Chance Lunceford

Huzzah! Tacos are a staple food.

Turn it into char.

Humanure char is a high-ash, high pH, product that contains lots of mineral content.

You can even begin the gasification with wet poop, but you'll get better efficiency and ease if you mix it with a dry carbonaceous media like wood dust to cut down on moisture.

The data indicates that poop+wood creates better char for soil than poop or wood alone because the wood improves the structure of the char for soil improvement and absorbs the nitrogen and phosphorous(amongst other things) that the poop provides and locks it into it's carbon skeleton to slowly release into the soil. Wood chips are better than wood dust for structure, so a blend to control moisture and add structure would, maybe, be ideal.

A few pretties from a recent walk.

Harvested some seed from 6 asteracea species in Park City today, while I was there for some work stuff.

Also saw 6' tall rocky mountain bee plant, but it wasn't ready to harvest seed from.

Harvested some wild wheat, too, even though I'm allergic to wheat, it's still cool to find healthy wild wheat growing.

Quick snapshot of me in the yarden this evening.

Despite record-breaking heat, my system has catapulted into a higher level of happy.

This is the first year the summer hasn't put everything on a lifeline. Things have been developing each year, but to increase velocity in 108°F July is a new milestone for the system.

Say, I was thinking about your post for awhile yesterday and today.

I would suggest you begin to learn plant propagation through grafting, rooting cuttings, and popping seeds.

It can seem a daunting task, but it's super easy, actually, and a very forgiving process if you'll allow yourself that room to fail and experiment.

Here are a couple of books I would recommend, because they're digestible and practical:

Free Plants For Everyone: https://a.co/d/0fSyHmeS

The author, Dave The Good, is a member of this forum, FYI.

Grow A Little Fruit Tree: https://a.co/d/00Hve8l2

This will help you establish some trees that won't require you to have a lot of equipment to prune, nor the need of a ladder, and you'll be able to grow more trees with more variety this way, and you can use your pruning material as the stock for your propagation efforts.

This fits nicely with your slow, patient, peaceful roadmap and, when you've gotten a couple years experience under your belt, you can cheaply and easily get a nursery license and start selling plants.

In the meantime, you can show some good faith to your neighbors by gifting them some fruit trees and berry bushes that you've propagated in your first or second year as a way to break the ice and extend warmth.

You may not want to be friends with your neighbors, they may not want to be friends with you (or maybe both of you will), but a small gift usually at least earns you an, "yeah, she's alright. She even brought me this blueberry bush," and you might find you have a better regard for those you serve as well.

Anyway, that's what I came here to offer. Good luck. You've got this.

Nancy Reading wrote:

Chance Lunceford wrote:These two photos (they're in the previous two posts too) were taken approximately 5 years apart in almost the same spot.

I love to see before and after photos! Please tell us about the stones? Are they ones you dig up? What benefit do they give you - apart from looking pretty; I've always loved pebbles!

Sure, Nancy, let's explore my stones...um... let's talk about my landscape rocks.

So, my yarden started as sand poured on top of a calcereous and extremely rocky wave-winnowed Lake Bonneville lag deposit which had been neglected for years by the previous owners and was a mess of goat heads and other spiky pioneers, and was almost inert.

So, I had to give the land some shape to catch water and hold composting mulch. When I dug, I found boulder after boulder. So, I used 'em to help keep the land in shape and to help with moisture retention, and because I like the look of stone.

I've used them to create borders, paths, retaining walls, feature walls, mulch around the base of trees, and anything else you might use a ton of rocks and cobbles and boulders for.

On that same walk, I took some pictures of a peach tree I'm calling the Slaughterhouse Peach (because it's growing on the hillside beneath a slaughterhouse) which I discovered yesterday.

I'm going to harvest the fruit when it's ripe. WHAT? THE FRUIT?! Yes, the only stonefruit I've seen on any tree this year, wild or domestic, on a volunteer peach.

It's growing on the bank of the Strawberry Highline Canal, which I've mentioned multiple times before (and I'll teach you about the canal project and what a miracle it was for the region in a future post), in a damned harsh environment but likely with a root or two tapping into a crack in the canal's concrete so water isn't an issue for the Slaughterhouse Peach.

Two fruit are getting ripe, and then there are a few more lower down that are not significantly further back in the ripening process. Hopefully I'll be able to harvest all of them for propagation, because it's disease free and must be late-flowering (of great use here normally, because we have late frosts in general), and is clearly well adapted to the local soil, so (if it is delicious) would make incredible starting stock for my project area and my yarden alike.

Here's a few pictures:

Okay, so, just took a walk with two of my daughters through the area I'm building my guerilla food forest project within.

I took some pictures of a couple things today, but here's the thing:

There's no fruit in Utah this year. It's been declared a state of emergency, even. We had the latest frost/snow I've seen in my lifetime, and it killed almost every blossom on almost every kind of fruiting tree or shrub across almost the whole northern 2/3 of the state. Brutal, man. The silver lining is, assuming we don't have another freaky frost, we're going to have a bumper crop next year.

However, one of the wild apple trees has about ten fruits.

I'll post a couple pictures of some stuff now, but I'm also going to list the different fruit/but trees and bushes I've found in the area (I'll post pictures of all of them later, after I go take photos of them all), which are as follows:

- Amber Fruited Golden Currant (I've only found one patch of these, and they're SPECIAL, because they taste like spiced apples)
- Black Fruited Golden Currant
- Crabapple
- Apple
- Cherries (Old pioneer timber cherries, one that is clearly a ranier offspring, one that is the offspring of that ranier and some other cherry growing beneath the ranier offspring, an unknown fullsize cherry with burgundy cherries, a bunch of wildling cherries that are descendants, probably, of the pioneer cherries, and maybe another half dozen distinct varieties)
- Plums (here's the real treasure, because there are at least 4 species of plums including American, Chickasaw, European, and Japanese, but there are hybrids and maybe some other species but it's hard to tell, resulting in some really unique specimens, ranging from grape to just over golfball sized fruits in every color that plums come in except for green)
- Fragrant Sumac (not that edible, but the berries make a tasty drink or tart cooking spice)
- At least 2 white oak species producing acorns
- I feel like I'm missing some stuff, but whattayagonnado?

Nancy Reading wrote:

I want assess how acidic the soil is, as I feel that could be probably a significant part of the soil problem; more acid soils 'lock up' the nutrients and make them less accessable to the plants. Then I need to come up with a plan of remediation. I feel it will involve boichar, seaweed and bracken in fairly large amounts. I'm reluctant to buy in lime, my soil down the hill has improved drastically without it, but I may try some crushed cooked bones as well. One thing I have noticed in my polytunnel (just next to this area) as well as in parts of this garden are little flakes of rust, like an archaeological find rusted away (I'll see if I can take a photo). I've worked out that they must be a soil horizon of some kind due to the constant inundations and rather suggest a lack of drainage. As it has been broken up and mixed in as a result of the earthworks for the tunnel, I'm assuming that this will not still occur. We've not had a super dry summer, but not as wet as it can get, and I haven't noticed standing water as yet. I'll keep an eye on it over the winter and see if I think additional drainage will help. Increasing the heights of the beds is a simple option, as they are just a little higher than the paths at the moment.

Wood ash helps manage acidity. Bone char would help too, and provide a nice phosphorous drip.