ways of foresting oaks.

I have just put what i wanted to put in a new topic into my ways of growing junipers page.
 
   here goes on oaks.
  in spain there are many hectares of farms of a sylvo pastural traditionopen woods and pasture land and somethimes an agro sylvo pastural tradition.
   the principal actor in this type of farming is the encina or evergreen oalk in more temperate regions the cork oak but i am unfamiliar with that oak but hte system is the same except the cork oaks trunk is left larger to produce more cork.
  [oak trees produce-
    good fire wood the wood is hard dense wood_
and acorns that feed fatten the live stock. Growing acorns is called glandiculture,
and as this is the evergreen oak, forage in winter. 
   

The first foto i am posting is of a dehesa on the other side of the motorway frome the shopping centre carrefour in Ávila capital of the province of the same name Ávila an mountainouse bit of Spain. I am putting in this one because the trees are well spaced and orderly it a good example of a dehesa.

Here, a photo of the leaf, flower ,and a gall of the encina, quercus ilex, subspecies, rotundifolia or ballota.
  The leaf is adapted to the Mediterranean, it is thick skinned to prevent water loss or over heating and its underside is white covered in reflective hairs too small to be seen by the naked eye. It reflects the light and heat away from itself. An olive leaf is exactly the same.
    The system of vital forms of Raunkiaer defines plants according to their ways of adapting to off seasons and not their genetic origenes, we all do it a bit cactuses or trees are cactuses or trees first, before they are grouped with their relations that might for instance be clovers. Olives and encinas in this system would be of the same group, evergreen, broadleaved trees with identical adaptation to the climate in their leaves.
    The leaf of the encina is prickly when it is within reach of the cattle, to stop live stock eating it and not prickly on higher branches though the prickles return if the higher branches get eaten, i have read,  if, for instance, you import a giraffe.
    Paul Stamets says fungi are intelligent, well  so are plants, they can put or not put, prickles on their leaves according to the circumstances.
      I have seen the plants on my balconies growing their first branch in the direction of the only bit of light with another shorter one in the opposite direction to counterbalance it, bright, eh. agri rose macaskie.

  i post the photo of the gate of  a dehesa in sanit lorenzo del escorial you pass it if you take the road out of the escorial to madrid that goes through the town Galapagar.

     I think i put in the last photo of th esmart entrance to a farm in the escorial to keep Spainish pride happy and deservedly so.
    I am a bit worried about how much of these fotos you all will take or o would probably not try to put in a minimum .
     Here's the foto I meant to put in of the dehesa next to the one of the first foto which is of encina heads seen from the other side of the motorway and the wood of them stretching away into the distance.
  This does not look like the front entrance to the dehesa but a side one.
     One of the protagonists of this type of farming is the fighting bull. agri rose macaskie.

  And one with Ávileñian cows in it. they are black, as many fighting cattle are but are not fighting cattle. This photo was taken just very close to the last so is probably of the dehesa Zurra.

Dehesas are made clearing woods that form naturally. According  to my book on dehesas,  “La Encina en el Centro y Sur Oeste de España”, Cesar Sánchez Fuentes. He calls for people to plant the trees in them so as to be able to choose to have trees with the sweetest acorns. You can also buy encinas that have been mycorrhized with trufas which enormously increases the economic potential of your tree. The old system must insure a varied genetic bank.
  I think the trees spring up because jays or nuthatches plant the seeds, maybe magpies do too, the sort of birds that probable eat tent worms and we kill them as vermin bury nuts and create forests.
    David Bainbridge, google, the American writer on glandiculture,  the production of acorns for live stock and for us, they are delicious, says native Americans ate acorns after leaving them in swamps to leach the bitterness out of them. Here they eat them off the trees that have the sweetest acorns. He also says it is possible to have as good a crop of acorns as of cereals, acre for acre and points out that a tree crop does not spoil slopes. If you plough slopes you leave the soil exposed to the fury of rains that will carry the soil downhill.
      He also says that it is possible for acorns to germinate that have passed through the intestines of a pig and there is lots of wild boar in Spain so boar that doesn’t masticate properly could be responsible for the seeding of hills with acorns.
  I post a photo of a lonely bit of hillside in the province of Ávila with hill in the distance dotted with new encinas an example of how they spring up here. agri rose macaskie.

Sometimes encinas are kept as bushes, cut every fifteen odd years to make charcoal with their twigs, these bushes are called chaparras.
      They are probably also used as forrage for the live stock, a banker in gredos Avila i spoke to  said he had just been to see the national park of montfrague and one of the farmers in the park told him they had just cut 500 kilos of branch  (of incing) and he commented the cows like it better than grass.
      The book i have on Spanish breads of cattle, "Razas Ganaderas Españolas Bovinas", A. Sanchez Belda, i have the present edition and the old one, this book mentions several races of cattle eating encina branches. They cut the branch for the cattle and what the cattle really eat is the leaves off the branch.
  I post a foto of a bit of land covered in chaparras dotted with the ocasional encina as a tree perhaps for shade. This is in the province of Ávila, on the road to the capital Ávila.
  This is one way of keeping trees as bushes. Here the moor is called monte bajo low mountain or refered to as kept as monte bajo if it is covered in bushes, if it is covered with trees it is monte alto.  agri rose macaskie.

This is a better photo of chaparras.
The book on spanish breeds of cattle says, for example, when it talks of the "cacerainan white", that it has a manifest ability to eat rude food stuffs. That under "general charicteristics" and under, exploitation and managment, it says that  it eats the recourses of the dehesas, grass, branch, (ramon) and acorns, when these aren't reserved for the pigs. Acorn fed hams are many times as expensive than hams made from pigs fed in a more normal way.

  The book is  a copilation of experts from different regions, experts from the regions of the breeds, this existents of different writers makes the accounts much more detailed in some cases than others.  I quote loosely from some bits of the book here.

  It mentiones that, the "morucho" eating the (ramon), the branch of the encina, is so usual that rules about the prunings are included in the terms of letting the  land in the dehesas. This breed of cows is to be found in the provinces of Caceres and Salamanca. The older edition says that in poor farms branch of encina is the only food these cows get in winter.
  The "berrendero en negro", eats  agricultural subproducts and frutos of the dehesa, acorns, and (ramon) branch, in bad moments, might be summer because it does not say winter, this is a more southerly breed .
The "Albero", eats bushes and tree species the tender tips of branches and the leaves, especially at certain moments, loosing interest in them at others, they seem to need to chew them, it has a marked ability to digest the lignified matter that is part of their winter, conservation diet.
  The "retinta" is said to eat the stubble and branch of quercuses, oaks, in summer.
  There, i have gone through a good portion of the branch eating cattle of the book.

  This information should be really important, are we to send cattle that have maximum production of meat or milk to countries that cannot feed them?  Wouldn't it be better to find the hardier cattle of our countries to send to dry countries with poblations who can't afford bought feeds. Its great to have a cow that has a super production of milk but if it dies in the dry seasoon when we can't feed it its not so good. the cacerarian mentioned here not only is good at digesting woody matter it stores fat to get it through bad seasons.
  Also bought feeds have been  proven to be full of rubbish, it would be healthier to go back those of our breeds of cattle that can survive on less concentrated foods and that produce healthy products if in slightly smaller quantities. 
    Poorer farmers in rich countries also need cattle with diets that aren't to expensive for their owners. It isnot only people from third world countries who benefit from hardier cattle, other people benefit from things more like goats. agri rose macaskie.

  The trees in slopes in the background of the last photo are covered with these trees.
    The next photo is of a chapara a encina bush, it is one in my garden, i wish to explain how the trees are grownshaped produce acorns and fire wood and branch. agri rose.

  They prune the trees in variouse ways. I will start with a basic one. They are prunned so that they have four to six branches leaving the trunk above the heads of the cattle at 2,8 metres,  These branches are prunned to grow as horizontal as possible to make the work of the "cortecino" the cutter or pruner and pollarder and the beater, who in some circumstances, such as if frosts menace the acorn crop, beats the branches for the acorns. At lower altitudes this is not neccessary and the pigs pick up the acorns as they fall. Storing acorns  without them going moldy is not so easy and it means employing people to gather them.
      I will show how i suppose thiese horizontal branches are acheived.
      The photo i post is of a tree that has been formed for the first time albeit a tree that lives in a shopping centre car park.  it is not a good example but  it is all i have got.
  when they cut the branches off a oak they always leave a few twigs with leaves on at the end of the branches they mean to keep. agri rose macaskie.

I reckon they cut the young trees or rather bushes because they have been eaten by live stock or deer leaving which makes trees bush out leaving a branch or two at 2,8 metres and then they leave the tree to grow new branches and they then they can chose the best of the new ones, the ones that leave the trunk were they wish them to and prune the tree again leaving the branches they have then chosen, which will be more exactly what they want than the  branches chosen in th first pruning. In Guadalajara the pruning is constant and so the tree forms exactly as they want it to. Maybe that is the case in avila once the wood is cleared to make the dehesa. the writer César fuentesw says they clear all the bushes of the area leaving the ones they have chosen to be trees he is writing about Salamanca close to Ávila  if this is hte case they havenot been forming the young trees they haven't even chosen them 
        I know what the goal is when pruning a encina, from seeing trees and from the book "La Encina en el Centro y Suroeste de Espana", Cesar Fuentes Sanchez .  I don't know how they do it how they get horizontal branches. Though the book explains how they maintain the branches as they do.

      Sometimes they leave a few of the branches of the bush at the foot of the tree, to protect the trunk from live stock or to feed live stock. César Fuentes, I have seen this once.

          I post my drawings of how I imagine the tree is formed. well the original bush, bush as it is after the first pruning my last posting and  the tree as it is once formed, are something I have seen. I will be posting photos of trees as they are once formed. agri rose macaskie.

        The desired, main and as near as possible, horizontal, arms grow and are pruned so that the branches that grow off them grow at regular intervales on the branch up and slightly outward. When these reach an adequate width for fire wood nine centimetres wide, the wood is very good fire wood and so they use small logs, that also can be used in stoves, they can be pollarded off the arms of the tree and new wood can be regrown on the main arms. The new growth is also also carefully pruned so that it grows back right.
        The branch prunned off the trees can be used to feed the live stock, cows in this part of Spain. They eat the leaves and tender tips, the parts they leave  are burnt up in the fire place quickly producing  embers that are placed in the braziers. 
      I post a drawing of the way the wood should grow back and a photo of a tree at the bull ring of the little village of Solo Sanchez in Ávila in which you can see how the branches growing off the main arms grow at regular intervals. This is beef cattle country.
      Bullrings serve as places to sell off cattle as well as for fiestas, bullfighting.  agri rose macaskie.

  Here i post two drawings of what the pruners look for when shaping these trees, always remembering that there are variouse other ways of shaping them.
  The first drawing is of the four main arms running parrelel to the ground.
  They always leave a spray of branches and leaves at the end of the branches when they desmochar the tree pollard all the branches of its arms.
      The other drawing is  of how i imagine they manage to keep these branches parrelel to the ground. I imagine that if the branch starts growing upward towards the light, they cut of the tip and give preference to some lesser branch that grows hoorizontally. Some of the branches have some pretty strange changes of direction.

When they have cut off all the branches off the main arms new branches start growing back as you can see in the tree posted here. Ávila car park of the supermarket carrefour.

  Here is a different way of treating the tree and it is in near the car park of the supermarket and the dehesa Zurra. cesar fuentes sanchez talks of balconied encinas he asys the sun gets into the middle of the there are several trees in this ploace formed like the one of the photo i post here and i woul dimagine these are balconied encinas this one is my favourite because it has such marvelouse long horizontal branches.
  The most attractive encinas, for me, are the ones with hanging branches, pendulares, this is one of those.
  They want the sun to get in to the tree so as to have a bigger crop of acorns. César Fuentes Sánchez says that in Ávila they give more importance to the fire wood they can cut from from the encinas than the acorns they might produce.

  here i post a photo of to different styles of cutting encinas one with a round crown and the otehr with a cross shaped one the cross shape exposes a greater area of the head of the tree to the sunlight so increasing hopfully the crop of acorns these two trees are on the raod up to the pass of menga they are almost the last two encinas the highest two on the slopes.
  i put in a drawign of the two shapesw sas they would be seen from above.

        Another way of pruning encinas is the Guadalajara one, described by César Sanchez Fuentes, it is in wheels, ruedas. You let the branches sprout from the trunk at about the same height as with the Avila trees, above the head of the cattle, in Guadalajara  sheep and goats but still they don't usually seem to let the cross of the tree be too low. The branches grow outwards and you let them till  they have reached a certain distance from the trunk, when they do, you cut them where they fork, this is the first wheel, belt, would be a better word in English.
      As you cut them at a fork the branches grow on outward with double the number of branches than there were in the first inner wheel, or belt. When they have grown what is deemed enough for the second wheel they are cut again where the branches branch fork and the next wheel will have even more branches to it. Sometimes these trees seem goblet shaped.
      I go to the north of Guadaljara often and i have observed that they prune the encinas constantly and there are no sudden and enormous changes no drastic pollarding as as there is in Ávila as far as i  know. They take form as they grow.  There must be some drastic pollarding inguadalajara too to stop the tree getting really big, jmsybr foor fire wood and another reason for drastic pollarding is for health reasons. 
      I post  a diagram of this system here and a photo of a tree cut like this. 


      The only other way i know of of cutting encinas is that of Cordova, in las Pedroches, a place that is very famous for its acorn fed ham. If you want to get another source of information on this type of farming tap, "cerdo iberica" into google and press search and then open up the article ·conozca el cerdo iberica" and look for the part that says crianza and alimentacion, there is a photo of the pigs nd an encina there, Translated that is write "iberic pig" into google, choose the article "know the iberic pig" and in the article under this heading, open up, "breeding and feeding". I will try to find a better address, i suppose they are all on page ten or something as the first pages are full of advertisments for the ham they produce.  Looking up "dehesa" you find things like shops called dehesa rather than articles on this type of farming. 
  There, in las Pedroches, according to César Fuentes Sanchez, there are more encinas a hectare than in other parts of Spain and the trees grow pretty much straight up like city trees. In cities branches growing horizontal to the ground would be a danger and are cut off. There they cut a branch off the south side of the trees if it seems to them there is too much shade for the pastures at their feet. A pretty important concern in agro, sylval farming.  I don't have a photo of this so i include the information here where i am posting photos of trees cut as they are in Guadalajara.

    All this must be interesting to those who study permiculture food forests. The treatment of the plants at the feet of the trees in dehesas is not what permaculturists would approve of but they must  learn lots of other things from the Spanish use of the encinas.

        It must also help those who are interested in feeding live stock in dry countries were the pastures dry in summer and die down a bit in winter. Where they have two off seasons or where the cold season, so the grass season, is short because the dry season is so long. Some poeple seem to think that if there is a dry season it should kill the grass, they are forgetting the desert flowers when it rains, if the grass has not been completely destroyed by overgrazing it comes back when it rains, it has methods of enduring the dry seasons.
        In dry places, substitutes for pasture and the seriouse consideration of their value and how their cultivation could be improved is an imperative.
        This is a tradition that ensures the presence of trees and so is green and must help to contain deserts, this is one of the reasons it is so important.
  It does exist in marocco and probably in lots of other places, what i am not sure exists, is the counsciouse of its existence and the proper weighing up of factores related to it in the west, and as the west is always  pushing its weight around in the world, it is important that they undestand the positive sides of these systems.

      The leaf and acorns are a healthy feed, they will not give the cattle mad cow for example and so an organic form of food, if it were possible to say they did not use herbicides and pesticides in this type of farming, something i doubt. It is important to know in which season the leaves are less full of tannins and which animales, which breeds of live stock, can metabolise them and what quantity of leaf they can eat. 
      It is also organic because it should ensure a outdoor life for the live stock and kinder treatment of animals, a more natural, outside, in family, life, is a requirement of organic farming, people like to think they are eating animals who had a happy, if short life.

      This is live stock eating the leaf of trees in a sustainable fashion. The owners of the animals can decide how much they eat, they cut the leaf off the trees.

      In the case of shepherds who accompany their sheep they can call them off if they eat too much from a tree. I have seen them do  it. agri rose macaskie.

Just one foto of what a encina looks like when it has grown out, it looks like any other tree, this is in Guadaljara and i am gone for a few days to Guadaljara to try and dig berms or try to put into practice  some other, new for me, bit of gardening, cultivating, knowledge, got from this site. Help there are two photos of different outgrown encinas on the same page- I hope the site will take it. agri rose macaskie.

  Just one last foto of a branch of encina with acorns on it. agri rose macaskie.

  I have to say that they also prune or rather pollard oaks because it keeps them healthy, rids them of places for insects to nest in.

  i shall post a photo of the wood that they turn the branches into that is sold as logs for the fire in the forground of a shop they also sell them in garages and you can buy a lorry full of logs.

I wonder if there might be a way to find low tanin acorns that could be used as seeds.

  I can send you acorns if its a year when they haven't all got whatever it is they get that makes them produce a sort of honey from the bottom of the cup of the acorn and makes the seeds bad in my parts of the woods, which happens some years,in damp-ish earth. The prettiest trees are pendular.
  if lots of people want them i am not in the country often enough to collect to many .
  Maybe the tanins are the reason they say you can only practice this method with iberican pigs or an iberican duroc mix. What animals can eat what is a question for zoologists.
  In tuscanny in italy they take the pigs down to the woods to eat acorns, i don't know any details about this.
        The cork oak is another big  protagonist of this system, in areas in which these more tender trees will grow they are the main protagonists of the dehesa.  I suppose you have cork oaks for your american wines,  They use the acorns of all oaks to feed live stock. Though they say the acorns of encinas are sweeter i ate the acorn of a quercus faginea last year which was not ata ll bitter. There are however very few groves of quercus faginea and lots of encina ones. The faginea is not evergreen.
      Spanish garden centers sell these trees, which would be a quicker way to get a fruiting tree than growing from seed if you are in a hurry, and can afford it. Viveros Sanchez is on the web. agri rose macaskie. 
       
     

Paul Wheaton i meant in the last bit i wrote that i could send them in dampish earth in an envelope, not that they got mela the sort of honey coming out of the acorn when it is attacked by some sort of fungi, in damp-ish earth.  The bees like the sticky stuff produced by the fungi that attack the acorns, they also like the flowers of the oaks.  I think they get this illness when its dry, last winter was very wet but the summer started pretty early i don't know how they'll be. When i say i think, it is almost complete fantasy, just they were all right last year a wett-ish year and not on the one before a dry one, i am basing the comment about mela and the weather on only two years of observation and no conversation with anyone who knows.
  Paul Wheaton, are you busy? i haven't bumped into you too much on the forums this last week or so. agri rose macaskie.

Somehow, I suspect that you won't be able to send me acorns.  I think the US is weird about seeds.

Busy:  I am perpetually catching up on the forums.  Plus, lots of times I get a notice about spam in a thread and when I delete the spam, the thread is marked as read even if I haven't read it. 

Plus, these forums are supposed to be for everybody, not "the paul wheaton show" - so lots of times I have something to say, but I try to cork my pie hole a bit and give others a chance to have something to say.

  I have a foto of a pile of sticks outside a goat pen used to keep the billy goats in. If you have the billies wandering around with the nannies you get a lot of undesired pregnancies i suppose.
  These stick are not from encinas i believe, though some of them may be, but from another oak the quercus pyrenaica,  that is hardy and natural to Spain and one whose leaves Juan Oria del la Rueda y Salguero says are used for feeding the live stock in winter. In someplaces leaves are collected and taken to the stables for them to eat and even being cooked up with potatoes to feed pigs with something that does not fatten them, just feeds them. and in others of the leaves  being collected as bedding. They seem to be particularly used with pigs and goats.
    The leaves of this oak  change colour in autumn but often stay on the tree brown all winter . Varieties of oaks that do this are called marcescente.
    I have whatched the shepherd carrying bundles of sticks to this place i don't think in winter i woudl remember if he took them brown leaves i think. He has not used the sticks for fire wood once stripped by the goats of their leaves.  It would have taken a lot of extra effort to get them home.
  It is an important fire wood and charcoal tree and it is the tree Juan Oria de la Rueda and Salguero was talking of when he mentioned ordenances in the siglo XV1 saying that the trees can't be cut with instruments that you can only take from them what you can tear off with your hand.
  I have seen this sort of oak cut like encinas so as to be able to pollard wood from a few main branches in Avila, and i have seen it coppiced and even kept as a broad mat of nearly ground level twigs well with in the reach of the goats or sheep, well below their heads. The photo i am posting has three fotos on the same page so it will add up to a lot of bits too many i suppose.

rose,

I'm not sure, but it sounds like I might be confusing you?  Sorry about that.  Of course, to me, everything seems consistent. 

Seeds to the US:  I just don't want anybody to get in trouble. 

Whats up with you and bill mollison, you leave him out of your permiculture list.

I do?  Well, I think mollison is great.  I'm just more impressed with holzer.  Holzer's stuff seems more aligned with where I want to go.

if you want to find pigs under the oaks in the season for fattening them autum winter then a place that is famous for its acorn fed hams is Las Pedroches in The province of Cordova, you wont find them everywere. the province Extremadura is more likely to have pigs being fattend in its oak woods than the province of Avila is. I have never seen them in Avila. Well once in a yard. It is easier by far to see the oak wooded farms usually combined with cows than the pigs maybe that is just were i go. agri rose macaskie.

  It is a bit confusing wondering whether to go on just observing the changes in vegetation as the soil gets better in much of the garden and enjoying the spectacule of seeing what comes naturally or wondering whether to create a food forest but i take responsability for changing track for you paul wheaton havign confused me.
      The argument that it would be easier to convince people to have good soil if they saw how much you can grow in it persuaded me.
        Also it is I suppose really important to prove you can grow a lot without pesticides and herbicides if you are to argue successfully against their use. Maybe you can't have monocultures if you are to accept illneses in your crops instead of using chemicals to get rid of them because that is to put all your eggs in one basket.
  of course a monoculture puts you in especial danger from plagues because if a plague catches hold it has so much similar food to move to but it is also a disadvantage  to have only grown tomatoes if there is more risk of losing all your tomatoes. agri rose macaskie.

Paul Wheaton i don't remember in which forum you asked me what the rainfall where i  have a garden is so i will tell you here. I have looked it up and it says that in the region of Guadaljara affected by the Ocejon, a peak in the northern part of the mountain range "the central system" and i am right near the Ocejon, the rainfall is 800 centimetres a year plenty of rain in winter all my guadaljara fotos are from that region. Most of the desertified regions that i reckon are really regions laid barren by over pasturising are inin the region of this peak with plenty of rainfall except in summer. It is much more rainfall than you had in your old farm, you said that it had 200cm of rainfall. I don't know what all these numbers are in inches. agri rose macaskie. 

800cm?

Are you sure it isn't 80cm? 

800cm would work out to 8 meters!  That's a rainforest!

I would have to look it up again , I think the thing is htat they measure rainfall in how many cm for square metre not in th edepth in centimetres . would htat make the figure more comprehensible. I have to wait till a member of my families in to iron out all the points in this it just makes me feel confused. I should look it up for myself. i will an dthen refer back to you. rose.

    I have been in the country, picking acorns from the round beneath some splendid pendular encinas and planting them in the garden and have planted a lot more than i want, maybe i could sell some nice examples of pendular oaks one day if i can grow them, the garden centres don't seem to sell the pendular ones anyway they would also be  pendular oaks that grew at a thousand metres, mountain pendular evergreenoaks.
    I read some where that trees should come with a note on their place of origen, o rhtat of their parents, that the plant was fathered by pendular oaks that greww where there where lots of frosts  is a sort of guarantee that you can grow them where there are plenty of frosts a encina from some lowlad place might not be so hardy, that way people form different areas know if what they are getting will grow where they live.
  Have eaten my fist home grown veggies, I only did fruit before, some turnips grown in my minnie hugglecultur bed. They seem to grow on air, they hardly have any sort of collecting root to speak of, and they do have some wrinkled hairy leaves, looks like their leaves do all the work of feeding them.
    I also ate the turnhip leaves and cooked them as greens, I really enjoyed them apparently they have lots of folic acid an dplenty f fibre if the greed with which i ate them is a sign of needinfg them it seemed my body wanted turnip tops.
 
    There is a dish here that depends of turnip tops from Gallicia in the north of spain called pote gallego basically bean and potatoe ham and turnip top soup like quarter poound of beans and pound of potatoes maybe that too many potaoes, ham, dried or ordinary ham, bones and,chorizo a sort of Spainish salamy with paprika powder in it. and almost any bits of meat you have around pork or beef an dchicken flung in a suppose depending on how much meat you can afford or think good for you. This is the sort of stew that contains big peices of meat that you will slice later not meat cut into chunks, a sort of country boleau which is a french thing of different types of meat boiled together chicken, pork and beef and potherbs which include carrots onions and maybe turnips and celery. You eat the meat as part of a main course sliced it is good with a salad dressing with mustard and sugar in it and use the stock as stock. Old english co0king included Boiled meat  the meat really shrinks so it means people eat more meat but boiled meat is not in fashio any more normally the only boiled meat people eat nowdays ins ham. these stews are winter food the french boiled meat serves to make  The central spainish version is with chickpees and cabbage.
      I Planted potatoes around the place just to see what would happen, into the grass, i still see the leaves of the black potatoes  I planted about three years ago that at first seemed dead i have never harvested them, always been waiting toill they had enought leaves to imagine i wooould get a good harvest and because i have simply forgotten them.
    I was at the vegtetable shop that had them looking for jerusalem artichokes so i could plant them and they still had purple potatoes and the price was in the bracket i mentioned, was what i remember it to have been twelve euros a kilo! If people want to know were to get some of the stranger foods to plant maybe the most fancy vegetable shop around is a good place to look. THey were sellling little bags of the fruit of the sorbus domestica the rowan is one type of sorbus, they looked like small apples. for four euros fifty a bag and they were very small bags of fruit, not a pound of fruit , may be a half pound.  I have two trees of the type  that produce them, though they are not producing fruit yet.  i bought them and planted them one a year and three years ago because there are some that grow in the hills in the village so it is a tree natural to the place.
  This weekend I planted a birch and dug irregularities into my slope to catch water and organic matter these irregularities also serve to step in and so move around on the bank more easily. I also dug a terrace- a flat space for swinging sofa thing i have, i am very pleased with myself for getting so much done. It was a very small  terrace for a good builder to dig out in a day but alright for a middle aged nearly old pot bellied woman who does not spend much of her time keeping healthy. the sol was perfect for digging not to wet an dso heavy and wet enough to be easy for the mattock to slice through it really easily.
  I have decided after reading about permaculture and looking at the youtube videos that our mania for getting rid of waves and dips in the land , that in the natural course of things exist and house dead leaves and hold water a while longer than other bits of land, is part of the problem so i have dug the slopes a full of dips sort of irregular steps.
    Making a ditch on contour to hold water up high so that it will slowly seep into the land instead of running principly down hill is something i have in mind as i dig in irregularities and i began to see were it would go. As a bigger project and needing new skills it will not get started for a while, i suppose. It takes me longer to start to plan learning to anythign i daon't know how to do or trying to do it  do so that i learn,  peg out the level on contour for example. It will be a while before i get a ditch on contour dug into the land, while i am already good at digging holes, even in slopes, from years of planting trees. The first ones i planted did not take. Maybe i can get someone else with experience in pegging and surveying to peg out the level on contour for me, i can do the digging which keeps me fit. 
    I am at a work crazy time of life, love spending the whole day digging when in the country and  writting in the town, a, full of projects i long to see completed time of life, though if completed i would be without projects. New projects seem to crop up so maybe thats not a problem. 
      My gardening methods drive my neighbors to fury they want to clean up the garden leave it bare and plough or dig it. rose macaskie.