Trevor Newhart

While i dont believe i can be of any help, i would certainly like to offer my encouragement for your project. I look forward to learning more.

Really impressed and excited by this thread. Any updates? Have you noticed any gley-like sediment building up in the low points of the pond?

Whelp, despite my self-insistence that I am not the "cross-country road trip type", it looks as though I will be embarking on just that, a long and arduous drive across this beautiful continent. My best friend, and the entire reason for this journey, Matt will be alongside me. As will his beautiful, and dog loving pup Daughty. I am sure if you are at all like Matt or I, the idea of spending six days straight in a hatchback with a dog makes your skin crawl. Heck, my skin is nearly walking. But alas, there is hope! And it is you who bring it!

I am posting this in the hopes that some of you may know of a farm, homestead, natural building site, or permaculture school or two that could use four hands attached to two healthy twenty-somethings for a day or two next month. Possibly in exchange for a warm meal and a bed, a place to park the car and a place to pitch the tent. Heck, you might even operate one of those fantastical places! If you either of those sentences apply to you, I ask that you don't hesitate to post a reply here and fill me in. If not, you may know of a "must see" location that we may enjoy paying a visit to. Whether that be a beautiful state park to stay the night, ancient stone building, or permaculture library.

A little bit about the trip:
-We will be starting our drive in Maine and ending it in sunny Southern California.
-The starting date will likely be around the 12th of March and we don't mind arriving at the end of the month, if we find enough places to keep us busy.
-Matt is a pescetarian and I am a vegan who has a soft spot for homestead eggs and a curiosity in roadkill.
-Matt is interested in natural building, black smithing, ceramics, woodworking, and goats.
-I am interested in permaculture, rice cultivation, cooking in general (but more specificaly: macrobiotics, Korean, Japanese, and fermentation), raising chickens, and wool processing.

Thank you all so much for taking the time to read this. I look forward to hearing your responses.

I know this post is a bit old, but I am very interested in the position. I don't have a whole lot of hands on experience yet, but i am a very hard worker with a pdc and a few years of self-study under my belt. Wish you luck with all of your projects.

I am sorry, but I believe you meant to say: FREE VEGAN PIZZA!!!

But in all seriousness, if I had a bit more experience than I do (which is to say a bit more than none). I would absolutely jump at this opportunity.
I really hope you can find some wonderful people to take you up on this.
Please keep me posted on this situation though, as I would love to lend a hand if I am in the area.

Wow.
This sounds like a dream scenario.
Is free pizza involved?

Judith,
Glad to hear that you have already considered all of this. I hope someday you can get a back-up starter and are able to do more experimentation with tempeh making. I think it is a pretty briliant craft and look forward to learning it someday.

Leila,
I am happy to have passed on that tidbit of information to you. Hopefully you can get a starter and experiment with your harvest. What variety of beans are they?

Judith and Leila,
While I don't have any experience making tempeh, I just wanted to point out to you that it can be made using a whole range of legumes besides soy. From my understanding you use the same basic recipe and techniques, though I would certainly check around before giving it a try. The most common soy substitutes are black beans, chickpeas and black-eyed peas. I had the idea of using siberian pea shrub as it is a coppicable perennial. I was thinking carob beans for the same reason, which I hope would impart a sweeter more chocolate like flavor. Though I am aware that the pod makes the chocolate substitute, one would think that the beans have a similar flavor.
Well yeah. Hope that is of some interest/help to y'all. If either of you, or anybody else gives these things a try, I would love to hear the results.

Hello Nuno,

I really admire what you're doing with this project. Some people might see this as a contradiction, which I'm sure is something you've acknowledged but decided to continue anyways. I think that's really great. As for actual advice, I have a few points:

1. Health Bars. You could use different colored bars to track the conditions of the system. For example, you could have a green bar that tracks the amount of nitrogen in the soil; a red one for the amount of pests; blue for water; gold for soil organic matter; black for soil contamination.

2. Floating Numbers. In a lot of RPG games, whenever you do a certain action that either causes damage, or gains experience; this is usually expressed with numbers that float from the action to the top of the screen. This sounds a bit silly, but it offers a lot of mental stimulation which I think is what makes otherwise slow games feel fast paced and plays a big role in making RPGs addictive. For example, when a player plants Cow Pea, there will be a floating green +2 to symbolize the amount of nitrogen that has been added to the soil. When the plant grows a bit, it will give off a floating +4, then a +8, +16, +24, and so on. Finally, when a player chooses to chop and drop it, it will give off a floating +100 to symbolize the nitrogen bloom that comes after the death of the rhizobia. It would also give off a gold +20 for the addition of soil organic matter.

3. Beneficial insect habitat combinations. You can create certain combinations of earthworks and plants that when are created by players, beneficial insects are added to the system. For example, if a player were to plant dill and Queen Anne's Lace near a water source, lady bugs would be introduced. They would then eat the aphids, reducing their population, and shorten their health bar indicating that the aphid population can no longer reach the same heights.

4. Story Mode. This would be a game type in which players are tasked with designing systems for various environments increasing in difficulty. For example, a player would first be tasked with designing a backyard food forest. They will then have to design an abandoned urban lot, then a small farm, an established forest, a sand dune, and so on. This would also give you the opportunity to create a preface that would express the necessity of these kinds of systems, and alert them to real world crisis.

I look forward to hearing updates from this project, and hope these ideas are of some use to you. I think this is a great project and be happy to share it with other people.
Good luck!

Hello Judith.
I feel as though a hydraulic ram pump might be of some use in this situation. It's a pump that uses the force of gravity to move water, it doesn't require any other power source, so that is certainly a pro. I have to confess that I have no experience with them, but I figured I would offer up the idea to see if it is of any benefit to you.
Here is a video explaining how it works:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWqDurunnK8
and a page teaching you how to build one:
http://www.instructables.com/id/Worlds-greenest-water-pump/
It does create a good amount of "waste" water, but you could very easily integrate that water into a swale system or a pond.
I had the idea of building a small water tower near the garden where you could pump up just enough water for a day or two of use and leave the dormant for the rest of the time.
Of course all of this is dependent on you having a pond on higher contour than your garden. So I suppose we will see.
Good luck.