Anna Hutchins

This is actually an activity I'd be very very interested in but I am afraid of poisoning myself and my family. I don't know how you find an expert to show you everything.  I've kind of gathered that most people who forge a lot of mushrooms don't really want to show their best spots off.

I also really like Super Sweet 100s and Cherokee Purples. They did not do anything for me after June this year but I was extremely neglectful and I probably don't have nice soil.  And it was incredibly hot late in the summer. I would still recommend them.

The other tomato that I would recommend that on a normal year actually does produce is the Juliet hybrid. Since it's a hybrid you obviously can't save seeds and get the exact same tomato, but it's always produced for me except for this year which once again was so hot!

I am also happy to hear any recommendations for any other variety that might do well. And I'm not even in California, but it seems like we're trending hotter or at least more extreme.

Edit: I forgot to say what the Juliet Hybrid even is!  It's a small Roma-looking tomato.  I've never tried to research the parents but suspect it was a larger cherry type crossed with a Roma.  It's (usually) prolific and is quite tasty fresh but can still be cooked.  It's just small so it would take a lot of them to make a sauce or something.  They tend to end up in tomato basil salad with feta around my house.

Wow this thread is making me hungry! Yeah any pastry with chocolate or cream cheese or fried apples all sounds amazing. I'll also add that while it's pretty basic, I really like a good cinnamon roll too.

At home I bake pretty simple stuff. I only make pies for Thanksgiving and my husband's birthday because he loves them. The pies are usually peach or apple or mixed berry.  But my favorite treat to make at home is probably chocolate chip cookies. I really really like chocolate chip cookies. Or s'mores honestly. You can make them at home in a toaster oven in less than 2 minutes.  They come out really gooey from a toaster oven because the graham crackers toast and the chocolate melts.

Would I prefer chocolate eclairs? Probably, but I will never make them at home.

Mike Barkley wrote:This post will clarify a point or muddy the waters. Probably both. It is intentionally vague but more specific details will be added later. It's a bit of a deep geeky rabbit hole but we need to go down it a little to understand why I think this is such a cool picture. In the words of young Frankenstein ... it's abynormal.

In a roundabout but important way light is involved. A primary something comes out of the dark hole in the center of the bottom picture. Which generates secondary somethings that are collected by a device inside the screen. When the secondary somethings hit the device they generate photons (light). That light is extremely faint though. Not visible to human eyes & light never enters the chamber. The curved part attached to the screen device is one big fiber optic strand about as thick as your thumb which transmits the faint light outside the vacuum chamber. It is then strengthened enough to barely be visible.

Is it some kind of spectrometer? Does a laser come through the dark hole and measure something?  I don't even know what a spectrometer is usually measures. Sugar content?

Thank you for your informative replies everyone!  I might have to start trenching organic matter more.  I bet shallow trenches on contour would really help retain water.  And they're easier than a massive Hugelculture!  I live in town so I don't want anything like that. Also it's a lot of work and I have young kids.

I will add that my local extension office does recommend under four inches of mulch for soil moisture retention.  I bet that amount will still let spotty rain through.  So maybe chop and drop is okay in the spring and fall when we get more moisture and cooler temps?  That would be a win because chop and drop is easy, and I don't have to dig out anything.  I'm lazy, and once again, kids.

(Also we usually get very little moisture in the winter so there's not much point trying to build a lot of infrastructure to catch snow. Now that I've said that we're probably going to have incredibly snowy winter.)

Oh and I compost just to keep stuff out of the landfill, but I end up with so little material at the end it almost feels futile. I'm sure that that organic matter is going straight back into the atmosphere. I would be interested in trenching it instead to see if that helps more with soil building and with the plants actually getting some of the nutrients.

Thanks for sharing Paul!  I love me some Andrew Huberman!

He's the reason I go outside on cloudy mornings and look up at the sky.  He pointed out that even through heavy clouds there is still a lot more light coming through the clouds than from any light bulb.  That was not intuitive to me.  

And just looking at the sky in the early morning in general helping to set your circadian rhythm.  

I have a somewhat technical soil question I'm going to ask you guys.

Bear with me while I think out loud.

First, does syntropic farming work for dry land situations?

And in dry land situations, should organic matter ever be left on the surface?

The obvious answer seems to be yes, but I have seen posts about organic matter oxidizing straight into the air on this forum, and I've sort of witnessed something like that in real life.

My grandparents had a conventional farm in Western Kansas that I visited often as a kid. I still remember a giant pile of brush that never broke down over decades and slowly just bleached in the sun. It seemed like it probably never even helped the soil under it. Everything just seemed dead.

So I guess my question is, would it have worked as a Hugelculture if it had been well watered when it was established? Or would it have still dried out and sat there for ages, just with a little bit of dirt on top of it?

And the question that directly applies to my site is: will chopped and dropped plants have the same fate as that old brush pile? I do live farther east.  We do get higher rainfall. I think it can vary dramatically between 15 and 35 inches of rainfall a year.  It's usually on the lower end of that.

I don't want to pile a bunch of grass on the soil that will just sit there for all time. Or go straight back into the atmosphere. But at the same time mulch does seem like it makes the soil nicer underneath.  So even if it's going back into the atmosphere at least the plants around it are benefiting? I guess I'm just wondering if I'm only speeding up CO2 release or if chop and drop will do something to build soil. I just can't imagine that I will see the amazing soil buildup that syntropic farming promises.

Does syntropic farming and chop and drop come down to having the roots die in the soil and leaving their carbon behind? That would make some kind of sense to me.

I'm hoping that's the case because having to make everything into a Hugelculture sounds burdensome, to say the least.  

I've always heard the onion sets just do not get as big. You're supposed to plant the little green plants for large nice onions.  I don't understand the biology behind the difference so I can't explain it.

I don't have a picture to go with this but my failure is definitely rhubarb.  I think I've killed at least five rhubarb since I've been in my current location. I think first I'm afraid to over water them so they dry out and die, or on wet years they get diseases or drown in my heavy clay soil.

I'm going to try really really hard this year to get in early on the Going to Seed giveaway and get some rhubarb seeds. Maybe they'll be tougher.

In my ecosystem grass would have been the climax... Sort of.  The American Indians constantly burned it and reset the ecosystem to make it favorable for buffalo. In a very protected area you'd probably get bur oak, chinkapin oak, juniper, and if you're lucky enough to have a river bottom you would have gotten black walnut.

I'm a day late, but I just wanted to chime in and say I did in fact mash'em.  (The potatoes that is.)  That was just how my menu turned out.  I had not realized it was hobbit day.

But happy birthday Frodo and Bilbo!