VERMONSTAH
Active member
I do use a clover for N fixing and it works.
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Aphotic's No Till- Indoor- Raised Bed- Experience & Pseudo Knowledge Emporium
- Thread starter Aphotic
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Yup, I use comfrey, grow it in my flower room and outside, I haven't grown it in my beds because it's root system is intense and it's hard to get rid of once it's established. I have a wide variety of stuff I use as a cover crop, I just chop it before replanting, towards the end when my canopy fills in, most everything dies off, the clover comes back though. Strawberries sound fun! I started some peppers to keep in my room, and have been thinking about planting garlic in with my plants as a pest deterrent. I've been trying to get some rosemary, and lavender going to plant with the cannabis. Before I had my PM issue I had started a bunch of different plants to companion plant with the cannabis, but have since put that on hold until everything's back under control.
If you have the room, and it doesn't take much, you should make your own compost, and WC. The quality will be miles better than anything store bought, it will be free, and you will know EXACTLY what's in it. Like others have pointed out, many store bought composts aren't that great, or microbialy active. Simply because much of it is made simply to reduce biomass, to get rid of waste. It's best to have the freshest compost/WC possible, it will be the most active. All that being said, if buying is all you can do at the moment, it's not the end of the world, and it will totally work, it'll just take longer to brew your tea, and you won't be adding quite as an active product to your soil as you could be.
If you have the room, and it doesn't take much, you should make your own compost, and WC. The quality will be miles better than anything store bought, it will be free, and you will know EXACTLY what's in it. Like others have pointed out, many store bought composts aren't that great, or microbialy active. Simply because much of it is made simply to reduce biomass, to get rid of waste. It's best to have the freshest compost/WC possible, it will be the most active. All that being said, if buying is all you can do at the moment, it's not the end of the world, and it will totally work, it'll just take longer to brew your tea, and you won't be adding quite as an active product to your soil as you could be.
VERMONSTAH
Active member
whoops
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Good news! You don't have to buy a composter, or worm bins! You can keep your worm bins inside, and make them from wood, or storage totes, it's super easy and there are many tutorials online. As far as composting, here is a link to the process I use, and you do it outside. You need to make your piles a minimum of a meter squared. https://deepgreenpermaculture.com/diy-instructions/hot-compost-composting-in-18-days/
Once you make a well rounded no till soil mix, there really isn't much you need to feed it, at the end of each cycle chop up the sun leaves, stems, and leave rootballs in place to decompose. So the only thing your losing is what it took to make your buds. It's close to a closed system, a little WC/compost top dress, some comfrey, horse tail, stinging nettle, you'll have more than enough excess stuff to add. I think many people are adding way to much between cycles.
What do you plan on spending $600-800 or so on for your build? I can help you go through the list and probably save you a bunch of $$$. Is your goal pumping out buds as fast as possible? Or just dankness with no time table? Personally I'm not in it for production, and I'm in the process of switching my mom room over to fluorescent lighting, the 600s are way too much for my needs, it's become like a job keeping up with pruning growth back, the stuff I have under fluoros is doing great, and even then is producing things way faster than I need. I'm also considering switching away from my 2-1k watt hps's in my flower room, 600's are far more efficient, I can match the output of my 1k watt setup and use half the energy with multiple 600's or so I've read. Everything I have is air cooled, and in light movers, and still with my low ceilings in my flower room, the light is too intense once the plants are mature, it's not too hot, too much light! Eventually I'm going to build structures to grow in, tailored to my needs, I'll incorporate skylights, and Windows, and use as much of the free power as I can, while still being able to easily black out the rooms when needed, in an automated system, I can't afford to do a greenhouse in this manor, but a few skylights and Windows for sure. Also I want the structures to be heavily insulated, and thst rules out most greenhouses. I'll prolly build the structures into the side of the hill, and use the hillside as a heat sink.
RIP
Bill Mollison 1928-2016
"If you hear that I am dead tell them they lie."
Bill Mollison
(An article from permaculture.co.uk)
In 1981, Bill Mollison, the co-founder of permaculture, won the Right Livelihood Award. This is his acceptance speech. It explains his motivations, how he began the global permaculture movement from nothing and his determination to find solutions amid ecological collapse.
I grew up in a small village in Tasmania. I was born in 1928, but my village might have existed in the 11th century. We didn't have any cars; everything that we needed we made. We made our own boots, our own metal works, we caught fish, grew food, made bread. I didn't know anybody who lived there who had one job, or anything that you could define as a job. Everybody had several jobs.
As a child I lived in a sort of a dream and I didn't really awake until I was about 28. I spent most of my working life in the bush or on the sea. I fished, I hunted for my living. It wasn't until the 1950s that large parts of the system in which I lived were disappearing. First, fish stocks became extinct. Then I noticed the seaweed around the shorelines had gone. Large patches of forest began to die. I hadn't realised until those things were gone that I'd become very fond of them, that I was in love with my country. This is about the last place I want to be; I would like to be sitting in the bush watching wallabies. However, if I don't stand here there will be no bush and no wallabies to watch. The Japanese have come to take away most of our forest. They are using it for newsprint. I notice that you are putting it in your waste‑paper basket. That's what has happened to the life systems I grew up in.
It's always a mark of danger to me when large biological systems start to collapse, when we lose whole stocks of fish, as we've lost whole stocks of herring, and many stocks of sardines, when we lose huge areas of the sea bottom which were productive in scallops and oysters. When we enquire why this happens, it comes back to one thing: the use of energy sources not derived from the biological system.
Dr. Sternglass, who was a pupil of Einstein's, has followed the drift of radioactive dust from Three Mile Island. The newspapers say: 'Nobody died at Three Mile Island'. Dr. Sternglass says that 30,000 children are now dead, died under the cloud drifts of hypothyroidosis, and many thousands are yet to die. Across this country, Russia, Germany, Japan, Canada and the United States, drifts an air system, carrying not only radioactives, but highly corrosive acids: sulphuric acids from the burning of coal, and nitric acids from motor vehicle exhausts.
The snow which we measured in Vermont a few months back had pH values of 1.9 to 2.5, which is much more acid than vinegar, more acid than any biological system can stand. We cannot find in the northern part of the United States or in Germany waters of pH higher than 4. Fish can't breed in those waters, frogs can't live there, and salamanders are extinct. Forests started to die in 1920, soon after the coal era started. Chestnuts have disappeared on the American continent by 80%, the Beech trees have disappeared. The Oaks are beginning to die throughout America, the pines are dying in Germany (they're losing 80,000 hectares this year) and many of them are now dying in Japan. The Eucalyptus are dying in Australia at 14% per annum. It won't be very long before you won't have any forests to throw away in your garbage cans. It's obvious to simple people like myself who go out on foot to find out what's happening that the Northern hemisphere will not be occupied by man for very many more years while he uses coal, petrol and radioactives. I wonder what happened to make us abandon the sort of life that I grew up in, in which we could sustain our lives indefinitely and in which no great systems died. I don't believe that we lead a better life, that we are any happier than I was and the children in that town still are.
I withdrew from society about 1970 because I had been long in opposition to the systems that I saw were killing us. I decided it was no good persisting with opposition that got you nowhere. I thought for two years. I wanted to return to society but I wanted to come back only with something very positive. I did not want to oppose anything again and waste my time. Somewhere someone had given me Mao‑Tse‑Tung's little red book. I didn't understand it very well, in fact it was very difficult for me to read. But, at one point when he was talking about an attack on the city of Tai Ching, his advice to his army was 'Don't attack Tai Ching: it's too heavily defended. Go around it and Tai Ching will fall.' So I've been going around the things that I think are killing us.
When I came back into our society I came back with a system I call Permaculture, a way in which man can live on the earth. To me we're not any more important a form of life than any other life form. Those of you, very few, who have been alone in forests for a long time, more than five weeks, know that you totally lose identity as a human being. You can't distinguish yourself from the trees, you can't distinguish yourself from any other living thing there. All aboriginal people, all tribal people, have to undergo such a period on their own in the environment. Afterwards, they never again can see themselves as separate: man here and tree there. You become as though you are simply a part of life.
The only safe energy systems are those derived from biological systems. A New Guinea gardener can walk through the gates of his garden taking one unit of energy and hand out seventy. A modern farmer who drives a tractor through the gate of his farm takes a thousand units of energy in and gives one back. Who is the most sophisticated agriculturist? We are getting rid of our soil even faster than we are destroying our atmosphere. For every one of us there is a loss of ten tons of soil a year. Nature can only replace one or two tons. We will leave our children an earth in which there is no soil or drinkable water.
We ourselves have always been left out of the energy equations. I'm the only machine I know which can fuel itself: I can make the food upon which I run. Give me a few friends and I can look after myself and many others. This will do me for an alternative energy source. We've never been taught to have confidence in ourselves as our own salvation. All the books you can buy on gardening are books on technique. All the books on strategy are wrong because they are one-dimensional. Multi‑dimensional systems will out‑yield one‑dimensional systems hundreds of times. Polycultures will always out‑yield monocultures. The Permaculture system is a safe way of a sustained ecology; it is in itself a safe and sustainable energy system.
In the days of Carl Linnaeus we were still naming things. For a century or so after Linnaeus we were finding out how they functioned. Today we know some of the principles that make them work but just as we've reached this stage, they have commenced to fall apart. We estimate that of the species that we can see and count, we will lose some 35,000 in the next one and a half decades. All my life we've been at war against nature. I just pray that we lose that war. There are no winners in that war.
A couple of years ago I resigned from a job at the university and threw myself at an advanced age into an uncertain future. I decided to do nothing else but to try to persuade people to build good biological systems. I existed for quite a while by catching fish and pulling potatoes. Then I started to make some money by designing sustainable systems for people, for their own houses and for their villages. Since then I've been able to train 20 people at a time. I have trained 400 young people who are now designing systems throughout the U.S. and Australia. In the coming year I will be training people in Germany and Brazil. We've set up a sort of brotherhood ‑ and sisterhood, because half of us are women. I don't believe women are any better designers than men but I think they know more about living systems.
We must make a very large movement towards a very quiet sort of revolution. We will go on training people until we have saturated all countries. What we try to do is to integrate all things that plants and animals will do with our own lives and our structures. It's possible to design entirely biological systems in which you could live, but we have to start with a place like Stockholm, which is about as abiological as you can get. There are simple things that anybody can do to look after themselves. Every city, for example, can produce its own food.
We are faced with an absolute choice: We can build the sort of cities we are building, continue to accumulate resources and power to run around like blowflies in cars, and be killed before long. Or we can live easily on the earth. It's possible for us to construct biological systems that work, it's well within our capacity. For a fraction of the cost of Swedish armaments Sweden could become an entire system like this. It's up to you, it's entirely up to you. I hope you all go back to work tomorrow and take your wages. Good luck to you.
The Right Livelihood Award, also known as the alternative Nobel Prize, is an international award to "honour and support those offering practical and exemplary answers to the most urgent challenges facing us today." The prize was established in 1980 by German-Swedish philanthropist Jakob von Uexkull, and an international jury, invited by the five regular Right Livelihood Award board members, decides the awards in such fields as environmental protection, human rights, sustainable development, health, education, and peace.
https://www.permaculture.co.uk/articles/bill-mollison-birth-global-movement
Bill Mollison 1928-2016
"If you hear that I am dead tell them they lie."
Bill Mollison
(An article from permaculture.co.uk)
In 1981, Bill Mollison, the co-founder of permaculture, won the Right Livelihood Award. This is his acceptance speech. It explains his motivations, how he began the global permaculture movement from nothing and his determination to find solutions amid ecological collapse.
I grew up in a small village in Tasmania. I was born in 1928, but my village might have existed in the 11th century. We didn't have any cars; everything that we needed we made. We made our own boots, our own metal works, we caught fish, grew food, made bread. I didn't know anybody who lived there who had one job, or anything that you could define as a job. Everybody had several jobs.
As a child I lived in a sort of a dream and I didn't really awake until I was about 28. I spent most of my working life in the bush or on the sea. I fished, I hunted for my living. It wasn't until the 1950s that large parts of the system in which I lived were disappearing. First, fish stocks became extinct. Then I noticed the seaweed around the shorelines had gone. Large patches of forest began to die. I hadn't realised until those things were gone that I'd become very fond of them, that I was in love with my country. This is about the last place I want to be; I would like to be sitting in the bush watching wallabies. However, if I don't stand here there will be no bush and no wallabies to watch. The Japanese have come to take away most of our forest. They are using it for newsprint. I notice that you are putting it in your waste‑paper basket. That's what has happened to the life systems I grew up in.
It's always a mark of danger to me when large biological systems start to collapse, when we lose whole stocks of fish, as we've lost whole stocks of herring, and many stocks of sardines, when we lose huge areas of the sea bottom which were productive in scallops and oysters. When we enquire why this happens, it comes back to one thing: the use of energy sources not derived from the biological system.
Dr. Sternglass, who was a pupil of Einstein's, has followed the drift of radioactive dust from Three Mile Island. The newspapers say: 'Nobody died at Three Mile Island'. Dr. Sternglass says that 30,000 children are now dead, died under the cloud drifts of hypothyroidosis, and many thousands are yet to die. Across this country, Russia, Germany, Japan, Canada and the United States, drifts an air system, carrying not only radioactives, but highly corrosive acids: sulphuric acids from the burning of coal, and nitric acids from motor vehicle exhausts.
The snow which we measured in Vermont a few months back had pH values of 1.9 to 2.5, which is much more acid than vinegar, more acid than any biological system can stand. We cannot find in the northern part of the United States or in Germany waters of pH higher than 4. Fish can't breed in those waters, frogs can't live there, and salamanders are extinct. Forests started to die in 1920, soon after the coal era started. Chestnuts have disappeared on the American continent by 80%, the Beech trees have disappeared. The Oaks are beginning to die throughout America, the pines are dying in Germany (they're losing 80,000 hectares this year) and many of them are now dying in Japan. The Eucalyptus are dying in Australia at 14% per annum. It won't be very long before you won't have any forests to throw away in your garbage cans. It's obvious to simple people like myself who go out on foot to find out what's happening that the Northern hemisphere will not be occupied by man for very many more years while he uses coal, petrol and radioactives. I wonder what happened to make us abandon the sort of life that I grew up in, in which we could sustain our lives indefinitely and in which no great systems died. I don't believe that we lead a better life, that we are any happier than I was and the children in that town still are.
I withdrew from society about 1970 because I had been long in opposition to the systems that I saw were killing us. I decided it was no good persisting with opposition that got you nowhere. I thought for two years. I wanted to return to society but I wanted to come back only with something very positive. I did not want to oppose anything again and waste my time. Somewhere someone had given me Mao‑Tse‑Tung's little red book. I didn't understand it very well, in fact it was very difficult for me to read. But, at one point when he was talking about an attack on the city of Tai Ching, his advice to his army was 'Don't attack Tai Ching: it's too heavily defended. Go around it and Tai Ching will fall.' So I've been going around the things that I think are killing us.
When I came back into our society I came back with a system I call Permaculture, a way in which man can live on the earth. To me we're not any more important a form of life than any other life form. Those of you, very few, who have been alone in forests for a long time, more than five weeks, know that you totally lose identity as a human being. You can't distinguish yourself from the trees, you can't distinguish yourself from any other living thing there. All aboriginal people, all tribal people, have to undergo such a period on their own in the environment. Afterwards, they never again can see themselves as separate: man here and tree there. You become as though you are simply a part of life.
The only safe energy systems are those derived from biological systems. A New Guinea gardener can walk through the gates of his garden taking one unit of energy and hand out seventy. A modern farmer who drives a tractor through the gate of his farm takes a thousand units of energy in and gives one back. Who is the most sophisticated agriculturist? We are getting rid of our soil even faster than we are destroying our atmosphere. For every one of us there is a loss of ten tons of soil a year. Nature can only replace one or two tons. We will leave our children an earth in which there is no soil or drinkable water.
We ourselves have always been left out of the energy equations. I'm the only machine I know which can fuel itself: I can make the food upon which I run. Give me a few friends and I can look after myself and many others. This will do me for an alternative energy source. We've never been taught to have confidence in ourselves as our own salvation. All the books you can buy on gardening are books on technique. All the books on strategy are wrong because they are one-dimensional. Multi‑dimensional systems will out‑yield one‑dimensional systems hundreds of times. Polycultures will always out‑yield monocultures. The Permaculture system is a safe way of a sustained ecology; it is in itself a safe and sustainable energy system.
In the days of Carl Linnaeus we were still naming things. For a century or so after Linnaeus we were finding out how they functioned. Today we know some of the principles that make them work but just as we've reached this stage, they have commenced to fall apart. We estimate that of the species that we can see and count, we will lose some 35,000 in the next one and a half decades. All my life we've been at war against nature. I just pray that we lose that war. There are no winners in that war.
A couple of years ago I resigned from a job at the university and threw myself at an advanced age into an uncertain future. I decided to do nothing else but to try to persuade people to build good biological systems. I existed for quite a while by catching fish and pulling potatoes. Then I started to make some money by designing sustainable systems for people, for their own houses and for their villages. Since then I've been able to train 20 people at a time. I have trained 400 young people who are now designing systems throughout the U.S. and Australia. In the coming year I will be training people in Germany and Brazil. We've set up a sort of brotherhood ‑ and sisterhood, because half of us are women. I don't believe women are any better designers than men but I think they know more about living systems.
We must make a very large movement towards a very quiet sort of revolution. We will go on training people until we have saturated all countries. What we try to do is to integrate all things that plants and animals will do with our own lives and our structures. It's possible to design entirely biological systems in which you could live, but we have to start with a place like Stockholm, which is about as abiological as you can get. There are simple things that anybody can do to look after themselves. Every city, for example, can produce its own food.
We are faced with an absolute choice: We can build the sort of cities we are building, continue to accumulate resources and power to run around like blowflies in cars, and be killed before long. Or we can live easily on the earth. It's possible for us to construct biological systems that work, it's well within our capacity. For a fraction of the cost of Swedish armaments Sweden could become an entire system like this. It's up to you, it's entirely up to you. I hope you all go back to work tomorrow and take your wages. Good luck to you.
The Right Livelihood Award, also known as the alternative Nobel Prize, is an international award to "honour and support those offering practical and exemplary answers to the most urgent challenges facing us today." The prize was established in 1980 by German-Swedish philanthropist Jakob von Uexkull, and an international jury, invited by the five regular Right Livelihood Award board members, decides the awards in such fields as environmental protection, human rights, sustainable development, health, education, and peace.
https://www.permaculture.co.uk/articles/bill-mollison-birth-global-movement
VERMONSTAH
Active member
Sorry i wont post in this thread anymore.......
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VERMONSTAH
Active member
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VERMONSTAH
Active member
[ur
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Why, what happened? Sorry, I've been really busy the last few days.
VERMONSTAH
Active member
Sorry about posting here. I wont again!
wasgedn
Active member
aphotic you and youre teachers are miles ahead the others growers...i really like youre thinking and approach...
and now you are a teacher for us ...thank you a lot sir teach a lot...
thx so much for https://www.permaculture.co.uk/videos....https://www.permaculture.co.uk/videos/making-and-charging-your-own-biochar
and now you are a teacher for us ...thank you a lot sir teach a lot...
thx so much for https://www.permaculture.co.uk/videos....https://www.permaculture.co.uk/videos/making-and-charging-your-own-biochar
wasgedn
Active member
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VERMONSTAH
Active member
Yep thanks for helping man and sorry for hijacking your thread. Its hard discerning internet law when your not familiar with internet law lol.
wasgedn
Active member
i think aphotic hasnt the time these days...i guess he has no problems with postings from others when their on topic...
.....i guess...but this is no classic growreport..
here is what i learned from aphotic ...amongst many other things
benefits of cover crops which carry or make nitrogen available...
.....i guess...but this is no classic growreport..
here is what i learned from aphotic ...amongst many other things
benefits of cover crops which carry or make nitrogen available...
VERMONSTAH
Active member
http://www.highmowingseeds.com/organic-non-gmo-seeds-rye-hairy-vetch-mix.html
the only non gmo seed company i trust has only rye and vetch.
the only non gmo seed company i trust has only rye and vetch.
Tactical Farmer
Member
Anyone have a working irrigation system (not blumat carrots) for indoor no till raised beds ?
Wand watering a 4x9 (36sqft) foot bed from one side is a pain with the plants are full.
Thinking a long soaker hose, possibility pressurized with a small pump with give even distribution ?
Wand watering a 4x9 (36sqft) foot bed from one side is a pain with the plants are full.
Thinking a long soaker hose, possibility pressurized with a small pump with give even distribution ?
Sorry guys, I've had a pretty crappy month, one of my goats head butted another goat that was pregnant, she had a miscarriage and then we lost her too a few days later. Then a pipe broke in one of my rooms and it flooded. Too many other little things to list, anyways it put me way behind, and I'm struggling just to keep everything together and get ready for winter. I'll post an update as soon as I dig myself out the of this hole, and I'll scan through and post some responses. Other than keeping things alive in my rooms, I put my projects on hold.
I would appreciate everyone's patients and please keep your comments respectful, and try to keep in mind sometimes the real world demands more of our attention than the forum.
I would appreciate everyone's patients and please keep your comments respectful, and try to keep in mind sometimes the real world demands more of our attention than the forum.
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I don't currently have irrigation in my beds indoors, but I was planning on it, and I have done a fare ammount of irrigation outdoors. So you have a single 4'x9' bed in your room, nice! I was initially considering a single large bed, but decided watering and plant maintenance would be too much of a hassle.
With pumps it's best to get a pump bigger than what your set up requires, as time goes on your pump will lose efficiency, junk will build up in the lines etc. If you planning on using standard soaker hose 3/4" I think, I wouldn't go any smaller than 1000gph, I picked up a few active aqua pumps on Amazon for $45 a piece, and I've had one of them running for a year nonstop so far with no issues. If you use soaker hose make sure to put a valve so you can adjust your flo rate as the soaker hoses tend to spray everywhere if you put enough pressure through them. You might want to consider drip emitters instead, or just make some water rings with spaghetti tubing and some tees, just make a circle with the tubing and the T, and poke holes around the inside of the circle with a hot finish nail. With a bed that big I imagine you don't need to water very often, just keep in mind that if you set your system up with a timer, that your plants water needs will vary.
I keep meaning to look up a moisture sensor, it would be nice if the system could be activated only when the plants need it, anyways that's the sort of system I plan on making for my indoor beds.
Cheers
Yes, I like that company too. My girlfriend has quite a few seed companies she likes and orders from, when I have a minute I'll ask her for a list. We have a couple friends who have seed companies, I'm not sure if they have any cover crop seeds though, but it's worth a look, one of the companies is Siskiyou seeds and they're in southern Oregon, and I'll have to look up the name of the other one. Don, from Siskiyou seeds makes YouTube videos on his farm, they explain what they do, how they process seeds, and a bunch of other great info.
I got my cover crop seeds from all over, no one company had everything I wanted, high mowing was one of them, seeds of change was another, and a few others, we also had some seed we collected ourselves.
