thinking about Asparagus… and what a great, informative article on how to plant and maintain a thriving asparagus bed!
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thinking about Asparagus… and what a great, informative article on how to plant and maintain a thriving asparagus bed! One of our favorite mail order nurseries - one of several I will be posting. This year, we are excited about our first perennial crops - tree collard, asparagus, blueberries! Raintree Nursery, fruit, nut and berry plants for the American fruit grower. This seems like an awesome local site for chicken feed; we will be checking them out for gardening, etc. Some great advice from a local deck builder - he talks about an important aspect of “building green” is to build it to last - and has some good pointers about how to do that. ![]() Doug Fir (Knotty) Cx and I went shopping several months ago to look for trim, and decided that Doug Fir is beautiful, with a tight vertical grain and a gorgeous reddish color akin to cedar; and it is not as expensive as some other tight grain varieties. It is also, we have discovered, a native of the United States, which likely means its forests tend to be better ecologically, and many of the forests it inhabits have been managed since 1912, and are mostly from the Northwest region - probably as local as we are going to get, unless we go with oak, which I don’t particularly like. There is a great article about doug fir here. Of course, we will also be looking for a supplier that is FSC certified; I don’t know yet if we will go with a local supplier, or try to find something less expensive online. Mt. Storm seems to be the best supplier locally - they have all sorts of interesting FSC - certified lumbers and plywood. I have been reading the Four Seasons Gardening book - by a couple of gardeners who live in Maine, and have been determined to raise fresh food for all four seasons - in Maine! They went to France (same latitude, if you can believe it) and learned how they grown veggies in the winter; they built “cold frames”, which create mini-sun rooms for their plants. But they are also a big fan of Dehydration as a route to having delicious food. They note that canning decreases nutrients, is EXTREMELY labor and resource intensive, etc. Which brings me to my topic - how I LOVE dehydration! We just bought the Excalibur, which Cx did a lot of research on, and liked because of the fanning (horizontal, not vertical) the size (9 great big layers), that it is square (offers more space,) and for its adjustable thermometer and timer, key for precise drying. We have been drying for our first round, and have several pounds of fantastic cherry tomatoes, and a bunch of dried pears. They are amazing. Irresistable in fact. Big thumbs up on the Excalibur Dehydrator. I won’t give up canning entirely (not quite anyother way to do large quantities of apple butter) but I have a feeling much more will be devoted. This is TERRIFIC article about how to dry your clothes, why to dry your clothes, even how to wash your clothes more efficiently without buying the very cool top-loading washing machine that we did! Don’t Be an Energy Glutton: How to Wash and Dry Your Clothes Efficiently : Chelsea Green. We have just cut down several trees - a couple of young redwoods, two cedars, and two mulberries. While it was hard to cut them down, we are excited about having clear solar access for our garden, our house, and eventually solar panels. They were all blocking the morning light, were in the way of a clear path, or were (in the case of the cedars) falling down because of misuse. So, now we would really like to use them for our own purposes - a picnic table, for example. But how? After calling our Local Tool Lending Library (where we have happily borrowing an electric 18″ chain saw), they suggested we call around to see about a horizontal band-saw. We ended up at Healdsburg Lumber - who suggested a portable saw mill. So far, I have found a great article on portable sawmills, with links to different varieties to purchase for the “personal user’s forest.” We don’t really have a forest, though, and the cost for a pretty simple, manual Wood Mizer is $3700. Ouch! Now, if we had enough wood that we could make, say a deck, out of it, that would be terrific.. So, how much wood can we get out of our trees? Well, according to the Ohio State University Fact Sheet, if we have a 16 foot log with a 12 inch diameter, we can get 30 board feet. Except that our trees are not that big - while we have three logs that are about 12″ in diameter, they are all only 6 feet long. However, this fact sheet did explain clearly about how people go about calculating board feet. So, when I looked a bit longer, and found a Wood Board Calculator, I knew that I needed to check the “Doyle’s measurement,” which US foresters typically use as their form of measurement. It looks like, if I have done my calculations right, that we may have about 250 board feet waiting for us. That suddenly becomes worth it! So, onward in my search for someone who has a portable saw mill for us to use.
I didn’t get to meet Bill, but I did attend a memorable talk by Scott Pittman, a long-time friend of Bill’s. I had recently read Mansanobu Fukuoka’s One Straw Revolution, and after the talk I asked Scott about a very provocative statement that Fukuoka-san made: “there is no rain in the desert because there are no plants.” Obviously we normally think of it the other way, that there’s no plants in the desert because of the lack of rain. In response Scott explained how Pseudomona syringe bacteria live on shrubs and trees and waft up into the atmosphere and become the ’seeds’ that rain drops form around. Interesting, a scientific explanation for Fukuoka-san’s spiritual insight. That was enough of a hook for me, after graduation I spent ten years developing a permaculture teaching and design practice. Though I have spent the most recent ten years developing a slightly different line of work, permaculture is still near and dear to my heart, and we will be drawing out the process in the months to come as we develop our property. When I was actively teaching classes I collected definitions of permaculture to share with students, here are a few I particularly like:
~from Sustainable Living in Drylands
We’ll post more in time, the diversity of definitions is delightful!
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