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I'd be a bit concerned about chemicals used in paper making and ink.

Yes, that is my training, received five years ago, and I've worked with many clients since then. One thing I know is that most diseases people face nowadays are firmly in the category of "lifestyle disease" and most of those lifestyle choices are around food. Not just processed food. I made a...

My dad's water buckets never froze more than a light skin of ice. Mine will freeze almost solid (two gallon pails) in the coldest part of winter, 600 miles south of where my dad's coop was located.

Yes! I use it with my own hens and goats. For a few years I had a "buck box" for the buck, which was based on a sheet of plywood so was 4' x 4' x 8'. One year I had a rather small buck so I put my big gentle Ginger in with him for the winter to help him stay warm. Well, with two pooping and...

Not dedication, desperation! I didn't pollinate all the blossoms, just what could be easily reached. It took maybe a half hour to an hour to do three trees and some currants and it worked. I could tell where my paintbrush had been, easily, by where the fruit was developing. I lost steam...

My dad had hens in zone 3 in far northern Maine. He used deep litter in the coop and had a nice, tight coop. The water rarely froze even though temps got well below zero and stayed there for weeks. If he went in the coop and smelled ammonia, he would simply add more bedding and the smell...

I can't say I know much about Orchard care but I do know that suddenly in the past two or three years my trees are producing. I'll tell you what I did differently to make this happen. Or at least I think it's what made it happen. I mulched heavily using the BTE method of free ramial wood chips...

I've had several breeds throughout my chicken keeping years and finally identified what I wanted in my flock and bred to get it. I wanted large breed laying hens that would reliably go broody. I also wanted a flock that was very good at free-ranging most of their food. A few years ago I bought...

No, that's not who I'm talking about. I was referring to the list owner at least at the time. At the time he had no land it was not living a self-sufficient life. I found Holzer's work to be very interesting, not necessarily applicable to my life but I did try the raspberry bed and it worked out...

I have never located wild plums in my area but I'm sure they exist. I bought a tree a couple years ago and it looks like I'm going to get a taste of plums this year. I bought a European prune plum to go with it but a rabbit ate it shortly after planting. No I've got cages around my plum trees...

Did 30 pints of black beans yesterday.

I was suddenly locked out of Permies at one point, too. And I agree that many of the ideas are theoretical and have not been tried. Or have not been tried in comparison with more realistic ways of doing things. I followed the owner some years ago and found him to be a big talk no action type...

Actually, they grew to full fighting height that very year. I got that quadruple harvest that first season. Ever since then, the harvests are huge and the big battle is beating back all the shoots every spring. If I wanted to I could have acres of raspberries right now.

Yes, the difference is amazing. I also find production has gone up dramatically with BTE gardening. Pictures of the raspberry bed project are detailed on my blog. http://blueviolafarm.blogspot.com/2012/04/hugelkultur-raspberries.html?m=1

Pretty much everything here is reused until it's gone. I'm not going to make a list because so much has already been mentioned. But I just kept adding things that I do myself until now I do almost everything myself. One of the big things I did that created a huge jump in savings was to stop...

I talked about this in another thread recently. I made a hugelculture bed for my raspberries a few years ago and production was immediately four times what it was in the rows where I got my plants. The only machinery I have is a shovel and a wheelbarrow. I used deadfall from a storm a couple or...

Whew. Put 8 more loads of compost in the greenhouse and a load of woodchips under the grape arbor. It is hot out and I'm not used to it. Planting soon, maybe some tomorrow. It takes a little longer for the soil to warm up under the woodchip mulch, but that is ok because the plants catch up...

This is my first time doing it with fresh flavorings. My plan is to sift out the salt from the scallions just because I used to the fibrous ends of the big ones. I'll run it through the dehydrator to make that easier to do. Then when the garlic comes in I'll add garlic, pulverizing it because...

It's a cold spring so the early flowers aren't that exciting. Food plants have pushed out many of my flowering plants but I do keep a few perennials in amongst the perennial food plants. Pink hibiscus, pink peonies, and four different irises. My pride and joy is the shade garden. That has got...

I haven't come here every day, so I'll post what I did in the past week. I may not get it all. It's the season! Here are the highlights. I did a little weeding, added lots of wood chip mulch (maybe fifty large wheelbarrows so far?), added some mineral amendments namely copper and zinc and...