Melissa Taibi

Mk Neal wrote:I think you’ll want to look for materials truly designed to survive outside in soil in all kinds of weather. Something like materials used for pond liners, maybe, or outdoor water tanks.

Many kinds of plastic, for example, get brittle in cold weather and could crack and defeat the purpose. But other kinds that are designed for the purpose and are durable in all weather.

Good point about becoming brittle in the cold. I was thinking something rigid/solid because I worry about roots being able to break through thinner materials. I had laid a double layer of a heavy duty tarp under a pile of fencing panels last year to stop plants from growing up through the fencing panels until I was able to get them installed but I still found 2 of the panels pinned down to the ground because a black locust seedling pierced through the tarp like it was nothing.

Plastic drums cut into 2ft rings would probably work, but I'd need a lot of them to span length of the bed and lining up circles would result in a lot of unusable space. I don't have access to outdoor water tanks, but I could have access to IBC totes which might be ideal except that I planned for my perimeter beds to be 30 inches wide (and 6 foot long before dropping to the next terrace) and IBCs are 40 inches wide x 4 foot long.

I'm getting ready to move my raspberries and blackberries to their new home after potting up and moving from our old property. They will be in a fenced garden area here and I'll need to contain their roots (I will have more wild ones in the food forest and I already have native ones for foraging, but I want a contained grouping in the perennial border of my annual row garden area as well). I'm looking at corrugated roofing options since I can get them in the right length and width to make my 2ft deep, 6ft long sections. I know people use the galvanized metal roofing to make raised beds, which would be a similar application, although all but the top 6-8" of my 'walls' will have soil on both sides instead of just one. I'm concerned about longevity and wondering if the PVC panels would hold up longer in that application. I'm generally trying to stick with natural materials everywhere, but for this particular application, I need something that WON'T break down in an environment that excels in breaking things down. I can't have raspberry canes popping up in my pathways and annual veggies.

Thoughts?

We moved onto a property that has an old well that was disconnected from the house when the municipality brought public water down this far. According to neighbors, the well used to run dry in the summer and the previously owner had to bring in purchased water so when they had the option to hook up to municipal water, they did. We'd like to put a siphon/hand pump on the well, so that we can use our own water for homestead things like gardens and animals. But I'm not having much luck figuring out to do that with an existing (not maintained) well.

The top of the well, well pump, and pressure tank are in a concrete structure sunk into the ground about 3 ft (that's our frost depth, so that makes sense). It must have one had a shingle roof on it, but that has since collapsed into the concrete hole. I cleaned it out this week but forgot to take pictures before we put the current plywood cover back over it. The top of the well casing/whatever type of metal cover is on the well casing is all rusted and there are 2 black plastic pipes coming out.

Will I need to figure put a way to get that rusted cap off? If I want to hook up a hand pump of some kind, I'll need to bridge the gap between the top of the well casing and 3ft to the top of the concrete hole (i.e. ground level) how do I do that? Could I just connect to one of the existing black pipes? I need to know how deep the well is to choose an appropriate pump, how would I do that?

I'll try to get a picture one of these days with the lid off... but we are heading out of town this week so I may not be able to get to it right away.

Rebecca Cellabee wrote:


If it's your lower bottom I'd say add triangular godets on the side seams starting about midway up the waist so you get some flare at the hips but in a flattering shape.

This would be my preference as well... it coincide with the way the shift/chemise was sewn for probably hundreds of years (which tells you how useful a garment it was).
http://yesterdaysthimble.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Shift-w-274x300.jpg

Jotham Bessey wrote:I think it's high time people started sewing modern styles. All sewing crafts I see are dresses and night gowns. What about pants and T-shirts?

To sew a well-crafted T-shirt (or any kind of garment made of stretchy, knit material), you need a different type of sewing machine (a serger) and to do the typical top stitching, you'd need a coverstitch machine as well. Many home-sewers just have a standard sewing machine and unless you are making a lot of items that use these machines, it doesn't make sense to purchase these specialty machines (especially when the cost of factory-sewn garments are so low). I personally use my serger a lot for all types of items, but many people don't have the need/space/funds to have both a regular sewing machine and a serger.

To sew heavy-weight materials with many layers around places like waistbands and turned hems, you may need a heavier-duty machine than the average home-sewer owns. It takes a lot of power to get through 5 layers of denim or canvas/duck that you'd have on a waistband of a pair of work pants and trying to do so on a lower-end machine can not only break your sewing needles, but can also throw off the timing of your machine which would require a repair. Jeans are sewn on industrial machines for a reason.

The rows with the proposed wattle fencing on the down slop side would be for annual veggies unfortunately... all of the perennial shrubs and dwarf trees are around the perimeter. I'm not sure how to describe the climate, it's neither super wet or very dry... it's Mid-Atlantic US, western PA to be more precise. Temperate I guess... we do have wet periods though, and can get pretty heavy downpours at times.

It really isn't too steep, I can measure the actual slope tomorrow, but the soil map puts it around 15% if I recall correctly (that may be high actually) **Edit... the garden area has a 9% slope, it drops 4.5ft over the 50ft length. That means that for each 5.5ft terrace (40" planting bed and 2ft walkway) the 'retaining wall' on the downslope side will only have to hold back about 5 inches of soil height (realistically it will be more like 8 inches with the addition of compost and mounding of the row, but still... less than a foot of soil/material).

My garden area at our new place is on a slight slope. I recently marked out the garden area and am planning to position the rows on the contour with the garden beds and walkways terraced a bit as it slopes downhill. I had initially planned on staking some logs on the lower edge of each bed to help hold in the soil as the terraces are cut. Realistically, I will not have enough straight, consistently sized logs to make this work and a single log may not be tall enough anyway. So then I was thinking, what if I made a wattle-type fence on the lower edge of the beds to hold the dirt similar to the photo below but wider terraces and not as steep. I have plenty of small black locust poles to use for the stakes and a massive hedge of forsythia and oriental bittersweet that I want to remove anyway that could work for the weavers. But, will it decompose too quickly to make it worthwhile since it will be against the soil on one side? My hope is that the soil will settle in the first season or two and since I won't be tilling it up every year, as the wattle breaks down the soil should be stable enough for me to replace the wattle every 5 years or so without having to re-do the whole bed.

How long, would you suppose, for a coppiced black locust to produce poles suitable for fence posts?

Peter Ellis wrote:
When thinking about a list of potential coppice trees, I would suggest people begin by looking at their wish list of trees they want for their sites. What trees will do well where you are and fill needs in your system? When you have that list, look through it to learn which ones will coppice well. There's your personal coppice selection ;)
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Something to keep in mind with coppice systems is that every few years, you're probably going to clear cut a section. Plan around that available space - you're going to have sunlight at ground level for the next two to three years, what crops will you have in that space amongst the coppice stools? Stack functions ;)
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And let's not forget, many of these trees that will coppice can be started from cuttings - and nursery production is a real economic opportunity.  There is no over supply of permaculture nurseries producing permaculture plants as of yet ;)

Bear with me, I'm going back to chestnuts for a minute because this information is quite pertinent to my property and goals... We have an approximate 2 acre thicket area that is overgrown with invasive multiflora rose and oriental bittersweet. We'll be doing a lot of clearing in the coming years and the plan was to turn it into a food forest with native plants but focused on thicket species rather than actually forest sized. We already have some black locust around and probably within this area. My initial reservation with coppiced black locust sprouting from the roots rather than (or in addition to) the stump wouldn't actually be a problem here, so that's a plus.

The other thing that would actually work really well here is native chestnuts... I don't want anything in this area that will get too big and shade out the thicket species, and one of the factors that contributes to the eventual death of native chestnuts with blight is that the re-sprouts get shaded out by the surrounding forest - this also wouldn't be an issue in an area maintained as a thicket, AND I would get yet another food-producing plant in my food forest/thicket, plus the wood from the chestnuts as the trunks succumb to blight. The prospect of stacking an additional function in the food forest is exciting.

We'll eventually be heating primarily with wood (we need our chimney inspected and maybe add a liner before we hook up our wood stove), so having 2 acres of land where we can coppice good firewood like black locust will be great, and having an area well suited for propagation of American chestnuts that serve multiple purposes is great on so many levels. I imagine there are programs that would assist with a larger planting of American chestnuts and that there would also be demand for seedlings propagated from cuttings of any blight resistant specimens I may be blessed with.

The fact that coppice systems need to be cut periodically marries perfectly with a productive thicket that also needs to maintain sunlight at ground level.

Eric Hanson wrote:Beau,

Are these American-Chinese hybrid trees?  Are they the most recent backcross variant?

The reason I ask is that there are earlier generations of American-Chinese hybrids that are available for considerably less.  The problem as I understand is that they are just about guaranteed to eventually succumb to chestnut Blight.

There is a parallel program that specifically inserted one gene into the tree’s genome that produced oxalic acid (if memory is serving me properly here and now).  If I am getting this straight, oxalic acid makes the chestnut basically immune to chestnut blight.  And also, if I am remembering correctly, oxalic acid is used by all kinds of plants to fight off various fungal pathogens, with wheat being just one example of a harmless (and very useful) plant that uses oxalic acid.

The two programs—backcross and gene insertion—competed for years with the backcross method gaining the early upper hand.  Thousands of acres were planted to chestnut trees, infected with blight about 200x stronger than the wild strain, and selected for best resistance.  Those seeds (chestnuts) were then pollinated by Chinese chestnut pollen, with the progeny selected for most American traits and best resistance, again infected with 200x blight and those survivors crossed with Chinese and then American and again.

It took a total 6 pairings—three cross pollination and three back crossings to get trees that were 15/16 American, looked 100% American, and only had Chinese blight resistance.  This took almost 40 years.  The last (6th) generation became available for general purchase just a few years ago and the purchase price reflects this enormous investment.

The parallel program started much, much more recently but ironically ended at about the same time.  The parallel program involved splicing in just one gene, something that has been technically doable for decades but only recently has the price come down to consider something outside of a medical concern.  The splicing approach is vastly faster, involves only one gene, and requires very little acreage by comparison.  I suppose that the parallel approach may be selling their own seeds and they may be able to really get the price down to something much more affordable.

I would be very curious to know exactly what type of chestnut you actually got—a “pre-production” chestnut, a backcross chestnut, or a spliced chestnut.

Eric

One can also purchase pure American chestnut trees for much cheaper... chances are they would eventually succumb to blight, but the roots don't die so they will sprout up anew, and with enough quantity of seedlings, you could just get lucky and get a resistant one (the parent trees are naturally resistant, but their offspring are not guaranteed to be). Technically, having a pure American chestnut tree that succumbs to blight is basically natural coppicing, no? If you have the land and are interested in coppicing already anyway, why not just plant straight American chestnuts rather than going through the effort and expense of getting the fancy hybrids? When they succumb to blight, just cut the main trunk. Seems like a win. **I just checked my native plant nursery and they are selling their seedlings for $10, their orchard was planted from seeds of a resistant parent tree... after 10 years some of the trees are starting to decline, but others are producing loads of chestnuts (which they are propagating for sale).