Hugo Morvan

My neighbor has a salad he gave me. i've seen his whole garden patch covered in seedlings. Last year he called me to check out what it had done, he had it growing in bare gravel on the other side of the building of the patch. Not a few, something like 20 small plants. Just appeared like that, no sowing.
I've grown this one a few years and managed to cross it with a Moroccan/Italian type of lettuce one which easily crosses we've noticed in the breeders collective.
I'm still growing that type and might ask my neighbor if you want something "pure" , i could send you Nancy.
We're all looking for this self seeding kind of lettuce, so it would also help if you look for it and mix it what already is showing some weedy potential. It's seeds are hard blackish bigger instead of those flimsy white papery flimsy ones i see quite often.

I need just a second, to be "gone", like a little computer restart. Relax body, no thoughts of here, no thoughts....  dream flow and "gone".
Put the alarm at 15 minutes mostly, sometimes shorter. Can do it in my van nodding off or on grass.
Powernap. It's a world of difference after that lasts all through the rest of day.

I can drag myself through the day if clients have no time for it.. but then i drink even more coffee and life gets stressy instead of productive. Nowadays i notice if i don't put the alarm it can take half an hour to an hour so it slowly becomes a midday sleep.

I'm a propagator. If i buy a plant i must find a way to propagate it for 'free' before i buy more of the same if i like them. I have a passive propagation system to the north of oak trees which you probably do not have, cuttings survived the worst drought and highest temps this summer without watering, because of shades and windblocked by other trees and shrubs. Microclimates are essential even if it takes invasive species to establish microclimates. The north of a house can be a great propagation starter place too, because of monitoring.
I would check what grows in nature establish those and then use them to establish store bought plants. Chop and drop and shading are essential features. Create windblocks with the most drought hardy trees east-west. Create food hedges north-south that provide shade for each other while growing up.
I know i'm in France and what we call drought is a wet year to you, but principles remain true.
Good luck, hope this helps.

Industrial scale agriculture is unsustainable, causing top soil microbiome loss leading to erosion leading to drought, it is the main driver of bio diversity loss, it is subsidized by an oil driven system  on top of that, the  industrial scale agriculture outputs are inferior products laced with pesticides, fungicides killing people's gut microbiomes.
Luckily for humanity,people are looking at alternatives. Plenty of examples of food forests that have been built in places where everybody said it was impossible to grow anything. But it took financial investment, effort and years to create , and very determined, knowledgeable and financially free kind of person to obtain these self-sustaining systems. They deserve grand scale copying in similar climate.. Willie Smits, Sepp Holzer, Geoff Lawton spring to mind,but people less known created these systems as well, just going out every day and planting trees, building forests, building soils, attracting rain.. Better wonder why they are not celebrated as heros of life in our dominant culture?
Google simply looks through the lense of financial investment and judges land based on if returns are better invested elsewhere for quicker returns and higher profit margins. But that's not what sustains life, that sustains buying power and real life power, but that is a scorched earth tactic, not viable long term. It's a discouraging answer by an algorithm developed by the powers that be designed to always discourage and kill fantasy and curiosity where at every corner. AI systems are psychopathic, use them for their encyclopedic fast knowledge, but check and don't trust them on fundamentals.

In this regard as you speak of Palestinian oak, that is what you're doing naturally in fact, spreading better adapted oaks. Do you think it hybridized with local varieties already? And do you ever think of teaming up with people to get some oak seeds from places that receive a lot less rain even than Greece? My friend the botanist is looking into that. He's even mapped out the mediterranean like climate zones in the whole world and we're spreading the word in alternative groups in the hopes to get something going. Or if you know of people who do something similar like you or even an organization, i'm all ears.

Hi Konstantinos, yes it's good to get diversity in oak genetics. Me and a botanist friend are busy with assisted forest migration. We've had it so hot in France and it's been so dry and not a drop of rain in sight, we fear we're moving in the wrong direction way too fast. Nature can't keep up. The natural speed at which trees migrate is way slower than it gets warmer. So we fear we might have reached a new plateau.
The government wants to help the farmers by giving permission for mega bassins, giant outdoor swimming pools that evaporate and need chemicals in it. They suck up the ground water to fill them to feed their monoculture crops. Creeks and sources dry up and forests struggle to rech the ground water, but that's no problem, as long as industrial agriculture keeps paying tax and keeping workers busy the state doesn't care about unliveable situations for citizens. Complain, complain etc.
So instead of waiting for disaster to strike we are looking into helping nature building a diverse population of oak trees better equiped to deal with drought and heat tham our local oaks. This year they are in my region ok, although many acorns are empty, but in other regions they start to yellow up.
My friend says this.

Oaks are magical because they love to hybridize; you should plant them all—*ilex*, *suber*, *x turneri* (*ilex* x *robur*), *x hispanica* (*suber* x *robur*)... *faginea*, *rotundifolia*, *macrolepis*...—and let nature take its course over subsequent generations, allowing local oaks to incorporate new genes and create the species of the future. Simply bring a multitude of species together; since they no longer have time to migrate fast enough, adaptation will occur down the line. That is exactly what happened in Mexico during the last ice age: northern species moved south, southern species moved north, and everything hybridized. Now, there are over 200 oak species in the country, plus another 160 that recolonized the north—a major biodiversity hotspot teeming with new hybrids that are still being discovered, some of which have stabilized into distinct new species! Landrace oaks!

Do you agree with that, being an oak specialist?

It looks very professional. Very unlike me. I see sand in the mix. So water can also go down. It's not too stagnant. I can't see what's wrong. Maybe it's the peat, not seasoned enough, nitrogen robbing maybe. I've lost a season to bad compost i bought. Some offer, it was bio, nothing worked.
I only try big seeds in small containers like cucurbitacea or moschata. Most of the rest i start in balcony trays. They have a build in reservoir in the bottom. it's a hassle planting them out, but the roots are longer which offers possibility to plant deeper. Especially handy in spring, saves watering. And i recycle the compost because there's left overs from replanting so if the brand changes i add a bit to see what it does.
And i do quite some direct sowing if i got the seeds.
Good luck.

Yes , looking forward to follow. I keep it low tech for now.
low tech passive

Awesome project Chance.
I see you like to propagate, me too. I made some bigger outside boxes to the north of the house, works great. Especially for difficult shrubs, which are 90%, you need to plonk in a lot and somehow some work and others just dry up and i get those out when watering. Easier then in pots. Which mostly is the second stage after rooting i put them in pots and gently adapt them to more sun while keeping watering low to improve rooting.

I wanted to say mirabelle as well. If so i read they're true to type. Grafting plums is not so easy in my experience. Best worked on existing trees to the north side. They seem to take and then just die back. Zig-zag graft works better than a flatty.. Often lots of plumb/ peach seeds lay scattered on the soil around the tree.

I did a diverse grex grow-out of bell pepper plants and after 5 month i ended up with scribbly things, it might just be me, knowing nothing about what i try to grow than to water it regularly, but i had them in the greenhouse and then it turned out to be the hottest summer ever, and i remember thinking to myself  "Why didn't i also plant some outside?". I want to try again as i still have seeds and plan on trying again in shadier spots as people say it's going to be even hotter next year.

I hope i don't come across as mr knowitall, because i'm not, but i do have a lot to say about what worked for me.

i agree. It has been handy anyway as a wind blocking, shade providing, soil building, food machine. It turned out many fruits and pits for offspring. I took them to Croatia for a seed convention and many of my peach population grow there now and some in Germany and other places in France. They have served as gifts when i visited projects. It's crazy popping up with a shovel and a peach tree asking where can i plant this during a festival, but people appreciate the effort and i heard they were happy with the fruit a few year later.