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Summary
Once again, Paul calls someone who paid him for a consultation on their
land – this time Jennie in the San Luis Valley of Colorado.
The land is almost completely flat and desert-like with only 12 inches of precipitation per year, with a lot of that being in the form of snow. There is a complete lack of
trees and not much humus in the soil, leaving it mostly gravel and a surplus of rocks. She’s already starting to remedy this by getting in
compost made from untreated
wood and food scraps from a
local sawmill and restaurants, a majority of which is even organic. Paul personally wouldn’t use it, opting to use a
Ruth Stout technique of simply emptying compost buckets onto
earthworks and covering the resulting slop with a couple of inches of wood chips or
straw. Unfortunately this runs into issues with
mice, for which the dogs are of no help, and Jennie is allergic to cats, so Paul suggest getting a terrier to teach the other two that mice are kibble.
Paul’s usual stratagem of spamming
hugelkultur hits a snag from there being next to no trees on the property, but she can get beetle-killed pine in from the surrounding area. First off:
berms. They’ll block the omnipresent, omnidirectional wind and make growing plants actually possible. Seeing as the wind comes from every direction, he’d surround about 2 acres of the property with 15ft tall, 30ft wide berms with a 5-8ft wide road about half way up them. Then put a 4-5foot tall
fence on top of the berm to make the
fence effectively tall
enough to keep out any local
deer, antelope, or
cattle as the existing fence is only barely enough to keep out cattle. This’ll leave the 2 acres as somewhat of a wind-and-deer-free oasis.
Relevant Threads
Southwestern USA regional forum
Rockies regional forum
Greening the Desert forum
Earthworks forum
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This podcast was made possible thanks to:
Dr. Hugh Gill Kultur
Kyle Neath
Bill Crim
anonymous
Chris Sugg
Kerry JustTooLazy
Jocelyn Campbell
Bill Erickson
Sasquatch
G Cooper
Dominic Crolius
Penny McLoughlin
Mehron Kugler
Pasquale DeAngelis
havokeachday
Julia Winter, world's slowest mosaic artist
Greg Martin
Mark
Sean Benedict
Rita Bliden
Dana Martin
Candace Dahlk
Keith Kuhnsman
Leanne
Eric Tolbert
Nick DePuy
Nathan Hale
Opalyn Brenger
Polly Jayne Smyth
Todd Gerardot
Katie Young
Ivar Vasara
Brent Lawson
Weston prestage
Candice Crawford
Chris Holtslag
Song Zheng
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