Hugo Morvan

My friend Stephane is part of a community that grows a big field of it and processes it into bread for everybody involved. It's a community of retired agricultural folk who've been working at mechanics. They've a solar powered day for processing it all. They're making flour corn into flour too. But he says most times it's more difficult to get people to do outdoor gardening chores than it is to get people to fix a broken machine.
I guess it's an interesting way to get people involved in sustainable agriculture who otherwise wouldn't be.

But i couldn't get all that going myself, so i see it more as a weed surpressing soil builder and animal food provider, but i'm only in an experimental stage

That's a nice piece of land. Looks very dry to me and the soil very sandy. Luckily there is a beginning of a cover crop in wild weeds shattered. Do you know them? Do you know which ones have nitrogen fixing nodules? Which ones have deep roots that can pull up water from the deep in summer? I think i'd start there. To get to know the local flora. Which shrubs do well, how can i propagate them. What can i import from nature reserves around that will help build up soils. Then while helping to install a soil building vegetation i'd look at what trees neighboring farmers grow and see if incorporatring some stronger varieties that don't need pesticides can be obtained. What crops do farmers grow? Grow a bit similar. Dip your toes into what works locally. Once you have some succes go experiment a bit.
All the while observing the land. I don't know if you're planning on building a house or a shed, but if you do you'll have some roof water you could collect. That will help your project greatly. Maybe there is a (temporary)source on the land. Maybe take a leaf out of greening the desert series of Geoff Lawton in Jordan. Use his techniques to collect water, keep it on the land, block wind. Maybe have chickens for food and compost. I don't know what future brings, maybe you do , maybe you don't but getting to know the flora and see what can be propagated is a good start.
Please keep us posted!

I don't like the domesticated ones much. Do you need wild resistance for cold adaptability or do you want explosive growth? The people at Going To Seed have a breeding program for tomatillos and many more. A lady has send me some resistant flower corn from Peru, but it seems to be difficult because flowering times do not match up. I'll have to collect pollen and apply that a year after to retrieve Peruvian genetics into the population. I might take that step this year into the breeders world. Hope you find what you're looking for here.

Hello TS. My friend from Switzerland came back with a link you might appreciate.
facebookpage

For digging up roots i use an all metal heavy duty spade with a tiny 4 inch blade and step-on. I remove the dirt and then identify if i can cut the root with a battery powered, jig-saw with extra long blade or use the battery powered scrubsaw with an f-ed up blade. Depending on the rootsize. But wherever i can i just let roots die down in the soil as they form deep mulch and pathways for new trees to colonize quickly.

Hi Anji, welcome to Permies. I am trying some tobacco plants as well this year. I managed to only grow it some years ago but i was too late for French season the plants flowered but never developed viable seeds. I'm a bit earlier with an indoor start up, waiting for last frost date to plant out. The last grow i had no interest, i just hung the leaves to dry on the attic and saved them, no curing or what. I had come across them on one of my attic cleaning moments right when a friend told me he had no money to buy cigarettes and was having trouble, smoking all the buds in ashtray phase had passed. He was happy when i brought him the leaves, but quite agitated it wasn't like what he was used to. After a couple of weeks he'd smoked it and asked for more, he had got used to it and had taken a liking to the pure natural strain. But i gave up smoking years ago so my interest waned.
Last year at a landrace congress a pipe smoker gave me his landrace tobacco seed. He says it's good for cigarette smoking as well, which i don't doubt seen my experience with how quickly people turn to liking a natural option.
And a friend has obtained seeds from a country north of us, which will like our warmer climate. I'm mixing all in.
With the coming price rise in food because of the oil based industrial agriculture complex i foresee that i have a good bartering material at hand if needed.It's very strange people do not do more of their own tobacco growing with prices in Europe due to tax regulations approaching a dollar a gram. They will drive to another country and gather for all their friends and family to save a few pennies, but growing they do not think of it.
I have also done a ritual that did involve sniffing tobacco water through the nose, a very strong high nicotine one. That's very mind boggling and clearing the sinusses.

Nancy got me thinking about covercropping with peas, my neighboring cattle ranger ordered me some. It's so amazing the prices we gardeners pay in retail. I would have had a pound, half a kilo for that money, he gave me 14 kilo or 28 pound. That aside, i wanted to do more with Parsnip for a while. I just cannot get Daikon to grow in my context while Parsnip literally overtook the grasses last year in a spot. I have that strain for some years and add new genetics at every opportunity i get, so it's slowly becoming a landrace. Sunflower is one from Peru that i grew in the greenhouse last year. I got it at a seed conference from Peruvians and it turned out that the flower closed in on itself. Might discourage some of the birds. The fennel i just have a lot of and the Silphy is an American perennial sunflower, grown here for cattle feed.
So there is quite some diversity in this mix, i hope for nitrogen fixing by the peas and that the deeper rooting plants will mine nutrients and after dying leave a decaying plug which worms get to feast on.
I have surrounded the small plot with bigger comfrey to keep the grass somewhat from entering. I planted a foot apart a bigger clump, a smaller one,m a bigger one etc. Hope it will close nicely next spring, so that even if it turns out to be a failure i can try again.
I'm a bit late, because nowadays we have these mini dry spells in spring in France just when crops seem to need most water. Luckily i got a bit and i soaked the seeds over the weekend. And covered the raked in mix with some old straw the farmer had laying about. Not too much, so the seeds get a chance to sprout, but it will take a shot at shading the soil i soaked before putting the straw down. Winds will have less of an easy time with drying it out completely.
The reason i do these kind of experiments is that i try to activate the soils in a way differently than grasses and their companion plants do. I'd like to prepare the soils for something of a landrace of pumpkins or butternuts or some no input cucumbers or maybe a winter rye. The inputs of cattle dung is going down since the cattle farmer seems to be selling quite a bit on his way to retiring. I'd like to find a way of getting these poor granite soils into a bit more productive land than just for cows. Moving towards a food forest/ syntropic hedge situation maybe partnering up with chicken raising or whatever i am dreaming about achieving one day...
I'm lucky to be able to experiment like this without being attached to a university or something, because i can doi exactly what i think i need to do and no bureaucratic strings attached.

The first picture are the spontaneous ones that popped up in grass, they're bigger than the  second ones are the deliberate ones.

Makes you wonder if we're overthinking the whole soil prep thing sometimes.

That got me thinking. I have put a plastic tarp down and the grass must have pretty much died back there. Now i saw a guy on the youtube with a microscope who said that is a bad habit, because it kills the soil life. Especially when it's dry over summer.
So i'll use these seeds to go and put it full of parsnip. It's a bit late, so i'm soaking them and will overseed like crazy.

 I have heard that you can get problems with inbreeding with parsnip - but I think that is when you select too few roots to make your population. If you've got good mix of genes to start with, and let lots go to flower, then it shouldn't be a problem I think.

I have had them for at least 5 years and have added new varieties at every turn, every seed exchange or private exchange i've added genetics. I mean i didn't start out like some people do buying 10 differing varieties and cross that, but i'm slowly landracing toward something which is very prolific. I've heard that's what i'm selectingfor unknowingly at first , because if you want like the biggest parsnips, you have to dig them all up select the biggest/sweetest or roundest or longest or whatever one desires and replant the selected ones to let them go to seed. But since i just let them be i'm selecting the best seeders/most agressive growers. Not many crops i know withstand grass and shade it out. So i'm excited about the prospect of using it as a soilbuilding cover crop or mulchprovider like comfrey, but comfrey stays for years on end, i've nort seen one die.
I'll send a picture later if i remember.

I do not know if they're trying to tell you something but mine did that last year. I left them to grow, they're big now and might flower. I like it because as mentioned above they are great soilbuilders. When left going to seed , the root dies back and this is great for worms and it leaves a plug to turn into airy soil. They're starting to behave kind of wild my grex. I haven't tried last year, but this year they're all over the place, i want to try and use them as mulch. Just wack em with a hoe or hand scythe. The ones making it ,i take it, have a stronger genetic pattern, i'll let them seed and keep building this wild variety of parsnip.