Ulla Bisgaard

Kevin Olson wrote:

Ulla Bisgaard wrote:I guess I will have to ask my husband for help with figuring out what size to make, I am horrible at math.

Lonnie, from the "Far North Bushcraft and Survival" YT channel has several tipi or pyramid style tent construction videos.  These are actually hot tents (i.e. tents with a sheet metal stove inside), but the geometry might still work for your purposes.  You could use 6mil poly drop cloths, or the heavier weight Dura-Skrim or Visqueen with fiber reinforcement, or woven, bonded green house cover plastic.  Something UV-stabilized would probably be best, given your strong sunlight.!

Thank you for the input and videos, I will watch them.
I was thinking about using landscape fabric for the winter tent. It’s black, so it will absorb heat easily and it was send to me by mistake so also free. The plan is also to use a heavy layer of mulch to protect the roots. We don’t get very many chill hours in our area. So far this year, we have gotten less than 100 chill hours. Most years, we get between 200 and 250 chill hours, but for some reason we have 500 in 2023. I was very frustrated in 2023, since my banana trees had finally set a flower and started on bananas. Then we had really bad weather and the flower got frost damaged, and the tree died as they do once they have produced. I am hoping to prevent this from happening again.
For shade, the plan is to use white row cover fabric, since white will reflect the sunlight away. Both will also be able to raise the moisture in the air, which plants like coffee really like. If this is successful, I am going to give tea another go. So far I have only been successful with plants for herbal tea, since real tea aka Camellia Sinensis sensitive plants, that need a lot of pampering until stablished.

What I perfect “for me now” thread to find. One of my experiments this year, is sweeteners. I am not saying sugar, since I don’t think it’s necessary, for my needs, to cook it down that much.
I am growing sugar beets and yes skirrets, right now, and I am growing sugar cane sorghum this warm and hot season. My plan is to use my juicer to get the sugar out.
It will be fun seeing how this turns out for everyone

Clay McGowen wrote:I’m going to go with - yes!

This year we had one cold night with a string of warmer days predicted after. I wanted to give my garden another week so I tossed some blankets, towels, and tarps over my more frost sensitive plants.
As you can see below, this wasn’t perfect as the squash leaves which were touching the blanket died, but the main body of the plant was saved!

I also put a big jug of water under the blanket to also help buffer the temps.

I kept this going a few days later when a similar weather pattern rolled in.
Overall, I’d say I got at least a week longer growing season out of it.

I imagine a tipi purpose built for the task would have good results. Especially if you could find some extra mass to tuck inside as well.

Yeah, I tried towels, duvets and regular store bought frost protection, but the lack of light killed the plants. We only get light frost here, but it’s enough to damage the flowers on my banana trees, so we don’t get any bananas. We are also in the situation where we are getting fewer cold days, so I am adding tropical trees, shrubs and vines to the forest garden. Some of those plants need protection from temperatures below 40F. I keep them in groups, so a tipi can cover more than one plant. I also have plants that can’t handle temperatures past 105F, and tipis are easy to move, so during the hot season I could move it to the hot sensitive plants, and use a shade cloth instead of the frost cover. I found out last fall, that my elderberries really don’t like it, when it’s 120F. It dried out all of its berries within 48 hours, even though we used more irrigation. My plan is to prune them, down to a size where I can cover them, if we get that high temperatures again.
I guess I will have to ask my husband for help with figuring out what size to make, I am horrible at math.
Thank you for your input.

Chris McClellan wrote:Ulla,
Uncle Mud here. Samantha is very kind. If you are interested, there are single burner rocket stove designs intended for anyone to be able to build mostly from mud and trash. Here's a link to one of my designs. https://permies.com/t/106214/Uncle-Mud-EZ-Cob-Rocket

A rocket oven is a much bigger beast. I've rebuilt/upgraded the round one at Paul's a few times and collaborated with Rodney on the design of the earthen rocket stove there. I'm about half way through the new rocket oven for Paul's. Given the proper tools a handy person could probably build something rough and functional for about $1000 in parts, much less if they were a great scrounger. It would take them 7-10 days, less if they have specific metal working and/or mud building skills and understood rocket stoves. Having one built for you that looked nice and performed well could easily run $3k to $6k. This is a particularly fantastic one my friend built. Two burners that can be switched out fro griddles and an oven.  If you're serious I will actually be out your way this summer. Drop me a message.

Thank you so much, that’s a generous offer. I will let my husband know. I don’t know if we will be able to. A combination of a storm, extreme heat, followed by extreme lows, has killed several trees and shrubs. We have to take care of that first. Dead wood is dangerous in our area. The storm also destroyed a large trellis and collapsed the chicken coop. I thank god that non of our chickens was hurt. Due to the wildlife risk, the coop is a priority. We live next to crest national park, so we get a bunch of different predators.
I will send you a purple message if he thinks that we can fit it in.

My family and I live in a desert climate, grow zone 10b. While I love being able to grow food all year round, It brings some very unique problems due to temperature fluctuations. Some times during the year the temperature fluctuates up to 50 degrees from day to night. We also get very little rain, but that changes year by year. This year has been especially bad, so I lost an avocado tree, an ornamental cold hardy banana tree, both of my passion fruits, and one of my orange trees. The reason was that we got Santa Anna winds with temperatures in the 80’s for a week, and then the night temperatures dropped to 32F at night.
This had me thinking that I should be able to create something that’s easy to setup for protection at night and open up during the day, so my plants will get some sunlight. I have  tried commercial frost covers, but since my plants don’t go dormant, using them means that they don’t get any or very little light, and tropical plants need light all year round.
Once a plant has matured and settled in, it’s usually not a big problem, but young plants need careful cultivation to survive here.
I have been thinking about it for a while, and tried several solutions that didn’t work.
Then it hit me, how about a tipi design? I am thinking about a thick cover for frost protection, that I can change out with a shade cloth if necessary.
I am thinking one, where I can open up part of it, during the day time, to let in air and sun, and then close it up again in the evening.
I have plenty of fabric, and I can probably find a pattern for it too, but I want to ask you all, if you think this is a good idea, and if there are things I should add to it. Any design experience would be welcome too. It needs to be portable, so I can take it down, once the warm season starts. I don’t want to spend time making it, just to have it fail.
It’s important for me to find a solution. Every few year we loose fruit and/or trees due to extreme conditions, and it costs of in both time, work and money.
I hope someone can help me with this problem. Also, this is a temporary problem. Once my tall trees has grow high and wide enough, they should give plenty of sun protection during the warm and hot season. I hope they also will give some protection during the cold season, but if not I will continue to need frost protection for my most sensitive plants.

I think this is great, but I wish there were places where you could just order one installed. My husband and I do want one. Especially the stove and an oven, but non of us are very handy fixing and building things. Hence why it has been a year since a trellis broke, and it is still not fixed, and it has take my husband 2 months to far (he is not done) to build a chicken coop.
I really want an outdoor kitchen, but do not want to depends on propane gas as a solution, but there are no where you can buy even a regular rocket mass heather.

I asked my husband. He says that he usually gives a doe three tries, if she keeps rejecting one or more of her kids, then she is done and get replaced. Some does are just not meant for breeding.

Nina Surya wrote:
Hello Ulla,
Thank you! The beginning here produce-wise is quite modest, except for the tomatoes earlier and eggs now still going strong.
Our place has 3000m2, including buildings. At the moment we're focussing on the renovation, greenhouse, vegetable patch and reviving the old orchard, but I'm slowly building up a food forest and healing garden as well.
Your posts are super informative and inspiring!
You obviously keep track about what you harvest. Would you mind sharing a little about your 'book keeping system'? Does it include the input of trees and such as well?
I'm asking because my own method - a notebook with hasty notes to self - isn't working that great (yet).
Your posts about your food forest in another thread are also very interesting. Thank you for sharing!

Sure, I use excel to do the calculations, and since I use seedtime to help plan the garden each year, I use their journal to keep track of how much we harvest each time. I also use record keeping lists, for things like eggs, so the person who gathers eggs, count them and add them to the sheet. I think I got them from the Homesteaders of America’s website. They can be put in a journal too. I don’t use them, but I know you can get paper journals for homesteaders, farmers and gardeners, where you can write in your expenses and yields. Keeping track of how much I spend of seed and plants, is a thing I am very bad at, but wants to get better at. I do have a binder where I keep the most important information, like what perennials I planted and where.
For day to day information and planning, I use a big white board. I need the visual or I forget things like, what seeds I pre ordered and from where. Our biggest one time buy, was the 900 dollars I spend on 50 cubic yards of compost and partly composted mulch. It was well worth it though, since it really boosted the plants in the forest garden. I am in the process of getting more compost bins, since we only produce a fraction of the amount of compost we need each year. I also get my soil tested once a year, so I know how things look.
Anyway, my biggest partner in keeping track of things on a yearly basis, is excel spreadsheets. I will attach a copy of it here. Note that in the attachment you can’t see the monetary value of the harvest yet. I have been too busy to do those calculations yet, and I hate math LOl.
There is one thing, that I always tell new homesteaders and gardeners to do. Each day I take a walk through my two gardens. I inspect soil, plants, trees and everything else for problems. This is a huge time saver in the long run, because I catch problems early, making them easy to eliminate. I remove any weeds that pops up, check plants for aphids and wash any off. I check the soil with a probe for moister levels, PH and temperature. It usually only takes 30 minutes out of the day, and I enjoy this time in the early morning. It’s a wonderful way to start the day listening to the birds, and drinking my coffee. This is also the time, when I start thinking about what to pick for that days meals. It’s relaxing and good for stress, since once done, I know if there are any urgent problems or not. My husband gets up earlier than me (at sunrise), and he also takes his coffee outside having a peaceful morning.
I hope this is useful for you.

A while ago, I wrote in this blog, that I probably wouldn’t have much more to write, since I had finished it. Well, I was wrong. Looking back, I don’t know why I thought I was done. I don’t think any garden ever really gets completely finished and stay that way. Things always happens, and I am always finding new ways to add more plants, and change things around. Here is a few examples:

Our passion fruit trellis broke in a storm, almost a year ago, and while we are working on building a new one, it’s slow going.
One of my avocado trees and one of my orange trees died this year, so we are planning the work of removing them and planting something else instead. After long discussions, we settled on exchanging the avocado for a cashew tree Cashew, Red (Anacardium occidentale) and the orange tree for an exotic cherry tree Surinam Cherry (Eugenia uniflora). We have a second orange tree, which gives us about 100 pounds a year, which is enough for our needs.
We also got new neighbors and they removed all of the plants next to the fence on their side. We have decided to use the fence to grow pepper vines Black Pepper Vine (Piper nigrum). Then I also added 3 types of pineapple plants, so we can see which one grows the best here, and they will grow nicely with the artichokes I have growing in the indoor grow room. Last I found a cardamom shrub I loved to that went into my shopping cart as well. Since the nursery agreed to hold my order until April, we have plenty of time before we need to start digging, and remove the old trees. I also must admit to buying 2 coffee trees at the Black Friday sale, and more currants, because you just can’t have too many .
My point is that it will keep evolving. My hope is that once the trees are more mature, the canopy will stabilize the temperature and humidity. Which hopefully will enable us to grow even more food, and maybe add some mushrooms into the mix.
Right now I am waiting for the Santa Anna winds to settle, so we can get lower temperatures and higher humidity. Then, after moving dead leaves to the side, I am going to spread out a wide mix of culinary and medicinal herbs to grow with the wildflowers we grow there. Once those are spread out, the leaves go back, so the seeds don’t dry out, and it’s harder for the birds to find them.
Yes, I hide seeds from the birds 🐦. Our song birds has figured out that I often spread seeds out, when I am in the front yard, so if I don’t hide them, they will eat some, and then “help” me by moving the seeds to a different location. This despite having a perfectly fine bribe station available at all times. It just means I have to outsmart them. Even though I kind of don’t mind finding corn and sunflowers growing in my raised beds, along with sorghum, asparagus and everything else, I still want to be in charge of my “workers”.
Other things has also happened. The fountain didn’t last. The bamboo broke during the hot season, so I have to figure out a different solution. What I really want is a tall fountain of rocks with water running in and out of ceramics flower pots, and succulents decorating it. I am currently researching if it will be possible for me to build one myself. They cost over 1000 dollars to buy, which is out of my budget. I also still need to finish the meditation/yoga deck, and pruning the trees and shrubs.
I think that my mistake was thinking of it as a stationary thing, instead of the evolving ecosystem I am working with. It’s as I always say, a garden are never done, but it supports our goal of living and loving life with a holistic approach.
Then I got a wishing well planter for Christmas, so that has to be installed, after getting a layer of wood protections.

Joe Peterson wrote:That’s a fantastic setup! Using an indoor nursery in a converted bathroom shower is such a creative and resourceful way to make the most of your space, especially in Southern California's climate. You’ve really thought through every detail, from the reflective walls to the ventilation system and watering method. It sounds like you’ve mastered growing in zone 10b with all the different crops you’re able to grow year-round.

Thank you Joe. It actually took me a 5 years to get it right. It started out as my husbands idea, while I was very sick. I was mostly bed bound, and putting a big planter in the shower gave me something nice to see in there, and work with on good days. As I grew better the purpose changed, and now when I am no longer bed bound it has evolved into what we have today. Growing in zone 10 a or b will always be a challenge. It’s a desert climate, so we get huge fluctuations in temperature s and humidity. This is why we have both a raised bed garden and a food forest garden. It takes a long time for a food forest garden to grow large and mature enough, to stabilize temperatures and humidity.
It has taken careful planning to pick out the right plants to grow there. We want trees of all sizes to maximize the size of the canopy we are trying to grow, and harvest times also needs to be looked at, since we want the fruit and berry harvest to stretch over the whole year. Other things we have taken into consideration has also been what we like to eat, and how some years are cool and some are hot. This means I very wide variety of trees, shrubs, herbs and vegetables. From perennials to self seeding annuals.
Is you want to take a look at the process you can look here. Food forest
As for the indoor grow room. It has proven essential to both our food forest garden and our raised bed garden, and pays for itself, in saving on plant starts and cuttings.