Hugo Morvan

Bit of a stretch, but for me in the same line of weird perception habits people tend to have about edible crops. Animal fodder.
I'm close to a farming community and my neighbor just laughs about me eating corn. That's for animals he says. Just because it grew so well and they had it in abundance they started to give it to animals and then it creates this like distance. We're not animals, we're better than animals, animals eat the weirdest dirtiest things, they eat waste, so we cannot ever eat whatever they're having.
Ever heard of cow peas? I mean come on. My permaculture friend grew tons of them, he didn't tell me what it was. He just had me snacking on them. I loved the things. Might be me being a bit of an animal, i will not deny.
Hope you get my jist. Same thing for invasive species. Oh it grows really well here. Then human psychology makes it that it must be bad. it cannot possibly be in the grey zone of it has some good, but some bad properties. It's growing! Where i live nothing ever grows, so it must be taking over the world. And then we focus as humans on this thing. Same thing when you get some hip shoes or a moped or an electrical car, then you see them evrywhere. Then this 'invasive' species is suddenly everywhere. It's taking over and we must by all means warn all the humans to kill this. Nothing can ever grow where i live and it must stay that way. That's just how sad we are. Two people cannot be right. No one is wrong and the other is right. And probably the one who we agree with is always right on everything else as well and the other is always wrong and evil while we're at it because he/she lies. Duality.
But back to invasives, they usually just build soil and capture tons of carbon and sometimes even produce lovely produce.
So a lot, lot goes with that question is BIGGER better.

They're literally breeding strawberries to be super red before getting sweet, so critters avoid them but people want them badly. They breed varieties of tomatoes for transport resistance, they couldn't care less how they taste or how many nutrients they contain. People want the best for their buck, which is the biggest and shiniest. While modern research has proven that the little spots /scabs insects cause on apples and what have you are full of anti oxidants keeping the big C away. WHile every time i travel by train i hear people talk about someone in their surrounding succombing to cancer or getting operated or treatment. It's so common now. But keep going for that biggest, supershiny, spotless stuff flown in from the other side of the world where they make big ones. much cheaper, much better!

I met a rose fanatic with almost a hundred varieties. She wouldn't stop giving me cuttings. Hopefully they take, otherwise i only have 4. I'd love to have a rosegarden.

Kids usually react like you describe. They're mourning for what they lost for a while. Incapable of believing things will become normal again. How long this lasts depends on the character of the child a lot and the surrounding.. If they are seen as interesting to be with they make friends quickly to replace the loss..
My daughter and her mom moved many times after the split. One time was very bad, she was really down and really didn't like the new place, but soon she felt better than before. Then she had to move back from where she came from and really resisted that.
I know a friend who migrated to another country (state i guess is the same). One kid was sad for a long time, but he's still here in the countryside the adapting kid moved away.
Be there for the child, speak with them, talk about why you had to, maybe show you also have a hard time leaving things behind. But don't let it get to you too much either, because they will bounce back before summer normally.

I'll just reply to myself, because i do not know how to get text-picture-text-picture format.

The soil is so expensive nowadays. My farmer friend has acces to fantastic big scale machinery. So he asked me to come up with a formula that we could make our own. Maybe deserving of it's own topic, i don't know.

So i did some research and came up with a third sand, a third cowdung and the last third a mix between soil from under Acacia trees and soil from under Alder trees.  He has got all this stuff on his farm, and then we mixed it in some big assed farmer mixer that goes behind a tractor.
It was disastrous it became one big mess of clay like stuff we had to scoop out. Then we decided to add wood chips to the mix and it became very nice soil.

The wood chips were fresh and the manure was a bit too fresh also, it posed some interesting problems. But noproject ever was complete without problems and we learned and i try to share that here so people do not make the same errors maybe, but we can make new ones together.

That was done this summer and he brought me a bag and i used it and to my surprise many acaia trees started growing, which never had worked before! So this bag we used in the propagation squares/boxes got weathered and is hopefully a bit matured. Because the experiments between shop soil and ours showed ours was better in the start, but later ran out of steam because the seedlings got robbed of nitrogen because the decaying wood consumed all... Anyway, that's another story. Here some pix of us experimenting making good and cheap composted microbial active soil.

i made one of these because Shane of youtube came up with this idea. It made sense, it featured all kinds of fancy electronics, like warming cables , that i bought and implied and that broke and turned out not to be that important.

It's basicly four planks connected and a sheet of plastic keeping evil tree roots looking for water and nutrients out.
Then fill the inner space with compost. Get cuttings in, big ones small ones, fat ones and thin ones, to see what will take (mostly fat ones).

Oh yeah. Very important. Cuttings need very little sun. They got no roots but they do have leaves if everything is normal, so they evaporate , but cannot drink water as of yet. So north side makes sense. For most people in the world (except south America and Australia). On the north of a building or tree line little sun comes there and normally it's not very popular to be planted, because stuff that needs a lot of sun like figs and doesn't like a lot of frost is planted on the south side of a building.

This is my second set up. Two squares sitting aside an IBC connected to the roof and guttering.
The farmer i made the soil with helped me with his handy tractor. Thank God for that, what are we going to do without our farmer friends!

Once i had chickens, but no time to maintain the electric fence. The chicks learned to forage outside the big chickens remembered the juice and stayed in. Until only two were left then the big chickens followed the chicks. I learned to protect seeded beds with prickly branches. They were good scratching and picking insects doing little damage. They started to live in the trees. They went over to the neighbor that had a builders crew and they dissapeared every friday one by one. Really weird. Every friday the fox came and i had one less. My neighbor said he thought it was a two legged fox that brought his honey chicken in the weekend.
When they were gone i realised i couldn't really care for the animals and never had new ones. Now i'm looking for a big breed that sleeps in trees and eats foxes and bird of prey then i'll try again.

Timothy Norton wrote:While this thread has primarily been about the fruit, I am now curious about the wood itself.

My peach trees have exploded with growth in recent years and I am curious about uses for the biomass. Does the wood have value? Perhaps for wood turning or for smokers? Anyone have experience with peach wood?

I don't know if the wood is that good. But the trees for sure are. They're so easy to grow, fast growing and hard as nails that i use them as wind blocks. And i think they're under appreciated as fruit too. i think because they're perishable and people like me don't really find time to make it into marmelade. lucily my neighbor lady likes to make that and share and hopefully, i can entice others to come and pick in future. But the rest just drops off and is appreciated by badgers and wasps and what have you? Oh yeah another function i discovered by growing them in a south facing hedge is a shade provider so i can plant other trees in the semi shade of them and they get an easy start like that. Easy for me as well not having to water like crazy in hot summers, and still have trees dying... And killing them is easy peasy. Just ring them and then without leaves they can function as a bean rack. Or for a rose or whatever.
All in all i don't get why it is not a permaculture darling. For me it for sure is. And carrying fruit after 3 years as well. I'm in F3 landracing those babies! Great fun tasting all those differing tastes and grades of juiciness!

It's so addictive propagating stuff. If only i could go back in time i'd have started years earlier!
Must be 300 cuttings there! All sorts. Mostly blackcurrant and some others like goumi redcurrant gooseberry and butterfly bush!
It used to be my passive seed nursery, but the rats found it.
Gotto make airprune beds like Akiva Silver has!