Denice Moffat

Well, we have lots of variety planted on our farm for our own harvest but we prefer to determine who we share with at this point. One thing we do every year now is to host a Community Bareroot Fruit Tree Order. We use our nursery license to purchase trees wholesale and then sell them at our cost (including tax, gas, hotel, tags, bags) and tack on an extra dollar to each tree. This allows us to get our trees paid for by just donating our time. It does take organization!

It's a great community project, empowers the locals to plant more stuff plus each time they come to the farm they get to see what we are doing and get more education that way. We now have a contact/mailing list and have started the 'insider's club' who will get post cards letting them know when the next trees are ready to be spoken for AND we can mail to those who are already interested in edible plants for our fall plant sale. Our goal is to only pre-sell plants and dig the orders up about a month in advance to get them into pots so they are really healthy and ready to be planted.

To date we've been responsible for providing to our area 1147 fruit trees. I think that goes pretty far towards our farm goal of creating food security in our local area!

Where do you get these lids?

I went to voterreords and another site, TruthFinder showed all my info. I was NOT able to opt out of either!

I've been experimenting with alternative building for 3 years now. I'm ready to start and earthbag foundation/wall for the next building. We are in the Panhandle of Idaho (about 23 inches of rain/year) and a different zone and precipitation than Arizona. I can see where cob would work well in Arizona but I don't think cob will work to cover my rammed earth tire wall or the earthbags. I'm cognizant that you don't want to mix/match too many mediums without a layer for condensation between them so there won't be a weak point, but what is the best thing to use in the plaster for 16 inches up from the ground for these kinds of structures? Earth mixed with cement? Proportion of clay? Papercrete? I'm needing a bit of forward movement on this. Can I use the same plaster for both projects?

Well I'm excited about this then. Two years ago I ordered seed from Burnt Ridge Nursery (they still have some--I just checked last week) and they are about 2 feet tall in pots in my hoop house right now and budding out. They will be going into the ground with their other nutty friends in a month or so. Burnt Ridge also carries English Walnut, Pecan, Hickory, Mixed Chestnut and Butternut seed. At one time they also had Hican. After purchasing bare root trees of them from various sources over the years and having them die off (they were kind of spendy) I decided to give it a go and bought a pound of each. Also bought a bag of almonds in the shell around Christmas, put them in the fridge to vernalize and planted them along with the other nuts (which were already vernalized) in April. I put each seed in a 4 inch pot. My deck was filled with trays. Each day I'd water them, pull the seeds forward that had sprouted and when they were up about 4 inches I potted them up into gallon pots. If they made it through that first season, I potted them up into 3-gallon pots. The Butternut is actually the second tallest plant -the almonds are extremely healthy--I planted about 20 of them last fall and they are about 3 feet tall now. But I didn't know that the heartnut would produce so early. Nice! Thanks for all of the input everyone. I also have Pistachio that I ordered from Sheffeld's. I'm not doing as well with them but I do have 7 seedlings so far. That one's a reach.

I purchased an ounce of seed from Sheffelds.com last year hoping to grow a few that survive my experimentation with Paw Paw. I'm hoping to graft onto them from some other varieties once I get them going. I have about 18 that have sprouted so far.

Re: What about road base gravel?  This packs down really flat and usually costs less than pea gravel.  It's pretty easy to level off and tamp down and, in theory, won't shift much with the weight of the water.  Well, that's the theory.

We put in two 2500 cement gallon water storage tanks last year. The manufacturer said to set them on pea gravel but that was not available. After asking several contractors (and the company doing the install of the electrical panel for the pump) we got the same answer. Use 3/4 inch minus rock. Level and tamp before setting the tank in. Fill in the sides that are underground with soil/rock not containing big sharp things that could push up to it and cause an air space or fill with water and freeze during the winter. But I think a little sand would be fine too. I know yours are plastic but that's what they all recommended for both cement and plastic.

I gave this DVD 8 out of 10 acorns:
The filming was way better than the first set of RMH dvd's but still needs work on the sound system. Yep, the Willie Smits identification marks were annoying and unnecessary. It was hard for me to watch the video and read the subtitles inserted just so you know. Very helpful of Erica to show us more of what kinds of substances make up cob--I think I'm starting to 'get it' after reading so many books on it but still lack the confidence to do a cob project--but I'm going to leap into it this year! I'll start small. Purchased the set of DVDs before I saw the option to Spread the Word. I would have donated a copy to our local library to get the ball moving in our town a bit faster. You all did a great job though! Excited to build one and yes, my husband bought me the book for Christmas because, "All you do is talk talk talk about these Rocket Mass Heater things" it was the only book I got for Christmas. Looking forward to reading it.