pato van ostra

This is just a concept I've been thinking about so I'm going to try and describe it as best I can... say you're going to cut Holzer-style terraces in a steep hillside. By that I mean a 'terrace' which functions more like a farm road that leads from lower point A to higher point B, or in other words an access way. So the terrace is going to gain or lose elevation as you travel along the length of it. What if you were to build it so that it undulates slightly up and down along it's length, with slight uphills leading into microvalleys in the hillside, and slight downhills leading down onto microridges on the hillside. Do this at a mellow a gradient as possible (1:100?), while still climbing/descending from end to end. Maybe orient the whole thing so the lower point A begins on a primary ridge in the landscape, and the higher point B ends in a wetter, valley area.

Only a concept but it makes sense to me as a way to manage water on a slope with access way terraces. Thoughts?

Michael Cox wrote:

Sounds ideal for log hives. I wouldn't worry about adding supers to it, just chop it in sections that give about 60 liters volume and put and piece of wood on each end. If you can lift the sections off the ground they will last longer.

They can just be homes for feral hives, and you can easily add a caught swarm to one.

60L volume with a 2ft diameter hole yields a length per section of .67 feet. Seems a little short? Or I suppose if you keep the log sideways, it would be like the orientation of a tire on a car?

I've got access to a huge log - probably 4'diameter w/ 2' inner diameter. Thinking this would be too large to make the 'supers' but it would make a really cool mushroom hive like the Russians make. Or possible insect hotel? I'm looking for some good ideas to make use of it before it rots away. Was a great big tree that got cut to put in powerlines.

Speaking of powerlines, the explanation for colony collapse that I've heard which should be considered, has to do with the massive increase globally in man made electro-magnetic frequencies (EMFs) in the past 10-15 years. Of course in nature there are EMFs such as the earth's Schumann resonance, & the electrical activity in every mitochondria, or electron-chain transport, which is foundational to all biology. These natural bio-EMF systems are very delicate and precise, working on the level of superconductivity which is the physics that drives the computers we're all using to read this. Think about an IBM factory, how they have to be scrupulously clean and get the details exactly right to make a computer chip. That's because it works at the scale of very small flows of current, one electron at a time. So this sort of delicate physics is what controls the functioning of our mitochondria which as we know are the "batteries" that create the energy to power every cell. There are huge implications to blasting our environment with these forces. So to not bring up the subject of EMF and the role it plays in biology, and the detrimental effect of non-native EMFs on biology, is a huge omission people are making. You can say I'm nuts but that wifi router you're sitting right next to, and the cell phone.... might want to rethink that.

I'm curious if this log would be too large. It's about 4' diameter with an inner diameter of 2'. I can cut it to whatever length I need with my chainsaw.

Hey just wanted to add a few shots of my hugel-garden down on the equator. We're at 3000' on a mountainside. The beds were composed of the woody, low-value regrowth that grew out of a cleared pasture.

So far planted to: Corn, Sorgum, Sunnhemp, Sunflowers, Chia, Lablab, some other dry beans, squash, clover, deervetch, hairy indigo, camelina, tomatoes, peppers, cacao trees (to be grown out and re-planted), coffee, and a fig tree for the fun of it.

Here's the garden a few weeks after it was created. Before it became a jungle and you could still see the layout of the beds.

Just a few pics of the garden we created in June.

It's about a 1/4 acre plot, 3x100' hugelbeds laid out slightly off contour, 6-8' high with tipi trellises...

Well, turns out this project is taking a lot more work than I'd anticipated.

First we washed gravel from the river using milk crates. Then we filled up sacks and hauled them up to the staging area at the end of our road.

Because the spring is another ~100m higher on the hillside and the rocks weigh so much, we decided we needed to cut an actual trail so we could use mules to haul the rocks up. Previously we'd been climbing basically straight up the hill to get to the spring. I had a limited time to finish up the trail and get the other projects to a good point before heading out of the country for 2 months. So when I get back next month I'll be taking the gravel up to the spring on our neighbor's mules and installing the pipe. To be continued with pictures hopefully.

The soil is very well drained and has a nice structure to it, not compacted either. I'm thinking its a lack of soil biology, what I didn't mention was in this spot the topsoil had been removed to be used elsewhere; I left things as they were to see if I could get the biology going again from scratch basically. But still, there must be something to do with the 12/12 light cycle here because many plants grown from seed will begin to flower early here. It's still a bit of a mystery to be solved.