paul wheaton

from jessee

https://permies.com/t/60/380024/Jessee-Bootcamp-Experience-today#4010288

carrying junkpoles

Willow feeders.

Hugelkultur.





Replace soil tests with polyculture, rich soil, hugelkultur and a diversity of mulches.



I know that in the last few years I have shifted some of my horticultural philosophies to changing the staples.  I call it "eat what you grow instead of grow what you eat."  

Rather than forcing food to grow that requires massive fertilizer imports ...  plus irrigation, lots of work, lots of discipline, lots of pest control, etc. ....     rather than all of that, grow heaps of food that will spread with zero effort and has massive harvest windows.  



Rather than solving ag issues, I would prefer to see a thousand times more thought go into how to convince people to start a food pump garden.  Maybe 20 minutes to get things started.  Maybe 20 minutes more to start another nearby (somebody else's property?  A friend?  A public trail?).   If a person is feeling industrious, i would like to talk about hugelkultur:  triple your food pump, while 10x the richness of the soil ....  

Daniel Andy wrote:One modification that may be valuable and I havent seen it in this thread.

The wood the rock jacks are made of will tend to rot where it touches wet dirt and this will lead to leaning and failure earlier than necessary.  Nobody likes dropping their projects to go mend fences.

You should be able to make the rock jacks last longer on dirt if you can find a few flat rocks and put one under each post.

May be overkill, maybe not. Depends on your soil moisture, I bet. This could be valuable in wetter climates and not necessary in inland or bedrock applications.

here is a picture i uploaded two weeks ago.  i think the rocks you wish for are there.

Jay Angler wrote:By "ONLY nails" are you meaning that never screws or brackets? Or that it simply isn't practical to drill a hole through and use a wooden dowel? Have your people ever tried making a Rock Jack with either mortice and tenon or holes and dowels? It might be time prohibitive, but it would be interesting to know if it would work.

Nails are the only metal.

Screws (of any kind) have proven to do poorly.

And some people want to try huge spikes.  

I am so pleased with the latest builds doing an excellent job of using round wood and nails from a nail gun.

I do think that some day there could be pure wood designs.  Maybe version 10?

Two rules of consuming sunchokes:

   - start small and build your biome

   - harvest after one or two hard frosts

We have not had a hard frost yet, but we started harvesting anyway.  So we are testing the second rule.


This, is one sunchoke





I have been eating heaps and heaps and heaps of sunchokes.  Every day.  Way too early in the season.   Maybe 20% of the food i eat every day is sunchokes.  And I have had some days where it is over 50%.  Zero farts.  

Many people here are eating lots of sunchokes.  Some have zero farts.  Some have farts, but they are contemplating putting the blame on something else.  I am now to the point of thinking that if they ramp up sunchokes, it might actually be a sort of anti-fart thing.  

with lots and lots of further testing ...   I wonder if we will get to the point of saying that anybody bringing up the fart factor is simply a person that ate too many sunchokes on their first try.  Understandable because once you have a taste and realize that they are far tastier than any potato, you can easily over eat.



My plan is to experiment on myself this winter.  Making sunchokes my primary staple.




Also ...   the giant sunchoke above ...   keep in mind that this was harvested from a hugelkultur built on solid rock.  We are focusing our gardening efforts on building soil rather than attempting to grow food in a way that depletes the soil.  The idea is that by building the soil, then our gardens will pump out far more food with little to zero effort.  

A rich soil with a rich polyculture solves a list of issues.

and some pics from jessee

https://permies.com/t/50/380024/Jessee-Bootcamp-Experience-today

from estaban's bel thread

https://permies.com/t/510/361444/quiet-hours-bootcamp-grind-Esteban

Some of the version 9 junk pole fence going in to replace what was built 12 years ago (version 3).  




Look at how the rock jacks are stouter, and have less rocks.



Note that all of the fence and rock jacks use ONLY nails from the nail gun.

Gonna do a closed live thing tomorrow (saturday) for PIE peeps.  Details in the private PIE forum.

i think this link works for you to get PIE

https://permies.com/pie

This last week has been extra flooded with pancake doghouses.