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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> If  only I could persuade that septic tanks are a waste of the finest  
manure in the world.

It wasn't designed for this purpose, the design was pragmatic for a septic 
field, but when I had the field dug I was flush for cash (ha! flush for cash, 
I 
love it!) and opted for a rather large tank and field, 1100 gallons and 900' 
of field.  That field is now pasture grown over with fescue and clover whose 
roots are deep enough to take advantage of it.  It's not the most efficient 
use 
of the nutrients, but not a total waste either.  Gray water isn't put into 
the 
septic system so the arrangement should last about 10,000 years.

>My design is to grow only what I consume.

Hear, hear!  We talk a lot about how farms will feed people in the future, 
but another reality may be that people will be expected to produce their own 
food much as they are expected to brush their own teeth and wipe their own 
..... 
nose.  To every prospective CSA'er and market gardener I talk to, I urge them 
to try to supply their own table first and then see where it goes from there. 
 

That's my design too.  I am surprised at how much of  theme this has become 
for this homestead while being largely unconsidered before.   The 
concentration 
on growing all we eat is not any more important that the idea of eating all 
we grow.

I need to find a better way to express this, but the effort and economic 
distance between the garden and the house is small (the gardens are 1000' 
from the 
house so this metaphor works) but as soon as produce and products reach the 
front gate, the economic distance is much, much greater.  By the time it 
reaches town, the distance is infinite.  That is, while it is relatively easy 
to 
feed yourself, it is much, much more effort to put that much food into the 
market.

Of course, I have a house full of teens and pre-teens and sometimes a whole 
pig is just an appetizer!   

>Of all manures I wish I had access  to horse

Horse manure all around is the best.  A horse here is indispensible.  He 
plows, harrows, hays, and pulls logs.   But I get an S10 load of horse manure 
twice a week using gasoline I as going to use anyway (manure is a bonus, not 
the 
reason for the trips).  From all sources I've brought in about 25 tons of 
horse 
manure so far since fall.  I can't keep it up forever, but it's like a 
biological savings account.


>But what will we say to  
>those millions of urbanites and suburbanites that we urge home food  
>production upon? To feed themselves, gardeners must feed the soil. How  
>shall they do that on postage-stamp lots?

This post caught me in a (thankfully) rare flight of pessimism.   I had just 
finished reading an article (http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3702#more)  that 
shows how the average yield of grains per hectare has gone from 1 1/4 tons 
(metric) when I was a child to more than 3 tons now of days and it has done 
this 
by genetic skulduggery and artificial nitrogen fertilizer.  

Now, one sacrifices maximum yields per square foot (if God had intened us to 
use the metric system there would have been ten apostles instead of twelve!) 
when one expands to a scale that requires machinery, even horse drawn 
machinery.   Going back to the yields of 1960 on the million acre wheat farms 
would put 
the world in starvation in a hurry.  But that same area tended by hand with 
diverse crops including wheat would more than feed us and to spare.    IF we 
had the soil nutrients to do so.  Alas, that's a reall big IF because even as 
we 
speak we are eroding away what soil there is.  And I can testify having done 
it most of my adult life that soil building, even with tons and tons of high 
quality manure and other materials brough in from outside ... it's slow and 
patient work.  It simply will not be rushed.  Ten years work can wash away in 
an 
hour if precautions are not taken.

Almost twenty years ago (and when I was almost twenty years younger) doing 
the prep work on this soil was gut busting hard work ...inhospitable clay 
that 
would bake like concrete on a hot spring day.  Now any old feeble geezer 
could 
prepare the largest bed in an hour.  In fact, most beds can be planted on 
without any preparation at all but I still turn them with a shovel between 
crops 
because I like to.   So when I go about and with the small-holder's eye size 
up 
each plot of ground I see stuck here and there an imagine what a person could 
grow there, I am all too aware of what it would take to make that patch of 
clay, or sand, or such into a garden spot.

And then I am less hopeful.   </HTML>