wayne boardman

I have some blueberries growing in a sunny location in southern Maine. I mulch them with wood chips or pine needles whenever I can find some. Here are a few plants that have self-seeded in the mulch under the berry plants, which means they obviously don't mind the soil PH:

- Sheep sorrel. It's a weed, but an edible one, and the chickens love a handful tossed into their pen. Its shallow roots probably compete a bit with the blueberries, so I wouldn't want to let it take over.
- Dill. It pops up here and there and seems happy. It has never grown dense enough to compete.
- Asparagus. Believe it or not, a volunteer patch emerged under one of the the berry plants, and I've let it grow there. My main asparagus bed is twenty feet away, so I assume a bird deposited some asparagus seeds there.

I used the plans from Phil Chandler's Biobees.com: http://www.biobees.com/build-a-beehive-free-plans.php

And Dave Wright has a series of videos showing construction details. Very well done. See https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE33573FD07D3D9D5

Wow. Talk about fine German engineering.

Thanks for the response. So does that mean you set up a series of paddocks with permanent fencing and then have gates automatically open and close to allow the animals to move to the next paddock? I didn't see any description on your website.

Grant, can you explain what you mean by "automated grazing management"? How is that different from the Salatin/Savory models, if at all?

What about soaking/fermenting the seeds?

Marc Troyka wrote:
Anyway, lab studies aren't relevant since comfrey has been shown to cause liver damage and has killed at least one person.
study

A quick scan of this document leads me to believe that the suspected toxic effects were found in lab rats and a few people who were consuming daily supplements of concentrated comfrey compounds. It's a big leap from that to banning comfrey plants from your permaculture plot.

Lots of beneficial plants could be toxic in high enough doses. And Paul has mentioned more than once that animals "know" when they need to consume low-toxicity plants to deal with parasites or other digestive issues. My chickens seem to like it, even more than rhubarb leaves (also supposed to be toxic), and they seem none the worse for it.

Personally, I see no need to ingest comfrey tea, but I wouldn't hesitate to put it on my plants or, better yet, use it as a chop & drop dynamic accumulator. Oh, and the pollinators love it,

It might be wise to also consider of some of the downsides of living in a place with so-called lax housing codes.

1. If it's extremely rural, you are going to have to do a lot of driving if you should need any of the comforts of modern society--like coffee, toilet paper, building supplies, fuel, vehicle maintenance, health care, veterinarian services, etc. To say nothing of a paying job and human companionship. If (when) the price of gas goes through the roof, you may be more vulnerable than someone closer to town. But if course, that's all just fine for some people.

2. If you do have somewhat closer neighbors along with lax housing codes, your neighbor might be "free" to knowingly or unknowingly pollute your groundwater and/or air, whether you like it or not. Or burn down his and your woods because of an unsafe wood stove. In that case, you could just move again, but don't expect to sell your property for what it's worth if your neighbor(s) has degraded the whole area.

As oppressive and inflexible as some building codes are, most every part of them were put in for a good reason, generally involving safety or health. HOAs are another matter--there's no reason to tie your fortunes to the whims of some idiot neighbors.

If I had it to do it all over again, I'd probably look for a medium- to small-sized progressive community with building inspectors who have a reputation for open-mindedness. If I had enough land to grow my own food and it was a reasonably walkable/bikeable community, I could put up with some building codes. But that's just me. YMMV.

With the coming climate change, Maine could be very well positioned, at least relatively speaking. The summers will get hotter, but we may not have the extremes of heat waves, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, etc. that much of the country is experiencing and will experience. So far, rainfall and snowfall have been fairly reliable, but permaculture practices will help no matter what happens.

Actually, the link I posted above was to a different podcast than the one I listened to. I meant to point to this one: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/ockhamsrazor/what27s-your-beef3f/4165970, which includes a link to the transcript.

When Mark Whittaker, a cow farmer and journalist, moved to the country for a simpler life, he did not expect to discover that his cows would be blamed for their contribution to the greenhouse effect.

Some good quotes:

There have always been large numbers of ruminants on the planet with herds of millions of bison and wildebeest wandering majestically across the plains of America and Africa. Suddenly, after two centuries of industrialisation we’re trying to dump all this heat at their hooves.

A study by the US Department of Agriculture’s National Resources Conservation Service found grass fed-beef requires just half a calorie of fossil fuel to create one calorie of food, whereas a 2002 study by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that it took a whopping 35 calories of fossil fuels to create just one calorie of grain fed beef - 70 times more.

and

There are those like Dr Rita Schenck in the US who specialises in life cycle assessment who says that growing grains takes carbon out of the soil, while well-grazed cattle put it back in. She’s studied a farm in Nebraska which had corn fields, planted pasture and native pasture. There was twice as much carbon in the pasture soil as the corn field soil. And she concluded that grass-fed beef was actually carbon positive.

He also presents a good take-down of schemes that hype reduced dietary cholesterol.

Joel Salatin has made most of the same points, but it's good to hear it from the other end of the world.