Dave de Basque

There are many choices for windbreaks, but I personally like Eastern Red Cedar, see the pic below. It grows really dense almost ground to top and is of course evergreen. The pic is from a site I hadn't come across before, Windbreak Trees. It seems like a really useful site regarding how to design and plant etc., and of course, they're glad to sell you the trees. White pine is on their species list too!

Anyway, back to the cedar, I might plant a double or triple row with an eye to progressively logging as they grow for the lovely rot-resistant wood, very handy for all kinds of things on the farm. Windbreaks are more effective if they're not just a vertical wall, I might plant some dense, low bush or shrub at the base of the windward side and also the leeward side of your cedars.

If your prevailing wind is from the southwest, then, I'd plant maybe some berries on the sun-facing side, and a shade-loving bush if you can find something appropriate, on the NE side. Planting something at the base of the windward side is more important to sculpt your windbreak than  the leeward side, but both are helpful.

In addition to the Windbreak Trees website I just came across, the Plants for a Future website is really great to search for plants with specific characteristics you might need on a permie property, it's great for stacking functions and idea generation.

Good luck to you and your chooks!

Hey I'm here to talk about the "new 54 page PDF about hugelkultur" offer from yesterday's dailyish.

I already have access to the 133 hr. PDC and maybe I'm a dufus but I can't seem to find where the hugelkultur PDF was hung for a few days so I can go nab it. Can anyone help?

Edit: OK, so I am the test dufus for this and will leave this post up in case it helps anyone else. It is right where you would expect it to be (and where I looked but did not see), in the "133 hours..." thread, where those who are logged in will see the links to the content right in the first post, scroll down and there is an option to Upgrade/Buy as a gift, keep scrolling to the very end of the post and you will see the familiar light-blue box with the ginormous "click here to download" text, and the name of the file in small print is, tada, hugelkultur.pdf. I have worked in IT and UX and we users really are stupid, ha ha.

I was reading up on alternatives to the big guys the other day, also partly in response to the increasing irrelevance of DDG results.

After tossing out a lot of alternatives, I settled on Qwant, which I'm pretty happy with.

Different results than others, and relevant. Privacy focused. Based in France and open source I believe.

The French seem to start up a lot of cool alternative software projects, and most of them seem to be unknown outside of France. Worth a look if you want other "alternative" software too.

https://www.qwant.com/

Just saw a post out there on the internet that illustrates one solution to this problem that already exists:

(oops, image link didn't work, see photo below)

source

OK, everything on that website does need to be taken with a grain of salt, but still, the photo shows a beaver dam's ability to hold back silt. Beavers are great topsoil builders and you can see why. I keep getting more and more convinced that nature already solved all our problems ages ago, it's just waiting for us to notice.

In any case, my mind always goes to de-silting ponds on the infeed to avoid silting, so it's nice to have another alternative to explore to help keep your pond water clear.

I think we need to adopt a different frame of mind about these problems.

We've spent a century or two building up a whole society based on short-term thinking (booting the problem to the next generation, i.e. now), enormous scale (sexy and powerful at the beginning but bringing equally enormous problems over time), and concentration -- of wealth, of water, of topsoil, of information systems, of human population, etc.

We are collectively driven to these unsustainable solutions, and because someone finds them economically "efficient" at a given moment we keep on taking this course. Even though the time of reckoning has already arrived, and we are trying to solve the problems created over the last 50 or 100 years with dwindling natural resources, grandiose decaying infrastructure, and decreased knowledge of natural systems as humans are now mostly urbanites who get our information via TikTok rather than our own eyes and hands.

I sometimes think of the mentality of many (or all?) groups of North American Indians by way of contrast. The "seven generations" principle of the Iroquois, the plains Indians carefully managing how many buffalo they harvested at a time in order to keep the herds bountiful, and many more examples. Perhaps because they didn't have a boss worried about quarterly profits telling them what to do and they didn't keep GDP statistics, they made normal, sane decisions that seemed to reflect a deep knowledge of how nature actually works, and complete respect and care for future generations.  They were investing in nature rather than mining it for short-term personal gain or grand visions of empire.

Permaculture, for me, is a way of looking at whole systems and infusing a bit of the spirit of wisdom and sanity of many indigenous cultures into our Western tech-centered mentality. "How does nature solve this problem?" is a great question.

Phil makes a very good point. With people on the land, and being sensitive to it, they can restore water cycles, recharge springs and aquifers, green the desert, restore clear-cut rainforest, etc.

I think in the end we'll have to change our way of thinking and our way of life. Eventually we will need loads of people all over the land taking responsibility for managing their little bit of nature with a view to restoring working natural systems rather than trying to tweak the problematic infrastructure that our old way of thinking created. That's what permaculture thinking has brought me to think, anyway.

For small-scale systems, where possible it's good to design in a de-silting pond or two on the way into a water storage pond. They can be relatively small and dredged frequently, using the fertile topsoil they contain on your farmland. A big dam I wouldn't know what to do with, there are so many big-industrial problems rolled into that dilemma.

I watch the top video and think, what to do with all the glyphosate and other toxic gick in that silt, even if you dredge it? I don't know and personally I'd rather work on creating practical alternatives to that whole dysfuctional system.

I'm going to be experimenting with living mulch this year in my "balcony food forest" and would appreciate feedback.

I want this thread to be useful for lots of people, not just for me, so if you have comments that don't apply to my situation but might apply to other people, please go ahead.

I was inspired a few years ago by a video from the UK of someone who planted a food forest with loads of different berries among other things, and used strawberries as a living mulch throughout. That accidentally led them to set up a side business with organic jams. Can't find that video now, but here is a similar one.



My main goal with living mulch is to retain moisture in the soil and protect from the blazing sun. Also, obviously, be nice to the main crop. Strawberries have the advantage of being perennial too, so no need to replant annually. And then there's the "stacking fuctions" bonus too... strawberries! The main crop I care about is tomatoes, and the main problem with tomatoes here is late blight (phytophthora infestans), so air circulation as fungus prevention is key.

My situation: I'm growing in grow bags and small planters on a long, narrow southish-facing urban balcony that gets blazing hot in the summer. I have zero problem with snails and slugs, which is a new situation for me! The soil is bagged stuff I mixed myself. A big problem for me is evaporation. The smallish planters sit directly in the sun and can overheat very quicly if the soil is dry. The big (40L / 10 gal) grow bags are made to allow air permeation which is good to keep the plants from getting root-bound but also allows more evaporation.

One fear: The sun might be too much for the strawberry plants. Though I had some in planters last year and they mostly survived (a few died from rot in rainy periods but it doesn't seem like the sun killed any). We will disappear for a couple of weeks in the summer and someone will come every few days to water plants, but not daily and not thoroughly, just what they're willing to do. Last year it wasn't a disaster.

Any notes from experience on strawberries as living mulch, or any better ideas folks might have, are great. Thank you!

One of the things I love about grape vines is that if I string up a wire in any direction, the vine (sometimes with a little help) will grow reliably along it and will leaf out and produce shade about 20cm/8" either side of the wire. Would passionflowers or hops do some equivalent of that? I've never had either.

Another question I have is about minimal pruning. I'm wondering if I can get away with doing absolutely none. We're now heading into late winter, and there are still some sickly looking green leaves in protected spots, lots of ratty little branchlets... So far I've just been letting nature take its course. The growth tips look pretty fried all around. I don't know if cutting back a bit would actually stimulate growth or if I am just creating busy work for myself. If my objective is leaf coverage and not fruit.

Thanks everyone for your contributions.

Does anyone have pruning or other advice for grape vines being used for shade, rather than for actual grape production? I mean, I don't mind grapes but my key objective is getting dense branching and lots of leaf cover where they grow. I have a couple of vines I planted last year to prune, and maybe 4 more new ones to add for this coming summer.

Background is that I have a long south-facing balcony that gets blazing hot in the summer. Some areas are protected with awnings and some really can't be due to things protruding from the house. I grow loads of things in planters and grow bags on the balcony.

Last year I started my project to get some shade on the walls of the house that are not protected by awnings. My go-to for this purpose is grapes, as they leaf out during the hot weather and lose their leaves, opening up your views again, in the winter.

I had uneven luck with my plants last year. My new Muscatel vines did fine planted in grow bags by themselves. Three others, two local varieties and a supermarket special, which I planted each in a grow bag with a tomato plant, all died. I think that grapes and tomatoes are bad companions.

Any pruning fertilizing etc. advice from folks to maximize leafing and branching rather than the usual goal of maximizing grape production? Any advice on new varieties or types of varieties to get for the new plants?

I got a load of kiwis in the late fall, and prospects to get more, so I decided to ferment some. I read the same thing -- add a grape leaf to keep them "crispier" (maybe not the right adjective for kiwis but I was hoping for them at least to not turn to mush). They were great and you have to eat them fairly quickly.

For future batches, I harvested a bunch of the last nice grape leaves on my vines, stuffed them into a jar, filled the jar to the brim with spring water + 3.5% unrefined sea salt solution, put a little round of "oven paper" (like wax paper without the wax) on top of them, closed the jar, and let them do their thing. They bubbled a little bit for a while and have been just chilling on the shelf ever since, now I'm going on 3 months. I'm happy with the result so far. No blanching necessary. They seem pretty shelf stable for a ferment.

As far as my location, I'm in a windy, dense, small urban location but close to a river, 100m from managed forest, and more forested mountains all around - I probably don't have as many spores in the air as a homesteader in the middle of a natural forest, but I will have a decent number I would imagine.

When unititated guests come over and I want them to try my fermented treasures, I try to skim the mold off the top of everything before they arrive. Gotta be strategic you know.

There are a lot of reasons that reducing or eliminating plastic interests me: health/avoiding ingesting microplastics, environmental/avoiding spreading toxic gick around, history/didn't people manage without this 100 years ago?, and maximizing self-sufficiency just so we don't all become incapable, helpless consumer blobs, like, can't I make some really nice stuff with the natural materials around me?

But the real reason I posted this now is I'm reading a book (Ecology of Fear by Mike Davis) in light of the latest round of fires that swept through Southern California last month. He pointed out (in 1998) how the skyrocketing use of plastic in construction of everthing from houses to apartment buildings to skyscrapers makes them go up in flames much quicker and billow out loads of very toxic smoke. So it was really the fire aspect of toxic gick that motivated my original post.

Which I mention just in case anyone has anything to say about that.