mark masters

What a great year, we are still looking for the first frost of the year, endless drying and canning, hope to make it through the winter with lots of bounty.
It is always amazing at how much we learn and how excited we are for the preparation for next year.

Just a quick update...

The Garlic rocked our world again, a great strain for this altitude. We have had our share of set backs, but I feel the plants respond well to adversity.

Druce Batstone wrote:

mark masters wrote:Getting rain early, the garlic is looking good, the hugle is planted and the our last freeze was a week ago. Rainbow Country!!

The garlic bed is fantastic. How do you manage to get such even growth of what looks like a large leaf area per plant? I can not get my head around the very lush growth with the last freeze only one week ago! You should have a bumper yield. I was amazed to learn that the yield of garlic could be as high as 40 t/ha with plant densities of 600,000/ha ( http://hortsci.ashspublications.org/content/39/6/1272.full.pdf ). May I suggest you weigh the garlic (after drying) and calculate the yield per square metre. Even better, also count the number of leaves, roughly estimate the length of the longer green leaves and measure the average stalk diameter of a sample of plants. Post the results on Permies for all of to try to emulate.

We are at 7500ft, right at the base of a 12,000ft mountain. These are tough conditions to farm some things in. The Garlic we found at a local farmers market. Its found along the ditches in these mountains. We grew it last year to great success and planted this from our crop. It produces huge cloves and is very strong. We have a patch of seed garlic from colorado that has much smaller leaf and diameters. We will see how the cloves produce, but the difference is noticeable.

This year the garlic started coming up in late February, we had many hard freezes, some as low 10 degrees.

We have had Two severe hail storms this spring and it has frosted again just last night. Its the day before summer!

Annie Howell-Adams wrote:My 20 x 20 community garden plot with 85 feet of hugel bed. This is a new way to garden for me, The mounds are layered with old wood, kelp, compost, soil, and recently composted llama manure. It's just January here in Washington. Everything is "cooking" for spring planting.

Any new pics??

These 4'x4' beds have a 6" layer of rotten forest wood for absorption of the water that all flows to this corner of the property. So far so good, it will suck up surface water and store it for later. So far, plenty of rain this year, it is usually windy and dry until July. We also have a hoop house for tomatoes, eventually we will get away from using sheet plastic, for now it is helping us to achieve some form of food sovereignty. This is year three on this land and year two of intensive gardening here. We have learned so much.

Getting rain early, the garlic is looking good, the hugle is planted and the our last freeze was a week ago. Rainbow Country!!

The making of the first raised huge, I have been digging holes in the terraces and filling them with rotten logs and leafs. I think the future looks like raised hugles, I'll keep sharing here.

New Hugle
garlic on the way, Ya Ta!!

The current conditions on the reservations are rough by any standard. It is a case of deprivation, the policy since Jackson has been, "Kill the Indian to save the Man", thats a direct quote from Jackson himself. By removing the Natives most powerful tools and incarcerating them on "Reservations", another way of saying "Concentration Camp", the government of this country has swept the people of this land under the carpet.
The consequences of removing the "ceremony" from native life, including language and food, has had such a detrimental effect on the people. Even the teachings of the past, that have been protected by many a brave soul, have lost much of the context in which they were created.
There are still many that practice the old ways of ceremony, but very few that live the complete encompassment of these traditions. Food has been a huge factor in the disassembly of these cultures. Most of the processed food has very low nutrition and very high in sugar and fat. Then there is the alcohol, this is the real spirit stealer. The amount of damage done is unthinkable.
With all this said, we still do ceremony, there is a lot of what you speak of, the weekend ceremonialist or warrior. As a result of the increasingly dire conditions in the world, many of us are looking for deeper connections to nature and world around us. Though the environment has increasingly changed and the people with it, the relevance remains. I see that there are cycles in nature that have been recognized by a long relationship with the environment, a way of coexisting and respecting the living world. The instructions are still very much imbedded in the ceremony. I would hope that each person would gain insight into their own involvement in this toil through these ways. After that, it is up to the individual to activate accordingly.
In this way, I feel that my journey has been lifted by the practice of these traditions. As far as integrating these practices into the current paradigm, they seem to have varying degrees of effect on people, depending on how committed we are to the reality we live in. Much of what is taught stretches our perception of how we think. I often see in myself, just how much the english language, and the colonial mind set has affected my perceptions. I have to humble myself constantly to accept the depth of these influences.