Farm Fit work & FUN day 5k

Tomorrow is the day! come out at ten for a f5k, 3.1 mile run around the land. we have abundant hills to heighten your heart-rate and trails thru the woods and around the community.
visit here for the Lane's blog about it.

Throne Room 2.0

Voila…!

 It's an outhouse, cozy and cute. While making your precious deposit, you may like to read about the benefits of utilizing this ubiquitously wasted--and thus, polluting--resource in the HUMANURE HANDBOOK, currently being featured inside.

 The artisinal woodshed: so far there's chinese chestnut, sycamore, hickory, maple and probably 5 more species in there drying out for the next wood-burning season.

Foggy view of the cove and matching siding on the house and it's outside counterpooper. I've named this style 'Hansel and Gretel' siding--the lower 80% or so is wane-edge board and top 20% or so is off-centered board and batten. 

Loppers, scythes and spades O my! The North wall has a small overhang for some finely oiled wood-handled tools: you never know what needs to be chopped, dug, or raked down-home on the forest farm!

Woodland framing

4 days of precision lumberjacking and design-as-we-go carpentry has built this humble woodland-styled hermit's hut in the woods near CAIRO, NY. I spent about 20 hours actively working on this project with Dada Gananathananda, a very dear mentor and monk friend of mine. Much of that time involved gathering materials from the woods, locust trees for posts, small saplings to temporarily brace them on their stone foundations, maples for the permanent 'knee braces', and finally plenty of pine trees for rafters, beams and 3 collar-ties. All the tools we needed were fairly primitive--in the absence of electricity on the site. Handsaws, machete, hatchet, home-made plumb-bob, hammer and chisel (plus a chainsaw -- not pictured). we used a level only twice, to cut off the rafter ends and level the tops of the posts. The Ridgebeam was hewn from a larger 13" pine cut on-site and incredibly, is dead-level ! :^D 

  Overall, this was a very fun project and gave full scope to test my increasingly intuitive carpentry skills using unconventional roundwood. Then, of course, the athleticism of putting on boots and playing lumber-jack is always a joy. I'm working with Dada from a distance to help him arrange rough-cut materials from a sawmill for a wooden roof. For the in-fill around posts (also called walls), he may do 1/2 the way up shale stones and mortar and the rest some kind of wooden latticework like wattle-and daub (wiki click here). At any rate, i look forward to seeing his rustic retreat develop, wishing him all the best !

Experimentation in the garden: Shizen nøhø, Lasagna Gardening

When the colors flash crimson and yellow-flames as the sun lows more and more obliquely to the Earth (neither perpendicular nor parallel, slanting) and the Winter's face is a fixed-fog of sunrise ice, all the wild abundant bigness of the green season winds down. It shows in the cows furrier and darker backs, cold clearing up the air, and the coming ice shows on brittle stems of unchecked chicory in amongst my blueberries.

Indeed, this transitional and much-too-beautiful Fall is a fine slice of season to contemplate, commiserate, research, dream and generally lay about with wild daydreams of new projects. And lee's not forget to finish the existing ones down on the permaculture farm. I can hear the banjo lickin in yonder Hills, yeehaw.

Actually, less than dreaming, I've been working on those projects. planning for spring while planting seasonal crops like wheat and winter peas. Researching and sometimes working some more at night, laying in some clay to pelletize seed to run some experiments on some short season crops to follow the wheat and peas, using the Fukuoka-style of Natural Farming--also called 'do-nothing' farming. Check out this wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_farming

This style of cropping tries to mimic nature and encourages the farmer to overcome the tendency to make more work for oneself. Practically, it means spreading straw on the field and suing pelletized seed, or seed balls to succession plant year round. In the climate of the North Carolina Mountains, I am hoping to follow the wheat and peas coming up in the picture below with an open-pollinate Pink popcorn, asian cowpeas and pumpkins. Then some trials with vegetables and rice, planted in seed balls and as plant starts.

Wheat and Austrian field pea coming up from a patch of ground that was tilled in April. The seed was simply thrown over the surface before a period of clouds and rain, then mulched loosely with old hay. Scattering the hay in all directions and avoiding clumps is important, Fukuoka-San says

Clay drying before busting up into a powder for use in clay balls for experiments in "Natural Farming" To make seed balls, i recommend this youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_V9WI3ObyE

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Lasagna Garden Beds

Another exciting Fall garden project is Sheet Mulching, also called lasagna gardening. The idea is not to do any soil turning or weed removal beforehand. You can mow the area and then begin to layer the ground with 2-ply corrugated cardboard overlapping the edges 4-5 inches. Alternately you may used 10-20 thicknesses of newspaper. Then, add hay, leaves, compost, manure in alternating layers.

1.) Cardboard! -

2.) Hay. When building up your lasagna garden bed, it's important to get he Carbon to Nitrogen ration right
in order to ensure digestion of the materials is of an appropriate quality and time-frame. Too much Nitrogen, or fresh, wet, and green stuff, you risk putrefaction--a smelly anaerobic 'hot' pile. Too much Carbon material and your decomposition with be slow and unattractive for the soil micro-organisms (also the soil pH will dip).
Straw is not Hay. Straw is the year-end, yellow-colored stems of annual winter grains (barley, oats, rye, wheat) after the seed has been threshed out. It is a carbon, whereas Hay is cut Green, the nitrogen rich flush of perennial grasses and pasture weeds like orchard grass, timothy, fescue, clover, chicory, dandelion. According to this very informative youtube video from Wisconsin Public TV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fGnVRlOqHY  Hay has the perfect mix of C:N already.


3.) Bio-Char and Manure
This stripe of materials on the pile is what agriculturalists of the cutting-edge call BIO-CHAR. I did not buy this, but instead harvested it by digging up the soil and ashes underneath a burn pile. The charcoal is derived from the incomplete combustion of twigs and branches lying especially low to the ground in the burn pile, later embedding in the earth. This resource has very stable carbon compounds that have a HUGE amount of surface area, and that's where the microbiota and protozoa that exude humic acids, or humus, like to live. Humus is the gooey and black 'very dead' organic matter, that typically makes up 70% of the Organic Matter content (OMC) in your average soil. The rest is recently 'dead stuff', 15% and living stuff, 15%-- roots, insects, protozoa. So, humic acids are very important! they're the habitat where the microorganisms responsible for the long-term fertility of soil live. Charcoal acts like a humic acid, by the action of binding minerals on the cation exchange, moderating soil fertility, and leading to increasing OMC and overall soil structure. What is soil structure? Soil structure describes the arrangement of the solids in a soil and the pore spaces for air and water between them. Basically, how well soil particles clump together and resist extreme drying out or extreme water-logging. Building up OMC in your soil develops good soil structure, whereas cultivation nearly always leads to declines in soil structure because it opens up humic acids and decomposing stuff to higher oxidation and more rapid rates of decay. Normal soil OMC percentage is 1-4%, I'd say a good organic garden soil should be at least 5% Applying nitrogen fertilizer kills micro-organisms that build up OMC. So, manure and burn pile ashes (look for charcoal bits) for habitat to microorganism, then you feed them.

In addition to the ashes and bio-char in the above photo there is a stripe of crumbly drywall which delivers elements similar to Garden Lime, sulfur and calcium. Drywall is Gypsum, or calcium sulfate dihydrate --CaSO~2H2O -- which is mined from the ground, also created as a byproduct of scrubbers on coal burning power plants. Fertilizer companies sell gypsum as a mineral fertilizer often with phosphorous. It breaks up heavy clay soils just as good as greensand, but I've heard it's not recommended for sodic soils (salty). Just add a little of this free fertilizer resource.

4.) Leaves, these you can find curbside anytime of day in any neighborhood of town. Then some wood bark. I've got a good deal from the Buncombe Landfill for a 6 yard dump truck load.

Then some bone meal (a purchased product) and topped up with plenty of aged cow manure. I also add AZOMITE, volcanic ash, which delivers loads of micronutrients. Oh yea, some old Kelp Meal also, obtained for free somewhere in my ramblings and squirreled away for a rainy day (actually, i tried eating a little, but the taste is too strong, i prefer whole kelp, kombu, alaria or digitata kelp boiled in my stews for optimum health and mineral delivery to the active human =^D


Now, do it all over again! hay, manure, a stripe of bio-char  manure, leaves, wood chips, manure, hay, woohoo! Build up the bed knee-high, a minimum of  18 inches.

There's a classic book on Agriculture I'm finishing up called Farmer's of Forty Centuries: A Permanent Agriculture in Japan, Korea and China. This fellow was considered the father of Soil Physics, the study of soil physical properties. An interesting time it was written, 1911, too, because the USA and Europe had recognized the possibility of expanding production per acre with high Nitrogen fertilizers, an aspect of soil chemistry--but would not figure out how to do for another 30 years. This fellow went to Asia for 9 months and meticulously took notes and photos about how people lived-on the landscape: how they built, cooked, cultivated, transported and traded the physical world with only local resources, mostly biological. What he discovered was an economy of ubiquitous thrift in the management of the landscape, a culture of zero-waste and maximum utilization of every scrap of biological fertility (including hand-dredging the canals that simultaneously fertilized and elevated the terrain--adding to the flood control of where people both farmed and lived)

Without going into this subject to any great depth, I would like to say that in comparison to these 100 yr old people who came before the synthesis of Nitrogen fertilizers it's not hard to see that the current economy and culture of at least half the worlds population is exceedingly wasteful of biological fertility; solely dependent on machine-made fertility, Life. If the Earth has a lifeblood, some have said it's her oil that humankind love to burn so copiously, but I would argue it's the replicating movements of minerals and elements dissolved and cycling in her soils. A positive notion of truly becoming native to your place, agriculturally speaking.

If you would like to build an outhouse and begin composting your manure, check out my blogpost of a year and 1/2 ago: http://ravenridgefarm.blogspot.com/2013/05/fun-project-1-throne-house.html

Autumn Waxing & How to Dig a Hole

Dear Readers, I am happy to commence a post after quite a span of months. Excuse me if it sounds a little scientific at first, but i assure you that my writing inexorably cascades into the poetic and the practical, hope you enjoy.

 In the normal course of the year -{volcanic eruptions and nuclear fallout notwithstanding}- Plants at this latitude and elevation turn brittle and dry and low on sugar. The sugar is returning the roots.

the most important equation you learned in college chemistry is this:

 water (H20) + carbon dioxide (C02) = 

C6 H12 06  (Sugar, etc.) + 02 (Oxygen)

In a nutshell, this is called photosynthesis--what plants do-- and the inverse of this equation is called respiration--what humans, animals, insects and protozoa do. In the northern hemisphere right now, the ubiquitous carpet of plants are pancaking their buttery and syrupy sweet sections under layers of weeks and months and weather. Having been rooted in their immobility, night and day blown, thrashed and cut, grazed and stomped, misted, rained, soil-saturated then baked in day-long heat and weeks-long, insect-buzzing drought, now finally they're getting cued into the diminishing daylight length and prepping for a different kind of the same rough treatment.

A cattle farmer once told me while we inspected cow pats for soil macro biota (beetles and worms) that the locusts and grasshoppers come out at this time because they thrive in the low-sugar environment of autumn. All the photosynthetic parts of plants--leaves & grasses-- are withdrawing their carbohydrates and sugars to roots. Because of special enzymes in their stomachs, locusts--a general term for an adult grasshopper-- are able to digest the dry roughage of grasses and trees that are transitioning into winter. These guys are the clean-up crew, sweeping up the un-digested litter of what summer's vacillating mood swings have sprouted and spawned over the landscape.

Autumn, then, is the colorful and still-alive transition into what one may call the more skeletal season of winter. Sure Autumn is beautiful, yet I like to think that each season has it's own severe beauty--even soft and succulent spring can bring heavy rain and a piercing-damp cold, or a sudden unexpected heat--but what I enjoy most are the spaces between the definite peaks of a season. The transitions of autumn and spring.

A season is like a breath, winter a breathing-in and summer a breathing-out. The Solstices are pauses in the movement between two extremes of distance from Sol, ('the sun', and stice, to stand still). Therein is an unremittingly flow outward and inward with indefinite points in between where opposites merge and flux for a period of dynamic intercourse. In Autumn, we see nature's final show before the contraction of winter, characterized by the cold and the dormant, a kind of shut-in tightness that is yet alive, ready to emerge and spring into summer's expansion.

I'm suddenly reminded of part a Rumi poem:

*****************************

There is a shimmering excitement in
being sentient and shaped. The

caravan master sees his camels lost
in it, nose to tail, as he himself is,

his friend, and the stranger coming
toward them. A gardener watches

the sky break into song, cloud wobbly
with what it is. Bud, thorn, the same.

Wind, water, wandering this essential
state. Fire, ground, gone. That's

How it is with the outside. Form is
ecstatic. Now imagine the inner:

soul, intelligence, the secret worlds!
And don't think the garden loses its

ecstacy in winter. It's quiet, but
the roots are down there are riotous.

*********************************************************************************

What Autumn means for trees is that their invisible vitality is going subterranean, while above, the leaves are shedding and --if they're fruit bearing-- plenty of sugar has concentrated in a round receptacle of seeds ready to drop. Leaf and flower buds that remain are the last impression, an imprint made from this year, made for the next.

In the forests and fields around my farm there's an abundance of sweet juicy persimmons, thousands of orange ornaments hanging-on impressively high. They're small, about 1 1/2" diameter max. The best persimmon tree stands alone in a cow pasture 70' tall on a saddle between two hills and two springs that's kinda like an 'X' from above. I hope to enter it as a state 'champion tree' someday (google it)

*************************************************

My last post was in January, and so in this one I must document spring, summer and autumn, but instead of cramming all that business in, i will instead segway into something I have wanted to share for quite some time:
how to plant a tree:

1.) Dig a hole. Seems pretty easy, but…what's the moisture of the soil? I like digging in winter and spring when the earth is perfect! at least the soil moisture is just right. if you have sandy soil, the day after a rain is great. the soil should not stick to the shovel, but should slide off. It's the same with tilling or plowing. too wet and it'll lose all it's pore space when it dries, turning cement-like. Too dry and it's hard to gain purchase with the implement and it can blow off and get powdery and likewise with wet soil, lose good soil structure, or tilth.

Dig a hole for your tree, shrub or bush that is approx. twice the size of the root ball. you don't have to go too deep, but at least break up the soil below where a hardpan may have formed from plowing or where the good topsoil meets the subsoil. Even so, roots will penetrate these layers.

2.) putting the tree in the hole.

Make sure you set the plant on loosened soil with few or no big spaces that might attract voles or gophers that eat tree roots (especially apples and pears). Make VERY sure that the top of the root ball or the portion of your plant below ground parts is HIGHER than the earth. It's a big mistake to plant too low, forming a depression--but most trees and shrubs like a well-drained soil, not one where water collects and dampens the roots.

So, If you plant with the top of potted plants' dirt portion/rootball 1" above the native soil it's good. If your hole is on sloping ground, and it looks like following this practice will allow too much of the roots to actually be up out of the earth--do it anyway! you can fill in around the roots with dirt and mulch later on, just don't let a low-spot form on top of the roots!

3.) filling in soil and soil amendments

The big question: put only compost in the hole or mix it halfsies with the soil or simply apply it on top as a mulch? there's been some back an forth in the landscape and growing world on this one... The main reason to avoid improving soil inside the hole is to avoid stress during drought, because too-rich soil may encourage laziness and shallow-rooting, whereas applying soil on top mimics the stratified soil of a forest (infertile subsoil, rich upper "duff" layer). Likewise, overwatering can lead to limited rooting.

So many variables are at play…the best i can say is to study & research just a little, then go to the field, employ your intuition and experiment! If you never make mistakes, your successes will only be half-hearted!

That said, I like to take the middle path: fill in half the hole with native dirt, then mix a shovel or two composted cow manure with the dirt, then mulch  on top with 4-5 inches of leaves, hay and wood chips. In nature, diversity--not uniformity--is the law :) In between the layers i add AZOMITE (volcanic ash--fulla minerals!), BONE MEAL, and either PLANT-TONE (chicken manure with calcium and others) or HOLLY-TONE if it's a blueberry, because it has the sulfur pellets to aid acidification for this Erikaceae family plant (think: azalea, laurel, rhododendron, sourwood, blueberry, dog-hobble)

Finally, i would like to say that I rarely give water. If the rainfall can't support the crops, forget about it! the self-proclaimed "do-nothing" farmer Masanobu Fukuoka was adamant that rain does not actually fall from the sky, but that plants attract it and man's ignorance is responsible. Frankly, and with utmost respect for the late Fukuoka-san, I must say he is wrong. Japan has consistent rainfall year round, perfect for agriculture, but certain areas dry out and we're in one of them all over the USA, incl. east coast.

That said, I will be connecting my 500 gallon water tank to the Cabin at the top of my ridge this winter to water during very dry spells this coming summer. Thanks to the Late L.D. "Buck" Fender for accepting a $100 dollar bill, an apple tree, and a 1/2 gallon of Fresh Jersey milk in trade for that fine rain barrel. Buck features in 3 pages of Tim Barnwell's "Faces of Appalachia" picture book, taken almost entirely in Madison County back in the 70's. Buck is shown pressing sorghum with a horse and turnstile, then boiling it down. As I would drive up to visit my cousins, he'd be setting in a rocker on his stoop at the beginning of Jass Cove Road always kind, quick-witted and laughingly funny.  He'd often make fun of himself for never keeping animals around for very long. Which is to say he'd soon be giving legs of goat to friends…

tree inventory, january 2014

Aah...winter sun and air!

i've been counting, scouting, nosing in the weeds and in the snow, spreading leaves to mark and grow my little seedlings and bigger trees into a lush edible EDEN.

I call this the bush, tree and shrub inventory

of 2014, here we go:

p.s. the following list is for my one acre. numerous neighbors and friends have more edible trees, bushes and shrubs of mine and their's right in the vicinity of my farm plus there are some very Big wild mulberry and persimmon trees--comma, smiley face-- :o}

Trees, shrubs, bushes at Raven Ridge Fruit Farm :

Apples 15 grafted in 2007, transplanted a couple times but now happy as clams, wish i had kept track of the varieties, but when they fruit this year it could be fun detective work
Pears 12 two european types grafted off Warren wilson college trees and 3 asian types
Cherries 1, a big fast growing tree with nice spring bloomin over my drive, fruit for the birds
Plums, planted 2
Plums, wild: 1,000's of suckering thorny stems....
Peaches 2, LOWE'S end-of-year steal. Belle of georgia, late blooming, i'm going to plant a bunch more on a part of what i call 'nose land', which has shallow soil, maybe 1' deep maximum. the wild plums like it there, and the two peaches filled out wonderfully in the first year.
Chokeberry 11, planted in a spring bed around pawpaws

Blueberry,  ok, i didn't actually count these buggers, but i figure there's 47 from 2009 on the North hill, + 12 +10 near the house, +41 and 20 recently purchased and planted in contour with, plus...15. that is estimably:

 145 blueberry bushes.
depending on spacing and variety, 1 acre of blueberries is 867-1,450 plants. i hope to have maybe 300-400 eventually, or possibly 200-225 by the end of 2014.

Raspberry 20, caroline and heritage, trellised yesterday
Blackberry10, ouachita(i think) the canes grew 3 to 5 feet tall in the first year.
Goumiberry 10, actually just eleagnus seeldings, nitrogen-fixing nurse crop  for larger trees
Figs 7, definitely frozen in the tops, roots will sprout in spring:)
Gooseberries 3, don't ask me where these are...
Serviceberries 4
Rosa Rugosa 3 the intermittently pretty and disheveled rose that makes ROSE HIPS for tea
Persimmon 14, large enough to graft 'in the field' this year:) a few of these are wild and one is 9" DBH, diameter at breast height
Pawpaw 12 mostly seedlings, a few grafted planted on wet site 7-8' spacings for good pollination
Mulberry tree 3 :o)
Grapes 3
Kiwi 5

here's just a few of the rebar hoops for climbing FRUIT 

Vines 

NUTS!

Japanese walnuts 2
Yellowhorn 6
Monkey Puzzle 3
Chestnuts 10
Pecan 2
Ginkgo 4 :1male pollinate, 1 female for nut bearing and 2 seedlings for grafting from female
Korean Nut pine 2

 Raspberry and blackberry trellising basics: they don't need too much tension on the wire. one 4'-5' high and a lower one to prevent the canes from falling over. Easier to mulch, weed and pick if they're upright. i used catalpa posts from a recent tree job and a few T posts spaced about 12-15' apart. This 'spinning jenny' or pay-out' spinner makes it easy to pull the 12gauge wire out. the same spinner helped a gang of my friends install a 4,500ft perimeter fence for our cows.

 my cane fruits are planted on top of a swale because there is a vein of thin soil through here and I have observed that cane fruits are deep rooted. When you're pulling at the wild blackberries almost always one root goes too deep to get out without a shovel.

In this same patch of ground above the swales, i have planted rows of blueberries, which should do well enough with the shallow soil. Blueberries have no tap roots, but instead a tight wad of orange roots, like a disheveled bun of an old scottish grandmum.

Blackberry, catalpa post, Cabin!

The neighborhood drum band

winter begins, house pictures w new siding

Thanks to Krsnadev Kevin Innes for helping fight some drafts in my house, it's very warm and cozy

 Looking west from the wild plum patch, Kevin and Kate Lanes house on the distant ridge (resting atop the outhouse peak:)

Sunrise to the East from the Garden