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Amerindian Magic, Japanese Genius, and Mother Nature.

h.h.

Active member
Veteran
Geese are also good for getting the insects and turning over mulch. Very good eggs as well.
A single goose will bond with you while a pair will bond with each other. A bit less destructive than chickens.
 

MrFista

Active member
Veteran
Yes, the chickens can make a mess allright. I figure the 3 I have here are producing enough fertiliser for the entire 1/4 acre though I'll be continuing to add organic matter, seaweed and minerals (rock dust) as they are sourced.

The chickens are now full time in the tractor, but next winter I'll let them run over the garden and greenhouse again.

Met a new friend who has a 20 acre food forest! Can't wait to go do some work on it for them, it needs a prune apparently. Will be couple months before I have time to visit, still excited already though.

Getting really good with native plants. Can walk around naming a lot of them and describing various properties. Think I'm gonna be a botanist when I grow up. Of course the day job will nver keep me from my hobby - food production systems and permaculture, and how to assist others converting to sustainable methods.
 

jaykush

dirty black hands
ICMag Donor
Veteran
sounds great fista, i miss all the juicy info you used to post.

20 acre food forest sounds awesome. cant wait until i have my 100+ acre forest garden.
 

MrFista

Active member
Veteran
Yeah I miss having the time to research the stuff i'm interested in (permaculture) but in the big picture I'll have a lot more to offer when things slow down again for me. Workload is beastly at times, but the results are pretty awesome, currently putting a plant evolutionary tree together (the reproductive cycles and floral morphology) in a way that it is (hopefully) understandable to first year biology students, it took me three years to get to this understanding and it really shouldn't be that hard!

Take the sporophyte. At first diminutive, non photosynthetic (liverworts) then slightly more complex and photosynthetic (mosses) then larger, with a meristem and stomata appearing (hornworts). in all these stages the sporophyte is marginal, a small part of the life cycle, but then ferns arrive. the sporophyte becomes larger, dominant with vascular tissues to support it's burgeoning size. As vascular improvements continue eventually we see the gymnosperms (with tracheids), then more vascular improvements can be found in angiosperms. The size and success of plants can be largely attributed then to their vascular systems - though of course it's far more complex than that. Today we have more than a quarter million species of flowering plants, a laboratory of such breathtaking scope and diversity I will happily spend the rest of my life working in it.
 

jaykush

dirty black hands
ICMag Donor
Veteran
but in the big picture I'll have a lot more to offer when things slow down again for me.

i know exactly what you mean.

the plant evolutionary tree sounds amazing, also sounds like it will never end. which is the best part!
 

That_One_Weed

New member
Holy S Im lost what the C is ( EM ) and why the F do people Abbreviate The H outa Everything?

just so everyone knows im kidding >_> but sersly whats EM??? Today I realized i really dont know a fucking thing about organics V_V yet another Venue of the Proverbial Smorgasbord that Is Organic growing.


At first i thought growing organic meant switching to Organic Bottled nutes...then it was Mixen your own water only Super soils...then it was AACT n shyt...Now this...cha'mon Organic world there has to be a end somewhere LOL
 

MrFista

Active member
Veteran
The problem with man is his attempt to put everything in a box. The real world has endless combinations of various factors and the more we learn the more we realise we know very little.

Can I put it simply?

It's all about the building and retention of soil. What builds good soil? Water - so you need to have this working for you, nutrients - so you want them staying on the land or cycling through crops - organic matter - so you want mulch, cover crops, things growing biomass to add to the mulch and compost pile.

Trace elements are easily dealt with. Get some rockdust and some seaweed and that's that done.

Char is the bonus item for draught tolerance, increased mycorrhizal and worm activity, increased CEC and more.

Every system is different, but the basics remain the same. Build soil, cut out the chemical crap, keep adding biodiversity and as you do the system stabilises. Watch, record, and learn.
 

MrFista

Active member
Veteran
So I made a meal last night after grazing the garden.

Entree of strawberries. Then we had taro wraps - Baked taro leaves wrapping onion, garlic, capsicum, chili, tomato, celery, cabbage, cauliflower, bokchoi, spinach, oregano, basil, parsley (plus mushrooms and cheese not from garden). With fresh beans, and fresh potatoes with mint.
For dessert we had a plum, apple and rhubarb crumble.

This (growing my own food) is really starting to work for me but there's so many skills involved I get to losing track of little stuff and the garden slows down.

Seedlings ready always for filling holes as I harvest, food preservation techniques and equipment, cooking skills to handle seasonal variation - important - and well worth taking the time to learn... seed saving and storage, plus the whole gardening thing... compost, mulch, micros and microbes...

I think time is a real limiting factor for most to get this hardcore into urban gardening. We live busier lives these days than we used to. I get it, I just, you know, the garden is my church too. It's not so much the garden that takes all the time, it's all the other things too, cooking, learning, searching for new plants, learning, trying new stuff out, learning, and obsessing, ah, the obsession, helps with the learning :)
 

mad librettist

Active member
Veteran
My fantasy involves a woman that tends the garden with my help when she needs it, while I am responsible mainly for foraging/hunting.

Fresh garden produce + wild potherbs + a bit of game = the happiest table ever!
 

chappie

Member
Veteran
Love the poetic, inspiring threads like this one. Alchemical mental jewels where behavior and action are transmuting high concepts into high performance agronomy. Any updates?
 
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