Outdoor low-tek passive propagation squares, a simple solution for massive propagation on north side

i made one of these because Shane of youtube came up with this idea. It made sense, it featured all kinds of fancy electronics, like warming cables , that i bought and implied and that broke and turned out not to be that important.

It's basicly four planks connected and a sheet of plastic keeping evil tree roots looking for water and nutrients out.
Then fill the inner space with compost. Get cuttings in, big ones small ones, fat ones and thin ones, to see what will take (mostly fat ones).

Oh yeah. Very important. Cuttings need very little sun. They got no roots but they do have leaves if everything is normal, so they evaporate , but cannot drink water as of yet. So north side makes sense. For most people in the world (except south America and Australia). On the north of a building or tree line little sun comes there and normally it's not very popular to be planted, because stuff that needs a lot of sun like figs and doesn't like a lot of frost is planted on the south side of a building.

This is my second set up. Two squares sitting aside an IBC connected to the roof and guttering.
The farmer i made the soil with helped me with his handy tractor. Thank God for that, what are we going to do without our farmer friends!

I'll just reply to myself, because i do not know how to get text-picture-text-picture format.

The soil is so expensive nowadays. My farmer friend has acces to fantastic big scale machinery. So he asked me to come up with a formula that we could make our own. Maybe deserving of it's own topic, i don't know.

So i did some research and came up with a third sand, a third cowdung and the last third a mix between soil from under Acacia trees and soil from under Alder trees.  He has got all this stuff on his farm, and then we mixed it in some big assed farmer mixer that goes behind a tractor.
It was disastrous it became one big mess of clay like stuff we had to scoop out. Then we decided to add wood chips to the mix and it became very nice soil.

The wood chips were fresh and the manure was a bit too fresh also, it posed some interesting problems. But noproject ever was complete without problems and we learned and i try to share that here so people do not make the same errors maybe, but we can make new ones together.

That was done this summer and he brought me a bag and i used it and to my surprise many acaia trees started growing, which never had worked before! So this bag we used in the propagation squares/boxes got weathered and is hopefully a bit matured. Because the experiments between shop soil and ours showed ours was better in the start, but later ran out of steam because the seedlings got robbed of nitrogen because the decaying wood consumed all... Anyway, that's another story. Here some pix of us experimenting making good and cheap composted microbial active soil.