farm stuff, any farm stuff. food growing or cash c r opping

Started by billy rubin, August 23, 2021, 12:57:51 AM

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billy rubin

dammit

both our satellite connections are too slow to load images today.

guess ill havr to go back to fixing the air compressor

got a nice motorcycle ride the 20 miles to town and back tho getting pipe fittings


News has been received from the Punjab that the Amritsar mob has again broken out in a violent attack against the authorities. The rebels were repulsed by the military and they suffered 200 casualties.

billy rubin

this place we live on is an old farm, appalachian-style.

what that means is that the ground has been strip-mined, poorly and casually recl;aimed, and not very productive. its also been hayed every year since god was in short pants,.

the result is that th etopsoil is very thin-- maybe only four or five inches-- and then you get to simple clay that is too heavy for grass roots to penetrate well. the farmers here cut the hay every year, brought no fertilizer or manure back, and essentially mined the fertility the same way the coal company mined the coal.

for the lastr several years weve let a neighbor hay the ground for the price of about ten bales of hay that we feed to the goas and the donkey. easy for us, no involvement and we've been busy.

but now that were putting in chestnut trees and native hazel nuts, im looking over what we have to work with.

heres what the top ten or 15 acres look like, after one half year of lying fallow:



just the grass hay dying back in the late late summer. theres timothy, some deadnettles, a bit of vetch, and then whatever just grows here naturally. not very nutritious, and not much activity putting anything back into the soil. ^^^this is what it would noprmally look like before next years cropping.

but next to the warehous, the plants have been left alone, for about ten years now. a vast difference:



there's native wild cherries, crabapples, milkweed, teasel, goldenrod, asters, and so on. the ground has been able to reclaim some topsoil and start to build a more varied horizon than the stuff out there thats been cut every year.

were about 6 years into what old eugene p odum christened old-field succession, back when he invented the idea of ecological steps involved in colonizing bare ground. a revolutionary idea, but one that people have finally been paying attention to it for frtility issues.


keeping ground fallow in a rotation is old-school. when i was in california, ground was too expensive to kep out of production, assuming you could buy the water to irrigate it. you hired a consultant who told you what minerals were lacking, and you injected them in with the water. the idea that the soil could regenerate itself was ancient and out of fashion, as well as expensive.

but we're on outr way to an improvement here. the wife bought four chestnuts saplings, and i made her bbuy five more, and when she's not looking ill go get another half dozen. one thing i know for sure is that if you wan to make a living in agricultre, you have to cough up the willingness to start big enough to make a minimum amount of income. four tomato plants wont feed you,. but 400,000 will make a dent in your debts.


News has been received from the Punjab that the Amritsar mob has again broken out in a violent attack against the authorities. The rebels were repulsed by the military and they suffered 200 casualties.

Tank

If religions were TV channels atheism is turning the TV off.
"Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt." ― Richard P. Feynman
'It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life.' - Terry Pratchett
Remember, your inability to grasp science is not a valid argument against it.

billy rubin

its the future.

my mothers family were red-dirt farmers in pre-united states oklahoma. that ground stayed in the family for well over 100 years, and if i win the lottery ill buyt it all back.

when i was a child i spent my summers there feeding the hogs and beefcalves, living in the house my mother was born in, amidst the debris and litter of a dying way of life.

doesnt have to die. we're in late stage capitalism right now, where the bezos and th emusks are all about insulating themselves from the death throes of the world that theyre killing. but its still possible to grow your own food, provide your own fuel, and live a simple life away from the complications that we make for ourselves.

ive got twenty five acres in a climate where the water is likely never to run out, and in the end, i dont need a whole lot.


News has been received from the Punjab that the Amritsar mob has again broken out in a violent attack against the authorities. The rebels were repulsed by the military and they suffered 200 casualties.