rose macaskie

    I picked fruit as a student, olives in Israel, they have established a tradidtion of Europeans taking a working holiday on a kibbutz. They house and feed you but hardly pay you anything. I washed a traditional Palestines womans, long purple dress that i had brought for myself and dyed the floor of the room i stayed in purple,  which i feel guilty about to this day.
      I also picked strawberries in England and i would like to say not all jobs on a farm are terribly tough, I found picking olives agreable, you stand up to pick olives, we only picked till midday, we started at five or six in the morning but picking strawberries in England and i only did two or three hours strawberry picking, was hell, I have never been so exhausted in all my life as i was picking strawberries, I suppose you  have to develop the right muscles for spending hours squating at floor level before it becomes less absolutely terrible. I am the slowest of fruit pickers and I try, I wanted to get as fast as the others I felt competative about it, it wasm't just too laid back to try to pick fast.
the first day in israel we were sent to dig a dip out around some grapfruit trees, i am as fast digging as anyone esle nearly, the girl i had gone to Isreal with dug so hard and fast that i thought she was crazy to go at digging like that and it turned out i was right, back in our rooms she collapsed and burst into tears and accused the kibbutz of making her work to hard which was not very reasonable as no one had made her digg that fast. These are some of the things that can happen to amateur workers.
In the kibbutz i ended up washing pans in the kitchens of course, I  have always had to do a lot in the kitchen at home i was good at washing pans. agri rose macaskie.

  Sorry about the wint in, burra maluca is right , i have corrected it I have so much to say and am so bad at writing, and it is not that I dont correct what i write, i go through it three or four times sometimes more. I need a secretary.
JUst think about it, professional men have a wife at home doing all the tediouse work and a secratary in the office doing the writing and then they pretend to work hard, they are soo lucky. rose macaskie.

       A gardener did geranium cuttings with me when i was a child, it is great doing things with someone else it means that later you try it without all that nervousness and lack of confidence I have if i try things alone following a book.
        It is a bit stupid that things should be so much more stressful, the fear of faillure the fear that you are just wasting time because it will never work should be so much greater if you are doing things from instructions but that is how it is for me. I dissaprove of people who say learn to do it on your own every time you ask for help, sometimes you have to do things on your own but it is so much easier when you have some one doing it with you, even another beginer. If you can find company on a new task that is the best way.
       As a result of being shown how as a child I have ocassionally done cuttings ever since. I can't pretend to be a great sucess at them. If you put in a willow branch and it takes that can hardly be called success they take so easily but i have had a few cuttings grow for me. The one that suprised me most was that one bit of juniper, of all the bits i put in the box i have in the garden that is something like a cold frame but with shade cloth over it instead of glass, took. That was with no rooting powder or heating or lights but it was the only one of many attempts to grow junipers from th ebranches of the wild onews of the district that took. If i think of my own efforts to grow things from cuttings i would say try it with everything, you never know if they will take or not and then you will learn. I dont try it with enough things.
      I forgot, it is easy with currents. Of course if you have lots of money a shop brought plant is quicker, a cutting starts off pretty small, maybe i should try it with bigger branches.
      I did have a small propogation box but it did not seem to wrlk very well for me when I tried it, so years later i decided to trash it.  I am thinking of finding my self a bigger propogation tray. The light works wonders though. agri rose macaskie.
 

living wind,when i put in lots of pictures to something i wrote a friend laughed at me for not believing people can read and when i write a lot I get told off for writing too much.
    It is a bit long but i have got used to reading texts i used just to read literature and it causes reading text books books makes me feel awfull, anguished. I always think the text is going to lose me but in the end it turns out that i can handle it if i can bare to drag myself through it.
      It is undisciplined and impatient of me to write so much, it is much more fun reading the bits of the forum that come in little bits .

      I am sorry for all the information that had little enough to do with your question, I have since read an old post of mine elsewhere here, in a thread started by Travis Philip on whether of not to accept a whole lot of trees that the government offered cheap to farmers who would look after them and in which i write about how comfrey works  for hard pan and so i have information for you. 
I must have written my post just after i read that confrey has a spike root that will drive through hard pan because that is what i have said but i do not remember that bit of information now. I also talked about having read about the usefulness of planting alfa alfa and comfrey together as the alfa alfa with its nitrogen fixing nodules provides lots of nitrogen for the comfrey to take up.
    Yesterday I read, in a paper on companion planting from the company "golden harvest", that alfa alfa is capable of getting its roots through hard clay and even rocks, so that sounds like good for hard pan. 
    I have read of a man digging a hole through hard pan to put a tree through it, so you could plant a tree or a bush too that would probably lift and break the hard pan.  agri rose macaskie.

    I agree with Hugh H growing comfrey from seed is not yet working for me but other permaculture plants from seed are working, the purslane is doing very well as are other lettuce plants miners lettuce and  sorrel. Yarrow is doing very well from seed and so is rhubarb, marigolds and calendula.  Buying a packet of seed for 1,50 and getting lots of plants from the packet is a lot cheaper than buying small plants at I.50 maybe more each. agri rose macaskie

we are bad permaculturist on this site. A permaculturist grows quiet a frew trees that are not fruit and nut trees just to have leaves for compost or leaf litter, lots of locusts and other nitrogen fixing trees. Probably also not to have to many trees of one type together for biodiversity.
    Juniperus thurifera and oxycedrus have  a smell that insects dont like whichmay scare insects off your fruit trees and wood that you can use to put in your cupboards to put off moth and death whatch beetle and berries all winter for the fauna and they are very hardy trees for bad soil and rough weather. Oaks give you acorns for chickens as well as biodiversity among your tree types, chose the right sort, ever green oaks, or  holms oaks and it even gives you flour for making acorn bread with. Poplars give you fast but light wood for i dot know huggle culture amyube oaks give you good fire wood and so on. Some junipers give you very hard trunks that used to be the iron bars of house building in old Spain. 
Then there are permacultures prescrbed amny storeis of plants so tall trees short trees bushes and herbaceouse and creepers should be in the arboretum a winter flowering cherry for bees that are out late in the year and arbutus uneda for the same. agri rose macaskie.

leif kravis, would not you grow bananas and advocados and coco plams in Jamaica.

  My recent research into fruit trees has allowed me to know that you can get trees that fruit in different mounths of the summer. That is, an apple whose fruit ripens in July another in August another in September and another in October and another that ripens late and keeps till April when you can start eating your rhubarb. The same goes for pears some ripen late but are hard and uneatable till they have been stored for a while. You can have peaches and plums all fruit i sppose with fruit that ripen in each mounths of the summer one variety in one mounth and another in another if you chose the trees well, and figs that have a breva or breba crop, that is the figs of last year that never got very far, ripening the next year so you can look out for early ripening figs tree species as well as the ones that ripen as normal in September.
If you wanted to get this sort of usefull spread of fruit maturing times or want to have apples of your prefered flavour, you would have to plant an awfull lot of seed to find yourself with fruit that ripened in different mouths and had the flavour you liked because the trees don't come true to type from seed. That is an enormouse disadvantage to growing from seed.
   
I read a better idea for having a fruit tree growing on its own roots than growing it from seed that is to grow it from a cutting. I don't know how difficult that is but i came across one nursery that does this while I was looking up fruit trees, the Orange Pippin nursery. Having trees growing on their own root being one reason for growing trees from seed.
I read one scientific paper on roots that said that fruit trees have deep roots, it did not expand on this though. I wonder if the reason some examples have shallow ones is that we feed them and water them so well that growing deep roots is a bit beside the point for them. Darrel Doherty says that the grass of one farmers land was not making top soil to any great depth because it received too much good cow manure to grow roots to any great depth.
  Trees do grow sinker roots, that grow right down like tap roots they don't usually have many sinker roots but can have a few, so though you have cut through their tap root to sell them, bought ones  are capable of growing new deep roots.
  Another reason to have trees grown from seed would be to have a bigger genetic bank of fruit trees. If each apple tree is grown from injerto of an apple tree of the sort you like or from trees that have been njerted with that tree, then all those trees have the same genes which makes them more liable to being carried off by something like the graffiosis of elm trees. I read once that elm trees were usually grown from sucker of one tree and all elms in one county would originate from the same parent tree which would mean that elms had very few genetic differences and be less likely to find a way to survive disease.
If you buy lots of types of apple trees and crab apples to polinate them the you will have an enormouse gene banks and the seeds of your apples will be more likely to produce interesting new varieties. Ditto other types of fruit tree. agri rose macaskie.

  Hugh H. I used to grow seeds in the kitchen or sitting room it is only since i have got the grow lamp that I used the bathroom as the bathroom window is a bit high to give a lot of light withotu a lamp but the size of the sshower makes it easier to hang a grow lamp. This bathroom only has a loo and a shower in it, we never used the shower we all bath. The climate is very dry here so even in a bathroom things dry off quick.
    As i said, the fungi in the some soil i was growig seeds in last year on the kitchen table seemed to go right through the pot. I put a see through plastic tube in the soil, from top to bottom, so i could water through the tube and only wet the bottom of the soil, which i thought might help with the damping off. When i took it out later and it was covered in fungi, the whole depth of it was, inside and out, so I think it is the fungi in the soil tha tdoes for seedlings, and the soil is naturally damp as i water it, not that of the air. Even then some seedlings survived, that is why i thought the thing might be to get them strong fast enough and they grow even when they are surrounded by fungi and with the grow light they get quite big in two weeks, some of them do at anyrate.
    I know that lots of people grow seeds with out a lamp but it is the first thing that has worked for me.
    i have had sucess growing ginkos from seed that i picked up in the street fallen from some tree planted by the government, ditto locust trees and even an olive, by breaking open the seed case carefully in the case of the olive. You have to get good at breaking open the case of the seed, which in olives is very hard, without squashing the kernal to grow them from seed. I wonder if things with hard hooves like horses don't help olives to grow. rose macaskie. 

    Sounds like you have more seed growing equipment than i have. I have thought of buying a propagation tray because i would like to get trees from cuttings of my favourite junipers in the woods near my house and may be of maples, if i can get trees from cuttings of the maples that grow in the woods, then i would know what colour their leaves were going to turn in autumn. I do like the way one tree has yellow leaves another salmon another rose and another yellow, it woould be nice to get various maples in a  variety of colours. There are wild junipers thuriferas with a different growth habit from other ones, like there are weeping ones and ones with branches that spread out like a very spready skirt and there is a common juniper i llke with a very tight growth habit which is attractive.

NuTrac. I cant find potting compost, a good sterile mix for seeds here in the garden centres, though i did see those words potting compost in small print at the bottom of a soil mix mix for bonsais but then i began to doubt that the words potting compost meant what i thought they did, which was something suitable for seeds, as suddenly all the packets of earth had these words on them. I have looked for sorgum moss so i coud mix it with sand and make my own but i have not found that either, maybe i have to buy it on the4internet. In the end I rinsed the earth i used in plenty of water and then left it to dry to wash out nutrients so as to make it more sterile and less likely to fill up with damping off molds.
      Would the seedlings grow more roots if i had a heated tray under them?
      I  have never had much success before with seeds. It used to be a bit depressing buying them, I bought packets of seeds and they mostly did not come to anything so having most of the seeds grow is very exciting and the possibilites that spread before me of growing masses of things quickly and with very little cost is likewise exciting. Try, try and in the end a better way occurs to you. agri rose macaskie