Cards worth five dozen free eggs that get punched with each dozen. Printed on HOMEMADE paper (so they can't be replicated), we can give them out in lieu of legal tender to willing people who would otherwise ask money for goods and services. Maybe we could do this more broadly to take money out of the equation to a greater degree.
Bring ducks into the vineyard when we want plants to grow between the rows, and chickens when we want to till. Would this mean moving birds around in crates?
Shrink the acreage at Patuxent grazed (managed) by a very small number of goats by moving them from Patuxent to the vineyard and back again, with stops along the way to provide goatly services...for dough? Moving them would probably be a bad idea as a long term solution but it might soften the learning curve so that we could learn from the variety that the goats chose from in the different places as we try to provide balanced browse in one place.
2Ways to start graze/browse use of open area
-Take walks with goats every day, all around the area, including woods. Observe feeding patterns
-Start high-density grazing, even with two animals, and watch the grass as much as the animals. I am led to believe the pasture's behavior will change. We should allow greater pasture growth to lead adding animals. Instead of struggling to provide enough forage, we should be needing to figure out what to do with it all.
Monday, July 27, 2009
The Mysterious Vineyard
I may be working at a small vineyard in Maryland. It isn't nailed down so I won't say much about it. I don't really even know where it is. There may be no one else minding it anyway, but I may be effectively in charge of it.
Wine is what I really want. A rough formula estimating the yield of the roughly fathomed dimensions says we might be able to expect 50 cases of wine from this vineyard. I don't know the varieties or for what purpose they are extended, but table grapes or raisins would be fun too. Reading Joel Salatin (in particular You Can Farmhas forced me to think about that dread topic, marketing. It occurs to me that in order to make a saleable product as soon as possible and make investment in the vineyard feel like worth the effort earlier, there might be better options than waiting to make the kind of wine that people want to buy. Certainly some from the first and from all crops should go toward figuring out how to make good wine of it, but people like to have good vinegar too. Perhaps I'm being cavalier and some gourmets would take offense but I think it's probably faster and easier to make good vinegar than good wine, and then there would be money to turn back into the site.
I also read an article today in Acres USA about using animals and turning them off from the crop plant by inducing nausea after the first time they eat the plant. Say, grapes, leaves, or the wood itself. I've seen a lot about training in feeding in Stockman but it's usually been to maximize pasture use or control weeds, but exclusion is new to me. It's probably common for pets. Mulberry trees would have to go in if there were goats cause I could hardly deprive them of stems and leaves. I wonder if geese would be prey to raccoons and such. I've heard of them as guard animals for other fowl so maybe they'd be fine without getting locked up nightly. It would probably be more useful to run some ducks and chickens to eat the bugs that the vegetarian geese reject. And if the geese roosted near the smaller birds perhaps even the slyest of foxes would be foiled. Cause it would be a pip to not have to be there every day and have eggs meat, feathers and sweet critters, better fertility and pest control. I'm trying to visit the site in August so I'll know more then.
Wine is what I really want. A rough formula estimating the yield of the roughly fathomed dimensions says we might be able to expect 50 cases of wine from this vineyard. I don't know the varieties or for what purpose they are extended, but table grapes or raisins would be fun too. Reading Joel Salatin (in particular You Can Farmhas forced me to think about that dread topic, marketing. It occurs to me that in order to make a saleable product as soon as possible and make investment in the vineyard feel like worth the effort earlier, there might be better options than waiting to make the kind of wine that people want to buy. Certainly some from the first and from all crops should go toward figuring out how to make good wine of it, but people like to have good vinegar too. Perhaps I'm being cavalier and some gourmets would take offense but I think it's probably faster and easier to make good vinegar than good wine, and then there would be money to turn back into the site.
I also read an article today in Acres USA about using animals and turning them off from the crop plant by inducing nausea after the first time they eat the plant. Say, grapes, leaves, or the wood itself. I've seen a lot about training in feeding in Stockman but it's usually been to maximize pasture use or control weeds, but exclusion is new to me. It's probably common for pets. Mulberry trees would have to go in if there were goats cause I could hardly deprive them of stems and leaves. I wonder if geese would be prey to raccoons and such. I've heard of them as guard animals for other fowl so maybe they'd be fine without getting locked up nightly. It would probably be more useful to run some ducks and chickens to eat the bugs that the vegetarian geese reject. And if the geese roosted near the smaller birds perhaps even the slyest of foxes would be foiled. Cause it would be a pip to not have to be there every day and have eggs meat, feathers and sweet critters, better fertility and pest control. I'm trying to visit the site in August so I'll know more then.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
One count before they're cracked.
Skeleton plan for how to have enough to eat:
First, muchos vegetables on horse field. Then,
we should have some of these numbers drifting along L-field, tilling, fertilizing, and reducing the seed bank in the top of the soil. Maybe concurrent with or in preparation for row crops. Also then we will have alarm clocks.
Surely we must plant some whinter wheat.
And a goat! or two. Don't know how to feed them yet. Or one cow.
First, muchos vegetables on horse field. Then,
we should have some of these numbers drifting along L-field, tilling, fertilizing, and reducing the seed bank in the top of the soil. Maybe concurrent with or in preparation for row crops. Also then we will have alarm clocks.Surely we must plant some whinter wheat.
And a goat! or two. Don't know how to feed them yet. Or one cow.
Textbook Tyme
A seasoned person would look at me spending borrowed money on books, claiming the right to say I will be a farmer, not having yet set foot in a dialed-in farm's field and have low expectations for the results. But there was, and is, serious learning going on at MyFarm and the classes are work school. And my view is I know just enough that to pass up land that's available now in a place I want to be would be the dumbest thing to do.
I ordered some books today.
This is a magazine.
This is four books.
Basically my hope is that these will in great part tell me what to expect and what is expected of me as far as livestock goes in particular. I'll finally be able to formulate an idea of how to use the pasture and keep animals on the grass. This is the element that I haven't known enough to design or plan around. After this I can hope to have a picture of a "complete" farm.
Part of me wishes I didn't have to buy them but part is so pumped that I didn't have much choice. I've been doing well with finding stuff at the library but these I am going to have to refer back to and I did my best to find them: no library accessible through SF public has access to them, or any similar books. What to do? They should arrive soon.
To demonstrate commitment in a superficial way, I bought a three year subscription to this rag. Though it's true that the price was adjusted radically in favor of the long bomb.
I ordered some books today.
This is a magazine.
This is four books.
Basically my hope is that these will in great part tell me what to expect and what is expected of me as far as livestock goes in particular. I'll finally be able to formulate an idea of how to use the pasture and keep animals on the grass. This is the element that I haven't known enough to design or plan around. After this I can hope to have a picture of a "complete" farm.
Part of me wishes I didn't have to buy them but part is so pumped that I didn't have much choice. I've been doing well with finding stuff at the library but these I am going to have to refer back to and I did my best to find them: no library accessible through SF public has access to them, or any similar books. What to do? They should arrive soon.
To demonstrate commitment in a superficial way, I bought a three year subscription to this rag. Though it's true that the price was adjusted radically in favor of the long bomb.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
I am loving Will Allen.
I haven't seen this movie Fresh the Movie but this fellow is in it.
He was in the Times too.
He took in 6 million pounds of food last year to make compost, making more than he needs. I bet there is space in cities for companies doing nothing but on-site large-scale composting. Seems like there's no reason that compost have to go all the way from San Francisco to Vacaville and back. Seems like it would mostly involve diverting waste streams. To build a dam to harvest energy, as it were, would be grand so long as the farms outside the city could maintain fertility as well. Then maybe MyFarm really could cart its fertility around by bicycle. Chris Shein, permaculture teacher of many MyFarmers, said that a restaurant supplies his personal garden with a 55-gallon drum of food waste every week...I think that's right. It's a lot. Much is eaten by the chickens, faster than any compost pile would.
This raises a lot of questions regarding the role of inputs in a sustainable system. I said a word before about looking forward bringing into the farm as much organic material as possible, to jump-start fertility. But maybe I want to prove that the land is fundamentally capable of healing itself with only onsite plants and onsite solar energy. Seems like it is sensible to think of it like plowing - at the outset, a lot of progress can be made with relatively little harm to the developing soil ecology. But it shouldn't be treated as a long-term strategy to the extent that the activities (e.g. a tree-trimming company or grain grower) that produce these inputs are capable of returning them to the biological systems that produced them in the first place. At the same time, there are possibilities for a healthful input cycle: nothing could seem more natural than a farm/woodlot-sawmill and farm/woodlot-restaurant nutrient cycle, which would produce concentrated inputs that can and should be depended on on a long-term basis.
It seems like the goal of land management should be to return biological matter to the actual area of earth where it originated, whether in an agricultural setting or a forest or some other wild system. It will be a challenge to be flexible on the emergency-stability continuum of fertility.
He was in the Times too.
He took in 6 million pounds of food last year to make compost, making more than he needs. I bet there is space in cities for companies doing nothing but on-site large-scale composting. Seems like there's no reason that compost have to go all the way from San Francisco to Vacaville and back. Seems like it would mostly involve diverting waste streams. To build a dam to harvest energy, as it were, would be grand so long as the farms outside the city could maintain fertility as well. Then maybe MyFarm really could cart its fertility around by bicycle. Chris Shein, permaculture teacher of many MyFarmers, said that a restaurant supplies his personal garden with a 55-gallon drum of food waste every week...I think that's right. It's a lot. Much is eaten by the chickens, faster than any compost pile would.
This raises a lot of questions regarding the role of inputs in a sustainable system. I said a word before about looking forward bringing into the farm as much organic material as possible, to jump-start fertility. But maybe I want to prove that the land is fundamentally capable of healing itself with only onsite plants and onsite solar energy. Seems like it is sensible to think of it like plowing - at the outset, a lot of progress can be made with relatively little harm to the developing soil ecology. But it shouldn't be treated as a long-term strategy to the extent that the activities (e.g. a tree-trimming company or grain grower) that produce these inputs are capable of returning them to the biological systems that produced them in the first place. At the same time, there are possibilities for a healthful input cycle: nothing could seem more natural than a farm/woodlot-sawmill and farm/woodlot-restaurant nutrient cycle, which would produce concentrated inputs that can and should be depended on on a long-term basis.
It seems like the goal of land management should be to return biological matter to the actual area of earth where it originated, whether in an agricultural setting or a forest or some other wild system. It will be a challenge to be flexible on the emergency-stability continuum of fertility.
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