Ashe Higgs

What is the exact location of these swales? I want to go check them out.

I'm just getting things going here in NY where I have about 11 acres of property complete with water (~2 acre pond).

There's a lot of work that needs to be done to get things "permacultured" good and proper.

There's TONS of wild raspberries and the strawberries are doing well and always have in this place (it used to be my grandparents place), but I'm specifically looking for strategies to

a) help propagate the wild strawberries (they're already hardy and perennial) on a larger scale (i.e. how to nudge them into out competing the other local weeds)
b) how to design to make harvesting a bit easier.

The plants grow all over the property, but there's lots of competition.
Comfry and dandelions are great, grass no so much...

you might try putting the shredded paper into a bokashi bucket...

I'm pretty sure Phoenix is 9B. It's been 70's and dry, getting cool at night.

aman inavan wrote:Does anyone else have problems listening to podcasts using Chrome?

The play for a few minutes and then stop

Very annoying

i had to use FF as well. I use Chrome on Ubuntu 11.01

i built this bed recently. it's about a foot deep, which I then piled with organic matter (mostly palm) as I replaced the soil and mixed with some compost and vermiculite to improve drainage, and moisture retention. (the soil here is almost pure clay and needs a lot of improvement).

at any rate the photo shows my bed this morning, which hasn't been irrigated since Thursday. There's obviously a lot of moisture coming off the bed, but I can't tell if that means I did something right, or if it just means the surrounding clay is just wicking all the moisture out of my raised bed...

Tyler Ludens wrote: http://www.desertharvesters.org/

that's a bad@$$ website by the way. great find!

i hadn't actually gotten around to tying the mesquite seed pods yet. lol.

I'm maybe leaning more towards the Palo Verde myself. For the time being I'm limited to backyard homesteading and I'm thinking of six trees in the back. 2 for N fixing and 2 pomegranate and 2 Black Turkey fig and maybe 2 date palms in the front. Based on what I've seen of Lawton's Greening the desert in Jordan, these are basically the same trees he used.

I've got two sunken Hugle beds completed and working on a third now. I plan to just plant the trees right in the middle of the beds and grow my herbs and veg, etc. around the N fixing trees. I plan to eventually get a pigeon loft completed to bring pigeon manure into the yard.

I'm leaning towards the Palo Verde because the Mesquite can get really big and cast a lot of shade, so i'm thinking the more sparse vegetation on the PV will allow more filtered light on the beds...

just doing some research on nitrogen fixing trees and although Acacia trees do well in Phoenix (with irrigation at least) I was thinking of using native trees. Mesquite immediately came to mind since the seed pods it produces resemble legumes and based on some prelimanary Google results, Mesquite, Palo Verde and Ironwood all seem to be N fixing, but I was wondering if any of the more knowledgeable folks here can confirm these findings?

I did a search of the forum but couldn't find any specific hits regarding this topic so I hope it's not a repost...

ron hood's "woodmaster series" is pretty awesome.  a little low budget in production but he really does a good job with actually teaching you how to do a variety of primitive skills.

http://survival.com