L. Kuro

I keep mostly Alpines and love them, they're friendly and trainable. Bigger goats are surprisingly easier to fence in than little ones, and it's easier to help with rare kidding problems if you can actually fit your hand up there.

Annette Henry wrote:Well, I watched a 'what not to do' vid this morning on asparagus and it made me very glad that my plans utterly failed last spring regarding my asparagus patch.  I had no idea it was that invasive!  My planned patch was far, far too close to my garden for that to work.  So I began to re-imagine just what I should be doing instead.  I know wild asparagus grows in my area.  I found several stalks on my property just after we bought it.  However,  they are wild and I want some cultivated varieties.  Growing them in pots and putting them in the way the old advice keeps harping on seems far too much work for someone who is already overwhelmed with things to do, and as I said, I know it grows wild here - just not where I can harvest it as it usually ends up mixed in with the hay.  

So my idea is to till up a bed, and get it started really well, tilling some muck in and some 'potting soil' that's not really soil, more like chopped up bark.  Rake out all of the stones, weeds, and such, you know the drill.  But then, rake in asparagus seeds.  Just, rake it in and water and see if they come up.  

Good idea?  Bad idea?  

Missouri zone 6 on the plains for the usual questions.

It's not really invasive in any practical sense, some extreme native fundamentalists will just say that about anything capable of propagating from seed. It's a bad idea to just take things at face value from those types since they frequently lie or make things up all the time.

John Suavecito wrote:
If you add biochar before inoculating it and then add compost, research has shown a delay in plant growth.  The biochar sucks in the nutrition from everything around it for a couple of years until it achieves a homeostasis.   Compost is a great way to inoculate biochar, but it takes time.  If you want to inoculate quickly, I recommend liquid inoculation. I would add biochar after inoculation.

My two cents,
John S
PDX OR

It's worth remembering that those studies only added raw biochar and nothing else. This past spring I made a mix for tree seedlings out of worm castings, raw char, a bit of fertilizer with mycorrhizae and quality potting soil and my trees took off like rocketships, way bigger and better than just potting soil and same fertilizer the year before.

I'm moving to a piece of land with a lot of stones. I'd like to learn how to make use of them as a building material, but have no idea what I'm doing and don't want it all to fall apart the first time there's a bad windstorm. Where are some good online places to learn how to build structures with stone so that they're safe and last a long time?

Sweet flag grass has edible parts, although eating a plateful probably wouldn't be the best meal in the world.

I want to produce a lot of tree and shrub saplings, but only have a little space to work with and haven't moved to my final property yet. I've seen videos about air pruning beds, and they look ideal for what I want to do. Has anyone here used them? Is there any major downsides/reasons why everyone doesn't do it?

Vanessa Smoak wrote:
I just don’t understand how the market is so bad here in Georgia.

I don't think it's necessarily just a Georgia problem, or even just a timber problem. The whole country is in an upside down clown world state where the better and more useful the resource you have to sell is, the less you get for it. Timber, farming, and anything else that has to do with a commodity, you get just the bare minimum amount to keep the credit line open because the 'you vil own nothing' types have it set up where they can import from halfway across the world for cheap while they piles taxes and regulations on domestic production. But as blackpilled as that sounds, its not hopeless, it may just require some out of the box thinking. A lot of small farms are finding sucess by direct marketing to customers, maybe there's a way to do that with timber as well? Maybe you could team up with a woodworker and a guy with a portable sawmill and sell some kind of value added product instead of just timber? It won't be easy, but hopefully you can find some way to make it worthwhile.

Unless you're somewhere weird like Australia, native songbirds evolved to live alongside bobcats, weasels, mink, raptors, nest raiding rats, possums, raccoons and tons of other predators. If you provide nice habitat, they're made to reproduce enough to withstand predator pressure. Maybe plant some good habitat species for your area, something that favors little birds over cats.

I'm eyeballing land for a homestead near the state line, and wondering if the grass is greener on the other side. I need to stay within an hour or two's drive from Lake Charles LA, and plan to grow trees for bareroot sales, small scale woodmilling, woodworking, ect. Mostly plan to sell online, so proximity to markets isn't that big a deal. Texas doesn't have an income tax, but seems like it makes up for it in property tax and may not make that much of a difference. Texas has a reputation for being business friendly and free, but a lot of blue state busibodies have moved there the past few years. Louisiana is a poor state and doesn't have much money to enforce tyranny unless you do something really obnoxious and stick out. But since I'm looking at very rural locations in both states, perhaps that doesn't make a difference either. So for people living in that region, do you think it makes a difference which side I pick?