Jeff Hodgins

So this is an answer that might not suit everyone it's for real Bushman. What I do is I boil the taro and I rub it all over myself I also rub it in my hair and I find it takes the itching away but I think it may also serve as a physical barrier or maybe it smells different and they don't realize that it's me.

Anne Miller wrote:I believe in adding as much organic matter as possible.

Do you make compost?  Making compost is a great addition to zero inputs.  Putting what you grow back into the system.

Also with compost you can make free fertilizer by making compost tea and adding nitrogen:

https://permies.com/t/187485/permaculture/pee-fertilizer-safely-benefit-permaculture

I believe that composting insitu is the best for the soil because the increase in soil organisms is in proximity to the plants. Though I have had some problems with this with my jackfruit and papaya trees. I made a pile of green mulch around the trees and the trees died. The jackfruit got a black rot as seen in citrus and the papaya got hit with bugs  and died.

Jay Angler wrote:

I believe that David the Good tried biochar - have you considered that?

Keep up the good work!

I had considered making charcoal for sale and using the smaller waste and dust to amend the soil but after listening to a bunch of synthetic teachers I'm convinced that keeping plants growing on the soil is the key factor for fertility. As the bananas become more dense it is becoming difficult to cover the soil with living plants but a have a couple of aces up my sleeve. They are 2 crops that are extremely shade tolerant, cana edulis and dioscorea bulbifera. I'm also shopping for a dark purple taro variety that can handle more shade than most. Pineapple can also grow in deep shade though it won't fruit that way but we can do a reset on the bananas cutting them all down for a while and slowing the pineapple the fruit. Along with sweet potatos we hope to increase ground cover and maintain fertility in this way.

Here is a recent video from the front door. With CCR run through the jungle.
https://youtube.com/shorts/aYonm4qPv04?si=Mu76OS-Re8AWN-ho

This is a video from about a year ago. I recently moved to the farm with 9 hogs but I got sick and had bring them back up the mountain to my other house.

https://youtube.com/@jeffrey-tv1dv?si=4rs-QkjWahQkq0sI

 https://youtube.com/shorts/jzZSKvcPYmU?si=F52xOD04GoiY6mbM  
The rest of the videos are now posted to this YouTube channel if anyone would like to check them out.

I made some new videos of the farm and I'll try to post them here because I haven't made any videos in over a year if I'm unable to post them directly I will repost them from YouTube.

So we have been running the farm on zero outside inputs for 2 years with no animals on the farm. We decided not to use nitrogen fertilizer urea because our soil is rich in organic matter and urea would allow for faster digestion of that material by soil life. The soil is feeding the plants so we don't need fertilizer. If the soil was lacking OM I would have probably used some localized fertilizer.
We want to keep our soil good so we have a few ways to do that. 1 planting fast growing short term crops together with long term crops in order to get the newly cultivated area filled with plants as quickly as possible. 2 allowing weeds to grow to a substantial size before cutting. This isn't giving a direct profit because we have no animals there yet but any living plant releases root exudates to feed other organisms that work chemically on soil. This improves the structure of the soil. The plant also stores any nutrients that it can absorb, nutrients that would be lost to gasification if the soil were bare. 3 maintaining a mixture of plants. 4 Pruning. In many areas we planted bananas but we let the bushes and trees regrow a few times before changing them out for other crops species. This is important if you don't have enough seed or time to cover everything with cover crops. 5 limited soil disturbance after the initial planting.