My *OFFICIAL* permaculture farm journey thread

EDIT: WOOOHOOO!!! page 2! :p

i thought it definately LOOKED like mullein, it even feels like i have heard it described... the dead stalks that were growing nearby, likely the year before, were only about 4ft high however, not the 6-7ft in the mullein videos i have seen
i do have some mullein seeds that i planted this year in the greenhouse, so that will be what checks my suspicion, but i think it may just be:)

thanks for the info on the flower, im sure my grandma would've been able to tell me but i didn't really bother to ask...

i'll have to take some pics but one of the strawberries already has an open flower on it!:hooray:
strawberries soon i hope:)

also called in a locate today, will know fairly soon where i can and can't dig and how deep, maybe i do have room for a rain garden at the top of the hill or something, then i could use most of the dirt from digging that out for hugelkultur beds...

Wish I lived closer. I'd come over and wield a shovel.

On the plant IDs, I'm like an idiot savant. As I walk through the woods I have to deliberately not proclaim plant names and attributes as I see them.

"Smilax! Amanita, perhaps highly toxic! And, ah-ha, the invasive Paper Mulberry! Mimosa tree - invasive, nitrogen fixer, fabaceae family."

Heh.

thanks for the offer to wield a shovel vidad:)
fortunate or not, i am a little busy with other stuff going on to actually be outside often enough to need another shovel most of the time, but its good to know that im not the only one that wants to be out there working the land 24/7:)

UPDATE:
so yesterday i picked up a couple loads of steer manure/hay - aged
got them for free and was offered to get a free supply all summer
i also spent 150 dollars on woodchips, i plant to eventually get my money back out of that

today it is wet so i will put some woodchips on top of some of the uncovered beds and may water a bit just to keep things more moist, may not though because its supposed to rain/snow all week(just lil bits of night snow)

UPDATE:
been a while since the last one i know, been a little busy and the few times i have worked out back i haven't been taking as many pics as i should haha

so heres a few pics of how the hugel bed is coming along, things have come up and im not certain how much i will be able to get done on the planned hugelbed this year so what i am going to do is cover and plant what i have piled up so far, i will then move all the extra logs into my yard that aren't currently in it(they didn't all get unloaded under my supervision and some are in the field adjacent to our property)
i plan to plant wheat, beans, sunflowers, sunberries (or something like that, free from SSE) and some other stuff, more on that when it comes time to plant
then i will mulch with the straw/steer manure combination i have, afterwhich i may or may not put some woodchips on top of that to help maintain moisture better, i just don't want too much carbon material to lock up ALL of the nitrogen the first year, furthermore the wheat is more to help hold the soil in place the first year than for any sorta yield or anything like that)

so i was going to water and just sorta check on/observe the cornfield the other day and lo and behold, one of the brusselsprout stalks i left in last year is deciding to grow right back!

in the first pic, the larger bucket now has wheat and a little clover thing growing in it, this is the bucket that HAD a flower, two small sunflowers, 6 cilantro plants, a spinach or lettuce plant, two bean plants growing in it, i moved out for a few months and it wasn't ever watered(inside at the time) so everything but the wheat and that clover thing died

i need to buy some more vents for the greenhouse, i may do that tomorrow

by the way, all the sprout pics were taken a few days ago, they are not 100% recent but they are pretty close

so a foster kid that was staying with us last year took some of the harvested wheat we got last year and tried to grow them in a small flat(one of those jiffy greenhouses without the lid or pellets, just a tiny bit of soil on the bottom) they didn't even begin to sprout so a month ago or so i dumped the flat on the north bed, well a week or two ago i started passively pulling some of the "grass" that was growing up through the bed, when upon pulling one up i saw a wheat seed attached to the rootball lol
so we have some wheat growing in the northbed along with some
okra
mullein, like one plant in the corner lol, i may plant some more later
borage
purple basil
cumin
scarlet nantes carrots i believe


and i think thats all the updates for now, cant wait til i graduate this summer and can begin to spend much more time out there:)

future updates will also include the dandelion jelly i will be making and selling, i dont know how many pics i'll end up taking of that after i get sucked in but ill post up the recipe for everyone thats following the thread and pics of the finished product for sure

in case i didn't post this before i am going to look into running my business as a nonprofit organization, but regardless, 10% of all product and gross income are going to charities/churches in the community, the requirements for a charity to recieve anything from my organization are that they have to run entirely on volunteer work, at the moment the only charity/church that i know of that qualifies is the mormon churches welfare program, but when i have time this summer i will be looking into finding more charities/churches in the area becuase i am not just trying to help one grouop in the community, i am simply looking for proof that everyone involved in any charity/church i donate to is entirely sacrificing their time/money for the betterment of the community and not accepting any pay for the work they do, more on this as things begin to kick off:)

could someone tell me if this "weed" can be profitable in any way?
its growing all over the place around here, sorta pretty, tasted some the other day and i didn't die haha:D anyway i thin it would be absolutely awesome if i could make any sorta money off of this
if nothing else simple identification would be nice:)

also, is there some site i go to that has a list of "weeds" that can be profitable or something? im in USDA zone 4 so tropical weeds wouldn't be much use to me but itd be nice to know what i can use to make some money while i wait for my more conventional crops to yeild:)

so heres some pics of the dandelion jelly in the process of making it, first the fun pics:)

here is some more pics of the process

now i composted the petals after i had strained them, does anyone have any use for dandelion petals that they can think of?

the blossoms i took a pic of cus i thought it was sorta strange to have blossoms already, maybe if im lucky i'll get fruit this year but from what i understand, it may just be teasing me and i may not get fruit til next year
the tree is a semi-dwarf i believe, i was still learning when we bought it but i was really adament that we not get any DWARF fruit trees, but i really like yellow delicious variety so we had to get one, and i think it was a semi-dwarf at least

and another weed that it would be nice to have identified, of course latin names are nice but any common name for it would be nice too, ive always called it milkweed but a quick google search tells me that i have always been way wrong:)
its a light greyish green, it smells real nice, kinda powdery/feathery texture, no bleeding or sap when broken
im thinkin this one would be more likely to have a use due to the pleasant scent that it gives off...

looks like mullein to me also. cant wait for more updates!

i try to update fairly often, mid-june or so it should really pick up and i may be updating every day or two:)

Hey, just saw your thread and made an account just to say hi. This is pretty awesome stuff, and really ambitious too. I admire that kind of stuff. Keep it green

This is a fun thread, I hope when things get growing in earnest you continue to post photos.

Here in Rhode Island the bamboo would infest everything, going through and beyond the hugelbeets. It is a very successful plant.

thanks for the responses guys
and yes it sounds like i would have to install a barrier if i planted any around here, for now it probably would have trouble just getting established but eventually im sure it would be quite invasive after the soil has improved a bit...

more pics here soon, though there hasn't been too much progress lately since im in the final stretch of school right now, come june things should pick up fast...

GOOD NEWS!
i think i've identified what that thing is that is coming up everywhere, WILD MORNING GLORY
here are some pictures if anyone has a different opinion i'd love to hear it because if theres a chance its soemthing else then i'll make sure to have it positively id'd before doing anything with it

here are some pics of the plants growing under the apple trees, there is lettuce, cilantro and some flowers that i planted as well as some native 'weeds'

i took a picture of some of the lettuce plants again
a lot... actually MOST of the lettuce on the southbed got baked to death, guess that wasn't the proper place for lettuce:)
but there is a few plants on the soutbed that survived, then there is all the lettuce in the pathway that are growing great and still bright green
i have officially declared the lettuce ready to harvest so we should be eating some soon here

the southbed just gets baked in the sumnmer time, but there are a few plants surviving and ive put in some extra ventilation on that side(all passive cus the wind around here most of the time helps out a bit) so we'll see what survives
i have put a couple pineapple tops in there, we'll see if they eventually take root and grow a little, dont honestly expect tropicals to survive our winter, even in the greenhouse, but if nothing else they provide biomass and keep the soil busy while giving me something to look at
there is also mango seeds and an avacado seed or two in there
i also have a bunch of pineapple SEEDS from cutting some apart the other day, will probably plant those in a few spots here in another week or two after they've dried out a bit

other than that, just toms, beans, onions and other stuff that i've planted, the cuke is doing the best out of the squash-like plants but it definately doesn't like the heat

ok, i took a pic of the northbed of the greenhouse
the shade is from the trays of water i have on top of the bed, 2 of them anyway, the third has pots of stevia planted that still haven't sprouted, dont knwo if they ever will cus the stuff inside never did either
this shade should also stop the cold-weather stuff from bolting so fast, it is a LOT cooler on the north side of the greenhouse than it is on the southside so thats what im sure will happen

eventually, these trays will have straw/manure in them nocced up with some mushroom mycelium for a small harvest this year and to pump more CO2 into the air in the greenhouse

most of the wheat has died for one reason or another, no matter though i didn't ever expect it to grow and i will be planting more on the hugelkultur beds and maybe near the cornfield

the rocks are there for the same reason as the rocks on the southside, collect heat for the night, keep things cooler for a little longer in the day...

Plant Updates:

i decided that though it is a nice medium, unless you pump liquid nutes into it, the coco doesn't grow anything very well, ive top dressed them all with compost and mulch but they still don't have anything growing that well in them, i have also occassionally pulled a lettuce leaf of any plant growing in the pot and added it to the mulch layer...

so far the north bed has only had carrots, lettuce and some wheat and weeds come up

i also scattered some wheat seed all over the greenhouse, 1 cup of wheat total as i had the wheat out for something special:)

you can tell that without spending extra money, the soil WAY outcompetes the coco coir because of how well the lettuce is growing, this had toms in it too but a freeze killed this one off

here is the southbed, a lot of the lettuce came back and everything else is doing pretty good, i think the pineapple will die eventually but its still got some green on it

here are some of the better plants, excludi9ng one tall one i forgot to snap a pic of

FUNGI UPDATE:

ok, the guy im gettin some spores from said he sent out the spores on saturday so they should get here fairly soon and soooo....

i prepared some jars for mushroom cultivation today
some notes: not nessacary to mark out the dowels, i missed the lines most of the time anyway, its more important to eyeball every half inch, i did dowels cus it saved a good 20 bux or more and resulted in more plugs in the end anyway

there is only 3 jars in the one pic cus i didn't have lids for the other three yet

i filled the jars with one cup of dry wheat kernels and then cut a full dowel into each jar, the last three i did got a bit more sawdust in em cus there was enough to collect by then
these jars arent yet done, since its wheat they have to be sterilized and then have the injection port and air exchange port punched in and filled with silicon and polystuffing for pillows and stuff

then when the spores get here, thye get nocced up and then placed in a dark closet until fully colonized....then the REAL fun begins

here is the next update: the mushroom spores have STARTED to germinate and colonize the jars so i am now updating the thread all about the fungi projects that are currently getting going

DESCRIPTIONS ARE NOW SEEN BY HOVERING THE MOUSE OVER THE PICTURE

here is the pressure cooker in action at 15PSI

i decided that 100% silicone is DEFINATELY MUCH BETTER to use for your innoculation ports, i used acrylic caulk on these ones and i had to put more polyfill over the hole that my needle left behind, i dont think this would happen in silicone

what i used for the sanatizing, and even better, THE START OF MY MUSHROOMS GERMINATION!!! yay:D

ok, now a quick FLORA update, nothing huge just yet, but we have first tom showing, and how the cuke is doing, plus the northbed polyculture which includes, lettuce, spinach, cilantro, wheat, dandelion, carrots, radishes, okra, and a few unidentified plants at the moment, and thats just what has come up so far
ive noticed that letting a few "weeds" grow right in along the other plants has even saved my lettuce from being munched on by critters, though there is still some lettuce that gets eaten occassionally, i have noticed pretty much NOTHING else get eaten
last year we had lettuce get muched down as well as a few carrots and we had some animals come in and dig up some of the soil when it was set up as a square foot garden, thus far this year, as a polyculture, not onlyhave less things been munched on but we havent had huge holes dug, just the occassional bird scratch earlier in the season, but it seems the more plants i get in there, the less issues im seeing

i left town for a week or so to visit family and took some pics when i got back, so heres the update

First and Foremost, the plant update:

3rd pic: i came back to a greenhouse with a CLOSED door in the middle of the hottest weather we've had in A LONG time, at least the vents didn't get closed, i am really disliking this greenhouse a little more every year, i think its possible to have a nice permaculture friendly greenhouse, but this is definately NOT the design for it

2nd pic: this is basically a mix of compost, straw/steer manure, and ashes from the fire pit that had some sort of yellow growth on them, i gathered it up in hopes that eventually ill see some sort of wild fungi appear, but if not, all these "weeds" popped up and they seemed to be unaffected by my absence...

1st pic:
close up of one of the wheat plants, as the ones in the greenhouse are starting to go to seed:D

here are some pics of the northbed that i took when i got back, the lettuce is a lot tougher now and some is looking like its beginning to bolt, as well as the single spinach plant that came up in the greenhouse, never really harvested from that but hopefully well get some from the strawberry bed
theres a couple "weeds" that got fairly large, but none that COMPETED against anything in the greenhouse

Next up... the Fungi update:

here is a couple pics of the mushroom jars and their progress, took these when i got home at 2 in the morning on the 29th of June-2012

the first shitake jar has some sort of contam from the looks of it, the black growth in the middle of all the white, this was an agar to wheat transfer so it makes since that hte shitake jar has more of a chance of contam, this was one of the first 2 jars that i put together so it was also the first agar to wheat i did and i dont think i sanatized as much as i should of beign that the lid was getting entirely opened and removed, exposing the jar to plenty of potential contams
it doesnt appear to be out-competing the shitake as of yet, though it has gotten bigger so im not even worried about it just yet, i may remove that part and put it in a pile of straw to fend for itself when i get to using this mycelium

pic 1: shitake jar contaminate 6-29-12 early morning

pic 2: the first and oldest blue oyster jar at 2am on 6-29-12

pic 3: the second blue oyster jar at 2am on 6-29-12

more pics of the mushroom jars, this is from the 29th late in the day, after i had slept a little and used up the rest of the day

pic 1: shitake jar 1

pic 2: blue Oyster jar 2

pic 3: Blue Oyster jar 1

here is the shitakes on the 29th, later in the day, ones a contam pic and the rest are just pics of the jars in general

sorry for the blur... cell phone pics