I want to help a friend to design a permaculture balcony,
# history
In 2022 a spider mite infestiation started on some peas and cucumber and then spread to the perennial berry bushes (raspberry, currant),
which caused them to drop almost all of the leavesby the end of summer.
The herbs (sage, rosemary etc.) were also affected, but not to the point that their growth was inhibited.
Predatory mites were bought and released, but did not significanty help to reduce the spidermite population.
The spider mites came back every year after that :-/
# balcony layout
The balcony is oriented towards the sun and is overarched by another balcony obove it.
As spider mites like it dry this provides nice conditions for them.
Also there are side walls which recieve sunlight in the morning, respectively in the evening.
There is some shaded space underneath a table that might be used for elements that require a more cool/humid climate,
also the upper innen corners of the balcony recieve no direct sunlight.
Currently no other plants that the aforementions berry bushes and herbs.
The eastern inner wall (shade in the morning, some sun in the evening) has a birdhouse which is happily inhabted by great tits (Parus major)
every year.
# scope of this thread
Now my idea is to construct sufficent predatory habit and to wait for local predators to arrive on their own.
I intend to dedicate some of the pots (of the now dead plants) specifically for this purpose,
but also new (preferably wodden) construction ideas are welcome.
My wish for this thread is to brainstorm habitat requirements for predaory insects/anthropods and some ideas/techniques/elements that could be integrated in such a design to stasisfy these requirements.
I will try to collect them here in the first post for easier overrview.
# Elements
## Insect hotels
The most common thing i see are Insect hotels,
i suppose there are whole websites dedicated to those, so posting some links for what the self-builder should consider would be great.
## Insectary plants
While many predators (like wasps) do eat or parasite on other insects they have to rely on plants for their carbonhydrate intake.
Those plants usually have smaller and more accesible flowers like Yarrow (Achillea millefolium).
Permaculture teaches us to observe a draw our conclusion, i have seen many insects on Yarrow,
but as i not know how the predators of spider mite look like i am a bit lost here.
However i have seen what i think are parasitic wasps drink from Marjoram (Origanum majorana), so that would be something
to include in the list.
Actually stocking fish in a pond generally decreases quality of water, because you want to filter out nutrients (esp. phosphates and nitrates)
to keep the water clean/less habitable for bacteria.
Growing any type of plant (or algae) accumulates nutrients in the plant, which you can subsequently remove to also remove the nutrients.
Search for "Natural Swimming pond" or "Wetland filter" for more information on this.
If you prefer mechanical filters, search for "Slow sand filter".
I peronally think the best filter (because it can basically filter nuclear waste into drinking water) ist the mollison filter, but its complex to implement.
Anyway your chicken should not have direct access to the water, as they tend to pollute it.
r ranson wrote:PH is the easiest to fix, so I test it first.
Do you happen to have a link that explains how to do so?
When i was reading about acidifing soil for growing blueberries, i did not find a method with a reasonable permanence/cost ratio.
Thank you.
I must say it really put a smile on my face, when i read your name on the list of speakers for gathering in vukomeric. Looking forward to meet you there tomorrow.
Zoltán Korbel wrote:
More specifically what I want to know is how far do the roots of a let's say 5 feet = 153 cm tall living willow hedge spread horizontally, because it would determine how close to the willow fence I can grow annual and herbaceous plants.
Do not worry, any distance that allows you to conveniantly access the fence wihtout stepping in your veggies should be fine,
depending on what you plant.
I suggest planting the perennials between the living fence and the annuals to act as a root barrier.
You will figure out the details by permacultures best tool : Observation.
Tina Wolf wrote:
It is true that not much will grow under the willow except some herbs and vines.
This knowledge is applicable to a large tree which will cast a corresponding shadow.
The living fence we are talking about will probably be coppiced to a couple of feet.
Regarding the choice of willow, please consider that it is a wetland species,
therefore your veggies will benefit if water needs to be drawn away because of a watterlogged situation,
but if it already is a dry place, you might consider less thirsty species like poplar or even slower growing dryland species.
It depends on your context.
Rembrandt Hall wrote:Help needed!
if the hydro produces 1kilowatt - according the seller - will it produce enough for a household of 2 people if covering that distance?
Distance is no issue except for the costs of a thick copper cables and their installation/maintenance.
If - and that is a big IF - the unit outputs 1 kw under ideal conditions, and IF you can provide those conditions, your peak useages in a typical household
will be manyfold higher. Think of running a hair dryer while the washing machine heats water, each usually have several kw.
You will have to buffer that.
The cheapest way to do so, is to be hooked up to the public power grid, and - if your local regalations allow it - even sell them your surplus energy.
If "on grid" is not possible, then you have to go "off grid", and this is more expensive than you think and also a long term liability(replacing batteries every few years etc.).
It could pay to get a professional to make an estimate of how big of an generator you can actually run in your situation,
and then decide what to do.
Joylynn Hardesty wrote:In my region, don't plant Comfrey in your driest spot. That plant is barely alive, dying back during our seasonal drought, waiting until spring to try again. Don't plant in full shade. They die. Plants in 6 hours of sun are more than twice the size of plants in 4 hours of sun.
Die back as in "will regrow when moisture is available" or as in "dead and will rot when moisture becomes available"?
I will repeat, what i should have read earlier, and also should have taken into consideration more seriously:
You know nothing, until you get your hands dirty.
Edit: I think online opens up the possibility to have the course with virtually any person with suffixient tehnology,
while in person faciliates communication.
Then again i did not have a PDC yet, so who am i to judge
Make transplants. Preferably with a small greenhosue (can also be one of those indoor greenhouses). Plant transplants in mulched beds.
Some plants may work as transplants in a specific context, some don't, it is try&error.
Bumped this, because it is hidden in an 10 year old post.
I Just read the first chapter, and its like wow.
I Will read the rest of it asap, and so should you
Actually i am really surprised the site is still up, usually links this old don't work anymore.
Pearl Sutton wrote:Eating the seeds depends on how small you are willing to crack. I have some seeds that are just huge, the Turban had small ones, not much to them. All are edible, it's a matter of how much work you want to put into them.
Really all of them? Also the seeds of bitter tasting cucurbitae, whose flesh is poisonous to us?
A friend of mine recently started working for a company that builds such houses (Timber frames for the structure, straw bales with clay as walls).
The costs are just around the same as for conventional building... the materials may be cheaper but the amount of manual work offsets that.
As for building it yourself: Sorry you can't
The people who started that company had years of trial&error to build up their knowledge, because when they asked old people for recipies it failed miserably because the soil composition differs from location to location. The other reason why is difficult to build by youself, is that in most climates you have a very slim time-window to finish the job, so you need people to help you.
If you want to build it youself, i highly recommend you to not rely on knowledge from Books and the Internet, but to get in touch with people who offer hands-on workshops so you can gather practical experience before starting you project.
Also when you use his system (you cover everything with sawdust) you can just close the bucket and store it indoors until the weather allows you to go outside to empty the bucket.
Also i personally do not believe in the "Composting toilets" that compost in place... a compost pile should be big(>1m³) and have contact to the ground.
M Waisman wrote:. Yes, we have lots of water- in the garden, nearby livestock pens, etc. They are not attracted to the spigot or nearby watering cans, cat's water dish, etc at all
What exactly is your lots of water? The things you listed is water that is changed/used on a daily basis, and are also hard to access for them.
How is a wasp suposed to drink from a watering can? Those usually have smoth surfaces that are aligned at a 90° to the water surface.
Also fresh/regularly changed water sometimes contains clorine...
Do you have something like a small pond? During the summer i sometimes observe 10-20 Wasps at the same time drinking from a sunken 50 gallon plastic pond...be sure to throw in some branches to provide good access to the water (and for animals to get out of the water...a dead rat in a pond is a rather nasty thing).
M Waisman wrote: My son got stung 3 times on his ears and neck just walking through the garden after a sweaty bike ride.
They are clearly looking for water, i guess you do not have any permanent water features, right?
In my experience they get docile when they have enough water.
Once i had a plastic container that i threw my used platic pots into, and they made a nest in one of those pots.
The container would partially fill with water so they were on an island.
They did not even bother when i moved their nest when i took pots out of the container.
So just try to give them enough access to water, and they won't bother your family or your tomatoes anymore.
Please update us here, if that worked out.
PS: You do want yellow jackets in your garden! They are not after you, they are after the mosqitoes!
i have a mediterranean climate (Zone 9a, so i do get frost), and i currently mulch all my beds heavily with hay,
because loss to evaporation during the summer is crazy here (High clay content in soil, so capilry effects pull moisture to the surface).
I am on a slope and during the winter i have strong down downpours (which washed my woodchips away last winter) and also heavy wind
tens to blow stuff away/break plants.
Now as the summer season approaches its end, i have to put something into the beds to keep it all together and pump some exudates into the soil.
As i already mentioned, I mulch a lot, so direct seeding may work with some legumes, but i feel safer starting those as transplants.
Now transplants are a lot of work compared to direct seeding, so the less transplants i need for a bed, the better.
Ideal characteristics would be:
- requires large spacing in between (so less work to fill a bed)
- grows/photosynthezizes during the winter ( we do get some sunny days with up to 20C°/68F° , but on most days it's cooler)
- can be terminated easily (ideally by cutting the stem) around March/April
- grows a lot of biomass
- provide a usable crop (tough this is low priority for me)
- They are not in the family of Brassica or Amaranthaceae (because of crop roation)
What comes to my mind are plants like : Buckwhat, Rye, Barley, Fava beans, Peas. I still lack experience, this is my 2nd year grwoing annuals, and so far i am not very successful, so i ask you for help.
To keep this more formal, it would be really cool if we could put the anwers in table like this one:
I will update this first post with your answers, so that at the end we hopefully have a good overview of plants that are suitable to be used as transplanted cover crops for mild winter regions.
Abraham Palma wrote:
In what conditions does the clubroot prosper? How can these conditions be prevented? What outcompetes it? How can it be promoted?
I tried some research on that topic, the only thing i found is that acidic soild favours clubroot, whereas alkaline soil somewhat inhibits it.
Also warm wheather favours the patogen, so one should plant them as overwintering crops rather than summer crops.
(makes sense anyway, because there are so many other things to grow during summer, while winter veggies are almost excusively brassicas)
Also there are some brassica cultivars (conventially bred, not GMO) that have resistence agaist clubroot, however the intensive usage of those resisent cultivars on clubroot infested land led to the emergence of new clubroot strains that can infect the resistent cultivars.
most books on permaculture do not even mention crop rotation (in the sense of not planting annauls of the same family on the same bed for a couple of years).
Some practices - like not even having divided beds/blocks but instead just putting plants where a gap appears - seem to make crop rotation virtually impossible.
Permaculture is about observation, and I observe that many gardeneres in the mediterrean plant their winter brassicas in the same beds every year,
on the other hand farmers have developed crop rotation based on observation/insights obtained by several generations,
and those conclusions made it into the conventional gardening/farming books.
When asking other permaculture people IRL about crop rotation, they say that they don't really care about it.
They also bring up examples where people have been successfully ingoring crop rotation rules for decades,
because everything will be fine if you put enough compost on the beds every season.
While this argument seems feasable for nutrients, it is the diseases that are concerning me.
Let me elobarotae with the example of Clubroot( Plasmodiophora brassicae ). If someone plants brassicas on the same spot for 2 decades
and finds his plants free of Clubroot, i cannot take this as a proof that you can plant brassicas in this way without risking loosing your crop and infesting the soil with clubroot.
My argument is, that if there is no clubroot spores, it will not manifest out of nowhere, no matter what you do.
So if someone wanted to prove to me that just by using sufficent compost you can circumvent the clubroot problem,
he would need to inoculate the soil with clubroot and keep growing.
Now my question is, has anyone ever done such an expermient?
My focus/issues with crop rotation centers around brassicas because they seem to be the staple annual vegetable in the temperate climate
especially during the colder season (Don't forget Turnips are brassicas , they used to fill the niche potatoes took over) and most of the profitable market gardet crops are brassicas too (Asia salad, arugula, radishes just to name a few).
Dave Pennington wrote:
Would love to see them succeed,
Me too. Their ideas sound good.
(Except for their plan to irrigate everthing with well-water, even filling the ponds with well water. This is just not sustainable.)
But asking for 7.5 mio $ without a business plan is something i would expect from a bunch of unexperienced teens,
but those people behind the project look experienced enough to do it properly, so i am wondering why they are not doing a proper transparent campaign?
They need to be open with how munch from the money that they make with selling the plots goes into the community projects,
and how they want to ensure that said community infrastrucutre will be maintained after everyone put down their initial payment.
I just see red flags:
- The way the initial post is written
- the lack of information on the linked website
- obvious usage of stock photos on the videos the website has
- no Photos of what is actually happening there
- the implication that things exist, that are just planned
Biggest red flag is probablby the price. 30k for 2 acres of desert and the promise that there will be a community.
It just screams scam at me.
Not the type of scam where someone takes your money and gives you nothing, but the type of scam where you find yourself on barren plot in the desert.
I mean what do the people get for their 30k?
The guy probably paid 30k for all plots together and now subdivides and sells with an image of a community that will probably never exist.
I would also go with different varieties, with the main argument being different ripening times.
Usually people here do not want all of their fruits at once, but more evenly distributed over the season.
So make sure to get early and late varieties...this way they also don't compete for the same nutrients at the same time.
Pearl Sutton wrote:If it's watertight, use it for any kind of dry storage. I always have things that I don't want inside the house but that need to stay dry.
Right - dry and away from critters!
Please be aware that rats can chew through plastic and depending on the geometry even through metal.
Maybe use it for what it was inteded: to collect residual waste.
I like the pond idea, have done similar things, but the issue is that you generally to not want to bury plastic(who will unbury it after you pass away or leve the place?).
Maybe use it as rainwater storage for later irrigation?
But then again it is a container that has been used for waste, so maybe you don't want to irrigate from it, because who knows what has been disposed in it before.
Susan Mené wrote:ICome to think of it, the bed did well with string beans last year, but everything else flopped.
According to the internet, beans/peas don't do well in beds that had beans/peans in the previous year.
I have read individual reports that claim peas will grow happily in a bed that had peas the years before,
however this might have been the reason.
Faye Streiff wrote:Could it be that they had too much plant food and the salts in it are burning the plant?
This should only be an issue with chemical fertilizer, organic material should decompose slowly so this is not an issue.
I do not think people on this forum use chemical fertilzers...if you do, please read the soil food web by elaine ingram.
EDIT: In that books she explains how the chemical fertilizers actually kill soil life via osmotic pressure, releasing a lot of nutriens for a short time (most of those wash away), leaving the soil in a worse condition than it was before fertilizing.
i have a lot of Rumex spp. seedlings that i need to get in the ground asap...However i ran out of free beds, so i need to squeeze them between
existing plants. I could not find any info on the internet which plants are good and bad neighbours for it.
John C Daley wrote:
Its not a simple single ansawer there is more detail involved.
Details like your location (how munch sun?), the soil conditions, and most importantly what are your goals?
You want the fruit trees come up ASAP? How tall do you want the fruit trees to get? Do you want to grow veggies in between? If yes, for how long?
Do you want a closed canopy or more svanah-like? Do you want to harvest the wood from the n-fixers, and if so, for what purpose?
Permaculture has a lot to give, because it takes more variables into account than what you get thought in most agrucultural books/courses,
and can therefore enable you to find a optimal solution for your specific situation. Big part of this is observation.
i am sold on the idea of weed free market garden beds, so i am trying it this year.
Paths are about 15 cm (ca. 6 inch) of wood chips and the beds are the same height of compost.
Most weeds here are easy to take care of, but couch grass (Elymus repens) really surprised me.
It grows through basically everything you would put in a growing area. I have seen it growing through a wood chip,
it did not even bother to grow aroud it, just went straight through the wood!
Weeding it is extremely time consunimg, on average i need about 5-10 minutes per metre of bed, and i do this twice per week.
This is too munch! (i really understand why some are tempted to use herbicides here).
So i need a smarter/more permaculture way to handle it.
(I am aware that "weed free permaculutre" is an oxymoron, but hear me out)
I am not even sure if i am winning the fight, so i have some basic questions:
1. When do actually deprive the plant from energy? Sometimes when i pluck a fresh shot, i unearth a nice piece of rizome (up to 15 inches),
but most of the time i get only litte more than what was visible on the surface.
Sure thing when i get a big chunk of rhizome it is an energy-negative transaktion for the plant,
but how munch time do i have to pluck a shot after it surfaced and started photosystesis before the plant compensated
for the initial energy for growing this shot?
2. Does the grass outside of the beds pump energy into the rizomes underneath the beds? And if so, how wide should a perimeter be to stop this from happening?
3. Does the plant go into a "hard to pluck" mode with short predetermined breaking points? After some time of plucking i do not unearth the big juicy rizomes, but only short pieces,
which are anchored into the ground like a tree! The question is, is this just the part where the plant grew out of original soil horizon (remeber, i have 6 inch of compost on top of the original soil),
or is the plant more like "Damn i have been plucked...again...better anchor myself harder into the ground and get shorter breaking points!"?
4. Bed preparation to weaken the plant What seems to help is to put something like a rainbarrel on the ground and let it sit for a couple of months. Then when i remove the barrel,
every plant underneath is dead...except for the couch grass, which just turned white and can then be removed..at least partially.
My latest expermient is to just mulch over the existing meadow with a big layer of hay...still couch grass shots make it through the hay,
but much less than otherwise...i really hope that a bed mulched this way this year will be almost couch grass free next year.
At least this is what i like to believe.
5. Cover Crops I plantet some squash and mulched the area with hay, hoping that when the hay breaks down the squash will make
enough shade to get rid of the couch grass...however when i look at the grass coming up between my existing crops,
i doubt this will work. We will see.
6. Couch grass recipies I have tased some rizomes...they tase edible but not really like something i enjoy eating. I have read that the rizomes can
be dried and ground up like flour. Does anyone have specific recipies for couch grass?
Would be munch more rewarding if i could eat it, because then i can rebrand my weeding into harvesting.
So any other ideas/brainstorming or recommendations?
I really need to figure out how to handle this weed more efficently, otherwise i cannot transition to live as a market gardener.
PS: I am glad that i did not quit my job to become a market garden farmer,
because with my current aproach i could never keep up with this weed on a area large enough
to be supporting my expenses.
PPS: Still i do not hate the plant and i sure don't want to eradicate it on the whole property...i leave it alone on most parts of the garden and even let it grow big before i occasionally scythe it down. It is a nice plant in general,
i just don't want it in the relatively small market garden area.
John Greenan wrote:I planted 29 bare-rooted blackberries in Central Texas at the beginning of April.
1. In the northern hemisphere you are supposed to plant them in the autumn, so they have time to develop a root system before the droughts come.
2. My question how deep the mulch is has not been answered, from the photos it does not seem to bee deep, rahter only sprinkled on the surface.
3. You are supposed to water less frequently, but deep. this way you encourage the deep roots that the plant needs to make it on its own.
From my personal experiences wasps become docile if they have suffient water.
Last year i had a through where i kept some stuff in to not have it scattered over the place,
water accumulated in the bottom, but for the items in it that was ok.
Wasps build a nest in a pot that was partially submerged into said water,
and they never bothered when i took stuff out, even when i moved the nest.
Really can't wait for them ro reappear soon, to get rid of the mosquitos!
However i have once been stund in the city: Wasp somehow flew in my face and found itself between my face and my glasses...stund my eyebrow,
it was swollen, but it could have beend worse...
R. Han wrote:
Does the book deal with the core of the free ranging problem,
i.e. that Chicken are forrest animal and not suited for a lawn/meadow?
This video shows chicken on a farm with poplar trees. Even if you don't know german,
you will clearly see that chicken prefer to be close to the trees to being in the open.
Why not doing what we call chop and drop?
This would be getting a scythe (has to have straight handle) and just scything the place couple of times/year snd leaving the debris where it is,
also you don't bother with roots.
Davis Tyler wrote:They produce a decent crop the first year, then a half crop the second year plus some daughter runners, then by the third year they die back and I have to buy new plants again
I think i heard in a yuotube video (maybe Curtis Stone?), that strawberries produce better if they are replanted.
Also saw neigbours happily replanting them and having surplus plants that are destined for compost (or giveaway if you interfere on time ).
Are there any varieties of strawberries that don't succumb to these viruses?
Key to robustness to viruses ist genetic diversity. Try growing some from seed if viruses are your concern.
Also i am not shure how to make the basins for the filter.
It would definetly need to be half-watercylce and not full-watercycle,
to prevent contamination of the ground.
If i use gley, the gley layer might accumulate some heavy metals and radioactives over time,
but the glay layer can be taken out and its organic matter then separated from the the toxins.
So by using gley, regular maintenance is a must.
However plastic/concrete/metal might be safer from seepage,
but became an pollutant at the end of its lifetime plus those materials
could also pollute the environment during their lifetime.
Probably best would be basins made of monolithic rocks that had been carved out,
but aquiring them in the desired volume would make me sad about the mountain it used to be.
Anne Miller wrote:Thanks for sharing Bill Mollison's Water Filter and Sewer Treatment system.
Thanks for replying.
Anne Miller wrote:Ben, Bill's suggestion as you can see in the diagram uses Mussel shells not live mussels.
Actually it uses both. There are live freshwater mussels in the filter. So it is providing for its own mussel shells and allows replicating the filter after some time.
The mussels probably also trap nasty stuff in their shell, and they dont degrade as fast as limestone rock etc.
As for the initial batch of mussels i can probably work out something with the local authorities to source exaclty
the species that used to live here, to introduce them to my ecosystem, and hopefully later reintroduce them to their former habitat.
My thougth was whether the initial batch of mussel shells is allowed to be from saltwater mussels,
as they are so easy to come by. It is just one detail of many.
