updates

looked at Seed Drill in Oregon City, junk. dropped off seed garlic in Longview. very hot, high 90s by the  meter. Seems hotter. No rain for weeks. Nine laying hens, getting four to five eggs a day...

overrun with grass and weeds.

Some starts showing in rows including sweet corn, potatoes, kentucky provider beans, red okra, sesame plants and more.

Updates

Been putting bark strips on trees over six layers of cardboard to see if it will keep the grass at bay.

Found our first blackberries in late may. First whole bush of blackberries that were ripe found on the trail behind the Falcon house today.

We had three ripe cherries but it seems like the birds got them. Sporadic blueberries. Temps in the high 90s and no rain for weeks.

Put in the temp electric and a small watering system in May and early June.

Planted Broccoli, okra, dorinni sweet corn, wades giant indian corn, kentucky provider beans, onions, lots of stuff last week.

Farm updates

Lost two more chickens, marek's or coccydiosis. Interesting that it was the pretty birds that died and the older breeds, the leghorns and the rhode island reds, that survived. Lost a Gold Laced Wyandotte and two Blue Andalusians.

Planted Buckwheat on about 4000 sf outside of the protected area. I had limed it already.

I limed and added some peat moss, not much, to the 2000 or so sf in the protected area. Today I planted spinach, mustard, collards and swiss chard in that area.

We got the okay for the road permit, so I'm going ahead with installing temporary electric service. I'll be trenching, hopefully, tomorrow.

Farm Update April 13, 2015

Bought an old Howard Rotavator tiller. Having the driveline fitted. Will till soon.

Picked up three Broad Breasted turkeys for Thanksgiving.

Transplanted a few black locusts.

Farm updates

bought an old Howard Rotavator tiller for the Kubota, $425; fixed the driveline for it, $112; new starter for tractor, $330; purchased five foot harrow and 3-point implement piece, $150; Old useable trailer, $295.

Yeesh, it adds up, even when you're buying old, used stuff. $1,312 total.

Tilled the large area inside the fencing, added lime and peat moss, tilled it again. Going to harrow it but the hydraulic system is making noise. I'm hoping I can simply add fluid and keep working. A new pump for the old Kubota will probably be $400. Still, that's a lot cheaper than a new tractor.

Lost a chicken today. Not sure why. It was just keeled over dead when I got to the farm. All other chickens seem healthy. No poisonous snakes up here, so I have no idea why it died.

Farm updates

Wester Tent Caterpillars

Today we found these voracious beasts, above, on one of our Satsuma Plum trees. They're Western Tent Caterpillars. They will eat every leaf on a tree, every tree. They especially love Choke Berry. I'll have to find their natural predator and plant some habitat for the good guys.

Megan, Kahena, Henry and I were busy planting hops rhizomes (for glorious beer). Hopefully, in a few months we'll have some Chinook, Willamette, Tettnang, Centennial and Nugget nuggets to make glorious beer (which is glorious).

We intend to build trellises for the vines so they create a natural pergola to dine under--while drinking glorious beer, of course.

Juana's Orange Amaranth. It's a grain
plant and good fodder for animals.

I also transplanted about 50 Juana's Orange Amaranth from the hoop house to the farm. I didn't have water for the sprouts as I was relying on the predictions of Weather Underground that we'd have rain tonight. But by the time I'd dug the trenches, filled with dirt, and lovingly placed each sprout, the weather predictions had changed to clear skies and, ominously, 'may freeze'. 

Water helps plants survive freezes so I bucketed some from a full swale and, well, we'll see who is alive tomorrow.

The boss and her crew

Speaking of untimely demises.., the big gal in the photo above is a Bourbon Red turkey we got about three weeks ago. She (or he, I'm not good at sexing) is the only survivor of a cadre of four. I was warned that turkeys are extra hard to start so I kept the first batch warm, really warm, too warm, apparently. It is enough to say that there are going to be three more little creature souls waiting for me, along with a host of ants and bugs, to explain myself on the other side of the great divide.

Royal Palm turkeys

Here are a couple of the replacements. They're Royal Palms. Some of the problems with heirloom turkeys (heirloom pretty much means not big breasted, not modern industrial breeds) are that they're a lot smaller, take longer to mature and they can fly. But the advantages are that they're smarter, hardier, and some, like Royal Palms and Bourbon Reds, are great foragers.

These turkeys will all be housed under netting, so flying won't be a problem. And they're going on bug patrol so they'll earn their keep.

A mature Royal Palm Tom

The surprise was when we put the new chicks in with the older Bourbon Red and she immediately took to protecting them. I was expecting to have to concoct another enclosure to keep them separated until they were old enough to defend themselves, but I got lucky. I think the Bourbon Red was really lonely.

Heirloom Hulless Oats

A couple of weeks ago I planted some hulless oats from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. I can't figure out how to rotate the image. Aargh. But the oats have already sprouted. There weren't many in the pack, frankly, but that's what you get when you go boutique heirloom. I'm hoping I can save seed this year, maybe next, and start to build up a stock for the Zombie Apocalypse. 

I'm trying hulless oats because they are supposedly easier to process and are also high in protein, thus covering two necessities: enabling laziness and providing veggie protein.

Lazy Composting

Gardening should neither be difficult nor expensive. If it is then you're doing it wrong (or maybe it's too big).

However, there are lots of companies and websites that will try to convince you that you need stuff that will make gardening both expensive and difficult.

For instance, the big plastic barrel supposedly for composting pictured below.

This thing is useless. It's actually standing where you should be composting, directly into the soil below it. If I had bought one of these I suspect that it would be sitting, unused and decaying, taking up valuable real estate.

For awhile, before I moved to really lazy composting, I did the routine where you have to turn the pile and monitor your compost, add this or that, move this or that. Yeesh--what a waste of time.

I suspect many people have stopped composting simply because the 'experts' have chimed in on how difficult and important it is. Meh. Don't listen.

Here's how we do it:

Just bury your organic material directly in the ground. The worms will eat everything. Your soil will become rich and awesome over the course of a few years.

The hardest part of my composting style is the very first time you do it because it will require digging two holes, one to put the compost from your kitchen into today and the other to put tomorrow's compost into tomorrow. Each time you compost after that you use the dirt from the hole you're digging for the next day to cover the compost you're currently burying.

Dig the holes in succession, in a line, in your garden and over time you will directly compost your entire garden. I have dug holes where I previously composted only months earlier and found nothing but the usual suspects, egg shells (no I don't grind them or do anything to them but bury them), onions and rinds. A year later even all of these are completely gone.

For years I have composted everything organic, and i mean everything--paper napkins, meat, onions, citrus rinds--directly into the garden. I have nothing to show for it but lots of worm poop. And, you know, we love worm poop.

As far as varmints digging up your compost. I use an electric fence and it is one of the best investments in technology I've ever made. But a dog would work, too, as long as you can keep it from the garden.

There is no debate, vaccinate

I'll discuss pretty much anything, with some measure of decorum, with anybody.

Abortion? Let's talk. 

Nuclear Energy? There are reasonable arguments on both sides.

Vaccines? This is where my blood boils. I flip my lid. Here's a response I wrote to someone who wanted to have a 'reasonable' discussion with me on the issue:

"You're a perpetrator who should be prosecuted for endangering the lives of the most vulnerable children in our society."

Dear Sir,

Thanks for admitting you're a freerider, more than willing to 'reevaluate' if things get worse. I suspect every anti-vaxxer will 'reevaluate' once diseases might infect their own lives.

Thanks for the discussion. I'm sure your arguments mean a lot to parents of children with cancer who cannot get their vulnerable children vaccinated.

I have zero desire to get along with you or any of your type. What I want is for you to take up your most basic social responsibility, to have the most rudimentary courtesy, it takes to have your children vaccinated.

Barring that, I'd like you to keep your children out of public. And, if you leave the country, then you should stay out of the country.

But, 'yah freedom to vector vanquished diseases back into the society you're taking advantage of (until maybe it threatens your kids)' right?

Every time my children get their shots I remind myself how lucky I am that I'll never have to watch one of them suffer some deadly disease. But it also really pisses me off that I live with a group of people so rude that they're willing to let other people keep the defenses up while they lolly-gag around in illogical, self-serving narcissism.

No, we can't have a reasonable discussion--it would be akin to having a discussion with a climate change denier where all of the facts, all of the history, every available observation, 99.99 percent of the science, and every statistic is on my side and yet I have to pretend like you have a real argument to make.

Nah, dude. You want to see nature in action? How about not vaccinating your kids and then taking 'em on a tour of the Central African Republic or India. We'd see how you felt about vaccines real quick, I suspect.

Got smallpox? Nope. Why? worldwide effort to vaccinate.

Still got polio? Yep. Why? A bunch of morons got scared of vaccines literally months before polio was wiped off the face of the earth. Thank ignorance, self-righteousness and unreasonable fear for vaccines.

Measles is one of the leading causes of death among young children even though a safe and cost-effective vaccine is available. Why? Because of people like you. Nope, I'm not your buddy.

You're a perpetrator who should be prosecuted for endangering the lives of the most vulnerable children in our society. No, we can't have a reasonable discussion and I refuse to even pretend that you have valid points for fear of falsely giving them any legitimacy.

Take this from a kale eating, no-chemical-gardening, vegetarian: Go back to nature, dude, nature will eat you alive.

Green fencing

The image below of a portion of our farm, from google maps, shows fencing helps regenerate soil fertility.

The three light colored spots directly to the left and
below the hexagon are fruit trees, and two brown spots
near the lower right edge of the photo are Japanese Maples.

In the photo the small hexagon in the upper left corner, 750 square feet in area, is markedly greener than the rest of the field. It was fenced off. The rest of the acreage is open to any critter. This photo was taken in the late, dry, summer of 2014.

We watered the trees, but we also watered trees in other areas that do not show similar increases in greenness. It appears that the fencing ended grazing pressure from rabbits, turkey, and deer. The longer grass, bushes and trees shade the soil, keeping it cooler and more moist, setting up a soil creation feedback system--more protection more green, more green more protection, etc...

We have since added considerably to this fenced area, now up to over 10,000 sf. This photo makes me want to fence my entire five acres.

Troops arrive for basic training

I found five little cockerels at Wilco for half price. They are lucky little birds. Normally they would have been tossed into a grinder as soon as they were sexed, but somebody must have thought they were pullets (hens) and sent them to the store where their true nature was discovered. Not sure what the store would have done with them if I hadn't come along looking for troops to chicken the Rooster Picket Bug Kill Zone Garden Perimeter Fortified Area of Defense (RPBKZGPFAD).

As the man at the store said, very absolutely, 'nobody wants cockerels!'

I replied, 'shouldn't they be free?'

No luck, but at $1.50, close.

My Janissaries in training: Two White Leghorns, two Blue Andalusians, One Gold Laced Wyandotte, and two Rhode Island Reds, the latter are pullets to replace my lost Buff Orpington and my Unexpected and Very Expensive Speckled Sussex Rooster.

They're heritage breeds. Without a marketable skill like laying eggs or growing genetically engineered giant breasts, they get, well, decapitalized.

That the boys get immediately killed was one of the ethical dilemmas I faced at the beginning of the chicken head scratching. We can't keep roosters as they're too loud for the neighborhood, plus I need good foragers that are pretty cold hardy--good forager plus cold hardy leaves me with only heritage breeds to choose from.

But for every heritage female I buy a heritage male is going to die. Oofdah, my bruised
conscience.

Cheap Cheeps

The white leghorns massage my ego/conscience the most. White Leghorn hens lay white eggs. White eggs are not sought after by the particular sort of hairless ape that keeps heritage breeds. So, the white-egg-laying White Leghorn cockerel is a lucky bird if he sees day two. Nobody wants cockerels, especially White Leghorn cockerels.

Poor Henry the Unexpected and Very Expensive Rooster, he's going stir crazy. But I can't put him outside. He is LOUD. I take him to the land and let him roam when I have the time or I'm working on the fence. Soon, he'll be in chicken wonderland, though, scratching, eating bugs, and generally Roostering.

We're keeping Henry Rooster in the garage until we get the fencing ready on the farm. Tonight he kicked his stall door open (actually a dog kennel) and raided the place. He hopped up on the top of the chick incubator and broke the heat lamp. We're lucky he didn't kill the chicks.

Work on the RPBKZGPFAD in progress. Electric wires soon.

Everybody's welcome on the farm

I'm not upset when I see mole hills or mice or rabbits. Generally, the more life the better. Mole hills are a sign that  the soil is regaining health. Moles need to eat over half their weight in earthworms each day so they're always looking for rich, abundant soil that is full of worms.

If you've got moles then you've got worms. If you've got worms then you've got worm poop. Yay, worm poop.

Strange fact: A moles saliva is toxic to earthworms. It will paralyze but not kill. The still alive worms are often stored in what is essentially a mole pantry. Sometimes, a mole will store a thousand worms for later meals.

Voles follow in the mole holes, as do mice. The real damage to crops is done by these two. But, as I said, these creatures, usually annoyances or worse, are not hated by me. I see rabbits but I also see Hawks, so nature balances the equation, leaving food for everyone, including my family.

Coast Garter

This little Coast Garter Snake, above, was roaming around. I picked him up. I'd never 'own' a snake because I like my animals to have multiple jobs, but I like seeing them on the farm. They eat mice, moles, voles, bugs.

I can't help grabbing the poor fellows. Reptiles are really cool. Garter snakes are generally not harmful to humans. But, they will emit a smelly musk when threatened, and they do have teeth. If they manage to puncture your skin and then gum you for a bit you might even suffer a small swelling or irritation because they do produce a neurotoxin. If you're a frog and you let the snake gum you then you'll have the unimaginable experience of being swallowed whole while still alive. I guess if the snake was big enough, and you let him gum on you until he released all of his venom, then you might have the same displeasure.

More thoughts on fencing

Here's the coop in the backyard of the home office. It's on a very steep slope. You can see the three strand electric fence and also the T-Posts holding up some bird netting. These combine to make, so far, a safe habitat for the chickens.

Henry the Unexpected and Very Expensive Rooster

Rooster Picket Bug Kill Zone!

We have a few backyard birds. We bought them as chicks from the local Wilco farm store in the Fall, and raised them under lights in the garage--picked a few crusty butts (warm wet rag and patience, be gentle).

We have a Delaware Rooster, a Speckled Sussex Rooster, a Barred Rock Hen and an Americauna Hen. We had a Buff Orpington but she ended up on a Raccoon's dinner plate.

I feel terrible about that. I could have kept her from being eaten alive but I missed closing the coop one night and, well, bahk, bahk, bahk, aaack!

KK and me. I'm not a cowboy, but I like the hats. They give shade and peripheral vision.

There is a lot to raising chickens. I suspect that our eggs will end up costing us about $10 a dozen, in the end. Much of the costs could have been avoided had I known about fencing and what type of coop I wanted right at the beginning.

But my children are learning about where their food comes from, so it's worth the effort. Plus, when the Zombie Apocalypse hits we'll be that much more prepared.

I'm a vegetarian, but only by convenience and the availability of options. That is, if I miss one meal I start thinking about what small creature I can slaughter to satisfy my hunger. I don't figure it will be too long into a systemic collapse before I start whopping heads off roosters, but as long as the economy holds up they are some lucky fowl.

If I had started with an electric fence, one strong enough to have the occasional weed touching it, our little buff Orpington hen would still be with us. 

Rooster Picket Bug Kill Zone under construction.

The pic above shows my Rooster Picket Bug Kill Zone garden concept under construction. The T-post fence to the left surrounds about a third of an acre. I've dedicated that space to market crops, some trees, and perennials. The smaller fencing attached at an angle creates a space inside which my roosters will eventually range. Their space, safe from red-tail hawks, and to be protected on the perimeter by an electric fence, will surround the entire garden area, creating, essentially, a moat a few feet wide surrounding the garden.

This fits with the permaculture concept of multiple functions (though, admittedly, not perfectly), gives the roosters a job, and allows me to keep the promise I made to the chicks when we got them, that they weren't ever going to be on a human dinner plate--even if they were roosters.

I cut 10' pvc in three pieces and wired them to the tops of the T-posts. I then strung three strands of 17 galvanized wire between the pvc posts for a total fence height of eight feet. It has preformed well, keeping the deer at bay. This pic was taken just after a windstorm wreaked havoc on the wires. 

My rooster moat does come at a cost. It is essentially three fences, all 450 feet long, each encircling the next. Total cost is going to come in near a grand and will have taken me, over the course of learning, several days to install.

The inner fence is T-posts, 2" galvanized wire roll fencing, pvc extenders, three strands of galvanized wire, making a total of eight feet--deer proof in our verdant area. If I'd known I was going to do the Rooster Picket Bug Kill Zone and the electric fence, I would not have needed the pvc extenders--deer generally will not jump over two parallel fences.

If I could start again, I'd use the cheap plastic deer fencing that comes in 7x100 foot rolls instead of the 2" galvanized wire fencing. That would have saved hundreds of dollars. Initially I intended to use as few plastics as possible, so I was going with metal where I could, but as expenses add up, ethics take a beating.

Not the best pic, but the home office chicken coop is in the background. This was the set up before I installed a small electric fence, the set up that just looked like a lunch counter to a raccoon.

We can't keep roosters at our home, a few miles away from our farm, so I have to come up with a solution for the two we have. That's what started the whole Rooster Picket Bug Kill Zone construction concept--I can't send the family pets off to certain doom.

What the (hopefully) predator proof area on the land does, though, is allow me to keep another promise. When we got sexed chicks we were told that each chick was a female, with 95% surety.  Of course, that means that most of the chicks who were not thought to be females were destroyed--tough life for boy chickens.

At that time, I promised myself that I would make up those numbers, some day, and raise five cockrels, preferably of a breed known for white eggs but not for meat production (Brown or White Leghorns, for instance).  In other words, I promised myself that I'd raise at least five chickens that would have been, more often than not, run through a grinder minutes after they hatched to make up for my five hens. So, the rooster moat will allow me to keep that promise, some day.

Probably not too many farmers worrying about the cockrels that were destroyed to make room for their pullets, I suppose.

Jack London, Permaculturist

Jack London was arguably the first modern American permaculturist. The word, permaculture, of course, was not yet invented. But London brought ideas he had learned from Asia about soil health and swales, nitrogen fixing crops and green manures. He even tried his hand at coppicing Eucalyptus, which would have been a good idea if Eucalyptus hadn't sucked as timber. Here are some pic's I took at a recent outing to the Jack London State Park in California.

Above is the coppice forest. For various reasons this attempt failed commercially, but you can see that, 100 years later the trees are still thriving. If the park would cut them and use them, as coppice should be maintained, they would do Jack London's memory a favor.

Above, a couple of pic's of some of London's thoughts on the subject. He mentions 40 Centuries of Farmers, so perhaps, probably, he had read King's Farmer's of Forty Centuries before he started his own agro-ecological farming enterprise. 

The two photos above show the extensive work London's laborers did in his fields. Though they're not seen easily in the pics, there are rows and rows of terraces. London's specific aim was to undo decades of soil degradation by terracing his fields, thereby catching the nutrients and water when it rained, rather than let it all run off somewhere else. 

London was clearly ahead of his time. His writings on the early 20th C. oligarchy could be cut and pasted into today's news. I wonder if he wrote about the connection between freedom and independent food production? Clearly, he was on the cutting edge of what we would today call permaculture.

Another early mention of permaculture-ish thoughts is in Shakespeare's The Tempest (Act 2, Scene 1, Page 8): Marooned on a verdant island the trusted Advisor Gonzalo is teased for what he would do if he had control of the island and were to raise a society on it...

	GONZALO If I could colonize this island, my lord—
	ANTONIO He’d sow ’t with nettle seed.	ANTONIO He’d cultivate weeds on it.
	SEBASTIAN      Or docks, or mallows.	SEBASTIAN Or thorn-bushes.
	GONZALO And were the king on ’t, what would I do?	GONZALO And if I were king of it, you know what I’d do?
	SEBASTIAN 'Scape being drunk for want of wine.	SEBASTIAN He wouldn’t get drunk much, since there’s no wine here.
	GONZALO I' th' commonwealth I would by contraries Execute all things. For no kind of traffic Would I admit. No name of magistrate. Letters should not be known. Riches, poverty, And use of service—none. Contract, succession, Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard—none. No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil. No occupation. All men idle, all. And women too, but innocent and pure. No sovereignty—	GONZALO In my kingdom I’d do everything differently from the way it’s usually done. I wouldn’t allow any commerce. There’d be no officials or administrators. There’d be no schooling or literature. There’d be no riches, no poverty, and no servants—none. No contracts or inheritance laws; no division of the land into private farms, no metal-working, agriculture, or vineyards. There’d be no work. Men would have nothing to do, and women also—but they’d be innocent and pure. There’d be no kingship—
	SEBASTIAN     Yet he would be king on ’t.	SEBASTIAN He wants to be king in a place with no kingship.
	ANTONIO The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the beginning.	ANTONIO Yes, he’s getting a bit confused.
	GONZALO All things in common nature should produce Without sweat or endeavor. Treason, felony, Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine, Would I not have. But nature should bring forth Of its own kind all foison, all abundance, To feed my innocent people.	GONZALO Everything would be produced without labor, and would be shared by all. There’d be no treason, crimes, or weapons. Nature would produce its harvests in abundance, to feed my innocent people.

Clearly, Gonzalo would be a permaculturist were he alive today. That Shakespeare writes about it, colors an already colorful character with it, shows that the topic of going back to the land was important in England at the time.

Which makes me think I should write my treatise on how Shakespeare popularized the most noble of human callings, being human, humanist, even, long before anyone else. Sure, John Donne may have been his contemporary, Thomas Aquinas predates him, Descartes comes a few years after, but Shakespeare was bringing jokes about how the devil is in-your-endo to the masses (neatly coupled with arguments for the beauty of universal compassion--I'm thinking Lear's conversion, here) centuries before William Faulkner, let alone Tennessee Williams showed up. But I digress.

Back to the land, growing your own, freedom through independent food production, these ideas are clearly as old as some of the oldest human stories. The Adam and Eve fable is much less about our Fall from the Graces of a thinking, acting, MonoGod, than it is an admonition against eating apples.

Har, right? No, really.

The Adam and Eve story is about whether or not our forest dwelling ancestors were going to be taken in by the fruit of civilization, whether or not they were going to cultivate unnaturally (graft and propogate) or continue in the Garden of Eden munching on wild edibles. Of course, unnatural propagation made deserts of vast swaths of North Africa and is making deserts of pretty much everything it touches now.  So, however old that Adam-Eve-Apple story is, and it long predated Judaea-Christianity, it was a prescient warning.

First Swale

Digging First Swale:

Our project, Marvelous Wonderful Farm, took another step, or tentative toe prod, as I began digging the first swale today. We're in the Pacific Northwest, just north of Portland, Oregon, so we get a lot of rain. Or, more accurately, we get a lot of drizzle. It adds up to about 40 inches a year, but most of that comes in the November to May period, the rest of the time it's pretty dry. So swales are important here as they help control water both when you have it and when it is scarce.

They can't be seen in the photograph, but I also planted a few black locust, redbud and white dogwood trees on the top of the little berm I built. All of the water now in the swale was previously draining straight into the swampy area at the foot of our property. Now we slow it a little. When the other swales are in (and the thousand or so trees) we'll really be slowing the water.

I've been waiting to purchase a track hoe or a tractor with a hoe, even, but our financial reality has finally gotten through my thick head. So the thick head told the hands to dig. And dig I did.

Enjoy the process, that's what I told myself. And, really, this represents only a couple of hours of digging so the process was short. We've got somewhere around 400 trees coming this year, the rest to be planted next winter, so I still have quite a bit of swale-ing to be done. I'd like to dig all of the swales this year while the soil is full of moisture and soft.

How many swales? I dunno, I'm planning as I go. I'm not religious about this permaculture experiment--I'm not 'certified'. I've watched every video I can find and I've read a number of books. So much of permaculture seems to be site specific and intuitive that I just can't see paying for non site specific expertise. I also hesitate because I'm afraid of what all of the earthworks and trees will do to our property value. We will need a loan, eventually, to build our house, and a 20 or 30K hit would hurt. Taking our property from (from the perspective of the typical McMansion Minded American) pristine grassy--view--sunset--open to treed--terraced--wildlands could drop our values pretty dramatically. But I can't wait another year to start, so dig I did.

The Farm Blog Begins

Marvelous Wonderful Farm's 2014 Christmas Photo

It's a bit of stretch to call what I'm doing 'farming', though I have a business license, and I'm losing money. But I do hope that I will begin to show a profit in two to three years, so here goes. 

Marvelous Wonderful Farm is my attempt to prepare my family for climate change, to grow healthy food, and, eventually, to show a modest profit. We have five acres in Ridgefield, Washington, about 20 minutes North of Portland, Oregon. We're on a well traveled road, making a farm stand a future possibility.

I am trying to grow food ethically because it seems like a farmer should be at least as diligent with the soil as a Boy Scout is with a camp-sight and leave it better than he found it. I imagine that occasional future posts will include decrying of the fossil fuel intensive, health destroying, water ruining, life killing heavy equipment work that is currently called farming, but I'll keep this blog more about my trials and errors than about the failures of Big Ag.

Let's learn to grow our own food together. After all, if you're dependent on somebody else for food, you're dependent. Better to be dependent on someone you know and trust who is also dependent on you, which is a long way to say that I believe freedom and 'keeping it local' are meaningless without each other.

Rooster Picket Bug Kill Zone, before electric.

An important caveat, though, for any noob farmer: I have land, not much, but enough for one man to farm. Lack of arable soil is the single biggest impediment to starting farming. There are vertical farms and ingenious coops and front yard farmers who rent lawns, and the like, but nothing can really substitute for a few good, south facing acres; and that's what I've got. I say this only to be fair. I know my advantages.

Chris Rush Dudley

Marvelous Wonderful Farm and Film

chrisrushdudley@yahoo.com