Today I made/bought/learnt (for a post oil world) 5

[PeakOiler]

I recently learned that a new farmers market has opened in the small agricultural town near where I live. It's only about two miles from my house. So perhaps I will take any spare peaches from my orchard up there this year (providing I get a decent harvest).

[Loki]

Got my chainsaw running again, turns out I had two dud spark plugs. Got a new spark plug and it started right up. Cut up a few dozen logs for mushrooms, which I'll probably inoculate next weekend.

Also worked on the pig pen, it's almost done, just need to hook up the water line and close a gap in the gate. There will be four pigs total, two mine, two a coworker's. They'll stay in the pen for 2-3 weeks then we'll run electric fencing so they'll have more room and can clear out some overgrown woods.

[rangerone314]

As of last weekend, the entire southeast hedge was de-weeded & remulched, and I started a large scale assault on the northeast hedge, weeding & mulching.

I planted 2 new pear trees in the house garden, and got another 2 blueberry bushes for it, bringing the total to 7 blueberry bushes in the house garden and 18 in the core garden. I also divided up oregano and have a new colony of 9 groups of oregano plants in a different part of the house garden. (Of course I harvested some off the newly planted oregano to reduce any damage from the shock of being transplanted)

Also for aesthetics, I bought two orange oriental lilies for planting on either side of the small pond in the house garden.

[careinke]

Installed my first bees. <<snip>>

Very cool. Am I not seeing things, but where are your gloves?

I was a little nervous not wearing gloves but..... Installing a package of bees requires a lot of dexterity. Gloves effective against bee stings are just too clumsy to use. I installed four packages and was stung once. I consider that sting self inflicted, I pressed the palm of my hand on something before making sure a bee was not there.

The last couple of posts on my permies thread has pictures showing the whole process. You can see why it would be really hard to do with gloves.

http://www.permies.com/t/12804/permaculture/Cliff-permaculture-projects

[Shaved Monkey]

Looks great
My bees were quite friendly,I tried to be calm around them,move slowly and to make sure I didn't squash any. I think I only got stung a few times and mainly when they got caught in my hair.
Some hives are just angry.
.........................................................
Dug in and sorted 2 beds so far
Hardwood sleepers made into boxes cow manure mushroom compost sugar cane mulch and lucerne hay lasagne.
2 wheel barrows worth of rocks
The front of the beds facing up the slope will have a swale filled with rocks
These will then drain from one to the other and eventually down to some fruit trees
Came across a hive of native bees in the mushroom compost.
I dont think they where happy to be moved and watered in but they should hang around for some pollination.
Planted my garlic,elephant garlic shallots and some tomatoes,cucumber and Zucchini.
Will wait for some shoots then plant some Asian greens cabbages and garlic are friends
The next bed will be lettuces, strawberries carrots and parsnips
The next bed will be san marzano tomatoes for bottling.( I spend $300 a year on canned and jarred tomatoes)

[DomusAlbion]

Converted our "Three Sisters" garden area into an expanded berry patch. Strawberries, red and gold raspberries, boysenberries, gooseberries and blueberries were added to the existing row of mixed berries.
This area is approximately 28 by 40 feet. The strawberries are in a raised bed that runs along the road into the orchard. At the end of each row I planted rhubarb just for fun.

It's been raining like crazy here in the NW. Our creek on the west side of the property was some 8 feet over its banks at on time. The creek bed was dug down some two feet by the current and we lost some top soil in the flood plain. The trees managed to keep hold but there are a lot of trees that came down the valley and are now on our property. More work for the chain saw and more fuel for the coming winters, so it was not all bad.

[PrestonSturges]

My online store made another $100 sale. Just as I was running the numbers to see if I should slash prices...

[careinke]

I watched a honeybee drink a dew drop today. The drop just shrank down to nothing and was gone. I also did some less important stuff.

[Plantagenet]

The snow is melting fast now, so I got the chainsaw and harnessed the dog to the sled and went out to harvest some firewood from trees that blew down last winter. I had my eye on one that fell near the road, so I sawed it into 4' lengths that I could lift onto the sled and the dog hauled them out to the road and back to the house and dumped them out onto the snow there.

When everything finally melts out I'll cut them down to stove size and then stack the wood and dry it through the summer.

[PrestonSturges]

I made $300 in sales online this week after spending $35 on Google content network ads, which is fitting pretty well with my finger-in-the-wind projections of marketing costs.

[Loki]

I picked up the pigs on Wednesday and set them up in their temporary pen. They're about 9 weeks old, mixed breeds, guy who sold them to us said they were mostly Berkshire and Hampshire, and they appear to have some other random genes mixed in for good measure. Got two black ones with white markings, a white/pink (the runt), and a big ruddy red one with black markings. They were pretty shy at first but are warming up. They've already rooted up almost all the grass in their pen, we'll be setting up some electric fencing to open up their pasture quite a bit in a couple weeks.

Today I prepped the mushroom logs I cut last weekend, I'll start inoculating them tomorrow. I was hoping to do them all (~50) this weekend, but it'll definitely take a bit longer than that. I'm thinking of cutting up another tree and inoculating another few dozen logs, but we'll see if I have time.

It's a busy time on the farm, we're putting a lot of crop in the ground. This week we transplanted the first tomatoes of the season and did our first big harvest (radishes, mustard greens, kale raab, sorrel).

Haven't worked on my oilseed sunflower project yet, still too wet to till, but it's drying out. I'm hoping to till and seed early next month. I think I'll hold off on buying the oil press until the crop is well established. I'm a bit worried about our local deer herd eating/trampling the seedlings.

[AgentR11]

Today I prepped the mushroom logs I cut last weekend, I'll start inoculating them tomorrow. I was hoping to do them all (~50) this weekend, but it'll definitely take a bit longer than that. I'm thinking of cutting up another tree and inoculating another few dozen logs, but we'll see if I have time.

Pics? The idea of fresh shitake's has my nose twitching... Wondering if what I got from two large oaks I downed might work.

[Loki]

I don't have pics of my personal mushroom logs yet, but I've found MushWorld's “Mushroom Grower's Handbook,” the University of Kentucky's “Shiitake Production on Logs: Step-by-Step in Pictures,” and North Carolina Extension's “Producing Shiitake Mushrooms” to be useful. All available for free online. I got my spawn from Fungi Perfecti, they're a well regarded company.

If I had a downed oak tree I'd cut it up right away and order some spawn, oak is the best substrate for shiitake. It's a pretty easy crop as long as you're comfortable with a chainsaw and have a way to water them in dry/hot periods. Equipment wise you need a chainsaw, drill and 5/8” bit, irrigation equipment (lawn sprinkler and garden hose would work fine), rubber mallet, food-grade wax and a way to melt it, a paintbrush, a handsaw, and a wire brush to scrape any moss or lichen off. I also plan on soaking my logs in a trough and overwinter them in a greenhouse to speed production, but that's not necessary.

[PeakOiler]

Yesterday I finished preparing an Earthday poster for a presentation on some of the "green" efforts I've made around here. I was invited to show and discuss my efforts at my brother's church this afternoon for an Earthday celebration.



The collage of photos include many pictures I'm posted on these forums. I'm aware you can't read all the captions, but if you're interested in what they say, you'll have to download the image and zoom in.

[rangerone314]

This weekend, I got a 4th semi-dwarf apple tree (a gala apple), a kousa dogwood (which gets edible fruit) and 2 small pecan trees.

I also got tomatoes, various perennial flowers & herbs.

[careinke]

I picked up the pigs on Wednesday and set them up in their temporary pen. They're about 9 weeks old, mixed breeds, guy who sold them to us said they were mostly Berkshire and Hampshire, and they appear to have some other random genes mixed in for good measure. Got two black ones with white markings, a white/pink (the runt), and a big ruddy red one with black markings. They were pretty shy at first but are warming up. They've already rooted up almost all the grass in their pen, we'll be setting up some electric fencing to open up their pasture quite a bit in a couple weeks.

If you are not free feeding the pigs, do yourself a favor. Get a bell, ring it every time you feed the pigs. If you are free feeding, then ring the bell whenever you give them a treat. Then when they escape, and they will, you can ring the bell and they will come. *Hint, fix the fence BEFORE you round up the pigs. Otherwise the first ones you catch will re-escape before you catch the others. I've now raised three sets, and the above are my lessons learned.

[Loki]

I inoculated 25 logs today today, 1000 shiitake plugs (avg of exactly 40 plugs per log). Took a longer than I thought, close to 6 hours. Wasn't working at production pace, took a lot of breaks. If I was working at production pace, had some practice, and a better set up (especially a better drill), I might have been able to get all 25 of the logs drilled, plugged, and waxed in maybe 5 hours. I was using a cordless 14.4V DeWalt, which sucked (underpowered with batteries that don't last very long). A bigger plug-in drill would have saved some time and effort.

I'm going to have to cut more logs, I culled a bunch that were too small or that had bark flaking off. 3” diameter is bare, bare minimum, ~5” seemed best. Bigger logs (8”+) are harder to handle and don't get that many more plugs. On some of the smaller logs I ended up drilling holes that touched in the middle, which doesn't seem good. They also take almost as long as the medium sized logs to deal with, but I doubt they'll produce as much. I'm hoping the smaller logs will at least produce earlier, but we'll see.

Careinke, thanks for the bell tip, I'll have to try that. My pigs are already beginning to associate my visits with food, but being able to lure them back when they get out would be helpful.

[radon]

My online store made another $100 sale. Just as I was running the numbers to see if I should slash prices...

Which webstore platform do you use, if this is not a big secret?

[PrestonSturges]

My online store made another $100 sale. Just as I was running the numbers to see if I should slash prices...

Which webstore platform do you use, if this is not a big secret?

My ISP uses ShopSite, and it has been OK, but ShopSIte hands off customer support to the ISP, which seems to have exactly one person who knows ShopSite. ShopSite has web templates for making sites, but my product line is simple enough to not need a catalog (database) so I hard coded my site instead of using their template. And I have a lot of other content to manage. So I'm just using the ShopSite shopping cart.

[Laurasia]

Last week I planted beans - the first planting I've done for almost three years. They're coming up well, I'm glad to say. Also I'm in the process of refinancing my mortgage to a lower interest rate which, if everything goes through, will give me extra money each month. Then I'll have to think about whether I want to spend it (on what?) or 'salt it away' (where?). I probably need to find out whether I've been approved first!

Regards,

L.