Perry Way

I have not a clue what purple means here. More than that, I don't understand this blowing rainbows out of my ass mentality. It seems to me that Permaculture is a logical straight-forward rational system that makes sense.

God bless you Geoff! Thank you so much! You're my hero I want to do the things you do, and certainly want to bask in all that food forest goodness! hehe. I think my property is a long way away from a food forest, but at a bare minimum I intend to reforest the land there.. to green the Carrizo Plain. These Cassia trees I intend as keepers instead of 100% mulchers. I'll grow others from seed to devote entirely to mulch like in your Food Forest video. I am sort of possessed with a general idea of surrounding fruit trees with legume trees, permanently, and then around a bunch of them would be Afghan Pine and Arizona Cypress as wind protection and winter microclimate creation to perhaps allow for some more temperate arid species like olives and pomegranates and figs like you did in Jordan. Without that microclimate there's no way olives and figs will survive the -5 farenheit lows which happen about once every 10 years. Don't mean to ramble on, thanks again!

Geoff Lawton wrote:Hi Off the Grid
if your cassia trees had nodules on their roots when you took them out of their pots the already have been inoculated and you can carefully check that out by digging around their root zone, you can then just add some of the soil to the area you are going to plant the new seeds. If you cannot find any nodules you can find trees that are nodulating and grab some of that soil and add it around your trees or mix with your seeds, you only need a tiny amount of soil to add millions of nodulating bacteria.

Thanks Geoff, That's good to know information. I will attempt to inspect the root area on the trees I just planted last weekend without hurting anything, but just the same I think also I discovered a source for inoculum at Prairie Moon Nursery and if it's the correct kind I'm going to buy some for the seeds. But what about if I were to mix some up in water and then irrigate existing trees with that water? Would that work or is inoculum treatment only for seeds?

Geoff Lawton mentions very briefly on the Food Forest DVD using Cassia trees for mulch.

That's about the most information I've gotten about the tree from a Permaculture perspective and I've been scouring the internet for info too.

I planted 4 or 5 Cassia trees on my property over the past few weekends, hoping I was lucky with picking the right tree. I guess I'll find out how they do with the minimal amount of rainfall that is normal for the Carrizo Plain. When I bought the trees I was told they were extremely drought tolerant and well I sure hope that's true because I don't plan to irrigate and every year is drought like conditions on the Carrizo Plain. What I wanted to know, and I guess is too late now for the trees I did plant is, do I need to innoculate in order to get the nitrogen fixation? Or does them being in a container and transplanted mean that they are already producing nitrogen?

Also, I collected a ton of seeds from the pods that were on the trees. I must have several thousand. I plan to plant them, all of them actually. Do I need to innoculate them or will they develop over time with the necessary bacteria that finish the nitrogen fixation cycle?

Also, where does one obtain the innoculation supplies? I'm just learning as I go along..

I musta spent at least several hours over the course of a day and a half before I posted my question for Geoff a few weeks ago. I spent a great deal of time just gathering my thoughts together to ask the dang question. Then the podcast came and the questions weren't asked due to time. Now from reading this I get the feeling we're supposed to increase the postings here, but no guarantee that Geoff will even see them let alone read them. I think I will get my answer one day, one way or another but it's likely not going to be this time around. Geoff is a superstar and likely there's all sorts of buzzwords and excitement going on about some things in particular but likely nothing to do with my query because not many people would choose to start a permaculture project in a salted landscape. I appreciate the gesture to set up the forum for this possibility but I think I will wait to ask Geoff in person, when I meet him one day, if that ever happens. Meanwhile I'm just going to study for clues and apply some scientific study of my own to get my answer because I have so far never heard anyone who has the answer. Geoff alluded to how the salt in the soil in Jordan in the Greening the Desert part 1 got transformed and desalted due to the fungii. Insert insoluable. He used those two words. I think he may have the most information on the planet related to that process.

Len Ovens wrote:My first thought is to fill the pond or at least part of it with big rocks. These act as shade as well as something cool(er) for any water is the air to condense on. It seems to me this is one of those things talked about in one of the podcastes/threads but I can't remember which one. Rocks are also great to encourage wildlife... like your frogs... and the animals that eat them. The less you can see of your water, the longer it should last. It is hard for me to test this as I live in a less than dry climate.

I have been considering your idea for a few days. It seems to me that the only way this could work is if there were several layers of rocks high because the sun on the Carrizo Plain is about the hottest sun I've ever felt. Honestly it's like hotter than other places for some reason the rays of the sun make it through the atmosphere more there (it's a fact actually). So I'm thinking if it were one layer of rocks then there'd be excessive evaporation during the days as soon as the first rock gets exposed to the air. My fear being it would evaporate more than it would condense. What do you think about that? Anyway, to bring rocks out there, that will cost me like probably a minimum of $1000 so I'll have to really consider this long and hard. I have maybe a week or two before they fill up. I was thinking next weekend, find the low spot in the large pond, and dig a trench in the center, going down 1 foot. If I do that the length of the pond I am thinking I will have enough water that frogs may reach maturity. That's a lot of digging bar muscles to make that work, but I'm thinking maybe 6 hours in the cooler weather... it'll be good exercise.

Jami McBride wrote:What do you think... will this mess up natures balance?

No. Nature will replenish the moisture that it wants to have in the atmosphere by recycling from somewhere else.

Fred Morgan wrote:
True confession time, I am a guy, rather large (over six foot, sort of resemble Herman Munster) and I used to knit. I would here too, except we don't need anything warm except perhaps one month a year.

I know how to knit, crochet, hook weave ... and play American football. 

Maybe I can knit me a hammock...

Fred, I'm a man and I knit too.  In fact I knit pretty good actually. I used to own 5 knitting machines as well at one time. But I got rid of them to fund other hobbies and now just content to hand knit the occasional item.  I knit a lot of hats.

Also, the word is the origins of knitting began with fishermen from having made fishing nets, the process of knitting became invented. Not sure if that's true but the general understanding is that back in the day, in the primitive technology days, the men were knitters and the women were weavers.

Argentino wrote:
aether:

For the 20 acres that I have, the property tax is very low, like $150 (US dollars) per year. The irrigation "tax" (it's not really a tax) is around $400 per year. The water rights for my property (it changes from one to another) gives me 3 hours once a week. There are a couple of months in the dead of winter with no water. I've been told by people in the area that this is not a problem as the fruit trees are dormant anyway at that time.

You won't need irrigation with this: http://groasis.com/page/uk/index.php and it's like that Ronco oven, you just "set it and forget it" which would benefit you in your position. I have some on my property now, a much more difficult piece of land than yours, and it seems to be what they claim it is, which it that it allows you to grow trees from seeds without irrigating.

One big caveat I can fill your mind with is, because there's water inside the Waterboxx, if you're not around to manage your property, you will need to bury these up to the ridge line on the side, and you'll need to wrap it in chicken wire so the coyotes or wolves or whatever you might have like that down in Argentina don't upturn your Waterboxx and ruin your plantings (and steal the water). I had that happen to me very recently thus requiring me to start over again with the first plantings.  Also I needed to protect against jackrabbits as they would scratch the top of the Waterboxx and biting the plastic leaving gashes. I'm sure over a long time they woudl eventually break through but anyway the chicken wire seems to be doing its thing. I'll be upscaling my Waterboxx plantings next year once we get past the winter freeze.  I hope to have 30 Waterboxxes set up by late February (here in California).

Suzy Bean wrote:
Paul's presentation on Replacing Irrigation with Permaculture at the Inland Northwest Permaculture Convergence: http://www.richsoil.com/permaculture/508-podcast-087-replacing-irrigation-with-permaculture/

Paul talks about using dew ponds.

I listened to the podcast last night and found it very enjoyable.  Then I started thinking about my property. I have a couple of seasonal ponds. They hold water due to hard pan clay.  This last year I watched them fill with water, then the tadpoles started growing. I was excited hoping for lots of frogs or toads, whatever they were.  But as spring turned hot on the Carrizo Plain as it always does, the ponds evaporated leaving the tadpoles squirming in mud concentrations. I felt so sorry for the little guys. Where I made a mistake driving through the pond when I got my truck stuck, I dug out a little channel deeper than the rest of the pond and some lucky tadpoles found that dip and those ones lasted a week or two longer than the rest but still they did not reach maturity.  The next door property has a much larger pond and that one had the same fate.

So I'm wondering what I can do to help facilitate this pond lasting long enough that the frogs/toads will mature.  Last night's podcast got me thinking about this topic again.  I feel casting a shadow with trees will be near impossible for the next 10 or so years because trees don't grow nicely in that hard pan clay (which is also riddled with sodium carbonate which is highly alkaline/salty).  So my next idea would be to dig out the pond so that it might accumulate more water and therefore last longer.

So my question to the readers at Permies.com is, what are some guidelines to consider when modifying dew ponds so that they still will hold water.  I'm sure if I dig down deep, I'lll pass through the hard pan clay and get to better clay beneath and I'm concerned that I might make the pond leaky like a swale. The end results would be more water getting back into the ground but also there'd be no frogs/toads.

If anyone has something useful for me to consider I'd appreciate if you shared it! Thanks!