natschultz McCoy

Where in Southern NY are you?  I live on Long Island, but I used to have a place Upstate and back then it was all dairy (cow) farms, apple orchards and cornfields.  You can definitely raise chickens on that!  Plant some native Red Mulberries and some willows.  Don't plant White or Paper Mulberries - they will take over everything - very invasive and impossible to kill!  Chickens eat bugs and your kitchen scraps!  Also, you can try Quinoa and Buckwheat for grains.

stalk_of_fennel wrote:
If you do this you will cause your worm bin to become a black soldier fly breeding ground unless you can keep the soldier flies out.  It's not easy.  I've got a worm bin and a soldier fly bin.  Yes, the worms love the soldier fly residue but if you end up with soldier flies in your compost bin they will out compete your worms for the food and you won't end up with any worm compost worth a crap.

How big are the larvae?  Can you sift them out from the compost before putting in the worm bins?  Or are they too easy to miss?  Maybe you can transfer the sifted compost to an empty BSF bucket with the entrance holes blocked (so new larvae don't enter) for a few days first, just to make sure they are all gone?

I had a purebred Alaskan Husky when I was a kid.  She was nice, but she killed my rabbit        She was not a "man's best friend" kind of dog. 

We just put down our 14 year old German Shephard / Yellow Lab mix a few months ago (a shelter rescue puppy) - he was the best dog in the world (he was also nick-named "Bear").  His best friend died from cancer last April - she was awesome too - she was a Pitbull / Lab and who knows what else (also a rescue puppy). 

If you loved your Shephard, I'd go with another one or a Shepherd mix.  Actually, any rescue / mutt is good as long as you get it when it is a puppy.

I found this list of firewood trees for zones 5 and up.  Oddly neither Ash nor Elm are included, however, I cannot grow either tree because of Dutch Elm disease and Emerald Ash borer, which decimated all trees near me (Long Ialsnd, NY).

http://permaculturetokyo.blogspot.com/2006/05/top-10-fuel-trees-for-zone-5-and-above.html
RANK NAME Heat/Cord
(Million BTUs)

1. Osage Orange (Maclura pomifera) 32.9
2. Oak, White (Quercas alba) 29.1
3. Locust, Black (Robinia pseudoacacia) 27.9
4. Ironwood (Ostrya virginiana) 27.9
5. Hickory, Shagbark (Carya ovata) 27.5
6. Apple (Malus domestica) 27.0
7. Honeylocust (Gleditsia triacanthos) 26.7
8. Hickory, Bitternut (Carya cordiformis) 26.7
9. Oak, Bur (Quercus macrocarpa) 26.2
10. Mulberry (Trees from the Moraceae Morus family) 25.8


WARNING:  DO NOT plant the Asian / Russian white or paper Mulberries!  They are devastatingly invasive!  You CANNOT KILL THEM!  The roots spread when you try; they take over EVERYTHING!  One tiny piece of root destroys your compost pile and leaf mould.  Even the most potent tree killing chemicals do not work (stump dies, roots THRIVE and SPREAD)!

Plant the native Red Mulberry or even the Black Mulberry – yummy berries and NOT invasive!  The native red grows so fast – keep on top of it with pruning if you want a traditional tree!  I haven’t tried coppicing them, but I can tell you that when I cut down the white one (hoping to kill it – BEFORE I knew how bad it was) within 2 weeks I had over 10 new shoots that grew into a shrub overnight; the next year they were at least 7 feet tall and FAT but the roots spread over 20 feet away into a new planting hole and took over the ENTIRE garden with little baby white mulberries EVERYWHERE – that’s when I bought the deadly chemicals and killed the stump – that only made the roots more determined to spread!

OK, sorry, that tree should be BANNED, it is so bad!  Anyhow, as for how many trees to plant for firewood, that site says this:

“Now unless you’re a lumberjack, or semipro wood cutter, you’re probably wondering what the blazes is a DBH. That stands for diameter at breast height, taken by measuring a tree’s diameter at about 4 1/2 feet from the ground. Now, this list only goes up to 6 DBH for one reason. Most trees are coppiceable if they are less than 6 inches in diameter and less than 10 feet tall. Therefore, if we want the tree to survive and continue providing us with firewood in a sustainable manner, we don’t want to let it grow bigger than that. So, we will need, on average, about 34 of the above trees to produce one cord of firewood (if that is the amount you really need). I would suggest more, as we are going to coppice them on rotation. The average by today’s standard home (considering the average home is lacking sufficient insulation, has ceilings too high, and if it has a fireplace or stove, it’s inefficient) needs 4 1/2 to seven full cords of wood per year to heat. I will be bold here and state that this is probably due to the fact that modern structures aren’t built toward energy efficiency, and most people don’t burn wood that kicks out a high BTU. The common, lazy fire builder usually goes for lighter, faster burning woods.”

34 trees for one high-BTU cord.  That's nuts!  I burn 3 cords on average, but I don't start until the interior temp drops to 54 degrees.

Hi, I stumbled upon this post while looking up willows for another reason, but here is a great article about cow health that is perfect for you guys.
http://www.mosesorganic.org/attachments/broadcaster/livestock12.5cowtreatmts.html

This is what it says about willows and silage in particular:

"Jerry also encouraged hedgerow planting. He noted that woody plants produce sugars anytime the temperature is above 32 F. "The Europeans always kept these plants around for wind protection, diversity, and to feed their animals in the wintertime." He said bioflavanoids concentrated in the buds of woody plants are anti-virals and augment vitamin C in the immune system.

He said hybrid willow can produce four tons per acre of dry matter, and ranchers in Australia coppice it for cattle, sheep, and goats. "They go crazy for this stuff, because it's loaded with all these nutrients that they can't get in domestic forages." He suggested farmers start hedgerows by taking poor ground "that you don't want to ever plow again" and planting 30 or 40 light-canopy trees per acre, such as willow, mulberry, persimmon, filbert, kentucky coffeetree, or osage orange. "There is no problem getting protein on any of these plants," he said. For instance, mulberry leaves contain 26% protein, to go along with 3% calcium. "Protein's not your yield-limiting factor on the farm. Energy is your yield-limiting factor. Protein is the easy part. I don't know why farmers buy protein." Jerry said protein is abundant because nitrogen is--it makes up 78% of the air, and plants can easily fix it "as long as there is a soil food web that puts the nitrogen in a usable form for the plants." Energy is sunlight captured in chlorophyll and other carotenoids (colored pigments).

One advantage to silage is easier preservation of these carotenoids than with hay. "You want good green hay, in which these compounds have not oxidized too much." But one of the negatives about silage is it tends to convert peptides and proteins into NPN. "That's why I like to throw sugars on grass silage, to get it to ferment NOW." This fast fermentation prevents heat damage and spoilage. Jerry likes to use dairy whey, because it is loaded with lactose sugar. Lactose ferments into beneficial L-lactic acid and is also rich in calcium and potassium. Lime on the silage will also stimulate lactic acid production. He said old recipes have ten pounds of limestone and ten to thirty pounds molasses per ton of silage. "Then you get a really good ferment and less damage."

Hope this helps,
Natalie


I may be a Vegetarian, but I’ll Defend to the Death your Right to eat Meat!

Perhaps Bog Rosemary (Andromeda).  It likes moist acidic soil, naturally grows in bogs.  It is NOT edible!

How do you stop your rabbits from burrowing under the fence and out the other side?

You want to leave your rabbits free to roam and you have coyotes?  Keep dreaming.  Even raccoons will find a way to eat all those rabbits before you know it.  Hutches exist for a reason.  In fact, when I was a kid I had a white rabbit (an Easter present) who lived in a hutch outside year-round (zone 5-6), and one day my bunny was "gone."  My mother told me I had left the hutch open and it ran away.  Years later she confessed that she woke up one morning and there were rabbit parts all over the yard - my dog (a Husky) got her and my mother frantically cleaned up all the evidence and lied to me.

Wow!  I can't believe they'd give away recycled clay for free - lucky you!  My old studio recycled all of ours with a pug mill.

If you have free grog, I imagine it can't hurt.  Grog is high-fired clay that is pulverized into sand-like particles.  It is added to clay to increase its resistance to shock.  In ceramics sand is not (normally) used because it is denser than grog and usually has a different vitrification point than the clay itself, which can cause cracking.  Building an oven is different than firing a bowl or sculpture, so sand should be fine.  Follow Ernie's instructions, just be sure to let it dry slowly and start with small fires to prevent excessive cracking.

So far I've had absolutely no luck with plum trees - they all die   However, I would think that your "soil" was way too active.  I would give that mix a minimum of 6 months (amend in fall, plant in spring) before I actually plant a tree in it. 

I left one dead plum in the ground, "hoping" it will come back to life this coming spring.  I'm thinking of just spreading some composted manure on top of the soil now, letting it breakdown into the soil over the winter and then either the tree "miraculously" comes back to life or I can plant a new one.