Andre Wiederkehr

If you're trying for a fairly dense stand of maize and end up with gaps (due to inconsistent germination or critters taking the seeds) you can fill in with grain amaranth transplants. Seed a transplant bed of amaranth (high density, by broadcasting) a few weeks before maize planting, then pop them into the gaps once the maize emerges. If you keep the roots wet the whole time they're out of the ground, they transplant okay. I like that this still produces grain in those gaps, even if not the main grain (maize) that you were planning for.

Just a quick safety note on the video from Timothy: when working on a bigger log, I would never put my hands into the split while still under tension like this bodger does at 1:13. If the froe slipped back into line, the log would really pinch. On smaller pieces, it won't really be a problem.

Once the split is complete enough that there's no more tension, I often reach into the split to pull the halves apart to snap any fibres that are still sticking them together.

In my experience, controlling the split is tricky. Probably a matter of practice.
Unless it's a really short piece, you'd almost always do it in halves.
The idea is to make the thick side bend away from the split more. The way I picture it is that this will stress the fibres on that inside surface of the split and make them peal off, staying with the thin side. Don't know how accurate that is.

Here's a video describing that:

I think with a thick piece where sticking your hands into the split isn't such a good idea, the same kind of differential pressure is applied by which side you put up and which side down in the brake, since the two trunks of the fork touch at different points along the piece you're splitting, and you can lean on the bottom half with the froe in addition to twisting in.
See this article, too. Give me a brake - Peter Follansbee

I was recently taught a bit of spruce root basketry, and that really clarified the concept on an intuitive level. Dig up some spruce roots, scrape the bark off with a knife or a tough thumbnail, and try splitting them. The roots are much more flexible and easy to bend around than wood, so perhaps easier to grasp the theory with. (Then go sew something with them.)

I appreciate this topic being discussed.

In the context of harvesting firewood for heating, I've heard various people talk about selectively cutting out dead (but still fairly sound) trees either
-because they're partly dry already or
-because of the notion that it somehow hurts the forest less than killing and removing live trees
Assuming you work ahead enough, the issue of moisture doesn't matter that much. But I've wondered about the latter concern. I know that dead trees (both standing and downed) are important habitat and food sources, so it's important to have some around from a biodiversity perspective. For me that is reason enough to not take them out, but I am curious: does it also end up making the forest more productive from a human perspective?

Any foresters out there who can comment on best practices for harvesting trees? Is it always better for forest health to take exclusively live trees, or is a mix of live and dead sometimes okay or even preferable? What about the idea of preferentially removing "diseased" trees? After all, these are going to be snags soon enough....

Just starting. So far it's been good.

I'm looking for more places to visit, though.

One focus is learning more about how a functioning food forest fits into a person's diet and annual work rhythms. I've heard lots of talk about food forests, but never seen one up and running as a major contributor to someone's diet. If anyone out there has such a system going and is kind of near my route, please get in touch!

One year of university I took all my food from home for the eight months I'd be living at school, using a bike trailer. 90 km, two trips. At the time eggs were a bigger part of my diet than now, so I took maybe 12 dozen or so. The last trip I made bringing food was in mid-October.

For preservation, I simply relied on the natural coating that eggs are laid with. So I selected eggs that were clean and did not wash them (washing removes the protective coating). I stored them in a friend's root cellar (high 30s-low 40s Fahrenheit) for most of the time, then brought them to my warm apartment and kept them in the closet for the last few weeks before eating. Using this method, I kept eggs from that trip in October all the way through to late April. Never refrigerated. I don't recall that any spoiled. I cooked them thoroughly to make sure they were pasteurized. They tasted good.

I just finished my first season of being involved with maple syrup production. I was a hired hand on an Orthodox Mennonite small farm in SW Ontario. We had over 1300 taps, all collected by buckets and horse-drawn sleigh or wagon. So I guess you could call this guy a smallish big operator.

The man I worked for had wondered this exact thing about what to do with the sugar sand, since it clearly still contained a lot of syrup, so he'd figured out a way to recover most of the syrup.
First of all, we swished the filter in the boiling sap to rinse out some of the syrup, then hung it on the edge of the pan with clothespins to drip into the pan for half an hour or so. Then we tipped the sugar sound out of the filter and washed the filter inside out in three pails of hot water. At the end of the boiling, the wash water went into the bucket with the sand, and we stirred it up thoroughly. He'd take a brix test with a refractometer and add water (using more buckets as needed) to get it below 12%.

The next time we boiled, the sand would all be settled in the bottom of the bucket, and the water above would be fairly clear and full of sugar. We carefully poured off the water without disturbing the sand (back in my high school chem lab we called this "decanting the supernatent") into the back pan, and the sugar would come through in that day's syrup minus the sand! He calculated that we would get at least 5% extra syrup with not that much extra boiling by doing all this.

If you don't dilute it enough, the sand still contains a fair bit of sugar and it's worth adding water and letting it sit one more time.

We'd discard the sand after this washing process. I still wonder if the sand itself is useful for anything.

The sitting water/sand does get kind of slimy over time, which I think is the same microbial phenomenon that makes the syrup darker toward the end of the season when your buckets and tanks are all a little dirty, so if you really value light syrup (I don't), you might not want to use the sugar sand.

For a little more context:

The evaporator was wood-fired, 5'x16', with a front pan for finishing, a back pan for primary boiling, and a preheater pan on top of the back pan that used the steam to heat the sap to near a boil before it ever got on the stove.
The "sand" seems to form on the syrup side of the evaporator (right where the syrup is most concentrated) It sticks to the pan a bit in a thin layer, and I was taught that syrup can get under this layer and burn, so every 4 hours of boiling, we would "reverse," which meant switching the hardware around to the other side of the front pan and take syrup off from there so that the thinner sap would be coming in on the side with the precipitate to wash it loose. I've heard of other setups where they never reverse and it doesn't burn, so make of that what you will.

We'd filter the syrup as we took it off every third to half an hour. One batch of syrup would be 10-15 L or so, and leave a few cups of sugar sand in the filters (variable amount depending on how long ago we'd reversed).

Have tried in SW Ontario (which is margninal for having enough heat). From that, I'd say it's been critical to find good varieties with really short season. So if you try using peanuts that aren't specifically for seed and don't know where they were grown, they may be selected for conditions very different from yours.

Other than that, what I know is that they need fairly soft/loose soil (sandy is supposed to be good) because they pollinate above ground and then dive underground ("pegging") to set the nuts.

When saving seed, I believe they keep viability best in the shell, so shell them just before planting.

Thanks for the reply, Paul.

paul wheaton wrote:if a first time gardener grew 50,000 calories their first year with very little effort, I would call that a huge win

As I said above, I'm absolutely with you there! I hope these GAMCODs encourage just that kind of response.

I want to highlight that I was saying the numbers I calculated above align with my experience from having given this a go myself for a few years in a row - I'm not just making guesses from an armchair and saying it seems like it "ought to be a lot of work." In my experience, it has been a lot of work to try to grow all my food. Good work that I am content to do.

I'm sure I have plenty to learn about gardening, and about permaculture approaches to it.
Perhaps there are big technique things I'm missing that would make it easier. Hopefully I can pick up some things from people's demonstrations this year that will make my gardening easier in the future. I'm excited to see what people come up with!

These calculations on paper about how it could go in theory at full scale don't compel me like real live examples do. So I would be by far the most interested in examples of people who are actually growing all their food in 100 hours (or whatever it turns out to be). Have you considered making a version of this challenge for doing that?

I heartily support the idea of showing non-gardeners that it can be cheap and easy to get out and start gardening, even without preparation and experience.
But the framing around volume - growing enough food to feed yourself - that is built into the name of GAMCOD makes me question the "easy" part.

I'll use three examples Paul listed of 2024 GAMCOD participant results:
Rebekah
Calories: 34,323
Time spent: 49 hours

Stephen:
Calories: 20,570
Time spent: 32 hours

Mike:
Calories: 14,326
Time spent: 4.65 hours

Extrapolating to 730000 calories (although I think the average physically active gardener would actually need more than 2000 per day) and using an 8-hour work day means that to grow a full diet using whatever methods and conditions these people had would take this many work days:
Rebekah: 130
Stephen: 142
Mike: 30

This is extrapolation, not what would actually happen if these people had tried out what they were doing at scale, of course. Based on my experience over the past few years of actually working toward growing a full diet in former hay field (so some topsoil, but not heavily built up with mulch and stuff), I would say Rebekah and Stephen are higher than what I've experienced and Mike is lower. But even if you're as efficient as Mike, to me it doesn't seem reasonable to say that 30 days of work in a year constitutes "little effort." Maybe others have a different perspective.

In summary, I think GAMCOD is helping show that growing some food (more than a nibble quantity) is accessible to a beginner and "easy" in the sense that it can be done in an amount of time that can be snuck into evenings or weekends without too much trouble. If that removes a roadblock for current non-gardeners, I'd say that's great! So far I do not see it proving that it is easy to grow all your food. If you want to do that in fairly non-mechanized ways, it seems to take a lot of work and time per person. That does not mean that spending your time that way is miserable or drudgerous or a waste, but it's still work.

Yes, I have! I've basically just done it to bake sooner when I'm running out of time and the bed of coals is still too high, not to make a cooler oven. I think if I removed them all it wouldn't bake long - not enough firebrick in this stove.

I shoveled them into a metal can (back right in that picture of the whole stove with pots on it) and put a metal cover on it to quench them, then put it outside (fumes). That way I could make charcoal for my dream of blacksmithing someday.

I don't like wasting the heat by putting live coals outside, but I suppose if you're into making charcoal already and have been doing that outside, this is actually more efficient because some of the burn happens in the house. A truly sealed can would solve the problem. Ideas for what to use?

This is a sidetrack, but something I've been thinking about for a while is how various "processing" activities that use heat could double for space heating in homes (in places with winter). It's yet another way that doing things super-locally can beat the industrial equivalent efficiency-wise. An example I've tried is dehydrating food using heat off the woodstove. The stove is hidden by the corn in the picture, but you can see we had dry corn, apple rings, and a bunch of seeds on that wooden rack tower all drying in the late fall. I wonder about other things: boiling down sugar (beet, sorghum, or maple), making charcoal in larger batches, blacksmithing. But the issue is these things aren't very friendly to a home environment (or so I hear): sap steam is suppose to make everything sticky, charcoal can be smoky or produce CO, and blacksmithing makes fumes and sparks.
Maybe it's a silly idea, but I think there's something to it. Has anyone tried bringing these jobs indoors in the winter?