Bryant RedHawk

Was that a Cane toad? The one that affected your dog?  

Charcoal has been used for humans too, maybe not in the Dominican Republic but here in "Indian Country"  it has been used for over 12 thousand years.

I weep for your loss, loosing a cherished member of the family is so very hard. I will burn some sage for its spirit and for you.

Redhawk

Lucrecia Anderson wrote:

Dave Burton wrote:

Lucrecia Anderson wrote:While our modern society may not be perfect, it offers more freedom and opportunity than just about any other. Or can anyone name an existing society that does a better job of meeting their overall ideal?

I can name a few, in fact, and there are many more I have yet to learn about. The indigenous First Nations  of the world and the way they lived before colonizations occurred are societies that I find to be doing it well:
-The Hidatsa (good reading is Buffalo Bird Woman)
-The Navajos
-The Apache
-The Inuit
-The Mapuche

I said an existing society from the perspective of personal rights/freedoms/standard of living.

hau Lucrecia, all the above nations are still here and active societies. There are many others too that are still here and their traditional society structure is still living and working. The Sioux nation consists of the Nakota, Dakota, Lakota, and Oglala tribes, we are all still here.
If you do a search for POWWOWs for 2018 you will see that we have many gatherings and that we invite non-natives, or if you prefer non-indigenous peoples, to come and even to participate in our culture traditions during these powwows.

It was the White eyes that came and stole, murdered and starved the people who already lived here. They tried to take away our culture completely, they forbade the speaking of our languages, they took our children and put them in boarding schools where they were beaten upon any teachers whim.
We lost all our great leaders, many hung by the pony soldiers just to get rid of them. The buffalo was nearly made extinct just because the white eyes thought that would starve us out, they wasted thousands of whole buffalo to do this thing.

We teach about our traditions and we explain why we do things the way we do.
Our society is one of caring for each other and for providing for those who have needs, we care for the earth mother and always have, we care for the animals, never killing just to kill something.
We feel that we must use all of any animal we take so that we can honor that death and the spirit of the animal will be pleased with how we treated the gifts given through their loss of life.

Our warriors go to war along side many others, but when they come home they go to the warrior tipi where they all work together to bring them back to balance.
We have always known that war changes people, we have always made sure they come back to balance of spirit, mind and body before they walk again among the people.
Our society has been around far longer than the Europeans have existed, those who came and invaded turtle island tried very hard to rub us out, but we are still here and we are once again becoming strong.

Redhawk

The best way to air layer is part way up a living branch and you use sphagnum moss not soil or dirt, some form of rooting hormone is normally used for air layering.

If you are bending a branch down to the soil (ground layering), dig a trench and use heavy wire "hair pins" to hold the branch down in the trench and then cover with the soil excavated, nothing else is needed except to keep the area moist.

For each of these methods you need to create equidistant wounds (slits in the bark about 3 inches long) which is where the new roots will form.

Chris and others have covered the conventional methods.

Horsetails like to have constant moisture, so they have deep penetrating root systems to provide that water.
As has been mentioned they are silica plants and using them as a chop and drop is great for soil, do be sure to dry them well before laying them on the soil, I've seen fresh cut stems sprout new plants when just laying on the surface.

instead of using black plastic to eradicate, try a lasagna mulch of cardboard and several layers of mulch on top of that. Be sure the cardboard extends at least a foot or two out side the furthest out plant stem.

In the South there are still field burn offs, mostly it is the rice fields these days but it used to be wheat stubble too, now they use a fly over method for planting most of the wheat in the fall so they do very little tilling or burning of those fields.

Burning field stubble does do some good, just not as much good as simply planting through it and letting it rot in place.
Prairie is fire dependent as an example of why one would want to burn any field. The ash deposit rebuilds the soil, dormant seeds in the soil are activated to sprout and grow, that's how the prairie is replenished.

Most of the farmers here in the south harvest the crop (wheat, oats, rice) then some will harvest the straw about a week after all the seed heads have been harvested. Then, if they are going to burn, they light the fires.
Today most are growing the wheat crop and planting soybeans behind the wheat harvest.
The rice harvest is later in the fall so that land usually will get burned and laid to fallow over the winter, unless they plan to rent duck hunting space which means they are going to flood the paddies a second time.

hau Eric, great workings you have there.

What I'm going to recommend at this point in your wood chip compost is to add bacteria, most likely you have plenty of mycelium growing in that heap but fungi like to feed on bacteria left overs and bacteria use enzymes to break down lignin which is what gives wood its structure.
If you have some fermented vegetable matter going (bokashi) or if you don't, it is fairly easy to grow some good bacteria to add to your wood chip heap, this will speed up the breakdown.

Ways to grow bacteria:

Rice Base (EM) - rinse and part cook about a cup of rice (boil 2 cups water and use 1 1/2 cup rice), this is less water than that much rice needs to fully cook, when the water is almost adsorbed by the rice, turn off the heat and add cool water to stop the cooking process.
Pour that rice/water mixture into a pail and add 1 cup soured milk (have an almost out of date jug in the fridge? that is perfect if you do), stir this mixture and set a lid on the pail, put in a fairly warm spot. Check in three days, it should be ready to pour onto the wood chip heap.

The Bokashi style - use a 5 gal pail and toss your scrap vegetable materials in at every prep session, once there is enough to fill the pail 3/4 full add some (1. near out or out of date milk, or 2. one single serving of plain yogurt), stir in and again set a cover on the pail and place in a warmish spot. (this takes about a week)

Fridge clean out method -  have any fuzzy items in the fridge? this is a good time to simply toss those onto the wood chip heap and work them under the surface a bit.

There are three easy peasy methods to get some good bacteria into that wood chip heap.
Once the bacteria are multiplying along, the fungi will be able to get more of the foods it loves and needs to grow quickly.
This will work on all your wood chip heaps.

I wrote up some faster methods for making the biodynamic style preparations (they are easy access on the soil forum at the top)

Redhawk

I have enough pasture to raise one cow without buying any feed.
That means I can eat beef for about 6 months once I haul it to the custom butcher and drive back to pick up the packages of meat, that cost me around 550 dollars in processing fees, fuel and wear and tear on the vehicle and trailer.

On that same pasture I can raise 500 chickens.
That means I can sell eggs and whole, dressed birds, let brood hens hatch and raise replacement birds and feed us meat for years with very little, if any expense.
Plus we get hours of entertainment from watching the chickens be chickens.
Then they show us how some of the dinosaurs probably looked when they were on the move too, when they run to get their treats in the evening.
So I have to vote for chickens.  

I use a shipping store and they use biodegradables when ever they can, the peanuts they use are cornstarch and they don't use bubble wrap except for glass items.
I was surprised that going with this way of shipping didn't really cost me any more than if I spent the time to get items ready myself.

We are in our 5th year of Free TV only, living so far away from any town means no cable, no internet.
When we lived in town we had business internet and Basic Cable TV it was expensive, the only thing I miss is being able to send my writing to my agent as a file, now I have to burn a CD and mail it, just takes longer.

The few channels we get with free tv are most of the ones we used to watch when we lived in town.

Finally getting a new layer of gravel for the road to our house, The first laydown has been pounded into the clay and I'm hoping that this layer will get the road really stabilized before the January snows come along.
We are down to two Guinea hogs, still can't find anyone that wants to get into the hog business but perhaps spring will find folks looking for good breeders, if that doesn't happen they may end up in the freezers.
Wolf's cancer is loosing the battle! She is getting closer to being cancer free, again.
December is starting to look like a good month for us which will be the second good month of the year. Things are looking up.

After all the "interesting" things that have happened this year, I just might be starting the Soil book after Christmas!