Currently living in the post apocalypse?

[Walk]

Dec 25, 2018 10:39:26 GMT -5 William said:

www-nbcnews-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna946751?amp_js_v=a2&_gsa=1#referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&_tf=From%20%251%24s&share=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcnews.com%2Fhealth%2Fmental-health%2Fclimate-grief-growing-emotional-toll-climate-change-n946751

The news about climate change is bad, its depressing and maybe in some ways worse than the reality for many of us.

I think the reality is that people will probably change the way they live. Garden more. Buy less stuff. Drive electric cars instead of gas cars.

I think the past is a pretty good road map to how to deal with this future. Gardens used to be bigger. People didn't used to own cars. My own grandparents still had teams of horses and knew how to farm with them on both sides.

So my great grandmother who lived to see the moon landings was born in a very different time.

We can live differently than we do today.

I'm reading Will Bonsall's book on gardening. He uses his own composted humanure to fertilize his corn and refuses to get any animal manure for his gardens on principle. He does however use tree leaves from town.

I am actually a little dubious about tree leaves from town and about animal manure because of bind weed seed and herbicide contamination respectively. I am not in general though opposed to free soil fertility (around here both manure and leaves can be had for free) on principle because it seems like a waste. I've gotten both for my garden in the past. I've also had some scares with bindweed seedlings and I know how liberally many folk treat their land with herbicides many of which now have residual ongoing effects that can go right through stock from treated forage or hay.

However both Will and Jeavons write that we can close the sustainability circle on our land and still have big productive gardens. So maybe the windfall times of free or cheap external garden inputs will come to an end because of increased competition for them and we will need to be careful to not sell our soil fertility. Elliot Coleman hays for compost too- though writes that we can feed it to animals first if we want with minimal loss of soil fertility. Im pretty sure I have enough grassland to harvest grass mulch for my garden and plan to do more of that next year. Hay it's free and sustainable.

I'm the daughter of Depression-era horse farmers, but we use people power to work our 1/4 acre garden. Like Will Bonsall, we use our composted humanure on our corn plantings which is about 1/4 of our plot each year, along with the composted manure from our few chickens and ducks. We use our homemade garden waste compost and leaf mulch on brassicas, onions, cucurbits, root crops, and greens. Another 1/4 of our plot is solanacea and amaranth and these all get grass mulch that we "make hay" from our land. The last 1/4 of our plot is legumes which don't get any fertilizer or mulch. We let weeds grow that are beneficial - ground ivy, dandelions, and chickweed in paths and purslane and crab grass as understory in tall crops to add biomass eventually (we've stopped planting intentional green manure crops and utilize weeds instead). We mow weeds in paths and hoe or cut as needed in beds. We don't have any way of hauling mulch or leaves in from off the farm and so just use what we have here. By the way, we've found that cutting grass with our GE ElecTrak front deck mower and raking the cuttings when dry with a 44" Agri-Fab tow-behind lawn sweeper with a "dump" feature makes easy to pick up piles of grass hay. When we had sheep we bought hay from a friend and used their bedding and manure instead of making our own mulch. So far the organic matter percentage is holding at about 4%, up from the 2.5% it started with in 1999 after 20 years of CRP that was plowed down initially. I really liked Will's book as it gave me lots of thought provoking ideas to incorporate into our fertility plans.

[mskrieger]

That's interesting what you wrote about favas growing under sawdust mulch, William. I want to compost our humanure. My husband works in a cabinet shop and we could have all the hardwood sawdust we want, but I am leery of it tying up nitrogen and other nutrients for vegetable crops if added to my garden. I'm working with a much smaller plot of land than you--1/3 acre in total, part of which my house sits on, right in town--so if I screw up the soil in one spot I have less room to maneuver. 

(I suspect if I really did add too much sawdust, I could just rectify it with MAP, but that'd be a shock to the whole system.) The other option would be fallen leaves, but then I worry about what people have sprayed on them. Too much gratuitous lawn spraying around here.

My soil's organic matter stays close to 6.9%, Walk. I add very little compost, sometimes none at all. I bet it's a matter of climate, yours being hotter. 

[mskrieger]

Theoretically, there is such a thing as too much organic matter... And note that Ruth Stout was growing in an entirely different climate and soil than you. Her Maine soil was very depleted and acidic, and she was using salt marsh hay, which is lovely stuff loaded with minerals and entirely lacking in weed seeds.

(Just a bit of local New England knowledge, which you probably already knew but just in case...)

[reed]

I mulch some, I compost some, I love what a thick patch of fall planted turnips and radish left to rot does for the soil, I throw in some chicken poo now and then and maybe some clean wood ashes. I do various common sense things  but it just isn't practical for me to provide the optimal recommended conditions for even one particular species let alone many so I just mostly quit worrying about it. 

The path I'v taken now is that with enough diversity it's easier to find/breed/select the plants that grow here, than it is to change the soil.

[reed]

Mine stared out years ago about 15' x 25'. I did lots of mulching, double digging and all that goofy stuff back then. Then I got a tiller and it grew to about 50' x 80' about a 10th acre. Then it doubled with a whole new spot, then they both increased again so now it's well over 1/4 acre not counting the non-fenced areas.

But now the fenced areas have increased in usable space and productivity without actually growing in size, by abandoning that stupid tiller. I no longer need the perimeters inside the fences or the extra wide paths to maneuver it. It's actually much easier without the tiller too. Damn thing is heavy, it roars and stinks. When I used it I always felt I had to till the whole place all at once but I don't plant it all at once. That left either tilled areas eroding in the rain or the alternative of hauling that thing out repeatedly to till one 4' x 50' bed then putting it up till time to plant the next one. Since I generally only want to plant 1 or 2 of the planting beds a time anyway, I can do that practically it the time it took to get the tiller ready.

[reed]

I have about 1 and 1/2 acres that is mostly tamed. The house, mowed yard and fenced gardens are contained in it.

Another 2 or so acres is semi-tame with lots of fruit and nut trees, berry brambles, grapes, horseradish, sunroots, burdock and the like. I only sort of tend to most of that, occasionally mowing a path through it or mulching some particular new planting till it gets established. Fenced chicken pasture is also included in that.

Rest of my ground starts getting steep and is heavily wooded although not as much so, as before the ash trees died. I plant lots of nut trees from seed every year, pecans do especially well and grow pretty fast.

I have and still do harvest lots of weeds, rotten tree branches, even topsoil from the non tamed ares to dump in the garden.

Irrigation is a thing I never used to have to deal with and I don't have a good set up for it. It is becoming more and more of a problem for me. Early planted stuff still does pretty good, living I guess off the deep moisture as the dry weather arrives but for late planted I do have to water, which I do mostly by hand. For example when I plant corn in late June, early July, I dig good sized trenches which I fill with water repeatedly till the soak in rate slows down. Then I back fill with dry dirt, make rows and plant. Then I water the planted row again just lightly and cover with more dry dirt. It's on it's own after that and I have had some good crops mature with barely a drop of additional water.

I compost just by picking a spot in each garden each year where everything gets dumped. Next spring I use my pitch fork to just throw it all around, big un-composted stuff is raked up and piled in a new spot so a different planting area each year, in each garden is somewhat idled, except I will also sometimes plant stuff in the piles.

I prep a planting area just by ranking it off, chopping out any big perennial weeds if necessary and hoeing out my rows, I don't till deep at all anymore. Paths are the width of an old flat scoop shovel, I shave them with a very sharp hoe and scoop it it up and pitch it between rows in the beds.

I'v harped about it before but for me the discovery of how well a fall cover crop of radish and turnips does is almost miraculous, they do all the deep tilling for me and provide a late winter mulch when they freeze down. Wild Purslane is abundant and seems to help with water conservation in the summer, I started letting it just make a solid mass under corn and tomatoes. I don't know if it doesn't use a lot of water it's self or if the ground shade it provides compensates for what it uses, but it seems to work pretty good.

I don't know if it's what you would call intensive, I just consider finding ways to grow more stuff in less space with less effort as common sense. And though some things sound like tremendous work, like digging those trenches it really ins't. Dumping the tiller, making peace with certain weeds, doing just a little bit of work at time but doing it regularly is working very well for me. Except for the increasing need for water, which I'm continuing to work on. 

[blueadzuki]

That brings up an interesting question that occurred to me a few days ago. If the global temperature went up a bit, would the world production of rye (which, as I understand usually needs colder conditions to grow than wheat) begin to suffer? I understand there IS such a thing as heat tolerant rye (There seems to be an heirloom one in North Carolina) but they seem rare.

One also might wonder about the obscure wheat relatives of Eurasia (tiompheevi, vavilovii etc.)

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Over the past two years, I grew out about 10 wheat varieties for the Rocky Mountain Seed Alliance's Heritage Grain Trials. Four of them did well for me. I am intending to inter-plant five of them this spring to start working towards a wheat landrace. I think that they are all tetraploids. Hmm. I'm also growing Tim Peter's perennial wheat. I suppose that I aught to include that in the crossing block, so call it 6 varieties.

[prairiegardens]

In the Wild Garden Seed catalog for this year there is an article by Frank Morton regarding the new tactics being used to patent not just seed varieties but something called utility patents which extend wayyyyy past previous patents. These apparently apply to ALL aspects of the plant AND all its progeny, all its traits, even its pollen, as well as any information which might derived from it through research. It's a very sobering and frightening prospect which highlights the total incompetence and idiocy of government to behave even slightly intelligently regarding food security or agriculture.. I don't know if the article might be available elsewhere, it's titled "So, I Bought Some Seed- What can I Do With It? IP Ambiguity and Its Impact On Organic Seed Availability."

[jocelyn]

It looks to me that old fashioned seed saving and swapping will become important.
Keep in mind that selective breeding by illiterate peasants has produced most of our current food crops.
It is only lately that GMO shortcuts have happened.

I was talking to a plant breeder who had been working on GMO soybeans, but the project was scrapped when the traditional breeding was able to come up with equally good fungal resistance. We had export markets for NON GMO soy, so the GMO stocks were destroyed.

GMO stocks are not always better than selective breeding. Unintended consequences often pop up too, so
keep on saving seeds, grin.

[prairiegardens]

Still going on with the present President of Brazil intent on selling off/cutting down the jungle for various sorts of development, including land which had been supposedly set aside for the people still living there. That's going to lead to real devastation across the globe according to everything I've read. Greed, arrogance, ignorance and stupidity in all their glory. 


record snowfall this last week on Vancouver Island, most since records have been kept, supposedly. 

As to colonialization of North America... The seizure of land set aside for Native Americans and Canadians continues, with both governments riding roughshod over treaties to pander to the oil and gas industries, and/or mining interests in the US. In BC billions are being spent to build a dam on highly unstable land, which is also some of the best agricultural land in Canada, to say nothing of much of it being treaty land. The present premier during the election campaign promised to scrap it but once in power of course had a change of heart. 

[steev]

Let us not forget our little fiends/friends, the insects, which are of drastically declining populations, many going extinct. No biggie, aside from loss of pollination, except that they are of primary importance to much of the food chain as food itself.

We face the real possibility of a world supporting little above insect level.

[philagardener]

It does seem that intelligent life is dwindling . . .

[steev]

Given the trend toward growing awareness of insects as food, it may be that the first world will start to take this seriously; people would soon be concerned if it were happening to cattle, pigs, and sheep; oh, my!

Of course, the real impetus to insect "ranching" is its application to technical environments such as space stations, colonies, or the subterranean habitats humans may retreat to after buggering-up the surface. Prolly a toothsome alternative to "chicken little".

[prairiegardens]

Regarding insects as food, an item popped up in FB the other day, which I didn't confirm. It was a video of supposedly an ice cream lookalike made out of soldier fly larvae, I assume with other ingredients, but absolutely no milk or milk products. The victims....errrrr..tasters appeared to enjoy their cones, but it decidedly did not fill me with anticipation.