Let’s talk a bit about biomimicry and our role in ecosystems. Last week, give or take, I got a sarcastic comment from someone. It was in response to me pointing out, once again, that animals (and fungi) are a necessary part of the decay cycle and thus in nutrient movement…
How do I feed my laying hens? Sometimes it gets gross. We do a few things to supplement their diet, like giving them weeds and perennial cuttings, and the worms I mentioned in my post about the worm grunting stick. And for now, we give them some store bought layer…
Some of y’all are familiar with the problem solving principle popular with permaculturists and plenty others: make the problem the solution. I’ve mentioned it before for things like getting the chickens to shred leaves for me to make them happy and to save me time and energy running the shredder,…
It’s customary when writing these sorts of gardening advice blogs to include your top favorite/most recommended things to grow, so here’s a dozen I’ve chosen after a bit of thought. Some are categories rather than specific things, and I’m definitely not above cheating at making my own list. My criteria…
The next couple months is my favorite time of year to get free biomass to bring into the garden and food forest system. This makes sense from the perspective of my temperate forest biome: we’re coming into leaf drop and die-back season. For people in urban and suburban spaces, or…
The thing is, you can grow plants with MiracleGro. You can get a crop, look at your lush growth and think “I’m growing this life. Based on what I’m seeing here I have every reason to believe this garden is alive” But you’ll also be weakening soil microbes, especially fungal…
For most of us, the biggest barrier to successfully growing our own food and medicine is a lack of nutrients in the soil we have available. Key to having productive and healthy gardens is having healthy living soil. I spent a lot of my early gardening years trying to grow…
We had a bit of an emergency this weekend that easily could have been a major catastrophe. It really reinforced the importance of planning for likely risks, having redundancies, and building resilience through diversity. A very, very tall and mature oak fell on a shed. That sounds bad and it…
We like to actually try out methods we recommend, so now we’re happy to say that the mushroom spawn we’ve been recommending between mulch layers DOES in fact pay off with more than just nutrient availability and some pest control. The beds we innoculated with wine cap/garden giant (Stropharia rugosoannulata)…
We frequently see people excoriating others not to use pesticides. Pesticides, we are told, shouldn’t be used. To some they’re everything that’s wrong with industrial agriculture. Some will even say “don’t use pesticides: use soap/beer/garlic oil/diatomaceous earth”. The thing is, those are all pesticides. Soap is a pesticide when you…
