Farm For All - A Journal Of Sorts

Mk Neal wrote:Too bad about there walnuts, I had the same experience this year with hickories.  I was excited to find so many, but turns out there was a reason the squirrels had left them!

Luckily the walnuts are just starting to drop here, so I'm not surprised that the first round had a lot of duds. Though, maybe it won't get better. Maybe it's just gonna be like that this season.

Too bad about the hickories, though. The squirrels certainly know what they're doing.

Mark Reed wrote:
From my experience, no dig is vastly superior but probably only possible on a small scale.

Oh, large-scale no-dig is already here. I think the lecture I listened to the other day was about a farm that had 13,000 acres under no-till production? Something like that. Now, whether all the new-fangled big equipment does as good as a job as what's done on a small-scale, I can't say. But they are showing significant gains in soil organic matter each year, so it's at least moving in the right direction. It just took people figuring out how to engineer farm equipment that could work with all the existing crop residue.

As far as what is taken out, nothing leaves my garden except the food we eat. I don't know if or how fast decomposition returns nutrients in a plant usable form but apparently that does happen.  

Yeah. He's obviously talking to people who aren't composting their waste, and people who sell veggies or feed other people regularly. Or just the general human tendency to take more than we give back. But I'm not sure how much, if anything, we have to give back to maintain fertility in otherwise healthy soil. I've heard it repeated that there's enough fertility in one person's urine to grow all of the food they need to live. I don't remember what the supposed source for that claim was, and I'm sure it was referring to nitrogen content than a more holistic view, but who knows. But the newest research is showing that what we add back the the soil is basically worthless if the soil is healthy because we could never add as much organic matter and nutrition as a functioning rhizosphere does on its own.

Mathew Trotter wrote: The reason Joseph's plants do so well without any amendments, in my honest estimation, is because he's choosing the best plants each generation. The reason those plants are better is because they've been bred to have a more efficient relationship with the microbes that are native to his soil. ...

And also climate and practice. Those genetics keep their superior qualities in other locations for some crops and some not.

Exactly. He isn't fussing with the soil, so they adapt to the microbes that are there. If those particular microbes aren't in the new location, they flounder. But more likely, the microbes that are present in regularly cropped and otherwise unammended soil are the ones that are likely to be found in other soils across the country, though not always. The plants that have their preferred microbes in the new location do well, the ones that don't, don't.

The point is that we now know that genetics is a huge factor in determining what microbes an individual plant can associate with. GMO corn can't associated with the same microbes as non-GMO corn. Especially old varieties of corn associate with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, where most modern corns do not. It's all down to how we've twisted the genetics by breeding things in sterile soil. The plants that do best are the ones that have managed to maintain some of those associations. And the rest is basic survival of the fittest.

Mathew Trotter wrote:This is why saving seeds is really the most important part of the process. Adding Steve's mix can jump start the process of improving photosynthetic efficiency, and importing organic matter can help keep the soil microbes fed in spite of less efficient photosynthesis, and you will see the benefit no matter what seeds you put in the ground if everything else is improving, but if those seeds are adapted to the specific microbiology of the local soil that's when the real magic happens.

Yep, but as demonstrated with Joseph's dahlias sometimes the superiority of the genetics selected in one environment express themselves in other, vastly different soils and conditions.

That's not at all surprising or contrary to the point. Soils are a lot more similar than they are different in terms of microbiology. Rhizobia are found basically everywhere. Most of the beneficial microbes we know about exist in any soils that we haven't destroyed. And only something like 10% of soil microbes can even be cultured in a lab, so we basically have no clue what's going on in there.

Wish you had better access to video, because those last two lectures explain exactly why those dahlias did better for you. Joseph already bred them to maximize their possible microbial associations (at least, as far as what microbes are available in his soil.) The limiting factor was the climate and length of his growing season. Microbial activity is mediated by the root excudates released by plants, and the release of exudates is mediated by photosynthetic efficiency. A more favorable climate increases the efficiency of the whole process. Whatever the bottleneck is is what's going to slow that process down, and for Joseph, that's his climate.

And that's glossing over the fact that unsterilized seeds from healthy plants with healthy microbial associations carry endophytic and other microbes with them to their new home. Even if the desirable microbes aren't there before the seeds go in the ground, a population can eventually develop from what's transported on the seed if the conditions are favorable.

Mathew Trotter wrote:
...whereas the farmers and gardeners that have to amend their soils are importing new genetics each year that extract from the soil without giving anything back.

I have certainly amended my garden soils with years of leaves, weeds, and so on from other parts of the property. I have even mined top soil from the woods and brought it to the garden. Still I wonder about the "not giving anything back" part. It seems to imply that growing things removes stuff from the soil and that is certainly true with those people who remove and discard all the weeds and spent vegetable plants. But it you don't do that, the only part that actually leaves is the food that's eaten, doesn't the rest just get recycled? The question is how long does it take for the minerals and nutrients to return to a form that the next plants can use?

That's the other part that's answered by the latest research in that second lecture I posted (or elsewhere in the roughly 8 hours of lecture I listened to from Dr. Jones.) Adding things back to the soil is basically worthless if the soil is healthy. More biomass and fertility is created by having a diverse mix of living roots in the soil than we could ever add by putting organic matter and such on top of the soil. It does get used by microbes, and I would suspect that it even gets used by different microbes (which might be important to the overall process), but significantly more microbes are being fed by plant exudates, and significantly more organic matter is coming in the form of plant exudates, than we could ever hope to add by placing things on the soil. That's if the soil is healthy. And optimizing soil health is down to maximizing diversity beccause a diversity of plants = a diversity of plant exudates = a diversity of microbes and interaction and breaking down nutrients into plant available forms.

The Jena experiment in Germany compared plots with between 1 and 16 different species and with 3 different levels of fertilization between nothing and conventional application rates. The plot with 16 species and no fertilization massively outperformed the monoculture with maximum fertilization. The plots with maximum diversity also survived being under water for something like 3 weeks when the adjacent river flooded, and they determined that that was down to microbial activity. And they've  also figured out that plants will actively attract specific microbes to "infect" them in order to thicken their cell walls as a response to drought. And one of the farms Dr. Jones mentions was able to completely replace nitrogen fertilizer in their corn crop with an intercrop of soybeans. They weren't harvesting or tilling in those soybeans. Just having them growing in with the corn replaced the nitrogen fertilizer at a significant enough cost savings as to be preferable.

The only thing I don't know is what wins out in the end. Does the transpiration created by the extra leaf surface area outpace the drought resistance conferred by a diverse plant and microbial population? Certainly the Southwest natives found that transpiration could be fatal, hence their 5-10 plant spacing. But at that point, they were already on the path towards monocultural production, so that in itself may have compounded things. I can't say at this point. Will just have to wait and see how my various plots do.

I stayed up way too late writing posts for and designing the new website. ADHD is a blessing and a curse.

Here are two posts that I wrote about the breeding progress and goals I have for favas and turnips. Hoping to bang out a few more today. I'd love for you to read them and tell me what you think.

https://farmforall.square.site/s/stories/harvest-notes-fava-beans-2021

https://farmforall.square.site/s/stories/harvest-notes-turnips-2021

Wanted to thank Jennifer for being the first to join the CSA! Currently waiting for funds to process, but I think I've narrowed down the list of germplasm I'll be adding to my breeding projects. These orders are focusing on fall-planted/biennial crops so that I'll be able to get them planted in time for their seeds to contribute to the CSA. All in all it will add 22 new varieties to the mix with the the help of a few seed mixes available from one of our bioregional seed suppliers. Now all I really want is to show off some plant porn.

Mathew Trotter wrote:

Mark Reed wrote:
From my experience, no dig is vastly superior but probably only possible on a small scale.

Oh, large-scale no-dig is already here. I think the lecture I listened to the other day was about a farm that had 13,000 acres under no-till production? Something like that. Now, whether all the new-fangled big equipment does as good as a job as what's done on a small-scale, I can't say. But they are showing significant gains in soil organic matter each year, so it's at least moving in the right direction. It just took people figuring out how to engineer farm equipment that could work with all the existing crop residue.

I think I saw part of a presentation about that, if I remember right it was in Michigan. I tend to think of things as they relate just to my own situation. In my own little bubble I don't envision scenarios for a large scale revolution of agriculture. Just a little spot where I grow a lot of my own food without the bother and expense of machines, fertilizers and pretty much anything else that I can't scrounge up for free. I also have no desire to produce on a even a small commercial scale.

I guess my little spot is actually bigger than I thought, in a sense. While what I call the gardens are the only parts where I plant annuals, apply mulch and all that stuff, the rest of the "yard" where the blackberries, grapes, asparagus, horseradish, rhubarb, walnuts, pecans, peaches, pears and so on live is also, most certainly no-till.  Those things are pretty well established and the most I generally do is run my big weed eater on wheels under them once or twice a year. Well I guess I do mulch a lot of those things some, just by raking the weeds around them after mowing but I don't always even do that.

I think it's important to have lots of different "outside the fences" things because less than 1/2 of them produce well in any given year. Couple years ago peaches and blackberries were abundant and I made lots of preserves. This star of the show in fruits this year is pears. Pecans always win in the nuts department and rarely fail. Walnuts are also pretty dependable. Unfortunately hickory is in decline in my area, the trees seem healthy enough, they just don't seem to produce as well as they used to.

*I process large amounts of walnuts by dumping them in the gravel driveway and running over them. I have an old carpet I throw over the pile which keeps the squirrels from swiping them all. There is also an unidentified bug that lays eggs that develop into maggots that eat the husk. Those are the best as the nut comes out very clean but you have to leave them on the ground in the open for that and again... squirrels.

I really like your seed CSA, great idea, I hope it does well. Your web site looks good too.

What software do you use to edit your photos and videos?

Mark Reed wrote:I really like your seed CSA, great idea, I hope it does well. Your web site looks good too.

What software do you use to edit your photos and videos?

Thanks! I have the space to grow and do breeding work, just not the funds to amass the breadth of genetic material I need to make it all work, so I hope there are people who don't have the space to do this breeding work but see the value in it. At the end of the day, I'm just trying to do work that benefits my community, and I hope it's compelling enough work for them to support it.

In general, I don't edit my photos. I use OpenCamera on Android to shoot photos and videos because it has the most robust set of manual settings out of any free software I've found. I dial in the settings before I take the shot, and that generally produces photos that don't need a lot of tweaking. Plus, I take multiple shots so I can choose the best one. Occasionally I'll tweak saturation and contrast and such if what I'm trying to highlight blends into the background a little too much, but that's it. Generally I use the manual adjustments in Instagram to do that, since I upload all of my pictures anyway as a quick and dirty way to keep records of harvest and planting dates, growth rates, etc. If it's something I'm not going to upload, but I need to send to someone, I just use the manual settings in my phone's gallery to tweak colors.

The one exception, now that we have enough power to run my computer, is that I edit the thumbnails for my videos with Gimp, since thumbnails require a bit more tweaking in order to grab people's attention on YouTube. That's mostly just to add text, cut out foreground elements, add various overlays, etc. But I don't have a desk to work at and doing photo editing with a crappy mouse on your lap is kind of a nightmare, so I try to do as much on my phone as possible and reserve my computer for the stuff that can't easily be done any other way.

Video editing I do in InShot. It's the closest I've found to a fully featured desktop editing program that's available for free on smartphones. For videos under 10 minutes, it's pretty much perfect. Much longer than that and my phone just doesn't have the RAM to keep up. For very simple edits you can make much longer videos, but whether YouTube recommends your videos or not it's dependent on user engagement, and the more polished the video the better the engagement (all other things being equal.) They've even added keyframes and some of the other features I've been missing since I edited my last video and I'm looking forward to working with them as I come up with things to film (I'm on my fourth attempt at creating a time lapse that keeps failing, so hopefully I'll have that eventually...) Back in the day I always used Adobe Premiere Pro (back before it was a monthly subscription.) If there were no budget constraints, I think that would still be my preferred way to edit videos. If I get my YouTube channel part 1,000 subscribers so I can start making a small income from it, it would probably be with the subscription fee for Premiere, though my computer might be too outdated to run it well.

And yeah. I guess the 2012 census put total cropland under no-till management at almost 100 million acres, or about 25% of the total. I'm sure that's grown in the past decade, but it also doesn't tell you anything else about those farmers' practices. I also am not looking to do commercial growing. I mean, I want to feed my community, but I don't want sell them food. I want them to be healthy, and I want to reduce they're dependence on commercial entities that actively harm our community. And I have ideas about what that looks like, and where my role in it all begins and ends. In the meantime, I'm just trying to figure out how to survive, and it's an uncomfortable compromise between where I want to be headed, and the interactions I have to have with the existing system just to get by and to make progress.

And you better bet there are days I'd trade it all for a shitty job in retail just for a level of certainty that I don't have anymore. Even though that would mean living on the street, that doesn't make it less tantalizing. But then I remind myself that so many of the problems we're facing are because we got too good at making things easy for ourselves without ever stopping to consider the consequences. There are so many ways that we medicate ourselves to cope with the lack of meaningful work while the work that's being done is destroying our ability to exist in perpetuity. "We can't afford to be neutral on a moving train." I just no longer see the value of my existence if it's predicated on contributing to the harm, rather than the benefit, of my fellow beings. I'm just not attached to life. If I'm not making things better, or at least not making them worse, then why am I putting so much effort in just to exist? We're at afraid of death that we've destroyed everything worth living for. I don't see the point of that.

The first pea flower in the fall/winter garden!

Rabbits or some other critter ate the really nice looking daikon I've been ogling. Most other stuff is growing at at fraction of that pace, which is down to lack of fertility. Been waiting for a break in the rain to apply more, and this looks like the best I'll get. A put down the rest of Steve Solomon's mix, sans seed meal, since I'm out of that. Now going through and spraying urine over the area, which I'll follow up with nettle tea. I really want to get the areas where I've weeded out the thistles to fill in with my chosen vegetation. Hopefully a little extra fertility helps speed things up. If only there was more pee...

Your website looks great! You've got some fava varieties listed that you'd like to add to your seed stock. Do you want any of these from Salt Spring Seeds? I bought more than I need last year, and I suspect they won't do well for me here anyway. This year's weather was an anomaly (hopefully) but they weren't doing well even before things went sideways.
https://www.saltspringseeds.com/collections/fava-or-broad-bean-seeds-vicia-faba/products/andys-broad-bean

Jan White wrote:Your website looks great! You've got some fava varieties listed that you'd like to add to your seed stock. Do you want any of these from Salt Spring Seeds? I bought more than I need last year, and I suspect they won't do well for me here anyway. This year's weather was an anomaly (hopefully) but they weren't doing well even before things went sideways.
https://www.saltspringseeds.com/collections/fava-or-broad-bean-seeds-vicia-faba/products/andys-broad-bean

Those favas look gorgeous! And I love that they say they're good as a dry bean, because one of the things I'm aiming for is definitely improved eating qualities in the dry beans.

And yeah, those are by no means complete lists of the varieties I want to add. Just focusing primarily on the regional seed catalogs first, since that's the stuff that's most likely to be well-adapted to growing here. Definitely plan to seek out varieties from further afield, and hit up the seed banks for mystery varieties, once I've exhausted the local seed catalogs. Would also love to be hitting up seed exchanges, but I don't know if and when those are going to happen again. And there's supposed to be a seed library at the public library a couple towns over, but I haven't been able to get a response from anyone, so it doesn't appear to be active anymore. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Glad you like the website! Was hoping to at least get a write up on carrots done yesterday while it was pouring outside, but I was still trying to recover from pulling an all-nighter the other night to work on it. I could barely see straight. And it's too nice today to justify not being out in the garden. Gotta see what the weather forecast looks like tomorrow...

Oh! I had a question for you and almost forgot what it was. Did the winter peas have white or pink/purple-y flowers? I think the one I've got flowering is a snow pea, but I'm not sure yet.

Oh, and here's an update on the azolla. The test bucket with compost is going swimmingly. The pool is the only other one that's been kept active, and the azolla did eventually colonize the entire surface of the water (this was without changing out the water; it just finally sorted itself out.) The stuff in the pool still doesn't look that healthy, but I think that's now down to it only getting limited morning sun. The test bucket is on the opposite side of the barn and gets the much stronger afternoon and evening sun.

Still haven't heard anything about the IBCs. Hopefully they still happen. If they do I'll be putting them on the other side of the barn than I'd intended. It's only marginally further from the chickens, which was my only real complaint. Realistically, there's much more room to work with them on that side of the barn, so it makes more sense at the end of the day.

In relationship news, I think the landowner is finally realizing what a shitty position they've been putting me in. Of course, that was only after making a 9 ft. tall pile of their trash after they asked me to clean up the place so they could have a party and then disappearing into the woods for almost a week and coming back with the better part of a hundred pounds of fruit and nuts over the course of two trips. I think they're finally figuring out that I would be better off if I were living anywhere other than here, and that I'm here for their benefit, not mine. But, I've lived with them for 10 years in 2 locations, and they weren't willing to improve their behavior to keep their spouse from leaving them, so I'm not holding my breath. People rarely change. I'm still planning to be out of here next November, after I harvest my seeds, unless I'm given a good reason to stay. Maybe that will give them the motivation to start keeping some of the promises they made before I agreed to move out here. We'll see. Now that their better half is for sure never moving back out here, my motivation to stay is pretty limited. Their spouse is the one that actually gets shit done, and is actually into permaculture. I got stuck with the dead weight when they left. But we'll see. I'd like to not have to start over again somewhere else, but it's just a question of which option looks worse in a year's time. If it's another year like the past two, you wouldn't be able to pay me to stay.

Anyway, that's my venting for the day. Didn't get around to spraying the nettle tea today. I sprayed the equivalent of 56 gallons of diluted urine over the entire garden (use a hose-end sprayer so I don't have to pre-dilute... I've really come to love the hose-end sprayer for applying things like nettle tea, versus using a pump sprayer... especially if I'm applying 56 gallons of the stuff.) Hopefully that deters whatever's been snacking in the garden in addition to adding a good boost of fertility. It's supposed to be nice out again tomorrow, so I'll do the nettle tea after a hopefully good night of sleep. Do I actually need the nettle tea in addition to the urine? 🤷🏻‍♂️ I figure it all least has a microbial component, being fermented, that's likely to be beneficial. And I suspect it has micronutrients that the urine doesn't. At any rate, I noticed a visible difference after applying it, and the plants clearly aren't getting everything they'd like to eat. So, hopefully one big application now really helps things get established before the real cold begins.

I'm also inoculating some sacrificial chickpeas with nettle tea overnight based on the latest presentation I listened to by Dr. Jones. First because she talks about wanting to have a mix of plants from four different functional groups (tall herbs, short herbs, legumes, and brassicas, IIRC.) Other than a few patches of clover and vetch which have volunteered, and a handful of peas, I don't have a ton of legumes in my fall/winter mix... most of my legumes are spring and summer legumes. And because I ate almost 40 pounds of chickpeas at the beginning of the pandemic (just boiled, since I had no way to make hummus or anything with them) and am absolutely sick of them, I decided they'd make an acceptable sacrificial legume until it gets cold enough to kill them at least. I could just use the favas, but I'm planning to put them, garlic, and a few other odds and ends on the front of the "terrace" as part of my living terrace experiment that I'll finally be able to start carrying out in earnest this coming season. So, sacrificial chickpeas it is.

Inoculating them with the nettle tea is to help establish microbial communities faster. I'd have to find the exact presentation where she goes into the details because I only half remember how she explained it. Basically, any bacteria that you inoculate seeds with dies before it ever hits the soil, but the plant will use the bacterial waste products it's surrounded by to determine what bacteria are in its immediate vicinity and then produce root exudates to attract more of the beneficial microbes from that subset of microbes. It wasn't until the latest presentation I saw that she went into detail about what kinds of things are useful to inoculate seeds with, and compost/comfrey/weed tea was on the list alongside fish hydrolysate and a handful of other commercial and homemade concoctions. We'll see how the nettle tea works out.

Mathew Trotter wrote:. Did the winter peas have white or pink/purple-y flowers? I think the one I've got flowering is a snow pea, but I'm not sure yet.

One kind isn't flowering yet, and I don't remember the flowers. The other one has kinda pale yellow with pink flowers.

I took the picture in the dark, so it looks a little weird, but you get the idea.