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Post by keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.) on Jun 25, 2011 12:33:12 GMT -5
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Post by raymondo on Jun 26, 2011 0:20:17 GMT -5
It's a lovely little film which makes its point very well. I had hoped that the BBC might offer it for sale as a DVD but sadly they don't.
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Post by keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.) on Jun 26, 2011 0:32:45 GMT -5
It's a lovely little film which makes its point very well. I had hoped that the BBC might offer it for sale as a DVD but sadly they don't. Glad you liked the film. Hmm... too bad they don't offer a DVD. I did a quick search and found this webpage where they are discussing it. From what i gather from the discussion, it might be possible to request an official dvd from someone, but who knows if they still have copies. transitionculture.org/2009/03/27/a-second-chance-to-watch-and-record-a-farm-for-the-future/Otherwise you could go the route i took months ago. I used one of those youtube downloader websites (i think i either used keepvid.com or savevid.com) and once i had the video downloaded, i used a program called DeVeDe to create a DVD of it. It worked out nicely. |
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Jun 26, 2011 13:04:12 GMT -5
The film is very threatening to me.... I have converted (am converting) my back-yard to that kind of a garden, but I don't know how well it would go over in my rented fields. I sure do a lot less labor in my home garden than in the traditional fields. I even have wheat-like grasses growing in the yard because of winnowing the feral wheat last fall.
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Post by synergy on Jun 26, 2011 15:53:52 GMT -5
I love that film, I watch it over and over and yes I have started planting my little farm with multipurpose hedgerows , my once naked pastures are getting dotted with small (very small wire cage protected ) trees. I am trying, and failing, and sometimes having little successes so i keep at it. I really think one day I will hit the right balance of beasties, and plants for food production but I am at it a little at a time.
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Post by MikeH on Oct 18, 2012 7:07:51 GMT -5
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Post by synergy on Oct 18, 2012 22:29:19 GMT -5
Wow that garden in Mouscron , Belgium is on about the 50 degree latitude parallel. And appears to be established in a rather compact walled space in the middle of the town encompassing only1800 square meters . Thus I live on about the same northern latitude and smaller than my 4 acres , I think and yet they grow this:
395 apple trees, of which 312 varieties
•81 prune trees, of which 69 varieties
•127 wine plants in 82 varieties
•41 fig trees in 35 varieties
•82 sorts of citrus trees
•50 different varieties of raspberry trees
Wow , that is inspiring! MikeH do you have an opinion on how they manage it differently , is their methodology really superior ? I go by the book so often because I am such a newbie and I feel I am relying on more learned knowledge. I am a fan of your blog One Thing Leads to Another.
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Post by steev on Oct 18, 2012 23:25:53 GMT -5
Relience on revealed/established knowledge is emblematic of fear of failure. We have nothing to lose but our effort/resources/ignorance; when we hazard to take a chance, we may regain our effort and resources, losing only our ignorance, and our respect for "authority", so often the source of our ignorance.
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Post by raymondo on Oct 19, 2012 5:12:33 GMT -5
Excellent find Mike. I think that's the sort of garden I'd like but I guess it's a lifetime's work!
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Post by MikeH on Oct 19, 2012 5:24:21 GMT -5
encompassing only1800 square meters . or .4435 acres Turn on the captions on this video (you have to watch it at You Tube to see the captions button) and you'll get additional insight into what they are doing and why. I think that they colour outside the lines. It's free-form horticulture. If it weren't for 8-10' boards on the ground, you wouldn't know where the paths were. When I walk through our woods, I find wild apples that Nature has planted, growing four feet from each other. When man plants apples, he uses straight rows with and particular spacings. Man imposes his sense of order on Natures sense of order which he sees as random chaos. I don't think that this approach scales up but I do think that it's workable at the individual or small community level. When I repeated the quote, "Don't do what the books say", I wasn't suggesting that we reject the conventional, only that we don't stop there, that we question it. I'll use composting as an example. Everything you read says layers of brown and green in a pile that must start heating. But if you look at how Nature does it, there's no pile or layering of brown and green. In fact, it's mostly brown. There have been semi-conventional gardeners, ie, non-forest gardeners, who have mimicked Nature to a degree - Ruth Stout and Emilia Hazelip. They composted in place by chopping and dropping and leaving the roots in the ground to decompose in place. We have piles of grass clippings, leaves, scythed material, brush ( cut up into 6" pieces), rocks (up to 4"), kitchen waste (ex-meat since we'd rather not draw in carnivores). It sits untouched - no turning, no wetting down - until we need it. Often we need it before it's "ready". We use it anyway. This spring we had a new raised bed that we packed with un-composted material from last fall that we ran through a mulching mower. We'd put in a layer, water it, walk on it and then put in a layer, water it, and walk on it. We repeat this until the bed was full and then skinned a two-inch layer of fully composted dark brown green waste on the top. We planted squash in that bed and they immediately sprouted in the compost. We immediately started to mulch with grass clippings. When the plants were large enough, they got 6 inches of grass clippings as mulch. We didn't have to water that bed until about one month into the drought. We had a good harvest - the zucchini gave us all the bread and butter pickles we need for ourselves and for next year's market and the winter squash will take us through the winter. A week ago when I started working in that bed to convert it to an area for trench layering fruit and nut trees either for rootstock or for additional trees, I noticed that the bed was a mixture of pockets of rich brown compost and original material in various degrees of decay. I left it as was although I did re-arrange it a bit to make sure that the tree roots were in a mixture that was mostly decomposed. I will say that we didn't start out that way. We have compost bins that we did the green/brown thing turning every week. We got brown stuff by the next year. But we never had enough and the bins weren't large enough so we'd buy compost and we'd pile up compost material outside the bins. A few years ago when we had just used up another five yards of delivered compost that cost $200 plus a $50 dollar delivery fee and I was muttering about the never-ending cost and looking around for anything that I could use to fill the remaining raised beds, I decided to use some of the slightly decomposed material in the previous fall's pile of leaves. The leaves were a mixture of dry and wet from the winter snow that had melted so I ran them through the mulching mower. The result looked soil-ish and the plants thrived on the material. That was the beginning of moving away from the Rules of Compost. With the size of the compost pile this year, I expect that next year will be the first year that we do no buy any compost. My apologies for doing into such detail but I think the detail shows that you don't always have to follow the Book of Compost. Thank you. We haven't posted much this year because the drought pushed us into survival mode which doesn't make for much enjoyment in the garden. |
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Post by MikeH on Oct 19, 2012 6:06:04 GMT -5
Relience on revealed/established knowledge is emblematic of fear of failure. Perhaps but I think that it's more a matter of "That's how my daddy and his daddy and his daddy all the way back to Adam, did it". We are creatures of habit who get stuck in a rut. Ruts in the garden can be a problem, especially if you misstep in one and do in an ankle. I think that there are a number of problems with so-called conventional horticultural knowledge especially KAG - Knowledge According to Google. KAG experience is usually cut-and-paste rather than first hand. Even if horticultural knowledge is first hand, it's not necessarily transferable, at least, not without tweaking. Being at the same latitude or in the same hardiness zone or even the same city doesn't mean that what works for one will work for another. The effects of one's soil, climate/micro-climate, and growing conditions (top-of-the-hill/bottom-of-the-hill/no-hill) cannot be easily identified, much less quantified. Based on where I'm at on my horticultural path, I think that apprenticing schlepping with for Fukuoka, Stout, Hazelip, Chapman must have been magical. Today, Jamie Nicol (google seedzen and Mas Franch) walks in their footsteps and there are probably others. |
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Post by homegrower on Oct 19, 2012 8:31:14 GMT -5
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Post by ottawagardener on Oct 19, 2012 9:45:29 GMT -5
I am converting an existing orchard in my new place into this sort of garden. Previous to our moving in, it was interplanted in places with veggies and frequently tilled. Walking on the soil was like walking on a beach when the sun was out because of how sandy the soil had become. The drought and earwig invasion slowed down the establishment of more plants both herbaceous and woody but there is always next year!
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Post by steev on Oct 20, 2012 0:59:37 GMT -5
I think the rule has to be "give it a shot!". Conditions are so variable and numerous that one can't depend entirely on rules from outside. The notion "that's how my Grandaddy did it" is fine, but it is actually possible to learn better, sometimes. I do not claim that newer, or different, is always better; it may sometimes be much worse.
In my own horticultural practice, it has become obvious that many things that were "discovered" and promoted in the 50's, were erroneous, although they seemed to be good ideas at the time. "Seemed" is not the same as "were".
The whole "composting" concept is an example of this problem. One can invest lots of work or lots of time; I am now an advocate of time. There are other organisms and creatures that actually want to turn wastes into soil; bless them!; may they prosper and their tribes increase! I have other things to do than their work, even if I can do it faster than do they, unaided.
In my own current practice, I have planting aisles ~8' wide; I throw waste/weeds into the tree rows between these to rot; if I choose, I can rake this material back into my planting aisles (it's nmt 4' out).
The rotting material feeds my fruit trees, my veggies, the environment in general; I don't "layer" it, amend it, or turn it. Admittedly, I have more than an urban lot to work in, so I can afford a longer turn-around, and the neighbors are less "vigilent".
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Post by olddog on Oct 20, 2012 20:18:33 GMT -5
i have watched that film several times also, it is like so perfect, utopia, all is right with the world, then i wake up and realize i am in California,
though many of the concepts are great, and i still love that film.
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