Mick Fisch

Tacosand enchiladas.  I know that is a mexican dish, but in the southwest it has been completely adopted.  

Biscuits and sausage gravy.  Navajo tacos.  Fry bread.  Good smoked bacon.  

My wife has started cooking our beans in a pressure cooler this year and we've noticed this cut the gas significantly.

Also, we've had a few times where we ended up soaking the beans up to three days (changing water daily and putting them in the fridge after the first day).  We did this due to unforseen schedule/menu changes.  The results were much better beans with no gas.  If you live in an area where the temperature is in the 30s, it might be an easy thing to put them in an unheated space.  (Our fridge is usually too full to accommodate a big pot of beans.)

If you want swales and don't have much money i would suggest you borrow/buy a rototiller and rototill the swale line..
Then use a hoe or dirt rake to pull the rototilled dirt to the down slope side to make the swale.  For a deeper/wider swale,  rototill a second time after you have moved the dirt from the first pass.

The steeper the slope the harder to keep on the swale line, but it beats the hell out of shovel and pick work.  (You will still be stiff and ready for a hot soak by the end of the day).

We had khaki campbells for several years, free range during the day and locked up at night.  I was loosing ducks to predators until someone gave me a Rouen drake.  He immediately took charge.  It seemed to me that the ducks were happier overall with a male in charge, but more important, we quit loosing ducks to predators.  The drake was always watching while the others were eating.  I often saw him looking into the woods and then herd the rest into the duck house.  After a little while he'ld come out and check things out and he'd lead them back down to the water.  I watched him one time when a big hawk was around.  He herded the rest into a bit of water in the yard and then got between them and the hawk, spreading his wings and trying to look big and scary.  Eventually the hawk left.  

It seemed to me that when we had only females my golden comet hens seemed to lord it over the ducks in the shared birdhouse(I think chickens can peck harder than ducks).

The khaki campbells laid big, light brown eggs just about every day.  They were really good at finding their own food.  My wife's only complaint was that, since we feed them in the evening, they associated us with food (people = good) and tended to hang out near our back door, which led to a really shitty porch.

I would have one or two go broody on occasion, but they didn't seem like they were very good mothers.  Only a couple of ducklings hatched out and none survived (possibly because the grass was too tall near the duck house and mom didn't wait up for them enough).

A couple of gallons of water in a big dish pan morning and evening were plenty for them to 'bathe' in during the winter or when the 'pond' dried up.

We've moved, and I'll be getting more either this spring or next spring.  (Getting 3 acres into permaculture food forest and mixed perennial and annual garden, so it's a question of what can I get done this year and what has to wait until next year.  Trees and bushes come first).

I think we need to up the goal a little.

A quick google search showed potatoes have a 347 calories/ pound and yields for commercial farms in the US run between 24,500 and 61,000 pounds of potatoes per acre (http://kenoshapotato.com).  Using the bottom yield (24,500 lbs/acre) that would give us a bit over 8.5 million calories/per acre.  

shelled corn yields around 15 million calories/ acre  (average yield in the us is about 170 bushels/ acre, 56 lb/bushel, a bit over 1600 calories/ lb)   170 x56X1600 = 15,232,00 calories/ acre.  (note, when looking up calories for corn, look up dried corn or corn meal.   Sweet corn (not dried) has a much lower calorie/ lb due to the water.  I used calorie data from https://www.nutritionix.com/food/cornmeal/lb).

So, I'm guessing if you planted 1/8 acre of potatoes, 1/8 acre for corn, and 3/4 of an acre for all the cool stuff you want to eat (melon, squash, beans, peas, berries, etc.) you should make a million calories/ acre pretty easy.  (Armchair farming is amazingly easy, no aching back, no bugs).  

pinto beans can make better than 2 million calories/ acre.  (average yield in Idaho is 1500 - 2000 lbs/acre (https://ipmdata.ipmcenters.org/documents/cropprofiles/IDdrybeans.pdf) with about 1570 calories per dry pound).  1500 *1570 = 2.361.969 calories/ acre

Even lettuce can make more than a million calories/ acre (63 calories/ lb, 36,000 lbs/ acre (https://nevegetable.org/cultural-practices/table-15-approximate-yields) for over 2 million calories/ acre.

I'm wanting to try this on my own property (Cache Valley, Idaho) next summer.  I arrived in my new (hopefully final) home last August and am looking forward to planting a HUUUUGE garden.  I'm in the process of buying the two acres of pasture behind me to add to the acre my house is on, over half of which has been goat pasture for many years.  I've ordered 30 red maples (partly just for the color), 30 saw toothed oak and 30 mulberry trees for the coppicing or pollarding on part of the back lot.  Also in the plan are lots of peach, plum, apple, pear and apricot trees as well as just about any kind of berries this area will allow.  I'm hoping to do lots of rootstock with grafting for the fruit trees.

In addition to calories, I would be interested in the variety and quality of food I can produce as well as quantity.  I am also interested in the energy input to raise the crop (both fossil fuel and norwegian steam (muscle).  Maybe we could give extra points for variety and perennial/ self seeding foods that required minimal maintenance.  As far as trees go, for the first few years I figure trees will not take up much space.  As they grow and take up more space, we will have a conversion to more perennials, which is what we want in permaculture anyway.  

I prefer #2.  

I drop it down into the pit,
my fecal mark I sign,
returning nutrients, I shit
and now I'm feeling fine

I just heard this in a class.  Some truth to it.  "You can have anything you want but you can't have everything you want.  Prioritize!"

Bacitracin, applied a couple times a day, because she will probably mess with it.  If it has a problem with hair getting in it, trim the hair around the wound.  (that might be impossible, it's near her eye and cats have definite bounds on what they want to allow).  My son got a major burn last year on his legs (hint, don't poor gas on a fire, some us never learn.  I think he figured it out after this).  Anyway, the burn specialists told him that bacitracin was the only thing other than sterile gauze and/or cotton they wanted touching the wounds.  That tells me bacitracin is the bomb!

Cat's are pretty tough.  We used to have a tomcat that was a lover, but not much of a fighter.  He'ld go out at night, looking for love, and drag his ripped up body home by morning.  He would lay around the house half dead for a few days, healing up and as soon as he felt a bit better, he would head out again.  Did it for a long time without getting infections.  Kind of reminds me of some skirt chasing guys I've known.  Different kind of pleasure, fire and pain, but again, some of us never learn!