Eric Nar

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since Nov 26, 2019
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greening the desert in AZ.
I have no idea what I'm doing, but it's happening
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Dolan Springs, AZ (Zone 9a)
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Recent posts by Eric Nar

paul wheaton wrote:

Kirk Patrick wrote:

Several people have sent me crypto, so I have become pretty good at it.  There are fees, but I tend to leave the crypto there and in time the value of the crypto is far more than the fees stuff.  



Id love to create a DAO and build a decentralized permaculture city! Have you ever thought of something like that? Its kind of like what youre doing up north. I think we could raise a few million and make it a reality!

Maybe Im just a crypto nut, but does that sound awesome to anyone else?

2 years ago
I'd love to give it a go! I was supposed to come last year actually to take video. Do you have video ready that I can edit? Where can I find it? Also do you have any permies assets like logo don't, etc?
I'll get on this asap!
3 years ago

Kat He drey wrote:Hi I’m in Australia, I was wanting to know the same thing, my yard is full of yaccas , I love them, I propagate regularly:)



That's a great row of yuccas you have there. Unfortunately I had to move and stopped any projects until now so I haven't been able to try any of the suggestions here. How much rainfall do you get each year down there?
4 years ago

Beth Wilder wrote:Hi again, Eric!

If mesquite won't grow there but catclaw will, then by all means propagate that! It's all good stuff. Do you have hackberry, elderberry, mulberry, various oaks, cottonwoods, juniper, or anything else like that anywhere near you?



Wow, you know a TON! I don't have any of the mentioned trees/shrubs. At least not that I know of. I want to build up elderberry and mulberry next. I just started in January, so I don't have much> Trying to use what I have. Ideally I'd get a straw bale cabin up, but that'll be some time. Til then, I want to see what works and what doesnt.

As far as using the green weeds as mulch, will they start to seed and compete with my main plant? So long as they're covered under yucca shed, its ok?

Thanks so much for your info! We should talk more. Id love to see pics of what you have done on your property too
4 years ago
I really haven't seen any mesquite or acacia. I do want to give cat claw a try because of the reasons you mention. The thorns are tough, but I was thinking of using them as a perimeter hedge. Still all in the works


Beth Wilder wrote:I've been trying to find out if there's much mesquite around Dolan Springs. Looks like maybe there's catclaw acacia (wait-a-minute bush, Senegalia greggii, fka Acacia greggii), but not mesquite (Prosopis spp) -- is that right? If so, you can use the catclaw in similar ways in terms of nitrogen-fixing, fuel, and wood chips and dropped leaves as mulch, with a similar caution for both about those thorns. Expect to get a few right through the soles of your shoes, at least if you're anything like me. At least the catclaw thorns -- although they will really catch and pull your skin with that claw-like curve, thus their other name wait-a-minute -- are shorter than the mesquite thorns can get. I'd be surprised if you don't have both trees/bushes somewhere around there, though, as they overlap heavily, at least around here. You may already know this (all of this, really), but both mesquite and catclaw acacia can be much, much older than you'd think by looking at them: hundreds of years sometimes.  When I get irritated with the placement of one or several of them, I try to remember that. I'm such a new arrival to their world. It makes much more sense for me to move than for them to be sacrificed, in most cases.

4 years ago
Hi! Thanks so much for responding!  I'm not trying to get rid of the yucca (I actually want to propagate them!), I wanted to do exactly what you're saying. So it works as mulch then? Do I have to chop them up or anything?
What is the stalk, and what are the dried leaves? I thought they were the same thing?

I have no idea what the "green weeds" in the pics are, tansy mustard? So I could shop those down, put them around a plant, then the yucca shed on top? Am I getting that right?

There are no mesquite, mostly creosote, with small amounts of prickly pear and cholla around here. I can't identify a few shrubs or any of the weeds. I plan on giving mesquite a try here, but Im really just starting what I can on raw land, so materials are scarce. I like you chicken wire fence idea, I may have to implement that in the future. I've been planning and watching for about six months, and really only started doing work at the start of this year. Got a fence up to keep out the cattle, and that's really it :/ I want to drop a few plants in so that I can use it's shed for mulch and not have this problem :)
Thanks for the input!



Beth Wilder wrote:Hi, Eric! Why do you want to get rid of the yuccas and creosote, or am I misunderstanding that? Both are incredibly useful and enriching plants that we go out of our way to propagate. Why not work with and around them?

You could take shed material — dead leaves and stalks, for example — from the yucca without hurting them and use it as mulch or for other things. We use the stalks as bean trees and as reinforcement for chickenwire garden fence in between T-posts. Because we leave the branchy parts on top of them on, birds love to perch on them and hunt insects and such in our gardens. Yucca also provides food (fruits from some varieties, flowers from some, stalks from some), fiber, medicine (roots of some), and soap.

Creosote tends to inhibit other plants immediately around it, so I might discourage it from spreading too much, but it’s the desert’s pharmacy, as many have said. I haven’t tried any parts of it as mulch because it’s rare right on our land (more plentiful a ways away) and doesn’t seem to shed much naturally, but it’s so resinous that I wouldn’t be surprised if as a mulch it hurt rather than helping.

One of the pics looks (on my tiny phone screen) like you may have some tansy mustard. I have a thing against it — guess I’m allergic to its pollen — but have read the seeds are good seasoning. I do scuffle hoe or chop and drop a lot of that one before it seeds, and we use it as the initial green mulch under the following brown mesquite wood chip mulch.

Do you have mesquite where you are? That’s another wonder-plant. It’s good for food, medicine, fuel (deadwood it sheds naturally), furniture- and utensil-carving, nitrogen-fixing, dried leaves (tiny but soil-enriching) and wood chips (from busting up deadwood for fuel) as mulch. We treat them as nurse trees/madrinas for other trees and shrubs we want to grow, imitating what we observe around us. Various species of wolfberry (goji/Lyceum), cholla (Cylindropuntia), prickly pear (Opuntia), yucca, mustards, and more like to grow at its feet and knees.

Have you had a chance to spend some time on and with the land, observing it?

4 years ago
I am starting up a permaculture set up on raw land in Arizona. I have yuccas, weeds and creosote bushes there. Can I take the dry yucca leaves, the weeds, or maybe chip the creosote bushes and use them as mulch? If I use the weeds as mulch, will they infest my main plant? Do I have to chop up the yucca leaves? Can I use creosote, I heard different things. I don't have a chipper, so that's kind of the last resort.
Here are some pics. Yucca, weeds, and that is just random brush (can I use that? Trying to make the most of whatever I have)

Thanks!
4 years ago
where do you stay? What is lodging expenses, and how do people typically get there from the airport?
4 years ago

Im in Florida were the soil is very similar, sandy as heck with no organic matter.

For mulching I would definitely recommend woodchips. That's what many people do around here and it helps the soil a lot. The finer particles sift down into the soil and the larger pieces break down on top and help with water retention. Woodchips/mulching are free around here too you just have to go pick it up

Also check out this thread about sheet mulching https://permies.com/t/56644/Horrors-sheet-mulching



Thanks for that. I just found a source for woodchips. I thought I heard of horror stories about using woodchips, so I went looking. It seems as though the problems people face (mostly slugs) with sheetmulching comes from too wet?  Im not sure if that's right, but Im in a dry place (AZ desert); and it seems like yea a lot of people in AZ are using woodchips. I was going to grow organic mulch, are woodchips better?
5 years ago