Jay Angler

Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.

From Small Gods

My region has had a tendency to extremes since we've lived here for 30 years, but I'm finding the extremes more extreme recently, so the information, like our local Climate Normals published by the Canadian Gov't, are an average of those extremes.

I had read that this is a weather trend far beyond my little corner of the planet - droughts deeper and longer and storms larger when it finally rains.

So I not only would want to have more water sources/storage mechanisms, than more land, but I would avoid land that doesn't permit that.

As John C suggests, a really big water tank is a good option to invest in, however, it may not help if you get hit by a multi-year drought. So you need other options as well, even if they only give the minimum water needed. People die much faster from lack of water, than lack of food.

Yes, if you're surrounded by more land that you exclusively control, that may help, but having friendly, helpful neighbors is a bigger help than many people recognize. The Lone Ranger is a symbol, but I'm more of the "it takes a village to raise a child" persuasion. If you're not the one producing that child, you may be the one helping to raise them, and they may be the one helping you when you know longer can do the heavy things your land requires. Plan for the long term!

Burra Maluca wrote: Who would ever have thunk that I'd fall so in love with an old bostik bucket...

I would suggest you aren't the first person who fell in love with it. If it wasn't loved, it wouldn't have been given such care. I suggest you ask your dragons which of them are also in love with it! (Actually, that could be dangerous, as they might claim it for their personal use!)

Jen Fulkerson wrote: ... So far I like the terracotta pots. They charge color when they dry, so it's quite easy to know when to water. I may change my mind about them when it's time to pot up. I hope if I wait until it's a bit dry, and maybe it will pop out ok, fingers crossed, all goes well...

If it was me, I'd start looking now for a thin, slightly flexible tool that you could use around the edge of the pot - think of how you loosen a muffin from a muffin cup after baking. If you don't find something better, a cutlery knife might do the job.

Why does a brown cow give white milk when it only eats green grass?

What happens to grapes when you step on them?  

They wine!

One year I had to go and help my sisters in the summer. The guys didn't eat a single potato while I was away, so I came back to bag of tangled, sprouted, inedible spuds.

I had a raised windrow of old tree chips that was very slowly decomposing. It was high enough to keep the spuds above our winter wet, so I planted the potatoes late August, and as the weather turned cooler, I put up some hoops and covered it with a white tarp. In February, I was harvesting potatoes.

I had read that some people planted a spud in a bucket and had fresh potatoes for Christmas, but I think that would take a greenhouse if a really bright spot, as clouds block a lot of sun in our winters.

Knowing whether you spuds are determinate or indeterminate I think makes a big difference. I have tried potato towers in several different ways and had poor results. In my climate and situation, keeping a tower at the right moisture level may have been part of the problem, but I suspect, the type of potato may have been a significant issue also.

Eino Kenttä wrote:  

it's close to the sea, meaning that we can get free seaweed for fertilizer. ...In order to garden on the parts of the land that have soil, we'd have to clearcut quite a lot of forest, and probably drain the land. We've instead opted for digging ponds in the wet places, and bringing the soil dug out of them to the sunny places.

I read years ago of a couple on a forested island in my region. Those were the days when bales of newspapers were easy to get for virtually free. They used the bales as building blocks to edge a sunny garden on solid rock, then filled the whole space inside with seaweed. It grew veggies for them. I can't remember what they grew, and I'm sure they had to refill the area for many years, but they at least had some fresh veg they didn't have to travel to get.

Nowadays, I'd suggest they look for some punky deciduous wood in their forest and layer that in also!

Big point is that as much as it is work, we can build soil from much of what is around us if we think of what resources can be had cheaply and nearby. Yes, there's risk from some of the chemicals in the newspaper - but there's risk of chemicals in much of the food we buy at stores! So if we engage our microbe and fungi friends and don't use anything really high risk, there's a lot we can do to improve soil in improbable spots.

I'd like to do a little reality checking here.

1. Both these designs are in danger of being wind tunnels. The both show the "tunnel", but in many ways that's the easy part to build. The amount of material, and the challenge of filling in the open ends of the tunnel, to actually create a warm, dry place to sleep, I suspect will be much harder than the roof, which as Nancy points out, simply needs a tarp to make it waterproof.

2. The Refugee tube is only made of two widths of pallets. To do so, took 12 identical pallets. Every extra layer - which would make the inside safer from driving rain, or make the effort of enclosing the ends more worthwhile - will take another 6 identical skids. In my neck of the woods, most of the "free pallets" are all slightly different sizes and designs.

Personally, the octagonal pallet shed that Nancy built and used flexible branches to form a domed roof would be more practical.  

Walter Byrd wrote: BTW: the term "invasive species" is not really fair. The species did not invade, humans brought them over.

Yes, sloppy word usage on my part - the Mountain Pine Beetle is a native of Canada. We provided it with a buffet, and it took advantage of that fact.

Most species which move to an area with or without human help, take advantage of whatever buffet humans have arranged. The Zebra Muscle took advantage of the polluted Great Lakes which had most of their top predator fish reduced or eliminated. The eco-systems are re-balancing, but it's taken 50 years or so?

There are several predators that have learned how to safely eat Boa Constrictors in Florida (or at least their eggs, which also helps reduce the problem.)

Humans tend to only identify something as "invasive" if they can't capitalize and make money off it. Which is raised up-thread as one part of identifying whether a piece of land is "marginal" or not. At some point, I hope that humans will choose something other than getting a lot of money, as their yardstick for the value of something.

The Orange trees were brought to Florida by humans and even though they've wrecked ecosystems, and have taken over huge tracts of land, we don't accuse them of being invasive! But we call the insect that spreads the bacteria, "invasive".