David Milano

Hi Cécile.

You are quite right that currants and elderberry share the characteristic of being very easy to propagate from cuttings. Sean from Edible Acres covers this thoroughly, and much better than I could, in a YouTube video:

Cécile Stelzer Johnson wrote:David Milano, I wonder if you pruned/trained your elderberry to be a tree? Or did you buy it that way?

Yes, we “created” the shape, merely by cutting the lower branches and a bit of judicious branch pruning. We like the form, and it’s well suited for berry collection.

No need for us to buy elderberry—they’ve naturalized here and there around our ponds and swamp—so we just take 12”+/- twig cuttings from them and stick them in the ground. Our success rate for rooting is in the neighborhood of 50% so I “plant” 3 or 4 twig cuttings in a clump and later gently pull the ones that haven’t rooted or that seem weak. This is, as far as I know, the most common way to propagate elderberry.

NB: In our region elderberry is so common that if we didn’t have it on our own land, it would be easy to find available cuttings on someone else’s. Most farms have at least a few elderberries, and permission to take a handful of cuttings is readily given. Of course if you’re looking for a specific variety...

Though my climate is essentially identical to Sean’s, our experience with to-the-ground pruning doesn’t seem to match his. It seems to set the fruiting way back—two years before significant fruiting returns. Maybe it’s a variety issue, maybe microclimate, don’t know. Whatever the reason, my solution is to maintain four, maybe five bushes, each in a different stage of development.

Started the process two years ago by planting cuttings in our vegetable garden, the cuttings taken from a strong pond-side elderberry (no idea what variety). Pulled all but the strongest, and after two years put another in the ground next to it. That’s what you see in the attached picture. I’ll start another each year until I have the desired 4 or 5 bushes. By then the oldest bush can be pruned to the ground and the others (with light pruning) will be supplying us with berries. Keep cycling and the bushes should live long and prosper, and give us plenty of berries.

The cuttings of course find their uses, though it never occurred to me that elderberries could be coppiced for biomass. I generally rely on Alder for that since it’s so well established around our ponds, but all things considered, the elderberries would likely have greater value than the alder. Time for a change!

For anyone interested in the life-history of city neighborhoods, I must recommend, strongly recommend, Jane Jacob’s wonderful book, “The Death And Life Of Great American Cities” (still in print; originally published in 1961). Jacobs delineates the colossal failures of centralized city planners and their “urban renewal programs” which did great damage to neighborhood communities, mostly by aggressively down-ranking mixed-use city development in favor of mono-use zones (the urban socioeconomic equivalent of agricultural monoculture). She describes, in essence, the destruction of the front porch.

At 71 years old I’m old enough to remember the pre-urban-renewal era. I recall vividly at about 5 years of age visiting my grandparents in Albany, New York, walking a few blocks around their home and seeing, for example, ground floor shops (whose proprietors lived upstairs), a small shirt factory (where my grandmother worked) and many tenement homes and the people who lived there (often porch-sitting with neighbors). In a short 20 years almost all of that was gone, replaced by empty, untended, often boarded up buildings, and far, far fewer people. In my youth, the lively city porch was a happy fixture; in my adulthood, it became mere memory.

We are country dwellers now, and although we have precious few “just-stopped-in” visitors (most visits these days are planned events) we nevertheless maintain a front porch, which I must say is much enjoyed by family and visitors alike. We decorate it, keep it tidy, and make sure the view from it is pleasant. For us that means creating and maintaining “domesticated grounds” which we plant, mow, and trim. The attached pictures are views from our porch.

Oh, and one more (important) thing: Our house is perched on a west-facing hillside, and most of our weather comes from that direction. The front porch faces east, a protected position. When weather is rushing in from the west the back of the house can get hit pretty hard, but the front porch is usually quiet. The big winds and blowing storms that pound us from the west are just breezes and harmless rain to porch sitters.

Lots of good stuff in this thread!

Cattle panels find uses all over the place here. Fencing (cattle and otherwise), trellises, hoop houses, temporary awnings… I’m sure I’m forgetting some. Our favorite is the cattle panel bean arch. I cut 4 pieces of ½” rebar, 18” long each, and drove them into the ground, angled toward the center, to support the four corners. Sowed the beans at the base on both sides. Easy building, easy planting, easy harvesting, and kinda pretty too. Behind the arch in the attached picture are peas on a cattle panel.

Wow, great fun!

Kind of along these lines, last year at the request of my daughter I hosted a field trip on our property to help kids in her local homeschool cooperative learn to identify, and learn pertinent facts about, trees. I flagged and numbered 13 different tree species along the edge of our woods, drew a cartoonish map (pic attached), divided the kids (all grammar school) into age groups with a mom assigned to each group as chaperone, and set them loose. With the map and their own tree identification booklets they searched out the flagged trees and did their best to match each species to the list on the map. Afterward we walked the loop again and together talked over some botany, biology, ecology, and wood economics. It was pure fun watching kids apply all that youthful energy to the task of learning about trees. Being outdoors and moving about seems to boost one’s educational efforts. It was a pretty special day really.

Am now considering a request to repeat something like it, this time for flower identification. Thinking I could put flags on stakes near the flowers to be identified, and mark wildflower stems with bits of colorful yarn. The flagging would necessarily be done the morning of the event since many of the flowers are ephemeral. If anyone has other ideas, please pipe up!

May I suggest getting help from an architect who has experience with earth-sheltered buildings in your region? So many important details: Roof weight, water retention and drainage, infiltration, insulation (earth is a poor insulator though effective for heat storage), ventilation, earth to air temperature comparisons, soil types, plantings, weather variability…

More thoughts…
Raúl asked a very important question about his project: “How long will it last?” In my opinion, all one’s thinking about buildings should be informed by the idea that the life of a good building ought to be measured in the hundreds of years. Too often green roof structures seem to aim for much, much less, sometimes mere years, or at best, decades. Wood and billboard tarps obviously fall into the much much less category, and while the appeal of lower initial cost is difficult to shake, it’s wise I think to consider long-term costs, including maintenance, repairs, rebuilds, and potentially even redesigns. (Long term calculations are full of pitfalls, but it’s more than reasonable to give it a good go in the planning stage.) This is not to say that a wood and tarp roof is never a good idea, only that it should, like all building ideas, be subjected to cold, hard analysis.

Last but not least is site consideration. The best place to build an earth-sheltered building is on wasteland, which will be improved by a living roof, as opposed to already biologically active ground, which is almost always diminished by a building, even a successful underground building.

I’ve designed a couple of earth sheltered structures for temperate climates, and for the record, am a fan of insulated concrete forms (ICFs for short) which can be engineered for walls and roofs. Also, notably, though a design professional myself, I was happy for help from more experienced colleagues.

All of this is of course stated out of context, and should be thoughtfully regarded in light of personal circumstance.

This is all interesting to me since (when we raised chickens) our goal was, in part, to generate ongoing replacement hens for the flock. Our problem was that broodiness in modern breeds doesn’t last long enough! It got going, but always petered out before the eggs hatched.

So the first year that we needed replacements we bought peeps and raised them in the garage. It worked, sort of. We got our hens, but also got enough dust to swear us off ever raising peeps indoors again. (We cleaned peep dust for months.)

My next solution was to keep a couple or three bantam breed hens that reliably go broody and stay that way for the duration. I built a tiny “peep barn” and put a good fence around it to keep predators out and product in. Then we collected fertile eggs from the “standard” chickens, and let a broody bantam sit on them in the little barn. The bantam did her natural thing, hatching the eggs, and then mothering the chicks. There was not as much survival using bantam mothers as heat lamps and feeders, but more than enough to replace older, spent hens, and to tell the truth, it was comforting, even uplifting, to watch the whole thing unfold.

I wish I could share a picture of a typical bantam hen with her babies… all I can come up with is a shot of the peep barn, attached.

In early spring we collected dried, fallen, conveniently hollow milkweed stems and with some scrap wood used them to make Solitary Bee houses. The idea with these was to offer a variety of opening sizes to the bees, which I’ve read better mimics nature and attracts multiple bee species, which in turn helps limit diseases and pests associated with monoculture environments. Of course this is experimental for me (EVERYTHING around here seems to be experimental!) so if any of you have opinions/experience I’d love to hear it.

Annette Jones wrote:I grow my own stevia from spring to late autumn, it dies off then so I just harvest the seeds for the next spring. I can't stand the taste of the commercial brands and they are mostly full of additives so I give them a miss. I also have my own sugar canes and squeeze syrup direct from the canes in moderation when I need to, I bottle enough to keep me through winter when the stevia dies. I share both these with my neighbours.

Just a quick note to say that this statement warmed my heart. As far as I can tell by looking at a satellite view of Schofields, Australia, Annette lives in a relatively urban area, yet grows her own sweeteners(!) and also, and not incidentally, shares with neighbors. Perfect.

And… not to muddy the topic, but as a secondary note, posts like this give me a twinge of desire—a niggling wish that my growing zone was several digits higher in number (we’re in zone 5). I went to some trouble to soften the blow of our long, cold winters by building a greenhouse with a rudimentary ground-to-air heating and cooling system. One of my goals was to grow some tropical and semi-tropical foods. This worked, and didn’t work. In the pic I’ve identified a representative range of success and failure. The mandarin orange (failure) never produces fruit, even with careful hand pollination. The figs produce somewhat (minimal to moderate success). The lemon guava produces pretty well (success). I’ve come to the tentative conclusion that the primary problem behind the failures is too few light hours (we’re in a relatively cloudy place, and of course have short winter days).