Bootstrapping An Acre of Strawberries

For the past few years I've been trying to learn the gardening/farming trade with hands on experience and some additional study. We've got a 2,500 square foot garden now (50x50) and I've been using no-till methods and cover crops to condition the soil for planting. My approach isn't perfect, and yields a mix of success and failures, but one thing that is working is our strawberry patch. Right now it's about 400 square feet and it produced about 40 pounds of berries this year, and did similarly well last year.

It seems plausible that I can scale that up and bootstrap the whole thing with minimal investment. I can ramp it up over the next few years so I can scale infrastructure and hone my methods and grow a market too.

It seems plausible that an acre of strawberries on my property could produce 4,000 pounds or so of berries, which might sound like a lot, but consider that some farms in California can produce 50,000 pounds per acre! It really varies state to state because of the local climate and growing season length, of course.

Regardless, 4000 pounds is pretty good. As a back of the envelope number maybe if the berries are processed into jam or retailed directly, I might end up grossing $20,000 per acre. (that's probably optimistic). Even if it's $10,000 per acre, that's not bad at all.

My key challenge will be growing the berries in an environment that's chock full of critters. My casual observation is the animals aren't crazy for the berries the same way they are about blueberries. Some losses are to be expected, especially since I won't fence the areas, but I'm going to try to grow the berries among cover crops and see how well that works to get the patch established and producing without losses.

If I can get that method dialed in, acres of production is really feasible. So I've got my first experimental patch underway this summer and we'll see how it goes. 

Greenhouse Watermelon Experiment

 In the summer, my greenhouse tends to be +10F warmer than the outside temperature even when the vents are fully open and the fans are running full blast. The hot temperatures are good for certain plants and bad for others.

This year I'm trying to grow different varieties of watermelons. Our climate is too cool for them to thrive in the garden, but maybe they'll work in the greenhouse. They're in a 12x12" milk crates with burlap bag liners. Some of them are doing great. Some are really struggling. It'll be interesting to see if it's going to work or not.

Helping a Mangy Fox

 A fox with mange started appearing in the yard. I have no way to know if he's the same fox that's appeared on our wildlife camera a few times, but he's probably a denizen of our woods. Over the past few years, I've noticed that some critters like foxes, raccoons, and rabbits end up coming close to the house when they're in distress.

We try to help out the animals that tap out when we can. Most of the time there's very little a lay-person can do, though. Treating foxes with mange is apparently pretty easy though. I found this link:

http://www.foxwoodwildliferescue.org/2017/01/05/treating-sarcoptic-mange-in-red-foxes/

We're trying it out now. It will be interesting to see if it works.

Investment Advice

For almost 100 years, people in the United States have been playing the stock market. Average people, mom and pop, buy stocks in things they don't understand. The market rises and falls and some people win and most lose. Somehow, people think it's respectable or good for their money to make money. The antinomian, or outright sociopathic activities of corporations makes them "wealthy". Their standards are sold out by companies like Apple, Nike, GE or whatever, but they get paid a dividend, or in stock buy-backs, so it's all good.

Retirement savings has institutionalized that system with 401(k)'s and IRA's. Resources that used to stay in a community go to New York and Los Angeles and San Francisco. The houses, roads, and infrastructure of people's home towns get gradually more dilapidated. Their kids move away to seek a job for funny money in the big city.

In my hometown, where I actually still live, several local businesses buck this trend, and actually do very well. Plowing resources into the local community--making an Ark or fortress against trouble--is a really good idea. Investing in businesses that routinely do evil, and are run by people that hate your existence is a bad idea.

401(k) Versus a Farm

In the years since the financial crisis, I've become very skeptical of financial "wealth", not just in terms of the ability to "store value", which is a ridiculous concept anyway, but more importantly, participation in the financial system really supports some of the worst people on planet earth, and perpetuates an antinomian devouring machine.

That poked and prodded me toward building a farm and becoming focused on value and exchange of value, versus the lies of "price" and money. All the money in the United States is derived from debt, and is really backed by the productivity of its people. It comes from an entirely parasitic usurious system. Money is dead. Banks are vampires. They have no material life or existence, they're blood suckers.

In spite of that belief, I still have a 401(k) and contribute to it two times a month. It's hard to turn down the "match", which in my case, is just other paper conjured into existence by the business I work for. Theoretically that money is backed by "equity" in the corporation, but that's just another pile of dreams and schemes. It's slightly more real than dollars, but is much less real than a pile of dirt, or fertile soil.

It's a good exercise to think about a moral choice versus a pragmatic or "economic" choice to obtain more "000's" in a computer account somewhere.

It's an easier choice to make when you believe all that paper wealth is probably going to be robbed to feed the vampires sometime in the next decade(s).

Any "dollar" I plow into the farm actually gets captured in something tangible. Any "dollar" or "stock dollar" I plow into my 401(k) goes into a computer and is a captive to a system that's opposed to the interests of me and my family.

Moving the Garden to a New Equilibrium Condition

One of the projects I'm doing this year is installing a border around the garden. I pile up wood scraps from the greenhouse build (I'll do a post on that once it's done), plus old rotting logs from the woods, and top it off with wood shavings. The idea is to separate the garden area from the yard so the plants that spread along the surface of the ground, or via roots, or runners can't breech the barricade. Also, the rotting wood is a food source, hopefully, for more fungi. If the garden can be coaxed into a condition where the soil food web has more of a fungal component, then that should be good for the crops, and help to suppress weeds.

I noticed last year, that the most effective weed suppressant was autumn leaves. In the garden where I've got a layer of leaves down, there have been zero weeds encroaching from the yard or sprouting from seeds. This fall, I'll redo some of our flower beds with a layer of leaves as a weed barrier, then cover that with pine bark mulch, which also does a good job at weed suppression.

Straw is not nearly as effective, and by the warm season (soil temperatures > 70F), grass and other weeds start peeking through. Woodchips are somewhere in between.

Winter Wheat Cover/Corn Patch Update

I terminated the winter wheat, then planted corn in the crimped over plants. I think I planted the corn too early this year, though. The spring was cool and very, very wet here. In other parts of the state, there was flooding and some farmers didn't even plant a crop. The cool, rainy conditions prevent the corn from germinating.

The plants didn't really start growing until late June. The first batch of seeds probably just rotted. I'll probably plant corn again next year, following a similar method, but I'll wait until the soil is 70 degrees. I terminated the winter wheat too soon, also.

The corn that is growing does seem pretty healthy and strong. The no-till method eventually works, but it's slow going. Areas of the garden with more compacted soil are a dead zone, though. I probably need to pile a bunch of compost there and let it rot for a couple of years.