Nathanael Armstrong

Hello! I am eagerly planning the garden for Spring and I am looking at guilds for companion planting... the possibilities seem myriad, so I am wondering what specific guilds have you all had great success with in this region?

Specifically, I am on the northern WA coast. So far I have 3 new apple trees planted in the fall, two big cherry trees, a pear, an Asian pear, a big plum tree, and some bare root trees I picked up before it started dumping snow here, so I am planning to plant these once the snow melts, which are: apricot, another cherry, another apple, peach, and nectarine. Perennials so far include just raspberry, blackberry, and marionberry. Thanks for any input!

I'm in the Pacific Northwest if that helps

Hello! I am a long-time lover of the permaculture ethos, and just this year was able to get a place and start doing some stuff! One of the great things about our home is it came with an already fenced-off garden area, which is great because we have tons of deer and rabbits. I'm not too sure about the native soil, and I don't know much in general, but I think the neighbor said it is like a clay but that it also absorbs water like crazy...

So the garden area came with raised beds, although nothing has been grown there in years since it is a remnant from the owner before the previous owners and the whole area was covered in grass and garbage. I got the area cleaned out and put down cardboard to kill the grass and started covering that with some wood chips, cut grass, and chop and drop leaves and twigs and such. The move itself and the house took up a lot of time and energy, so we weren't able to do much with the garden although once the cardboard and mulch were down we stuck some plants in there. Not surprisingly, they didn't do much, but we did get some kale, tomatoes... the raspberries and blackberries were already established so they were the most productive... some squash did grow but not a ton and pretty small fruits, and the slugs or whatever got most of those, and the pests did a real number on the cabbage. I stuck some potatoes in the ground and onions and they were eaten and rotten before producing anything. There is a well-established tree (pear we were told) that did not bear any fruit, which dropped a ton of leaves all over everything.

So my question is, how can I best tend the soil from here out, and especially if there are things I can be doing this winter to get it to its best by the Spring? Our city actually provides free finished compost, so one idea was to periodically pick up a truck load and start layering it on, but would that mess up what is going on with the mulch and leaves that are already there? We also have our own compost pile going. I have been collecting charcoal from the wood stove to get some biochar going and I'm thinking I should just be putting some in the compost pile to inoculate it by the Spring, or I could also just layer that on? There are both worms and fungi everywhere all over the yard so I'm sure they are already well on their way under that mulch layer.

Any input would be much appreciated!

Thanks!

Hey thanks for the reply! All that makes sense. The wood treated with and rat cancer experiments were done with coal creosote, not wood, so there must be a difference... but I hear ya.

I wonder how some fungi would find it, though. I saw Paul Stamets was treating simulated - I think it was oil spills - with fungi and they ate it up and turned it into a healthy pile of organic goodness.

So punky wood does create more creosote? I would have thought maybe if seasoned wood makes less then maybe punky wood makes the least? Great ideas for how to use the punky stuff! Of course in my PNW area there is NO shortage of decaying wood around 😁

Oh yeah and btw the chimney was cleaned immediately after the picture was taken!

Hello! I am burning super seasoned (over seasoned? Kinda ‘punky’) wood that was given to me from a very old wood pile of most likely fir or hemlock, and was amazed when smoke started pouring into the house one day! Sure enough the chimney cap is almost fully occluded, and after only about two months. The entire flue and cap was fully cleaned before we started burning wood in it. So it seems like a lot of pretty quick accumulation?

So I am pretty open-minded and out of the box and everything and in tune with the permaculture mindset, I am wondering if anybody else has considered the possibility that this creosote might somehow be useful??

A cursory search revealed that creosote was in the past used for some medicinal purposes... they use coal creosote for sealing wood... what else I wonder?

I know it is considered toxic but humans have found lots of uses for toxic things, so as long as we are intelligent about it I’m sure we can avoid poisoning ourselves.

I don’t know, it seems like chemically potent stuff that might just be of value around a homestead somehow...

Any thoughts?