Ayva Jean Damas

Joshua States wrote:
I compost all of our food waste, and I mean all of it. My criteria for what goes in the bin is a simple Y/N question: Was it once alive? If yes, it goes in the bin.

This is also my criteria for our compost. Its worked fine so far! I have a friend who has even put dead chickens in theirs, and by the next year it was completely disintegrated into the pile!

Timothy Norton wrote:I would like to nudge this thread and see if other's might be willing to share their setups.

Here is my setup. It's two bays, mainly because I didnt want to buy any more pallets and because we dont really have enough inputs to warrant more space. Once we do our first mow, Ill gather up as much of the clippings as possible, mix it in with what Ive been piling up then let it sit to finish while I start working on the other bin. (The pallet on top is just laid on top. There isnt anything on that side.)

I go for a square or marquis shape hole when I'm planting my bare root trees and shrubs to force the roots to grow outwards. The only other thing I did was put miychorrizal inoculant on the roots and in the hole and backfilled with the soil and grass that came out of the hole. Most of what I planted last year had made it it seems. (A beauty berry, two black cherries, several redbud, American plums, and tulip poplars). It went pretty well with potted stuff to have straight sides to.my holes, so I'll continue doing that this year too.

Cover cropping is something I want to work in this year. I had wondered if purple top turnips would work, they seem more accessible than tillage radishes, and I imagine tillage radishes don't make for very good eating. Purple top turnips, on the other hand, I've eaten plenty of times, both the greens and the roots.

I've read that true comfrey has white flowers, and the Russian kind has bluish/purple flowers. Do you remember which color your flowers were?

Here's an article (which you probably have already read) talking about how Amy at the Tenth Acre Farm uses both. It seems if you're just wanting chop and drop mulch, Russian is probably the way to go. It's also probably what you want if you don't want to be as fastidious about keeping it from flowering to produce seed and spreading. (That's something I would worry about, personally. I wouldn't want it breaking containment and invading the natural areas around me.)

Personally, I'd probably try to grow a bit of both. I don't have any advice regarding growing it around established trees. Maybe keep it out near the drip line just in case though. If the tree is big enough, I doubt something like a few comfrey plants will do it serious harm.

Christopher Weeks wrote:I think Home Depot rents tillers as well as a lot of medium/small-town independent rental places (at least around where I live).

I actually checked with the HD in my area and Lowes, and none of them rent tillers! I talked with my husband about renting a tiller, and he'd prefer we buy one, since we won't be bound by time restraints, and if we decide we don't need it after a few uses, we could sell it and recoup the money.

Joe Hallmark wrote:100% rent a tiller. The bigger the better or else it beat you to death.

Yeah, if my husband will go for that, I may go that route. There's a place about an hour away that should be able to rent me a 9 hp, rear tine tiller for about $120/ day, which is way cheaper than the $720+tax minimum I'm seeing at Tractor Supply.

Christopher Weeks wrote:It sounds like you'd be better off renting a machine, at which point you sort of just take whatever they have and you don't have to care if it'll last.

I think I have a source I could rent a tiller from, but if that doesn't work out, then I'd have to buy one. I'm hoping to break ground in 3-4 weeks, since my bare root trees are coming in on the 15th. Based on the research I've done, rear tine is probably my best bet, since I don't plan on using it once I've got plants in the ground, and my spaces are all open enough to accommodate the size of a rear tine.

Hey all,

After a very unsuccessful attempt at gardening last year due to heavily compacted soil (and inexperience), I've decided that as much as I'd like to go no-till from the start, I think I'm going to have to till if I'm going to have an in-ground garden. (Containers last year did so-so, but were not nearly as productive as I'd have liked.) I could hardly break through the turf and soil with a shovel, so starting with just broadforks isn't going to work. Even if I had the funds to set up a bunch of raised garden beds, that wouldn't help with the trees I'm planting/transplanting, so here we are. I don't really have the time to solarize a bunch of plots (and I have a pesky puppy that would think the plastic sheeting is a toy for him).

I figure if I get a tiller I can tear up the soil in a few places, work in some organic matter, get things going, and then be able to sheet mulch and work in other soil amendments, compost, etc, as needed using a broadfork from that point on, and only have to till in "virgin" spots.

Any recommendations for tillers to look into/avoid?

We bought a house that is outside of city limits and therefore not subject to code, but we were using a USDA loan to purchase it, so the sellers had to fix things that were blatantly not code. Some of them I didn't really care about (railings for 3+ steps), others I did (a power strip wired into the wiring and mounted on a wall, improperly installed water heater tanks). Our inspector said there's a minimum standard/universal "builder's code" that he used to evaluate the property, since we weren't subject to a specific city/county code.

Like other's have said, it is probably best to build to at least a minimum standard so that 1) you can be sure it's at least mostly safe, 2) you have a framework to begin with for how to construct your place, and 3) so that if financing is needed or you want to sell it, you can accept a variety of bids instead of being limited to cash-only.  If you do ever sell it and the would-be buyers had an inspection done, you'd want to be sure that all the big stuff, like electrical and frame work, were up to a general code standard... but you should want that to be the case while you're living there too.