest the wood from the n-fixers, and if so, for what purpose?
Permaculture has a lot to give, because it takes more variables into account than what you get thought in most agrucultural books/courses,
and can therefore enable you to find a optimal solution for your specific situation. Big part of this is observation.
i am sold on the idea of weed free market garden beds, so i am trying it this year.
Paths are about 15 cm (ca. 6 inch) of wood chips and the beds are the same height of compost.
Most weeds here are easy to take care of, but couch grass (Elymus repens) really surprised me.
It grows through basically everything you would put in a growing area. I have seen it growing through a wood chip,
it did not even bother to grow aroud it, just went straight through the wood!
Weeding it is extremely time consunimg, on average i need about 5-10 minutes per metre of bed, and i do this twice per week.
This is too munch! (i really understand why some are tempted to use herbicides here).
So i need a smarter/more permaculture way to handle it.
(I am aware that "weed free permaculutre" is an oxymoron, but hear me out)
I am not even sure if i am winning the fight, so i have some basic questions:
1. When do actually deprive the plant from energy? Sometimes when i pluck a fresh shot, i unearth a nice piece of rizome (up to 15 inches),
but most of the time i get only litte more than what was visible on the surface.
Sure thing when i get a big chunk of rhizome it is an energy-negative transaktion for the plant,
but how munch time do i have to pluck a shot after it surfaced and started photosystesis before the plant compensated
for the initial energy for growing this shot?
2. Does the grass outside of the beds pump energy into the rizomes underneath the beds? And if so, how wide should a perimeter be to stop this from happening?
3. Does the plant go into a "hard to pluck" mode with short predetermined breaking points? After some time of plucking i do not unearth the big juicy rizomes, but only short pieces,
which are anchored into the ground like a tree! The question is, is this just the part where the plant grew out of original soil horizon (remeber, i have 6 inch of compost on top of the original soil),
or is the plant more like "Damn i have been plucked...again...better anchor myself harder into the ground and get shorter breaking points!"?
4. Bed preparation to weaken the plant What seems to help is to put something like a rainbarrel on the ground and let it sit for a couple of months. Then when i remove the barrel,
every plant underneath is dead...except for the couch grass, which just turned white and can then be removed..at least partially.
My latest expermient is to just mulch over the existing meadow with a big layer of hay...still couch grass shots make it through the hay,
but much less than otherwise...i really hope that a bed mulched this way this year will be almost couch grass free next year.
At least this is what i like to believe.
5. Cover Crops I plantet some squash and mulched the area with hay, hoping that when the hay breaks down the squash will make
enough shade to get rid of the couch grass...however when i look at the grass coming up between my existing crops,
i doubt this will work. We will see.
6. Couch grass recipies I have tased some rizomes...they tase edible but not really like something i enjoy eating. I have read that the rizomes can
be dried and ground up like flour. Does anyone have specific recipies for couch grass?
Would be munch more rewarding if i could eat it, because then i can rebrand my weeding into harvesting.
So any other ideas/brainstorming or recommendations?
I really need to figure out how to handle this weed more efficently, otherwise i cannot transition to live as a market gardener.
PS: I am glad that i did not quit my job to become a market garden farmer,
because with my current aproach i could never keep up with this weed on a area large enough
to be supporting my expenses.
PPS: Still i do not hate the plant and i sure don't want to eradicate it on the whole property...i leave it alone on most parts of the garden and even let it grow big before i occasionally scythe it down. It is a nice plant in general,
i just don't want it in the relatively small market garden area.
John Greenan wrote:I planted 29 bare-rooted blackberries in Central Texas at the beginning of April.
1. In the northern hemisphere you are supposed to plant them in the autumn, so they have time to develop a root system before the droughts come.
2. My question how deep the mulch is has not been answered, from the photos it does not seem to bee deep, rahter only sprinkled on the surface.
3. You are supposed to water less frequently, but deep. this way you encourage the deep roots that the plant needs to make it on its own.
From my personal experiences wasps become docile if they have suffient water.
Last year i had a through where i kept some stuff in to not have it scattered over the place,
water accumulated in the bottom, but for the items in it that was ok.
Wasps build a nest in a pot that was partially submerged into said water,
and they never bothered when i took stuff out, even when i moved the nest.
Really can't wait for them ro reappear soon, to get rid of the mosquitos!
However i have once been stund in the city: Wasp somehow flew in my face and found itself between my face and my glasses...stund my eyebrow,
it was swollen, but it could have beend worse...
R. Han wrote:
Does the book deal with the core of the free ranging problem,
i.e. that Chicken are forrest animal and not suited for a lawn/meadow?
This video shows chicken on a farm with poplar trees. Even if you don't know german,
you will clearly see that chicken prefer to be close to the trees to being in the open.
Why not doing what we call chop and drop?
This would be getting a scythe (has to have straight handle) and just scything the place couple of times/year snd leaving the debris where it is,
also you don't bother with roots.
Davis Tyler wrote:They produce a decent crop the first year, then a half crop the second year plus some daughter runners, then by the third year they die back and I have to buy new plants again
I think i heard in a yuotube video (maybe Curtis Stone?), that strawberries produce better if they are replanted.
Also saw neigbours happily replanting them and having surplus plants that are destined for compost (or giveaway if you interfere on time ).
Are there any varieties of strawberries that don't succumb to these viruses?
Key to robustness to viruses ist genetic diversity. Try growing some from seed if viruses are your concern.
Also i am not shure how to make the basins for the filter.
It would definetly need to be half-watercylce and not full-watercycle,
to prevent contamination of the ground.
If i use gley, the gley layer might accumulate some heavy metals and radioactives over time,
but the glay layer can be taken out and its organic matter then separated from the the toxins.
So by using gley, regular maintenance is a must.
However plastic/concrete/metal might be safer from seepage,
but became an pollutant at the end of its lifetime plus those materials
could also pollute the environment during their lifetime.
Probably best would be basins made of monolithic rocks that had been carved out,
but aquiring them in the desired volume would make me sad about the mountain it used to be.
Anne Miller wrote:Thanks for sharing Bill Mollison's Water Filter and Sewer Treatment system.
Thanks for replying.
Anne Miller wrote:Ben, Bill's suggestion as you can see in the diagram uses Mussel shells not live mussels.
Actually it uses both. There are live freshwater mussels in the filter. So it is providing for its own mussel shells and allows replicating the filter after some time.
The mussels probably also trap nasty stuff in their shell, and they dont degrade as fast as limestone rock etc.
As for the initial batch of mussels i can probably work out something with the local authorities to source exaclty
the species that used to live here, to introduce them to my ecosystem, and hopefully later reintroduce them to their former habitat.
My thougth was whether the initial batch of mussel shells is allowed to be from saltwater mussels,
as they are so easy to come by. It is just one detail of many.
Well i personally need to filter out water that runs from the Highway to my garden/farm under construction,
so i need to start building a Mollison filter, and need to get the details figured out.
It is difficult for me to source freshwater mussel shells, can i also use saltwater mussel shells?
i have read that dispersive clay has very little friction when it gets wet and that it is therefore dangerous to
do water accumulating earthworks on slopes with dispersive clay.
Now given there is a slope with clay, what would you recommend to do to check for dispersive clay?
Given it turns out there is dispersive clay, are there tehniques that allow a "krameterhof-like" setup with lots of ponds on a steep slope with dispersive clay,
or should one not even try to do so for safety reasons (landslide)?
If the algae population is balanced there is no issue for you use case,
but if they take over they can start to die off again and therefore deprive the water of oxygen.
Not ideal for plant, but i woudn't worry too munch.
Austria has a Lockdown (you can only leave you home for work & grocery shopping) and wants to introduce mandatory vaccination for the whole population starting February 1st 2022.
Fredy Perlman wrote: If one were to exploit topography, wouldn't a series of channels potentially create a passive clay mine? Where either the soil is washed away leaving easily-purified large clay deposits, or the clay is washed into certain collection areas? Per observation, I don't think the latter actually happens...what looks to be happening is that, after human disturbance, sand and soil are removed from settled areas of clay.
I remember that Holzer wrote in his permaculture book about how they did exactly that to accumulate resources over several years to be able to build their house.
First of all, what makes you think a pond has to be sealed at all?
Ideally you only seal the dam resulting in your earthworks recharging the moiste upslope of the dam.
Such an unsealed pond is less likely to dry out than a sealed one, beacuse evaporated water can be replaced
by the water that is retained in the soil. Plus the water is available to the vegetation.
This is called the full water cycle. (As opposed to half-water cycle with isolated/sealed water features)
Secondly, there are situations where a liner is approriate. This video shows such a situation:
Please also look at the comment section under the video, there are a lot of people dogmatically saying "Pond liner bad. You bad. Use clay. This not permaculture".
However the author takes his time explaining in the comment section why the pond liner was the only option to
store water on the farm thus making the farm viable at all.
Lastly to answer why the liner in the roof is more ok, than in the pond:
a) The pond liner in the pond is always wet, therefore exposed to chemical whaetering which makes it last shorter
thena the liner in the roof.
b) The pond line in the pond is more prone to mehanical damage, especially when not protected properly
c) When the pond liner fails some decades down the road, it is possible that the future owner doesn't care about properly disposing/replacing
of the liner which is bad. A properly build clay pond can prevail for hundreds of years. Whereas the pond liner in the roof
is more likely to be removed once the structure reaches its end of life.
Please note that you can also use clay to seal the roof of your structures, there were structures in northern europe that were dry for over a thousand years
until the vikings decided to plunder the insides...entering through the roof and thereby destroying the structure.
Your picture IMG_6122.jpg reveals a small valley in the background, have you considered building a pond there by making a dam?
Did you do a mason jar test to check the clay content to see whether you can seal it at all?
It is advisiable not to have any steep areas like you have now, because it is harder and sometimes even impossible to seal that.
What to do with the trees depends on what you want.
If you want to farm in a convential way with tilling the land every year you would need to remove the stumps.
I highly recommend not to do this because:
a) It was probably made an orchard for a reason, it may not be suited for annual crops
b) the cost to remove the stumps would be prohibitive, it is better to buy cleared land if you really want to that.
c) there is no way to do this with preserving the soil.
Also i have a generall no-till mindset, like most others here in the forum, as tilling always erodes the earth.
Assuming you want to make a savannah-like food forrest it would be the best thing to just cut down the stumps and let
most of them rot away in place. This creates the fungal environment that most trees like.
Leave some standing for special habitat, many birds/insects demand standig dead wood.
Proceed with hugels as time allows. Still i would rent some heavy equiment or a contractor for the initial clearout around your zone 1/2.
Also you might want to not plant cherries (on large scale) for a while, there are some cherry pathogens that prevent cherries from performing well where cherries stood before,
tough the mechanism is not understood. Something monocultre-related would be first guess why cherries died in the first place,
they are usually drought proof one established.
Also what is the fire hazard situation in your area?
Are the stumps dry(=fire hazard) or moist/rotten?
Carl Nystrom wrote: You could even dig a trench and burn slash inside to make a giant quantity of biochar. Just let it burn down, then push the dirt back on top. Instant carbon sequestration.
I think this is the opposite of carbon seqestration.
Letting it rot in place so that microorganisms can drag down the carbon over time is proper solution for carbon sequestration.
Tido Bishop wrote:
-Does rockwool have any place in a rocket stove?
I think it is is rather nasty stuff (not as nasty as asbestos, but it goes in that direction) und it doesn't provide any structural integtrity.
Also the video you posted makes me rahter not want to use it.
Why don't you go with a "traditional" cob-based build?
Also think about the day when you tear it down...you have absolutely no healt risk when taking apart cob,
while the rock wool will make a huge mess.
The hybrid inverters i am looking at all want a 48V battery system.
While lead-batteries have no BMS and thus can be connected in series, what is the situation with LiFePos?
Can i take 4 (identical) 12 Volt LiFePo-batteries and connect them in series, or do all cells need to bee connected
to the same 16S balancer?
I was told i should go for a sperate inverter and charger, but it seems to me that this is more expensive than the hybrid solar inverter.
Also the hybrid units support AC input and most of them can be run without batteries, while the stand-alone MPPT-Chargers explicitly
say do not connect the inverter
All-in-all the topic is rather complicated so i think going for the hybrid unit is the way for me, as it also saves me time in reseach,
and time is a big factor right now, for those of you who do not know it : The italian harbours are being blocked, so at least in EU we will
run into immense supply issues in the near future.
Nevertheless i want to mention another argument for the sperate inverter:
If your inverter is seperate from the rest of the system you are not dependet on new/fancy transformatorless inversters,
but can go with an old-school copper-based transformator. The advantage this gives is that transformatorless inverters
can give you the peak power for like 20ms while the big coils in a transformator act as buffer, effectively giving you 2-5 seconds
of peak power.
Mark Reed wrote:
I've seen a documentary about them where it was established that they can recognize individual humans and know who they like and who they don't.
They can even describe individual humans to other crows.
Birds have smaller and more energy-efficient neurons, so i would not rule out that they are actually smarter than us.
