Josiah Garber

I am in Zone 6b Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Currently corn stubble in field, history of field is corn and beans. 10% Grade North Facing. I'm looking for a low maintenance cover crop something to act as a placeholder until I can get cattle on the land. I am thinking Sainfoin, Yellow Sweet Clover, White Clover, Alsike Clover, Cornflower and Sweet Alyssum since I have bees.

I recently purchased a 21 acre farm. I was looking for 3-5 acres, but the price was right. What are some good ideas for what to plant this spring on the 15 acres of north facing land?? I am not wild about using roundup and planting corn or soybeans which seems to be the favorite answer of farmers around this area.

Would love to hear suggestions. I am hoping to get cattle in about 2 years.

I got a soil report and I'm not sure where to go from here. I understand the ph is too high, any recommendations on what I should do? It is about a 1/4 acre plot.

The high ph explains why kale is one of the only things that did well.

See attached Soil Report.

Thanks for your help everyone.

Clifford Reinke wrote:

Josiah Garber wrote:I just developed a Garden Planting Calculator App for Android and would love to have suggestions for plants to add to it. This app tells you the best time to plant different things in your garden. I have a lot of the major garden vegetables, but would love more suggestions to make the app better.

Thanks!

Well, I can not tell what plants you already have from your link. I'll assume you have all the regular vegi's. Here are some not so standard plants you could include:

1. Lupine
2. Lavender
3. Artichoke
4. Different grains
5. Borage
6. Comefry
7. Valerian
8. Sunchokes

Your app looks intriguing, does it give other info on the plants besides just planting dates? Good luck!

It only shows you what you can plant. Most seed packets have the planting information on them. I may try to improve it to give more information about each plant.

Thanks for your suggestions, very helpful.

I just developed a Garden Planting Calculator App for Android and would love to have suggestions for plants to add to it. This app tells you the best time to plant different things in your garden. I have a lot of the major garden vegetables, but would love more suggestions to make the app better.

Thanks!

I finally got my Soil Builder / Production Seed Mixture together. Let me know what you think of it.

http://www.thefarmingpodcast.com/store/permaculture-seed-mix-0.9

I tested something similar with less soil builders last year on rather poor soil and got surprisingly good production from it. I'm hoping to do some more land like this spring as well.

paul wheaton wrote:Breaking this up a little ....

issue 357: powerpress is a wordpress plugin that I could plug in to richsoil.com/permaculture, but I cannot plug in to paulwheaton12.wordpress.com - yes?

issue 358: powerpress has the ability to take 10,000 wordpress pages and make it so 10,000 podcasts appear on itunes, thus fixing our current problem - yes?

issue 359: some people like to get stuff from the raw rss on wordpress and some like to get it from feedburner. In either case, they probably like "the latest 5 things" instead of the current "lastest 160 things" - yes?

issue 360: i could set up paulwheaton12.wordpress.com to do the podcast thing much like I am doing it now and I will, once again, have a limit of about 100 podcasts before I will have to move on - yes?

issue 361: any ideas on the SEO issue?

issue 362: There are two things that I like about paulwheaton12.wordpress.com: they update all the time, so there is good security and new toys automagically show up; there seems to be some sort of subscription thing that can happen there that I don't see happening on richsoil.com/permaculture. So I wonder if I post lots out there if I might develop a new audience, much like I have a huge youtube audience (that I never would have gotten if I hosted my own videos).

issue 360: I would recommend hosting a wordpress installation on a server instead of on wordpress.com. I believe that your wordpress.com installation is limiting your feed length to save themselves bandwidth. If you set it up on a server you can control everything and have an (almost) unlimited feed length with powerpress. Use your wordpress feed in feedburner and then pass the feedburner feed to your podcast directories and your subscribers. This is important because as your podcast gets more and more popular (and I am almost certain it will) you will need to upgrade to more powerful hosting to deal with the bandwidth issues.

issue 362: maybe you should setup wordpress on the same server that hosts richsoil.com or permies.com. you could put it in a subdirectory called permies.com/blog I do not think you will get a larger audience by hosting at paulwheaton.wordpress.com and if you do you will run into limitations with their free service. I agree that you should not host your own videos, but for your podcasts and blog you should host your own wordpress installation.

I think you should use the feedburner feed. Just tell it what feed to pull from, this way when you move to a different host for your podcast files you can change the feed in your feedburner feed options so that you don't lose all your subscribers.

Here's some videos that would be very helpful. http://podcastanswerman.com/learn-how-to-podcast/

I believe part 5 in particular would be helpful.

Welcome Toby! Looking forward to reading your book!