Delia Reed

William James wrote:The area is 400 square meters roughly. Planning on finding a source of finished compost nearby. We have access to rotted manure. I was planning to fork in 2 inches of compost and then mulch with 2 inches more every time I weeded this year, which is about every week or two. The soil just eats up everything I throw into it. We have small wood chips and straw, will probably add some of those on top.

I see P/K, but I don't see N in the soil test, maybe I'm missing something. I read that N isn't an important testing parameter, unless it's right before you sow.

Perhaps because this test was taken right after the summer growing season when everything was pumped out. Or I took bad samples, which is possible.

The garden was surprisingly full for such a bad test. Lots of heavy feeders (tomatoes, celery, peppers, etc). They seemed healthy but slow, but I attributed that more to a lack of water and not nutrients. It was a 4 month drought and I have water supply issues.

William

I have noticed this too, my soil test labs ignore the N, but I can get that test at any garden center for cheap. I think the lab assumes we already have too much NPK, because perhaps they assume we have been applying the fake fertilizers for years already. Not so in MY sand. Have you looked at www.soilminerals.com? and any William Albrecht, or Neil Kinsey work already? Another additional great I would recommend would be Alan Savory's article 40,000 elephants; http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/03/30/grazing-livestock.aspx
He came from the generation of wildland management that told us all grazing animals increased the desertification of the lands, and he personally took part in killing 40,000 elephants from Africa, only to discover desertification worsened. He has converted from that experience to real science and is now an advocate for grazing animals improving the soils. Thier fertilizer pellets help spread organic matter and any minerals they may have eaten- add this to Pat Coleby's natural livestock books, and in a desolate sandy land where minerals are all deficient, she deliberately allows free choice mineral selection for her cattle, horses, sheep and goats, and they Assist in the mineral dispersal. my system is incorporating these methods. I too have a sandy infertile base.

paul wheaton wrote:A few years ago I went to Ernie and Erica with the idea of a shippable core. Ernie told me that the idea was not new. However, the one thing I pressed for did sound new: that the core would be casted and would include a manifold.

Many conversations and a lot of work from a lot of people and PRESTO! We are having a workshop in October of 2012 complete with Ernie's shippable core. It was more "sculpted" than "cast", but, hey, it was a prototype. We thought we could get the materials for under $100. Then came the shocker: more like $500. Urk! Work, work, work .... lots of other people involved .... work, work, work ....

I came up with a simple idea of the wood box style shippable core shortly before the October 2013 workshop and offered "build your own" at the event. In the five days before the event, a LOT of innovation happened and three different shippable cores were created. When people arrived, we showed what we had come up with and people were asked which they wanted to build and take home. Nobody wanted mine (wood box style) nor ernies (an improved version of the 2012 stuff - still very expensive). The big winner was Erica's cast core with a manifold:



In second place was Erica's cast core that did not include a manifold. Erica is clearly the big winner.

Unfortunately, that core went to the tipi outside and was subjected to freezing and thawing before it could be fully heated properly. So it developed cracks. But Erica's work led to lots of inspiration and then perspiration. Erica came back and worked with my brother Tim to come up with better molds, better mixes of castable stuff and something like a poor man's kiln to properly cook the core.





We have one core here now that has been fired about 40 times and seems to be holding up. Costs have been gut wrenchingly high ...

(I would like to take this moment to thank the people that have supported my kickstarters)

.... but we are working hard on being able to get a design completed that will be able to shipped to somebody's door (in the US) for a total of $500 or less.

Plus, several people who attended the workshops went home empty handed. Those people will get the prototypes that seem to keep working.

....

I want this thread to be the central place for all things involving a shippable core.

For all of the information being developed here, I plan on sharing it. We (me, Ernie and Erica) are still open to the idea of supporting somebody who takes these designs into production for a business. Ernie and Erica are powerfully focused on R&D and I have a powerful need to see this product exist (and no interest in being in this particular business).

I do know of one guy that I have spent a few hours on the phone with .... and he has been here .... and he has some amazing ideas in shippable cores - but I am sworn to secrecy. I really hope to someday see his product.

I think there is a lot to be said for this design, once it gets some manifold stuff added to it:



Matt Walker has created something that might have beaten us all to the punch:

I wonder how much it costs. How big it is. How do you connect it to the mass? It certainly has a wood feed, riser and manifold.

Dragon heaters has had something out for a while now, but every time I look it seems to have two or three things that fall short of what I am looking for. I have great hopes that their products will evolve into something that I wish to support.

I was unsure how to build the heat riser and then looked up Cement tubes, and found that basalite has a lovely 8" diam X 12 " flue liner made of clay. I bought that for $17.

Also understand this, having had raw cow milk and raw goat milk and raw sheep milk, cow milk is different from the others in that it naturally separates. It isn't fun to drink because it won't stay homogenized. It is really better for making butter. Most people have concern over taste. OK, know this, if you are using the Meyenburg store milk as an example of the terrible taste of goat milk, there are some factors that contribute to that awfulness-

1. the caprylic acid and perhaps other factors in their milk is very sensitive to pasturizaton and makes it bitter. Commercial goat butter is bitter and awful. it is ruined. If it sits too long, I can also get this flavor. But like the high brix produce, when the goats and sheep are fed high dense nutrients the milk shold be sweet and stay sweet for about 2 weeks.

2. wash your hands, wash your equipment, get stainless steel equipment without edges to hide bacteria, and don't get your fingers in the milk, don't touch the edge of the bucket that you pour from, the trick is cleanliness. There used to be a picture on the meyenburg website of a vat of milk and a staff member had her hand in it. Very, very bad.

3. Watch the dust. I keep a paper towel soaked in H2O2 over the bucket edge (it has a half moon lid) between squeezing and pouring, as dust is our worst enemy- i need to redesign my milk room to keep it out.


And watch the goat nutrition- we fed kelp free choice and were feeding rice bran until they found it was contaminated (yes human rice too, organic too) with arsenic. And we haven't yet found a comparable replacement, until we can get the pasture in shape.

If you look at the edge of the Meyenburb carton, it says "shake well" why does it say that? Hmmm? if you don't shake well, and pour it off carefully, there is a 1/4 inch layer of darker scum in the bottom. Cream rises and it is white. When i read the Milk Book by William Douglass MD, he mentioned pus in pasteurized dairy cow's milk. Perhaps, the cow milk people are better at pouring so their pus stays in the tank and not going into the cartons. If your animal is making a thin layer of pus in the bottom of the jar after it sits for a bit, I recommend a product from franklampley.com, called Vitamix. If you fed them this by the teaspoon (some will demand more- I let them have it- they seem to know best what they need). They vitamins in there lack D and E so know that, but it has very absorbable minerals that are aminoacid chelated, which is more concentrated than any human vitamin i have seen- Human vitamins are cut with fillers. And their magnesium is often an oxide, even one of my favorite green ones.

I have found bulk vitamin powdrs to add D and E online, there are a few companies that sell thes for very reasonable. In the winter and kidding time, these are pretty important. e is a lifesaver and makes the difference between a weak, floppy non nursing kid or lamb and a smart jumping around kid or lamb that found the teat on his own and will be completely taken care of by his own mama. There is also selenium in the trace mineral block as well as copper, and the kelp, we use both, we are deficient in everything here, even the sheep need copper.

I love the Weston Price Foundation and the Price-Pottenger foundation. There is one thing Paul talked about that Sally really didn't go into. Let me elaborate here.

I learned in the www.soilminerals.com and then in the Neil Kinsey book Agronomy and the William Albrecht books on soil minerals and animal health, that increasing the proper balance of the soil minerals (in a nutshell- Calcium 68% to magnesium 12-20%- those are your big ones- all the others - the micros all should be there and the overemphasis on NPK causes problems all by themselves, for example- "grass tetany" meaning high nitrate grass killing your animals- vs real amino acid balanced grass which will tend to have enough Ca and Mg to keep the animals healthy.

Balancing the minerals combined with composting will make your plants virtually immune to insects, make them more tolerant of frost and heat and the subject addressed by Paul, he said real food rots and the fungus like it. But in reality, when the soil minerals are available, and the plants get their nutrition, they not only are ABLE to make vitamins for us, and our animals, but they increase the refraction (called BRIX testing) meaning there is an increase of the nutrient density, and these types of produce don't rot so quickly, rather they dry out. And more immediately, they handl the strss of being pulled from the plant or the ground for a longer period and stay fresher longer. We had a home grown purple cabbage that was used in small amounts, and stayed in the fridge for over a year and when I was ready to throw it out, (feed it to the rabbits) it just had dried leaves on the outside and on the inside had began to devlop new shoots of sorts on the stem that had been cut. Now my soil mineral balacing plan has just begun last year, so I am still working on it, but in our compost boxes, we were only low on ca and sulfur- so I added gypsum to my boxes, several times to the potatoes as they need more calcium, and root vegetables need more calcium. The potatoes were more hardy to cold, and they never got their usual hornworms and we saw a few "true" bugs on the leaves, but there was no damage- no holes. I have had virtually no insect damage to my lettuce, peas, strawberries, carrots, turnips, radishes. The corn had some aphids at first, but there were some predatory tiny flies that were on those quickly, that I may have attracted with marigolds, and caledula and allyssum. And here's the interesting part- I got 4-5 ears on most of the stalks, plus producing suckers, 2-3 per stalk. And the corn was sweet. All heritage organic do i need to add?

So we must extend this to the raw milk argument. Weston Price did a study of the soil minerals all over the US, and his map was very similar to the William Albrecht maps. When Dr. Price cam back to the states, he found the most mineral dense soils and went to dairies on these soils and had them make him a special butter for his patients. And this butter was glowingly orange, and it made his young developing patients physically change. He even worked with a Down's child and made changes to his teeth and fed him his special raw butter, and the young man was still developing and he normalized to a point, which tells us our suspicions, of Down's being what Price called a "Maternal exhaustion" symptom. Meaning the mother was nutrient deficient.

So I think this says loads about Weston Price's view on soil minerals. Albrecht found arly in his carreer that Mg deficint soils caused high calf mortality and high pig and chicken mortality, mastitis, tumors, and a number of malfunctions in the animals. When the minerals were corrected, the animals thrived. So know the pasture based method MUST include soil mineral balancing. The test i got from logan labs was $20 so that's not bad. you caN'T THROW YOUR ANIMALS ON SAGEBRUSH AND EXPECT THEM TO MAKE MILK ON IT. SAGEBRUSH BY THE FACT OF IT BEING THERE IS A SIGN OF DEFICIENT SOILS. We have sagebrush, the goats are clearing it and our plan is to use their manuring and we have to import some more minerals- we feed kelp so that helps the soil (it appears they hold onto their calcium and we must correct for that and sulfur). and we have been researching high elevation especially Peruvian plants for our short season, and cold, and desert dryness, and are looking at what to best grow for our animals. And ourselves.