It's the Pits....

It's always nice when you don't have to spend extra money on hobbies. From Inhabitat.com comes this suggestion:

How To Grow An Avocado Tree From An Avocado Pit

The big caveat is that like many other fruit trees, avocados grown from seed don't necessarily turn out like their parent, and it can take 3 to 15 years to find this out.

FreEBook: Plant Guilds

There are a ton of free E-books to download on the Internet (and considering how little electrons weigh, a ton is a whole heck of a lot), and many of them pertain to the topics I cover in this blog.  There are two ways to approach this bounty: one is to provide long lists to download en masse, and the other is to review them one-by-one.  The major advantage of the first is that you have all the information if you lose access to the Internet; the main disadvantage is that you won't go through them when you download them, so you'll need to discipline yourself to come back to them later.

Since a number of people have already done the first option, I will not be doing it here.  I will, however, provide links to those links and even repositories.  Instead I will be providing links to individual e-books in the same annotated manner I have been for articles, videos, and everything else.

The first free E-book comes from MidwestPermaculture.com: Plant Guilds.  This is a bit of a "cheat sheet" for doing permaculture in temperate climates, having done some of the design work for you.  In it are 10 plans of plants that go together.  Most of them are labeled by the largest tree in them; the two notable exceptions are the Bee Guild, to attract pollinators, and the Wet Meadow Guild.

Greenhouses without Glass

You may be familiar with the espalier pruning technique where trees are made to grow flat, but did you know that greenhouses had their origins from the same way of growing stuff in climates that were too cold: Fruit Walls.  Low-Tech Magazine has an in-depth article about this technology from the Renaissance.

Look, Out In The Field...

It's A Flower!

It's A Food!

It's A Fiber!

It's Flax!

Learn All About Flax.

This Rots....

If you want a good in-depth discussion on composting, listen to Trevor Van Hemert on The Survival Podcast.  What makes him an expert?  It's his day job!  He has a profitable business collecting compostable waste -- by bicycle -- and selling the finished compost.

Pulling Up Roots

As a general rule, you will get better results from plants if you start them from seeds in the place where you want them to grow.  However, this is not always possible: seeds don't always breed true, your growing season is too short, etc.  In these cases, it is important not to let the plant become pot bound, where the roots hit the sides and start circling around.  These roots can end up killing the plant -- imagine putting a solid piece of wood around a child's neck and leaving it there as the child grows.  What was ample room at first becomes impossible to get food and air through by adulthood.

What appears to work best is treating the pots with a copper hydroxide solution ahead of time.  This kills the roots as they touch the pot, so they never start circling.  If that is not done first, you may want to remove all the soil from potted plants and cut crooked roots before transplanting.  This should work well when the plant is dormant; it is the way most plants are shipped by mail.  I'm not so sure how good your results would be for an actively growing plant, however.  For those, you may want to use slicing, butterfly pruning, or teasing to get more fibrous root growth.

Related articles

• When You Buy Plants, Spend Smart!

Blasted Weeds

Do you have row upon row filled in your garden filled with weeds?  Here's a new way to deal with them: blast them!  Okay, so the system may not be commercially available yet, but it is an interesting concept: using 100 PSI air to propel gritty organic substances to pummel weed seedlings.

Something Fishy about this Method of Farming...

Barry at RatherYes.com has a rather extensive article about raising tilapia using aquaponics.  While it is an advertisement to sell you a book, unlike most of its kind, it lets you know upfront exactly what it is, and instead of teasing you with all the benefits you will get from buying the book, this article has information that is actually useful; insufficient for actually raising the tilapia, but extensive enough to make a decent decision whether this is something you might really be interested in.

Related articles

• Is Tilapia Unhealthy?
• Should I Eat Tilapia?
• Grilling with Hannah: Tilapia Tacos
• McCook woman raises fish, vegetables using aquaponics

Fast Fresh Food...

Thoreau at Prep-Blog has some tips for saving time in the garden.  While it's a bit short, every bit helps, because if you're serious about growing your own food, it can be extremely time-consuming if you don't know what you're doing.

10 Healing Herbs

The admin at Homesteading Guide calls these the Top 10 Medicinal Herbs for Your Garden.  While I'm not sure I'd agree with their ranking, it definitely is an interesting list:

1. Chamomile
2. Calendula
3. Peppermint
4. Comfrey
5. Lavender
6. Hyssop
7. Rosemary
8. St. John's Wort
9. Arnica
10. Marsh Mallow

Related articles

• Keep pets in mind when gardening
• 5 Plants For A Breast Cancer Medicinal Flower Garden
• You'll Never Have To Replant Again With These Self-Seeding Crops

Dig This...

The guy is speaking in Russian (I believe), but it doesn't matter, the video on his Facebook page speaks for itself.  He's invented a cool tool to turn soil using bicycle handlebars.  The only unfortunate thing is it looks like he is demonstrating it on soil that has already been worked; I'd really want to see how it does on virgin soil.

When It's A Cat's Ear....

When is a dandelion not a dandelion?

When it is Hypochaeris radicata, also known as Flatweed, False Dandelion, and Cat's Ear.  My mom asked me what the yellow flower out in the yard was, and my first answer was "DYC", which stands for "Damn Yellow Composite".  That gives some indication of the, um, "affection" botanists have for that class of flowers, because of the difficulty in narrowing down exactly what it is.  In the end, the Peterson Field Guide to Wildflowers: Northeastern and North-central North America on Google Books ended up being most helpful in coming up with an identification, but IdentifyThatPlant.com Dandelion and Cat's Ear made me confident that I had identified it correctly.

Learning more about it, Cats Ear is quite interesting.  It is edible, although it may be toxic to horses in large quantities.  Unlike dandelion, it is not supposed to be bitter, and like chicory, you can dry and grind the root for a coffee substitute.  I don't drink coffee, so I won't be trying that, and it's a bit late in the season to be eating the leaves, as they are probably quite chewy by now, but I look forward to sampling some next year.

Related articles

• Dandelions Need Love too.
• 7 Little-Know "Superfoods" You Can Find In Your Backyard
• Common And Powerful Healing Plants You Can Find In Your Back Garden
• Why Should You Eat Dandelion Greens?
• Natural rubber from dandelions

Marking Contours with a Simple A-Frame Level

I'm getting ready to make an on-contour hugelkulture bed with upslope swale, so I've been looking for a quick and easy way to mark contours.  One of the best guides I've found is Hesperian's Community Guide to Environmental Health.  The linked page not only describes how make the A-frame level using just sticks, string, rocks, and (optionally) nails and maybe a bottle, but also where and how to make contour barriers to prevent erosion.

For Seed-Saving Addicts...

Caleb at the Open Pollinated blog has come up with a unique way of making seed packets:

The interesting part is the design was originally meant for powders.

Gardening Posters

Afristar Foundation has some nice posters available to download on their Educational Resources page.  Here is the one for Permaculture Zones:

Jerusalem Artichokes

I never did get around to planting out my Jerusalem artichokes I bought this spring.  I guess now is a good time to do it.

You can see how they cracked open the plastic pot.

Going Upslope in LA

Wow, this couple has a self-reliant lifestyle in Los Angeles on 1/12 of an acre in a 900 square foot home:

A Simple Biochar Experiment

My cat loves to eat grass.  When it's too cold for him to go out, I'll grow some catgrass for him.  This past spring I did a little experiment to see about optimizing what I grow for him.  I took a mix of 1/3 peat moss, 1/3 vermiculite, and 1/3 compost (which if you do Square Foot Gardening you'll recognize as Mel's Mix) and a mix of 1/2 biochar and 1/2 compost and combined them in equal parts.  I took out one 3" round pot's worth of that mix, which I will call a 1/2 biochar-compost mix, and to the remainder I added an amount of Mel's Mix equal to what I had left, giving me a 1/4 biochar-compost mix.  I repeated this process down to 1/128 biochar-compost mix.  I then planted them all with 30 catgrass seeds, set them out on my patio table, and waited a couple weeks until it was time to harvest.  At that point there was visibly more catgrass in the containers in the 1/8 and 1/16 biochar-compost mixes than the ones with more or less.

The point of this wasn't to get quantifiable results but to have an idea of what range the biochar was most effective in.  If I repeat this experiment I will likely do more than one pot of each, and actually measure my results, but I will probably only try between 1% and 10% biochar.

Intro to Paul Wheaton

For anyone who is not familiar with Paul Wheaton or Permaculture, I suggest you check out "Grow wild: Paul Wheaton's at the forefront of a permaculture revolution" by Erika Fredrickson in the Missoula Independent.  Then if you like that sort of thing, head over to the forums at Permies.com, where they talk about bone sauce, homesteading, and Permaculture, all the time.

Hardcore Gardening

"You Might be a Hardcore Gardener If… Add Your Ideas!" on Common Sense Homesteading was very amusing.