Ben Zumeta

Two, hands down. Well, maybe one hand down because in addition to many other massive advantages, a two wheeled barrow can be easily moved one handed. Two wheelers can move 2-4x the mass with much less strain, as one doesn’t have to hold the entire weight balancing it. The extra weight of a second wheel is tiny compared to the benefits of balance. If you want the one wheel experience, just tilt it to get the joy of holding the entire load up. Using a two wheeler is much less work for any substantial amount of mass. I say this having moved hundreds of yards of material with two-wheelers, and having several single wheelers fall apart at the worst possible times.

I absolutely hate single wheelers, and if I were a conspiracy theorist would suspect they are the brainchild of some maniacally misanthropic orthopedist. A single wheeler kills your back and shoulders, and the just falls apart from the strain of the force one has to exert on it holding any substantial load up. Honestly, I think a one wheeled American style barrow is one of the poorest designed tools I can imagine. I would rather just carry buckets or a harvest bag. Maybe if all one is moving is lettuce or feathers down exceedingly narrow paths, it might have a purpose. Even so, it is prone to tipping with the slightest bump onto whatever one is growing beside those narrow paths. A two wheeler still fits down any path that is comfortable to walk down. A path so narrow it warrants a single wheeler has no space for airflow and plants to grow.

When I worked in the Laguna mountains at an environmental ed camp, we learned and taught about manzanitas being a key native peoples’ apothecary plant. The berries are delicious and do make a great tea. It is so tasty one might come to realize the hard way they can be a cathartic laxative in high enough dosage. They are apparently good for many other GI ailments too. The leaves are a natural antiseptic, and chewing them will help heal mouth sores and upper respiratory ailments. They will also make a person produce a very funny face, as they are very bitter, reminiscent of campho-phenique cold sore medication. The leaves can also make a decent toothbrush substitute in a backpacking pinch. Of course, take care when trusting anyone on the internet telling you to put something novel in your mouth!

Send some rain over here please! No significant rain (1/3” total) since May 12th, and we had a few dry weeks before that. Normally we’d get 12-15” in May (got 3”) and 6” in June got 1/3”). This was after 100” in the cold season before planting was possible. On the bright side, tree fruit that we can water off grid has been especially flavorful. The only real solution to this increasingly weird and bipolar climate seems to be biodiversity and undulating the landscape to make diverse soil moisture pockets.

I live off grid on 25 beautiful acres in NW California witht my wife who I met while we were both thru-hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. While I love it most of the time and am very fortunate, off-grid life is not as care free as one might think! Hiring any help has an extra cost to get them here and up to speed on our systems, so I am our gardener, landscaper, plumber and electrician (for most aspects), garbage man, propane and diesel delivery guy, diesel mechanic (a bad one who hates it), emergency medical responder, wildfire preparedness guy…and I am only really good at a couple of these things. Doing them all makes me not great at any of them. Again, we have a great life, but living off-grid is not exactly easier or less expensive!

The woody debris quickly (1-2yrs here) becomes fungally rich well drained but highly absorbent soil for the plants in surrounding beds to root into. It holds 1/3 its volume in water. If you are worried about the wood floating, then an overflow perforated pipe or sill would prevent that. The system I described in the post referred to above has handled 10” (25cm) days of rain with no such floating woody debris problems. The main risk anyhow would be in the first flush of rain hitting dry wood. Once it is waterlogged, it will not float off.  Topping up with more woodchips as the paths decompose and sink a bit is not much work.

Provide 1% gradient for water flow around any hugel bed and it will not float off. Of course, I would not recommend building dams with wood…leave that to beavers.

After I helped convince him of its benefits for my other garden plants, a viticulturist friend in the Willamette Valley in Oregon used primarily compost tea in getting a biodynamic vineyard he managed to produce 4x as much usable Chardonnay, when mildew was their primary problem. The owners complained that he made them work to sell so much more wine.

I would recommend making Johnson Su style for grapes as it is the best for beneficial fungi that will out compete and consume the mildew, as well as boost the plants’ natural defences.  As that method takes a year, I would buy the best fungally rich compost you can for the interim, looking for woody debris as its primary feed stock. Quality is key, but if its good compost it only takes about 2L to make a 200L batch for foliar spray. TeaLab has good recipes, but I would not add food to the brew for grapes. Rock dust and kelp can be helpful. If you cannot aerate, an extract will also help but may not stick to leaves as well. One spray on fallen leaves in autumn and then 3x+ in spring through early summer is a good regimen.

I have also had great success (95% reduction in mildew and nearly as much for botrytis) using horsetail (equisetum) tea. Either fill a bucket with the horsetail then top with water and wait 2 weeks. If urgent, boil a kettle of water, turn of heat, add horsetail to water line, and steep for 30min. Either brew method should be diluted at least 4:1 and up to 20:1, and sprayed on foliage top and bottom til dripping.

I think this is such a good idea I have a post about doing something similar here:

https://permies.com/t/75626/Hugel-Chinampas-duckoponic-swales

If wildfire is a risk, gutters can be a major vector for building ignition. Covered ones are safer, but going gutter free is the safest.

If you can just grade the ground to provide the easiest possible path for water to your infiltration basins, the pipe may be largely unnecessary. At the property in the link above, I probably could have forgone the pipe between the beds and just filled with coarse woody debris then topped with wood chips. Roman era British Isle fortifications had such woody debris filled trenches that outlasted their occupation and rock or pipe based drainages. I would also skip the geotextile, as most are plastic based and bound to become forever trash mixed into your soil. Just wood would be a much less expensive, longer lasting, more effective and absorbent in my experience and research.

Beneficial nematodes and BT (Bacillus Thurengensis) would be my first thoughts. I would also ask him what the point of gardening is if we are just going to spread poisons all around our yard and home. Most basic cellular processes are shared by all living things, and so most chemicals that hurt one species harm us all.

Jenx Murphy wrote:What if you tried tying the chicken wire to the trees instead of stapling it? I haven't done this for deer fencing but I have tied chicken wire to other kinds of fencing to keep small varmints from going under it.
Loop some plastic straw bale type or other durable twine through the fencing at top and bottom around the tree. Overlap and lace together when you get to the end of a roll. Might be stronger and it's kinder to the trees.

I may be misinterpreting the above quote, and tree species, bark texture and toughness, and age are factors. I am sure Jenx’ intentions are good. Still, tying anything like rope, twine or wire around a tree can girdle the bark, then cambium. The cambium transports water and nutrients and is where much of its cell division occurs, making it essential for the tree’s survival. More than 1/3 of the circumference of a tree’s cambium getting girdled could kill a tree. This is why hammocks and other rigging on trees in National Parks is supposed to be as wide and soft as possible, and should be temporary. With a fence, wind and animals will work that rope back and forth, girdling the tree.

I have stapled and bolted into living trees for use as fence posts where it seemed less damaging than the process of putting in a post. They did bleed sap, but after five years, the trees still look as healthy as they were before, and have largely healed over the eye bolts. I also have made tree guards between the fence wire and tree with sections of corrugated 4” plastic drain pipe. Akin to the old method of supplementing copper with a hammered in penny or copper coated nail driven into a copper deficient tree, I might consider using bolts or fencing staples that are galvanized or coated with a mineral deficient in your soil.

I agree with those points. In addition, planting grids with straight paths create wind tunnels and erosion highways. They are also maddening to make on uneven ground, which is pretty much anywhere that wasn’t created by a flood or heavy equipment. Grids look much worse when any one part is off, such as when some plants inevitably die. Getting a grid right will also take longer and cost the client more for a less resilient end produt.

On your point of weakening resilience to pests who can see your grid of food for them from a mile away, I am reminded of my time working on a Wilderness restoration crew in the Mojave and Sonoran desert. Our main goal was removing illegal roads into Wilderness that were created and maintained by ATVs trampling vegetation. Signs and obvious barricades just invited target practice and winches to destroy them. Werealized just how much a straight line stands out like a sore thumb in nature. Just randomly scattering rocks and “frankenbushes” (half buried dead branches in a tree shape) around the road disrupted the linearity and camouflaged the road. Where we did this random scattering well, it was much less work than other methods and the roads disappeared visually. If they went unused long enough, if atv- users didn’t notice them,  plants could reestablish in the shade of the frankenbushes and rock piles, These  also caught wind-born seeds.

This positive feedback loop is similar to the pest dynamics in a garden. When a pest has to look around harder for food in a diverse, mosaic garden, it is less likely to feast and procreate exponentially, and easier for more prevalent predators to manage for us. Grids are pest buffets