GAMCOD at Blackberry Acres

To see what GAMCOD is, check this thread: https://permies.com/t/241168/GAMCOD-square-feet-degrees-colder

I think I'm going to try this out and I've figured out my spot. There's a path that heads ESE from my yard/garden into the woods. I don't want to go far from home. On the right side of that path is the barn and a pole building that collapsed 14 months ago under record-setting snow. That pole building means that there's access to the sun from the path where there didn't used to be. So I'm thinking to mark off either a 4x50 or 10x20 bed, cut some trees, dig out the incredibly pernicious blackberry bramble, and maybe build a hugelmound.

Wishing you success.

I staked out my 200 sqft! (Frozen ground made this a little harder than it needed to be.)

1:49 video documentation:


(And I need to work on my video presence...maybe scripting for even a short and obvious video makes sense since this feels pretty clumsy. There's a spot in the first segment where I'm trying to explain this very simple thing and stumbling over what to say where I visibly roll my eyes at myself for being ham-fisted...er mouthed? :-) )

Very SKIP like flagging

This was a few days ago, but I cleared my 200 sqft.

2:22 video documentation:

Things have been in a bit of a holding pattern here. My plot:

I was going to mark out my new zone today but it is also snowing!

Yay for the moisture?

I have utterly failed to keep up with this project as more pressing tasks have eaten up the time I have in the yard. I was playing with the idea of a very minimalist late-start haybale based garden but I have to review whether using offsite hay is legit…I’m thinking it isn’t.

Here’s what my nascent hugelmound looks like just now:

Christopher, any updates on your gamcod project?

Ha! I have a bunch of "film", but no point. I failed to get the hugel built and so I stacked up a 10'x20' patch of haybales and planted into that. But it doesn't count because it's not planting into dirt. The good news is that I now have a 10'x20' patch of dirt that's been occulted by the hay-garden so I'm ready to go next year. :)

I did actually participate in GAMCOD last year, but I've only just gotten around to compositing all the video together. I still need to figure out calories harvested from my documentation.

To figure out the Calories I produced, I'm lodging all the still images I can find, then I'll calculate C from those, then I'll skim through the video again to see what I missed. I don't have perfect evidence on everything but it was also a bad year and a bad patch, so I'm probably not in the running anyway.

crop	weight	Calories
mustard/arugula/lettuce	7 lbs	810 C
squash	4344 g	1723 C
favas	80g	280 C
radish	30g	5 C
common beans	1/4 c	50 C
potatoes	30 lbs	10,110 C
coriander	1/2 c	149 C
mustard seed	1 c	832 C
total		13959 C
had it been an acre (x270.2)		3,040,270 C

I'm using a website called nutritionvalue.org for the things in their database and random searches for other stuff.

For the greens, my mix is about 70% mustard greens, 15% arugula, and 15% lettuce, but I harvested and tracked them as a single thing. Rolling the numbers up and mathing them in that way, I'm calling them .2551 C/g as a best guess.

That's really not as bad as I was expecting. The potato harvest saved me. I used some boughten seeds, so let's say I spent $10 (though it was all stuff I had on hand) and I also spent about 10 hours of work, 70% of which was on harvest and included harvesting, threshing and winnowing seeds for next year.

Christopher Weeks wrote:Ha! I have a bunch of "film", but no point. I failed to get the hugel built and so I stacked up a 10'x20' patch of haybales and planted into that. But it doesn't count because it's not planting into dirt.

I suppose it would if the hay came from your 'ghost acre' though...As you say you'll have a flying start next season!

And that was last-last year, so clearing the patch of vegetation this year was relatively easier.