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Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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  • From: "John D'hondt" <dhondt@eircom.net>
  • To: "Healthy soil and sustainable growing" <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] new ideas in growing
  • Date: Sat, 7 Dec 2013 00:54:35 -0000


Watercress can be found almost everywhere in the wild here but it will also grow happily in our garden. Another indication of high moisture. Land cresses are reliably good too in winter and garden cress in summer (maca from the Andes is in this family and does perform poorly).
And we do have a lot of nettles that are good to eat when young. Once they start flowering they contain a lot of calcium oxalate which can give you kidney stones. But by then our goats really love them and can get through huge amounts and it does improve the milk in quantity and quality.
In a good year, but that is quite a while ago, we can have huge masses of field mushrooms outside. And in the tunnels we usually have good quantities of parasols. Other than that it is generally too cold for high value mushrooms. Never managed to grow oysters or even wood bluewit. Sometimes huge amounts of dangerous species and people have been known to die from them.
John

Hi John,
How about watercress? Maybe in trenched channels. Here, great in
winters low light. I biked through Eire and feasted on Nettles. That's
what kept Europe alive trough the war. Maybe mushrooms are your nitche.

Quoting John D'hondt <dhondt@eircom.net>:

Just 52 N latitude Paul. But it is a rather special climate. Any
storm from the West, the Atlantic ocean, and we get salt water
dumped on us, six miles inland. The average monthly temperature
differs only 9 degrees C between the warmest and the coldest. But
differences can be much higher in any single day. I mean you can get
up in the morning and find everything frozen stiff and half an hour
later it can be 20 C which we would consider warm. Many crops
can't take these fast changes.
We had 3 weeks in June this year that the temperature broke records
at 32 degrees C, about 6 degrees warmer than anything we had
experienced here before. One more sign that things are changing.

We used to cut turf/peat here in Spring but in the last ten years
there was not one year that we would have been able to dry this
turf. In 2011 we never saw the sun two days in a row before
September. In 2012 we had constant rain and all our land flooded 6
times. This year the Spring was too cold (temperature never moving
above 6C), too wet or too dry. From one extreme to the other and
crops just sat there without growing much. It seems to be getting
worse from year to year and it is only because we have a huge
variety of crops that we did not have a complete failure yet.

One extra disadvantage of low light intensities and plenty of
moisture is that greenhouses and poly tunnels develop a green algae
cover every few weeks.

And what I see more of every year too are "chemtrails". Most people
here are still convinced this is a conspiracy theory but I am
inclined to belief the evidence in front of my eyes. Yesterday we
started with a beautiful blue sky and then I noticed three planes at
high altitude flying on parallel courses but staggered at about 10
plane lengths. The "contrails " they left after them stayed and
turned into what looked like a mile wide white band with sharp edges
and as long as the eye could see. An hour later this white band was
still there but by then there were other lines at 90 degrees to
this first one. And soon afterwards all the blue was gone from the
sky. Today we had the normal dark cloud cover all day with a little
drizzle. It would make one SAD.

John
Now that's a hard climate, John. You're around 53 N latitude? I'm about 35.

On 12/4/2013 4:57 PM, John D'hondt wrote:

Same here and with a little bit of good weather we grow good
crops. Living under a constant cloud for 6 months and never seeing
the sun or the moon crops are not so good.
John
speaking of anecdoal, plenty of old timers swear by planting
by the moon, and I don't dismiss it. But for us it's just
impractical. We have to do jobs when they need doing and dodge the
weather also. There's a time when the beds are more workable but not
too damp or dry for transplants. Most of all succession planting
and scheduling harvests for markets just doesn't leave much wiggle
room.

On 12/4/2013 5:57 AM, Pete Vukovich wrote:


Hope the light bulbs work out well. A lot of stuff is
anecdotal, true of life in general I think (was that a meta
anecdote?) . Some of the extremes I've seen or read over the years
have been more amusing than others.
I have friends who have rituals they follow religiously
without ever having done a control or doing any fundamental
research. A good part of the world thrives on rumor otherwise there
wouldn't be a stock market.

My ego used to have a bigger investment in things,
apparently it shrinks with age like everything else. I don't know
that much and never have, but I have spent some time experimenting,
reading, and even growing on my own. So I thought I knew important
stuff (yeah right).

Now I'm just happy when people are interested in something
other than sports, politics, cars, college, or the latest fashion.
I'm content just to help somebody plant a garden and decimate some
imported ornamentals (I have been promoted to a work animal, a 2
legged draft horse or perhaps an ox). I'm happy to watch them make
their own choices, I believe making their own choices (even poor
ones) makes them happier (feel powerful or something) .
I like the fact that I don't inject my opinion as often, and
ask more questions. I rely heavily on the phrase 'it depends' when
someone asks me a question.


Good morning,
pete









On Tuesday, December 3, 2013 9:09 PM, tradingpost
<tradingpost@lobo.net> wrote:

I'm all for new ideas in growing, and I use some myself, some from
successful growers like Eliot Coleman/Barbara Damrosch (Four Seasons
Harvest book). But we need to hear how some trending systems actually
work out in practice - minus the hype about them. Like community
gardens, how many participants stayed with it to harvest anything
worthwhile. And biochar - where's the scientific analysis of
inputs and
effects? Organic hydroponics - but don't they find the
organic solutions
need changing too often? How about aquaponics? Do startup
costs doom any
hope of profitable outputs? Or not?

What almost all wannabe experts skip over is the basic
principles of how
to grow sustainably and profitably, whether for home use or
market. Not
surprising if they just don't know how themselves. It's
called getting
the cart before the horse. Like anyone else we've had to refine
marketing strategy for ourselves, little good advice out there to be
had. I have a whole library on growing and see endless
articles online,
but only a very few turn out to be very useful for my own
work. Top two
techniques for us: growing in permanent beds, from Jeavons,
and covering
winter beds (with plastic sheeting) INside a greenhouse, from Eliot
Coleman. I've added one trick of my own just now, light bulbs under
cover to add a little heat at low cost to inside beds. So far the
spinach, kale, arugula and Asian greens look luscious. Test
comes this
week when outside hits single digits (or lower by New Years).

paul tradingpost@lobo.net






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