Maria Arboleda

Why don’t you use hard wood ash instead?

You need nutrients for you tree. Dig up the soil (not deep, just loosen it) about a foot around the tree. Get a bag of compost, worm castings and follow with wood chips. Also some mushroom dirt couldn’t hurt. Another thing you could do is pour a cup of compost tea around it and water it in. Should be right as rain.

After I posted this I did a little more internet digging and found many ways to score a tree for sap, what trees to use and what countries are making and selling pitch gum. Did you know that Switzerland is the ONLY country that sells red cedar gum.... I know, we could all be making a killing right.

So I went right outside to the barn yard and skinned and scored one of the red cedar trees. This picture is what I did. However once I saw the sap dripping out of the tree I realized that I didn’t even need to score it how I did, a straight score downwards with a knife would have been fine or simply a puncture would have been fine. Skinning the area does eliminate the all that bark from being collected as well.

So There I was, driving down our old dusty red dirt road when out of the corner of my eye I noticed a delicious and perfectly ripe passion fruit hanging from a stand of elderberries. So naturally I came to a skidding halt and the dog went flying of the bench seat into the dash again. Poor dog!

I got out and released the children from their restraints. They climbed out just as happy as I was to see all the lovely passion fruits dangling in front of them. I grabbed one down and opened it up to reveal the most heavenly sent. Then my son said “Mmmmm mom it smells like juicy fruit gum.”

And then I found myself standing their with another project for my to do list..... “how to make juicy fruit flavored pitch gum”

So this is where you guys come in and tell me how to make pitch gum and how to add the juice of the passion fruit to the gum and what trees I can use to collect the sap from.
From my YouTubeing adventures, everyone of those videos is how to take pitch from black spruce trees. Well, I have red cedar, white oak, hickory..... no pines of any kind. So another question is can I just take sap from any tree? Is all tree sap edible or consumable?

It was an accidental discovery. I make myself a sun tea from wild sumac berries every summer. I use winged and stag horn sumac... Ozark mountain range here 👋🏽

After drinking it all day I noticed that night that my armpits started smelling like sumac and bee balm/oregano no bugs entered my aura that night AND I didn’t smell like a dirty hippie anymore because of the bee balm. Thanks nature!

-1/2gl glass jar
-Fill it up with sumac berries (not poison sumac)
-Add some wild bee balm, fresh wild strawberries, black berries, blue berries, black raspberries.
-Poor in 4 Tbsps of raw honey
-let it set in the direct heat of the sun for an hour or two.

DO NOT, I said, I said NOT boil sumac! It has to be a sun tea. Boiling killed off all the medicine and will make the whole tea reeeeeeally bitter. No bueno!

I have been trying different things over the last two years to work towards not buying feed for any of my animals. Needless to say I have way less animals now and I truly understand culling in the fall now. But what about dogs..... I can’t just cull my dogs off in the fall, so I make them “Rice N Tup gravy” 4 cups of rice and left over whatever is stick to the bottom of the skillet mixed with a cup or two a water, mix and poor it over the rice.

That feeds
1 grate Pyrenees
2 German Shorthaired pointers
1 Brittany
1 Chihuahua
As well as our human share of rice for dinner that night. 3 humans

These dogs are outside and free 24/7, 365
They all run a minimum of 4 miles a day.
They hunt as a pack and protect our lands and our farm animals no problem. I would not call them skinny by any means.

Also i would like to add that I’m kind of lazy sometimes. So we have it worked out with a local restaurant in town that they dump all the left over food into a 5gl bucket for what used to be our pig buckets, but since the hog is now in the freezer we just give the dogs the buckets. They started getting fat. One 5gl bucket full of hamburgers, french fries, baked potatoes, hush puppies, whole pans of leftover lasagna, pie, gravy..... my friend walked right up to our front door past ALL of my ferocious beasties who were asleep from the 5Gl scrap food challenge they love to take part it. Not one of those dogs barked. Freeloaders! 😂

A friend of mine tried this and it also worked.

 The city was complaining about his messy front yard of pollinator food (wild flowers). So he made seed bombs and threw them on all the vacant city owned lots and once they sprouted and grew, he then took pictures of those lots covered in pollinator food and won his case while also providing more pollinator food......  this is the kind of passive aggressiveness I can get behind. Lol

I think that’s a wonderful idea and if you can find a way to do this, you would really be helping to change the world. It all starts a a child’s level of education. I feel like everyone in here could relate in some way to that because either we are learning all of this because we wish we had been thought these things years ago, or think our children or younger people or other people in general need to know these things. That’s why Permies is a place.

I do “wild school” with a group of like minded moms n dads and Montessori as a basic education. In wild school last week the kids learned Fire building, Hugel mounds, and we all added clay to a slip straw house. And as expected all the kids ended up covered in mud by the end of the “educational house building”. Permaculture and food forest is just how we all live in our little mountain properties so this is all incorporated in their everyday life.

Age range is new born -7yo and of course all of us parents are learning new stuff with the kids and from the kids.


7th Generation

Good news everyone! The bulldozer showed up  up and cleared off our house site today. YAY!

I have taken the advice of all of you (thank you very much)
A few things are different now.
It’s going to be a 50’ circle and we are going to  do a reciprocal roof and an earth roof on top.

Does anyone have the answer of how to add a skylight to the top/center of a reciprocal roof with frame. And What’s the word on leaking skylight on a reciprocal roof?

Mike Haasl wrote:So you're planning on the rafters spanning across the whole oval?  If so are they're going across the narrow way or the long way?

Could you make the bedroom hall wall into a load bearing wall to help hold them up in the middle?  I'd be tempted to put a huge 50' log (or two 25' ones) running the long way of the oval resting on the hallway wall in the center.  Let's call it a beam.  Then, run the rafters the other way (the short direction) from the sides of the oval onto that main central support beam.

The logs are going to be going the short way.