You need to leave at least 2 lower nodes behind to spawn 4 new nodes, you chopped off its head the plant is stressed. So not during a transpiration peak period, but otherwise they are there to be abused once established.
I've had great success topping sunchokes all season as daily feed while stimulating the plant to produce more side branching leaf fodder. The end of season stems made great pellets for the winter when they got less juicy and more woody, the stem dries like popcorn and then i just smash it up in the hammer mill. If you can get em going now, sweet potato for it's leaf crop is always great all through summer to pair with squash leaves that have allot of juicyness in a drought for a rabbit. Off topic but springtime blackberry shoot's are like pull and snap if you've got a welding jacket and they freeze really well and dont hold the black berry back much. Once they harden off the rabbits seem to only nibble at it as wood.
mine arn't up, and some of my best growing spots have to come up through 3 inches of woodchips i use to hold the bindweed back. I don't think ever this time of year, usually i don't remember I want tubers till may n just plant em late. If they came up now it would be murder by nature for the greens, it's Rubarb season at the moment.
There's a shop in vancouver called Don's market
http://www.donaldsmarket.com/locations.htm This time of year i can usually buy a box of about 100-120 sunchokes for 30 dollars, if you go to the garden shop you'll pay 10 bux for 4 dry chokes.
It's a bit late for starter's everything is shooting through the earth upwards and used up all it's tuber energy but the ones in the market have been in dry cold storage all winter.
It's possible I know many of mine left as I let the catch bin fall over, if I was a bsf that didn't want to die over winter after a mishap in the greenhouse. Id go over to my neighbors grow up where it's warm and damp all winter and they leave garbage everywhere, yeah you could establish cold tolerance and move out. But it would probably take 20 years of evolution before they would be commonly identified. But no in all my compost heaps and barrels of experimental lazy bokashi trials I've never seen one return. It would almost be like how locust plagues usually come from just a few "ideal condition" hatching grounds the bsf of a region through it's warm season could be spreading serially all summer trying to find a new ideal condition. But really be coming from the same ol refuse leak at some factory where there's a micro climate that suit's them year after year. I'm sure if I had a decent 50,000 sq ft polytunnel they would stay year round and try migrating out every season, granted it being heated by compost and rocket mass aquaponics in the winter might help.
I take that back it's plenty edible, but you wont eat the root's and i'd rather eat more of my linden/lime tree than go hauling up primrose for soups most of the year. Slug's don't seem to like it which means they live in it because of it's high drought tolerance and water retention. I don't think i've ever seen it wilt to any degree worth considering but they'll go down easy in the high summer.
evening primrose has a spiked tuberous root and if your putting it under in august it will never see it's tall growing flowing stalk phase unless you want more biomass. I use it for soil stabilization in boggy territory that goes crust arid in the late summer. But you can get a tonne of seed off it and it grows really fast without regrowing from chopped up roots. Burdock is even bigger but now your messing with an edible crop again which is way more valuable than a potato. It's not daikon carbon sinking but it's off the edible list for us I think but the ducks and rabbit's will chomp into it.
That does go with the fire control talk yes, the talk itself last about 50 minutes so somebody must of made the files as a subset of the larger 1983 pdc. It's not in that pdc itself from the link i sent you, some of the aquaculture doubles over but other bit's you can here there recording from a lesson on the landscape.
I'm really hoping to find it so everyone can have it who finds this thread in the future.
your going to kill your worms pretty fast, if you want to go from bum to mouth I think that's only kosher with worms. You can do it with ruminants but it has to be rain through or they'll all die from ammonia.
Think of it from a "if you breathed through your skin" standpoint, if fresh manure can kill a plant, why wouldn't it kill worms. Your probably going to have to shift the manure collection into a bin or small tumbler for a little par compost burnoff before feeding it to worms.
I'm trying to wrack my brain on how to integrate poultry manure in a worm bin but it's so hot I can't see it not going through a composting phase first. I mostly feed my worms compost because I want better quality castings, i got sick of taking undigested bit's out before using it in potting soil.
you can check these out but I can't for the life of me find the Fire control Mp3 i have on my phone that you could really really use. It's practicaly everything I've learned about fire in my lifetime, bill survived a catastrophic firestore and really expounds on this very very australian issue.
http://www.permacultureplants.net/Audio/audio.htm
If you don't come across the fire control mp3, can you send me a message privately. I can probably extract it off my phone, it's been there for years I don't remember where I got it. But even my daughter now knows how to find the fire shadow's if you can't escape and which plants to boundary your home with. There are some plants with serious fire retarding powers. Please don't hesitate to request it from me I don't mind going to the trouble.
It for sure can be applied without burn, I make whole instant gardens by shredding the hay and poo into a mix and planting straight into them. You can't grow lettuce in year one but you can knock out allot of potatoe while it's decomposing into softer soil. We sheet mulch with it six inches deep all over and I feed the same shredded mix to my worms. Rabbit poo is safe but think of them as a clay soil amendment if you put it on by the bucket's like I do. If the hay isn't blended well the balls can glue up and then dry out making great drainage but to much air for plant roots. It's certainly not to much to compost, if the beddings already in it all you really need is water. But you really need 1000 lbs's to get her to cook up nice. Our's is fresh so it's got allot of urine so if we gather it up it tends to start cooking and attracting it's own goo. Rabbit poo makes great 18 day compost because your just enhancing it into soil so you can't really go wrong.
Technically yes they could but in reality their spring timing may be off, we got hops coming up now but only a few surface dwelling chokes. I've look at what bindweed does to them and yes they grow just fine but bindweed leaves are small and get exhausted wrapping up the stem. I don't think your hop yields would be very good, and in the spring the hops may choke the chokes out and in the summer the chokes will shade out the hops. I think it's worth a try though because your growing conditions might give you an early start on the chokes I don't have. But i wouldn't call them complimentary companions just yet, if your chokes arn't established they could come up small and then get wiped out. In about 3 weeks grocery store chokes are going to start getting harder to find, when i first started out I was lucky to get 4 feet of height out of them but now they grow to 12 feet every year and I think i might put those hop roots my wife set aside for me under a few.
Icha I can't imagine the upset of tenants burning on your land, your definitely on the right track with the woodchips full of fungus, have you watched the film "back to eden" http://backtoedenfilm.com/ It's about woodchip gardening and a couple of the offshoot videos of people who tried it go into detail about the rock dust they use and how long it took with what soil they started with. Hopefully one day you'll be able to look back and think if those tenants hadn't burned my place up I would have never found this accelerated pathway to what you've been doing for years.
Sorry my setup sounds convoluted but I had no idea you were trying to keep over 1000 ducks on 1 acre, it's basically a feed lot vs an apartment complex. If its a labour issue scooping out the bounty for windrow composting then i don't know what your going to do about your birds flying away outdoors. Muscovy's fly and are not loyal during egg laying season, maybe the labour was frightening because the surplus manure wasn't factored into your business model. I didn't get an answer on how the ducks won't scorch themselves in summer, your gravel idea is the most stable but it's really just sidestepping a concrete floor which is what you end up at with that much overstocking. It seems the constant human need to bypass labour is how your going to end up with an effluent stream that produces the same ill effects as conventional systems. 60 birds to the acre is a sufficient manurial input year round, i don't know where your going to get 20 or so acre's to take that off for you yearly. I know i want to do it by flooding run's into swales that feed downhill, but it's another empty suggestion if the machine or human power isn't there to windrow woodchips to create soil that grows forage or sells as surplus. There are plenty of people selling mountains of chicken manure, not many selling composted chicken manure. Im not going to talk you out of this plan but I did hope to amend it with a few surplus insentives to get you to diversify your reason's for doing it. Bill M. use to say by all means keep your cow but sell the worms.
3 cheers for raw honey. I cut through the tip of my index and nail while trying to hang a duck off a bungee cord for plucking. Can you say maximum bacter, my wife's screaming stiches theres birds to be plucked and my fingers running like a fountain. Mashed it with stiptic until it stopped flowing then just arnica and raw honey. Twice a day for a week and I was able to go back to plucking with a 1 inch bandage, It's a bit insane how much raw honey works and during the age of ignorance we walked past it belly aching about our wounds. I think if I was cut in half my last request would be for a cigarette and a jar of honey.
have any of you seen jerusalem artichokes in the shops, i'm always looking for grocery stores that keep the food in a planting material state. Has this been the greatest spring in 7 years for anyone else or is it that the rain cloud that lives above me at the base of a mountain has moved on due to urban sprawl. I found a chinese grocer's in the sketchy part of downtown that has raw peanuts sprouting out of the shell, they want 9 bux for 3 dried chokes at the nursery but I found 150 sunchokes for 25 dollars at a place called dons market. I still need an ethnic grocer that has allot of seed and beans from South south america, if i could get yucca at grocery store prices I'd be laughing. I try to focus as much as I can on tubers and large seeds, I dunno what happens to tiny seeds but I know the birds/squirrels/ants and my ducks know. I learned what closing the greenhouse door meant last year when the squirrel ate 80 of my peanut plants.
Anyways back to what to plants, the answer is this year everything early or late, I get anxiety sitting while at work everytime I see the sun i realize I'm not planting my dream crops. I think i can actually grow wheat this year, i don't care if all i get is a loaf of grainy bread out of it.
If you think there rank offenders in your mulch just fluff it with a pitch fork and they'll uproot if they have rooted. I try to have conditions where nothing green is an enemy even creeping buttercups, but hitting then early and simply can save you back if your in the mood to do something. I've put 100 bales on my garden but the ducks haven't let me see more than a tuft of grass here and there that's not a mouthful for a rabbit.
Woodchips are your answer in a 3 fold yield, you can't compost sand, the ducks will muck through it and erode it and if it's too coarse it will get hot in the summer. You getting your bedding from the chips, you shovel off well manured bedding into a heap and add water. Next you plant your wetland forage system with your compost until your sick of the fertility in woody plant growth that produce herbaceous forage without them destroying it. I've grown insane comfrey in block gravel mud by filling holes in the wetland with this hard compost, the drainage and water retention go through the roof. I end up with allot of oil pungent tree's so I leave the chips where they dump it and let it roar off the hot oils in a precompost you could say for 2 weeks. It all comes out brown and absorbent, the stuff in there exposed run is probably 12 inches deep, our runs are on a torrential winter mudscape. It makes crazy soil even if you just keep layering it with mud and shit, but over a much longer time and a ground full of worms they can't get to unless you flip the chips. Even in something as pedantic as bedding there are permaculture means catalyze synergistic connections amongst elements in your project design.
Thanks Jay that's the kind of guidelines I like to see people looking too when there just getting there feet wet, I'm in agreement with all the observational safeguards you take and measured responses you make. My muscovy arn't chickens and yes they'd trample dry feed to get to a juicy maggot. I'm still dreaming of way to make slugs into a protein crumble for winter my wife will never forgive me for putting frozen slugs in the freezer. I really think sometimes enhancing animal feed is one of the greatest joys in husbandry, there was war over the ferment tonight so I know there happy. I always hate to see squirrels swimming in leftover dry feed from being to busy to ferment.
I'm going to play devils advocate for a moment on a particular subject. How do you know the poultry are eating less vs simply not liking it? Are they offered a conventional alternative taste test after a week eating the ferment? I noticed if I chart the last year I've done allot of different trials with their food, and I always noticed new trials always came with anxiety about meeting their needs. For instance I know my ducks will fight over feed mixed with apple cider vinegar and marmite at serving, but if I add flax everyone get's angry and start neck pointing at me that I F'd there expectations. Yeah if I leave it out for 2 days they'll eat it and I could claim they need less, but will the guilt phantom come to visit me in the future? There's allot of ways to botch a ferment other than it just going rank, I can spit out a soft pickle but what can they do? I know if my wife leaves a stale piece of bread out by day 3 I'll eat it in the middle of the night.
I'm pro ferment but if anyone could respond with some certainty about needs being met by a one size fits all method I would love to chase the back of my mind fear away. I guess this subject mainly stems around winter so it would be an end all solution, I solve the anemia years ago in some of my ducks with ground beef so I've had my share of "I dunno what I've done wrong and now it's causing suffering". During the time where there's no insect or vegetation inputs I've hope what I give them is really being unlocked in it's potential as food. But if I think about eating kimchee for a living because all I'm being reared on cabbage, I'd presume im going to die after loosing weight and feeling great for a period. I take that back i'd die on eating cabbage for 2 weeks, so your right fermenting is extending their life no matter what you have as feed. I'd rather have fermented gmo dried corn than eat it off the cob.
I was going to delete my post because I've answered my own question, but if it stimulates deeper discussion please have at my first statements.
there not all titled basalt rebar in quotes, if you look at the garden planter video or the students making a dome video there all showing the application of basalt rope/rebar/mesh. Pretty much the top 5 videos, i think the last one is on using the dome shape for wind power.
heres another basalt link i found further down. Mind you they don't use the roving anymore as basalt rope became available.
hehe you mean the classic mississauga new home who has to have a gravel trench put in within the first 3 years. Sure do have some links...
http://www.youtube.com/user/mdi01 The first video is about the basalt rope breakthrough, the second is there latest in the basalt mesh and how it can be used in permanent zig zag fencing that's under 2 inches thick.
Temperate domes retain the shell there inflated with and the outer dome is rendered with different sealing agents that has maintenance just like any other roof. The dome's are a radiative contiguous unit so there not build to be as subject to external conditions. B
One of the things that has been around for years at the monolithic dome institute is the advocacy in the use of basalt rebar which doesn't rust and weighs way less. In the construction of uninsulated ecoshells for tropical climates basalt rope is used rather than rebar, I can carry all the rebar I need to built a 1000 sq ft home on my shoulder.
The subject of running forward and visual barriers is true, so why couldn't I run a fake barrier of colored cable in congruence with my virtual barrier. I like that at no point do we get away with not thinking even when a solution seems to apparently solve it all. Any technology can be used to build or destroy how we see it in the world is just a reflection of how many people choose the lesser. If we get sloppy at 2 head or 2000 head where going down a bad road but that's on the person not on the technology which is neutral.
But back to debugging this solution as truly viable, my problem with electric is the bloody maintenance and chasing energy sinks. I have no problem running fake yellow tape that can wrap around tree and follow my set barrier patterns. Does anyone who would love to stop pigs at the edge of sweet potatoes mind running fake rope they don't have to maintain? I'm game and I'm not abandoning electric but using it to keep things out rather than manage within. Let's keep the debate to how could we innovatively use our pattern eye to take this way beyond escaping fencing labor and into high capacity soil building within a permanent agriculture. If we all could do a little bit of everything we would never be faced with one man running rampant on a theme or there not being enough farmers to produce for our species.
the cowboys to the extent it was a real occupational choice at some point in history helped wipe out the resources we permies work to put back. If it isn't about predator control and it just about being able to design foraging paddocks within a forest, i could see this work miraculously for pigs. Imagine being able to keep them on a forested slope and not on the swales to damage your food and forest crops. Yeah I can lug electric fence through bush and do allot of machete maintenance at each controlled area, or I could invest in each animal and be able to put up barriers straight through vegetation. This isn't about being handy and putting our feet up, it's about allowing more of us to work on a scale that can actually feed the world without making us slaves to it. In the hands of us as designers many things that were out of our individual reach can become possible. I know I'd like to be managing cow's intensively while gardening, our minds our bigger and more capable than our backs so why not let us see what our full potential is.
The are other worm systems that do not function off the kitchen scrap under the sink model.
The rain through worm systems produce highly valuable leachate and do not reflect the doom sauce brewing at the bottom of an anaerobic bilge system.
I've done both dry and rain through systems and the only reason I've changed over to a non leachate system is because it's the middle of winter and my system get's diluted. As soon as the weather can hold 60f i'm going to begin watering my flow through system.
Flow through system have no issues with lack of oxygen or excess moisture, if you want to reap beneficial fluids from your system it has to function on a true flow through model or be managed heavily. The worm situations you see on a large scale have to do with ease of harvest hence they feed at the minimal moisture levels, I dump the stuff by the gallon on my plants because it's basically peculative cold tea extract at that point.
I do agree i killed or fungus'ed out every plant I touched with the under the counter scale worm bin models and I don't think it's worth using unless your worm farm is at a biological scale that it has a good immune system. My worm bin is a 250 gallon tote with pipes through the bottom with 3 inch spacing for harvest at the bottom. It's not an income scale setup but it produces enough high quality casting to regenerate our acre at an accelerated rate.
Get out! only 6 left, oh man!
I gotta see how many fly's i can catch with my flytrap because a pound of flies is allot. I think between the ducks and the rabbits houses I could maybe collect that every day, now I can feel like a king giving it back to my ducklings.
you can put neem in the water but you might want to start with something more sensible and less dilutable like garlic. Anything larger than a fish tank should have fish in there, my ducks have done nothing but promote mosquito growth in water.
OH man that's fantastic growth, you must have allot of water in comparison to what I'm familiar with. I'd use a pitch fork and just stab and wipe, I'm surprised you can't wood chip it and use it's biological gels as a soil ammendment for water retention.
if your talking a trench that could fit a bail of hay then yes it would have a big effect, wood would be better if you have it, and wood chip footpath with raise bed / swales would be even better. I don't know where you live but woodchips I get by the tonnage, i've only ever paid for it once. I dug out all my footpath soil and threw it up to fill my walkways a foot deep. The clay/mud got layered onto hay to drain it down over time. You know where needs and where doesn't and you just go off contour where you want extra. I've gotten to the point where I make boardwalk footpaths out of pallet's we get so much water and fill them in with chips. The point of the pond is to stash for later since you were in no shortage of rainfall, if you've really got no rain coming you have allot of observation coming up about the infiltrative rates of different zones on your land.
Honestly I would rent a pipe laying trench digger and run lines out to whatever slow you do have. It might only add up to a half and inch over an acre in flat lands but directing the "surface" water ever so slightly away should suffice to bring the water back to ground level. The dormant tree's are mostly likely fine if the water is resolved in the next 4-6 weeks. Your not about to go anaerobic to the point of becoming a peat swamp, but it does present deflocculation of air pockets if the soil collapses from warming up and off gassing it's air without being able to breathe in at the soil level. I have plenty of muddy situations around my tree's but that's only happening at the feeder root level and their dormant. 2 feet into the ground is where the water is "not" going and hence you have 4 inches on the surface. By trenching slightly off contour your trying to channel water but really break through any hard-pan that your flatland may contain to open up drainage into the subsoil where it belongs. I don't recommend this unless you've got the conditions to support it but in a panic I'd probably throw down allot of gypsum to create as much drainage as I can using the standing water as an ideal spreading agent. I have enough acid soil that I'd feel safe to jerk the soil ph so quickly because it's the dormant time of year and I have allot of water I'm trying to work it in with. If i was trenching my way out of it the gypsum would go in the trench. How deep is up to you but were only talking about a 3-6 inch wide trench.
You know it wouldn't be the end of the world to spend 500 to 1000 bux and have an excavator put a pond in that you could channel the excess to save for later irrigation. I know 5 year's seems like a long time but to an ecosystem 5 growing season's is nothing, the biggest storm in 100 years is nothing. It's only us that see's things with such a narrow vision, I've seen so much in the past 4 years that I try and put in design's t flood/wind/fire/water/drought/quake proof my system. I basically don't trust anything will be as it was last.
Is prickly pear somehow invasive and fast growing in your location? In california I could have faced a very large fine for removing a single pad, there quite endangered and I couldn't imagine a situation where I would turn my gaze upon a cactus as a source of biomass never mind burning it.
I understand in conditions with no tree's let's say carbon can be hard to come by, but when we start ripping out the survivors I can't see a future were we'll ever see a tree again. If you can grow cactuse's would not other arid brush species not grow much faster and produce more biomass. I'm not understanding the strategy because I'm having a hard time creating a condition in which I'm in such an abundance of cactus but nothing else that I'd compost food.
A side note, i had no problem collecting prickly pear and traveling out of country with it in my bag by simply using pieces of paper. I had no gloves, let's just say I was driving back to the airport and decided to hop in a ditch that caught my eye. A few layer of paper in each hand and you can just clap the pads off "i didn't say slap" just tilt the pads with light pressure. But that's for collecting so you can grow it on, if your trying to collect 2 or 3 strawbales worth i'd just stab my pitch fork full and then wipe em off. But I'd never do that.....
you think finding your name is bad, im sick of googling questions I can never answer then getting all excited when I find a link to the exact wording and it leads me back to my dam post on permies that went unanswered. I get so oh humm and bummed out, my real name shows up a tonne anyways from other lives so im happy if when you search for me you find fermenting urine and mixing it with biochar. It's better than when my name use to pull up the bad ol days of photography, and a terrible device that suggest itself as what you were looking for rather than my name.
I don't know how I didn't see this threat before, tumbler's aside am I correct in surmising your looking for solutions to static active aerated composting?
I do it small scale with about 1 1/2 to 2 cubic meter's of compost stacked up in the cage from one of those water holding tote tanks. I havn't moved my compost brewer air machine up the hill yet so I can push through an equal volume of air per minute, but honestly I'm really happy with my shop vac and a 3 inch capped tube with holes in it. I remembered how the shop vac was used to clear the 44 gallon pond sand filters so i started researching static aeration because I wanted to speed up my 18 day compost and possibly switch to no turning.
Mind you I'm really really happy with my results, but I've got allot of hands on experience with fast composting in awkward situations and materials. If you have a flat or cold pile all it's going to do is make it colder, but if you bury the pipe and introduce air on day for you can really stoke the bake.
There's no recipe for how long to run the air, and you have to manage the formation of runnels of air. You want the whole mass to steam you don't want to see venting unless you made it on purpose to manage excess water. When I first started I overdid it with air and the pile began to dry out, if I didn't catch that and just sat back with my feet up relying on a timer I'd be toast.
everything I ever made of pvc has now been replaced by metal or wood, and I've dried to make everything with pvc. pvc is my #1 garden steak/garden bed rebar, but other than for stabbing into the ground everything I've made has gone brittle and smashed over time. I'm not knocking them as fence panels but I don't think I understand how they become panels. I have portable fencing but it's the construction site metal fence panels, pvc steak's longer than 18 inches tend to curve and then freeze curved if your weaving them through regular fence. I much preferred using my old electric fence steaks with netting to make a fence because the net can come off the interval hooks on the steak if things get narly. Ultimately Im not understanding why you wouldn't go electronet if your only worry is keeping chickens in. It's the same net and steaks I use but electrified and built not to tangle. I have the net fencing bridging area's that are too sloped for panels, 150 feet for 150 bux ain't bad and you can make up new paddocks as fast as you can walk. I don't need anymore perimeter electric some fake electronet makes for great movable fencing without the standard fence pain.
The only way I've found pvc to be reliable is to fill it with sand, and that's a massive pain and makes the poles heavy but no stronger.
Emile's point of view is astute for your current experience and successional forest management agenda. It's insane to try to contain free range rabbits matting in un-managed living conditions, with no means of animals husbandry other than freedom to roam. Rabbits are territorial and somebody's going to end up presenting themselves on the surface to a hawk everyday. Geese on the other hand replicate slower are larger and more aware, they duo with muscovies who play a more carnivorous component in pest management. I love your idea of free range colonies but your rabbits are going to die, if I had to be on rabbitry v3 before i could say I can hold in 80% of kits in there pen. I spent most of my nights picking up teacup rabbits under the hammer mill and we had triple fenced there walls just to have them walk through a crack in the door made by hay. If you could 1 inch fence rabbits in and predators out you'd only be averting 25% catastrophen. And your tree's well my rabbits eat black berry cane thorns and I feed them sapling trees in the fall, your forest establishment is toast for all woody growth. Rabbits chew up stuff to handle emotions, my ducks love the sound of squeaking styrofoam but they never eat it. You have to factor in destructiveness, and if you want a forest poultry lay down herbaceous growth like gangbusters and roast the remains with manure. They don't come back to a cell grazed area until herbaceous growth turns into wood, the shrub layer does more for my birds than any other layer of a forest than the soil itself.
Best wishes and hope your future forest establishments are a success.
I remember now what you need to drain your land and produce fuel and structural timber at the same time. You need willow and bamboo clumps in the stagnant "anerobagizing" flood zones. The willow won't pump you dry because you regulate it's root mass by coppicing the tree at waist height every other year, you don't have to go as far as using up your swales as transpiration pumps but if you really have a flood plain then you might. I already inherited a willow that takes off allot the excess or I'd think we'd be under water instead of it always being under our boot. I put the ducks away tonight and the ground felt like walking on wet pillows, if you started to put in willow as a fence on the catchment side of your property you could begin to stem the inflow. But if it's really that flat the situation is larger than your property and all you can do is pump it off in zones.
Nothing wrong with the idea in general but what are you going to do with the rabbits as you put tree's in. Rabbits like your young tree's better than grass.... I suppose you could colar every tree, but also in trying to enclose the area so they can dig but not get out. Your going to have to go down 2 feet and in that open breeding setting your looking at 1 inch mesh 4 feet high. A baby rabbit can squeeze through stuff oh man can they squeeze like rats, and if you havn't seen rabbit jumping competitions you have no idea how determined they can be to get out. I use to have 3 foot high pens and there will always be one guy that run straight at the corner goes from one wall to another then fly's over the top. I think all your saying can be done but the things you don't know about rabbits will have you re-doing your work at extra cost you didn't plan. Honestly compared to mob grazing a few meat goats for a season then putting in your tree's and letting poultry keep it at bay, rabbits colony outdoors with no roof is going to bite you in the butt. I'm not quite sure how you'd catch em at harvest time if there naturally raised n ubber skittish. Rabbit tractoring would be viable but it sounds like you want a self regulating grass management solution?
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