Barrier to Entry for Natural Food Production is High

New Garden Bed

After a season of working relatively seriously on the garden and trying to produce food on a smaller scale, it's apparent that the barrier to entry for commercial scale natural food production is really high. It takes a lot of general and theoretical knowledge, plus a lot of site specific knowledge that's only acquired through hands on work and study over time. It also takes a lot of hard physical labor, because initially in the early learning stages, buying machines to do the work would be an enormous waste of money and material. Furthermore, continuing to produce food with "imported" materials and machines implies you're going to do that year after year, and probably never turn a profit.

Starting from scratch is difficult and requires a huge investment of time and labor, and probably minimal capital investment.

"Wild" Apple Trees

We've been working hard to get some fruit trees to grow, be healthy, and start to produce some food. Meanwhile, these apple trees do it without any intervention. There are a handful of trees in the woods that are either leftovers from an old orchard or are volunteers from seeds, which is even more incredible, that produce a lot of fruit in spite of no human hand tending them.

Iterative Adjustments

The image at the left is a patch of foxglove beardtongue wildflowers in the woods. This area is near the top of Big Creek's drainage system. It's pretty flat and there is a lot of impermeable blue-gray clay relatively near the surface.

All through this patch of the woods, maple trees have no problem starting to grow, but the soil is too wet for them to thrive, so they can only get to a certain age and size, then die.

I imagine what happens is they struggle through many seasons establishing their root systems and then either drown in an unusually wet stretch of days or keel over when the ground pulls up. When they die and collapse, they either create a little mound of new soil at the base of their roots or fall into the wet swampy ground and rot away into new soil.

It's surprising swamp-tolerant trees don't take over, but in this location the Maples are the most common tree and even in sub-optimal conditions for them, they seem to out compete other trees, but since they're small and stunted or ailing, light manages to get to the forest floor so undergrowth thrives and there are lots of salamanders and other critters that enjoy the conditions.

In the woods--really any natural area--what we see at our historical moment is the result of countless years of iterative adjustments and survival through many random extreme events: extremely heavy rains, extremely dry summers, high winds, extreme cold, and so on. The combination of plants and animals that could persist in all those conditions on this particular piece of land are what we see today.

It's probably a good lesson to take to heart--and is quite a different lesson from the panacea gardening methods preachers you find on youtube. It's a hard earned skill to imagine how a wide range of conditions will impact a new garden or orchard you plop down in the landscape.

Gardening Method Hype

We did two "deep mulch" garden areas. One is covered in about 4" of wood chips (they were newly shredded when I put them down last fall). One was covered in straw and cardboard. Some beds were just covered with several inches of straw.

The wood chips might improve the soil by next year. This year, though, many of the plants in the wood chips are really struggling for various reasons. One of the supposed selling points of wood chips--that they regulate water in the soil--does not seem to be true in our conditions. In some places, even though there's several inches of wood chips, and we've had a lot of rain, the plants seem to prefer as frequent watering as they did when the ground was bare and tilled.

The cardboard/straw combo was almost disastrous. The cardboard did kill the grass, but it also turned some areas of the garden into a swamp. We planted strawberries into the cardboard and straw. The berries started to develop root rot, and I subsequently stripped back the straw and cardboard and planted cover crops--which I should have done very early in the season. The plants did recover, finally, but it was a bit of a panic. The straw worked well in suppressing weeds and keeping the ground moist, but the depth needed adjustment through the season. Some of the strawberries are thriving and others are struggling.

It seems like every gardening method is sold as a panacea using religious language, e.g. "back to eden wood chip mulch", but any given method might not apply in every given soil situation and might not apply uniformly through the year. It will probably take several years of planting, adding compost and other amendments to really improve our situation and to learn what's going to work on our property.

No-Till Learning Curve Woes

We've got three patches of sunflowers growing in the yard. The longer term plan is to convert most of what was previously lawn to gardens and orchard. Over the past couple of years I've learned that the soil on the farm varies drastically from place to place. Some is fantastic: either it wasn't farmed previously, or has been enriched by the nearby black locust trees. Some is really bad: the topsoil is almost gone. The rest is somewhere between.

Last year I trucked in 15 cubic yards of woodchips for the garden, and 10 cubic yards of mulch for flower beds. The left over mulch decomposed nicely into something resembling deep black soil. Over the winter, the woodchips in the garden broke down unevenly. Some is like soil. Some looks like it did the day I moved them.

Some sunflowers from the same batch of seeds have been planted in each soil type. The seeds in the decomposed mulch are rocking. They're 2-3x larger than the garden sunflowers, which are doing reasonably well, too, and they're enormous compared to the seeds I planted in the yard without tilling. Those are really struggling in the poor soil areas.

The soil in the no-till yard patches seems pretty lifeless. The worms are only right at the surface. A few inches below the surface it's a uniform brown material with no roots and very little organic matter that's visible to the eye. It seems like it will be a multi-year project to improve the soil in those areas.

Milkweed Seed Success

I planted 6 milkweed seeds I sprouted on a wet paper towel. All of them grew after I planted them in some 4" pots after a few days of germinating in a heated humidity tent. It seems like the key is to cut or scratch the husk, and keep them moist, but not in a condition that'll rot the husk away after a few days.

I think you could have a really high success rate by prepping the seeds, then scattering them onto a thin layer of straw or grass clippings just on top of some bare soil. You might be able to get a hundred of them to grow with some pretty minimal effort.

If you just plant them in the ground, chances are they won't grow at all.

No-Till Sunflower Update

Sunflowers do really well around here. On our property they'd rather grow than not grow, when a bird drops a seed on the ground, chances are it will grow. It's no surprise, then, that my no-till planting of sunflowers in our future expanded garden are doing well. I planted them with three methods. One was to poke a hole in the ground and stick a seed in the soil. Another was to mash one into the ground and cover it with a handful of dirt. The third was to scatter them around under straw. All the seeds are growing. The most labor intensive method was the least effective. (poking the soil)

I think all I'd need to do is throw handfuls of sunflowers around and cover them with some straw and they'd grow like grass. I will probably give that a try.

Milkweed Seed Update

Mix of Clipped and Unclipped Seeds

I nipped the bottom of several milkweed seeds with a pair of sharp clippers. The pair I used was actually for electronics, but anything would work--scissors, a pairing knife, etc... I just clipped away at the seed husk until I could see the interior of the seed just a little bit.

I then spread those seeds on a paper towel and covered them with a paper towel and kept them moist. (covered with a dishcloth). A wet dishcloth keeps the paper towels moist overnight. You can check the progress of the seeds during the morning, then soak the dishcloth.

A number of the seeds sprouted in just a couple days. The unclipped seeds take a very long time to sprout. Actually I haven't witnessed any sprout yet. I planted the sprouted seeds in pots and am growing them inside.

Sprouted Milkweed Seeds (4 days later)

How to Grow Milkweed from Seeds

In the late autumn, you can find milkweed seed pods in meadow-like areas alongside the roads, under power lines, or along paths. If you want to grow milkweeds in your yard, it can be difficult to get the seeds to germinate if you scatter them in your lawn, or even if you put them in a prepared bed. The outer husk of the seed prevents the seed from just germinating. It's pretty likely the seed will rot or be eaten by a critter before the plant ever gets started. If you start them inside, you'll have more luck.

You can buy seeds online, or go collect them yourself. The seeds are ready when the pod splits open. If you take a seed pod too soon, the seeds will be immature. One pod has hundreds of seeds--probably more than you'll be able to use.

There are many people who provide tutorials on scarifying seeds. I tried a couple methods on milkweed seeds. One was to deep freeze the seeds for a number of weeks. The other was to simply snip open the seed shell to expose the interior slightly, which is super easy. The seed has a tear drop shape. I snipped off the pointy end by a small amount. I put the snipped seeds in coir/worm-casting planting soil in an egg-carton style container, since I figured the germination rate would be low. I kept the container in a heated humidity tent.

The deep-freeze seeds all failed to germinate and simply rotted. The snipped seeds actually sprouted recently. I'll update this when I get a sense of the rate of success.

No-Till Sunflowers and Strawberries

Sunflowers grow really well on our property. They barely need to be planted. Sunflowers grow voluntarily from birds and chipmunks dropping them on the ground all the time. I planted several in areas we'll expand the garden into next season. I mowed the grass down with some hedge trimmers, then poked a small hole in the ground and dropped a seed in. Some germinated about a week later. I also scattered some clover seeds around. Hopefully the sunflowers will overtake the grass and the clover will survive through the summer into the fall.

I probably planted the sunflowers too deep. It seems like it would have been sufficient to just scratch a small divot in the ground and cover it with some dirt to keep birds from eating the seeds, or make some seed balls with dirt to accomplish the same thing without even poking a  hole in the ground.

We also planted some strawberries using a similar method in the newly expanded garden. The strawberries were started inside from plugs that we planted in peat pots using coir and worm castings as soil. A couple weeks later, the strawberries are still doing well. The only problem with this approach is that the soil near the berries is more compact than the coir/worm castings, so the berries are in a sort of bowl. A couple of them seem to be a little stressed and are possibly sitting in some water.

The strawberries are surrounded by straw, plus some leaf mulch compost that's been aged about a year.

NPK and the Soil Food Web Video

This video discusses the difference between fertilizing soil and how the soil food web feeds plants.

Using Sun Path Charts

There are a few web sites that calculate sun path charts when given the latitude and longitude of a point on earth. One of the sites is www.sunearthtools.com. It generates a report that you can download as a PDF or view online.

I think the cartesian plots are easier to understand than the polar plot for northern and southern temperate latitudes, so I'll explain that.

The plot shows the apparent paths of the sun across the sky from a point on the earth throughout the solar year. The path traces from left--representing the position of the sunrise--to the right, representing the position of the sunset. Note that for us, the sun's zenith is at about 1:30 PM in the spring and summer months. (we're pretty far west in the Eastern US time zone. In New York City, the zenith is at around 1PM. In Maine it's 12:30PM.) The shape of the paths vary by north-south position. (We're in northern Ohio around 42 degrees north of the equator.)

The uppermost line is the path on the date of the summer solstice (June 21 2017). The lowest arc is the winter solstice (December 21, 2017). The intermediate lines are the paths on two dates, one on the lightening side of the solar year, and one on the darkening side of the solar year. The center line is the spring and fall equinox--note that it runs directly through the east and west cardinal points. The gold line is the day the chart was generated.

The figure 8 is the "analemma". The analemma represents the position of the sun in the sky at the same time of day throughout the year.

Summer Solstice Sunset

The pictures at the left were taken at Observatory Park in Montville, Ohio on the solstices and spring equinox. You can see the compass rose inlaid in the brickwork, and the solstice lines. If you look at the chart, above, the summer solstice sun set is around 300 degrees Azimuth.

0 degrees is North
90 degrees is East
180 degrees is South
270 degrees is West

The summer solstice sets about 30 degrees north of west. You can see that's the case on the photo at the left. The summer solstice sun rises about 30 degrees north of east.

Winter Solstice Sunset

You can see the winter solstice sunset is south of west. On the chart above, it's about 30 degrees south of west, which you can see on the pavement in the photo.

Finally, the equinox sunsets are due west in the spring and fall.

Spring Equinox Sunset

One application of these charts is determining which parts of your yard will be in shadow or sun during the day. How can you do that?

Go out in your yard at some location and face due south. (you can use a compass app on a phone or a real compass for this purpose). Look at the chart at the elevation of the sun on the summer solstice. Point your arm up at that angle. For us, the solstice zenith is about 72 degrees above the horizon. If your phone has an inclinometer app, you can use that to find the angle, or just estimate using your arm. If you're pointing at a tree, you're in the shade. If it's the sky, you're in a sunny spot on that day. You can then repeat the procedure at the zenith -4 hours, and +4 hours positions, and you'll have a really good idea of how sunny that spot is.

If there are some trees in the way, depending on what the species are, the area might still be partially sunny. Locust trees, for example, allow a significant amount of light to reach through their leaves, spindly conifer trees, like scotch pine also allow quite a bit of light through their branches sometimes.

Squirrel Net Update 2

I replaced the Raspberry Pi 3 with  a dedicated outdoor WiFi repeater with 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz channels. It's a Strongrr Outdoor Wireless AC 600 Mbps repeater. It works really well compared to the Pi. The range is probably double the range of the Raspberry Pi. I probably only would need a second one to cover the entire property.

Garden Bench Build

When we moved to the farm, I knew there was plenty of wood for firewood or woodworking, but I wasn't exactly sure how to process it into lumber, or whether I'd cut down live trees for that purpose or only use fallen or dying trees. It probably took a year of thinking about it to reach an informed decision.

There's more wood than I could possibly use for either purpose in dead and dying trees throughout the property. The log shown in the picture to the left is from a maple tree that fell across our creek in the past year or two. The tree isn't huge, but it supplied a large amount of material for projects.

I milled it with a Stihl 056 chainsaw that I bought from a guy who offered it on Craigslist. The 056 is a powerful saw (87 cc engine) that is late 1980's vintage. It seems like a very common problem with the Stihl 056 is that the ignition system goes bad after all those years. When the saw gets hot, the ignition stops working and the saw just cuts out. When it first happened, I thought the saw was flooding, but I noticed the spark was really feeble, even when the saw was cold. I had the ignition replaced with a modern one--the most difficult aspect of that project was finding a compatible flywheel.

Once the ignition worked, the saw was really reliable and powerful. It can cut through 10' of hard maple with a ripping chain in less than 10 minutes per cut. When cutting 2" slabs, it takes about an hour to mill up a log like the one shown above. (not counting all the setup, cleanup, etc... time)

Chainsaw milling is very labor intensive, even when everything goes according to plan. It's also really hard on all the equipment involved. The chainsaw is running wide open for a long time. Even the mill suffers a lot of vibration and abuse. The chains get dull rapidly and you need to pay a lot of attention to the condition of the whole rig to minimize down time.

The lumber has a lot of character that's imparted by the milling process itself. The chainsawed faces have a unique texture and patina that builds up as the wood dries. It's difficult to maintain that character for most woodworking projects, since it's usually necessary to obtain regular faces of the material before assembling it into a piece of furniture or using it in construction.

I have done a couple of experiments with this material over the past year or so. The slabs really aren't completely dry. They're probably at the half-way mark and will probably only be ready for fine work next fall after they roast in the woodshop attic.

I maintained the live edges on a slab and cut some recesses for legs on the bottom of the slab, and used 1" dowels to help reinforce the joint. The legs are 4x4" and the glue area is large, so the legs are very strong and required no cross braces. I finished the bench with tung oil, and charred the bottom of the legs with a torch. It's out in the garden now.

Squirrel Net Update: Flaky Components

Squirrel net has been running for only about 10 days. (It's my solar wifi node experiment.) There have been 2 failures so far--the solar charge controller failed, and the Raspberry Pi 3B has been flaky.

The charge controller that failed "HQST 30 Amp PWM Smart Solar Charge Controller with LCD Display" gave up the ghost after exposure to high humidity, but no moisture. The controller appeared to still function, but the voltage sensor on the battery terminals failed. It's not clear if it was a physical component failure or something else.

The Raspberry Pi 3B just fails periodically. It seems like it is probably a software failure. In fairness to the people who make the $40 gizmo, it was probably not designed for this application. The WiFi, for example, is relatively slow and low powered. The hardware also seems to keep plugging away in spite of exposure to the humid conditions lately.

Anyway, I'll probably replace the Pi with dedicated outdoor wireless hardware. It'll have better power and better reliability (hopefully) due to the packaging.

Great Deep Mulch Garden Series

This link is to a series that does a great job explaining how back to eden and deep mulch method actually works.

Garden Expansion

I spent a few hours over the mixed weather false-spring weekend expanding the garden from 40 feet x 40 feet to about 40x50. I'm sheet mulching the new section with cardboard and straw and also throwing in some old rotten logs. One of the logs is hollow, so hopefully some predators can hide out in there. I will probably add some other features to the garden this year--like a tiny pond and bird bath and more bird perches and boxes.

The sheet mulching is a good alternative to tilling the soil. It's much less work, and presumably will produce similar results over time. The main problem with the soil in the new section is it's pretty compacted and clay-ey. I'm planning to throw down some gypsum and see how well that works to drain the area.

Permaculture Videos

This is one of a really informative and well produced video series on permaculture. It features Geoff Lawton.

Ruth Stout Garden Method

The video, above, is an interview with Ruth Stout who developed a deep mulch gardening method that's really similar to Paul Gautschi's "Back to Eden" method. She used straw or hay instead of wood chips. She fed two people all year with the produce from a 45x50' garden with very little work.

Many youtubers apply deep mulch garden methods with success. It seems like the key component is access to cheap or free mulch of basically any kind. One of the better recommendations I've seen is to use a variety of materials to provide a broad spectrum of nutrients to the soil.

In the fall of 2016, I put a load of woodchips on our 40x40' garden. So far, over the winter the woodchips haven't decomposed much. By contrast, last summer we had a pile of wood bark mulch delivered, and that's already become soil, more or less. It's totally laced with fungus and breaking down. Similarly, other material I started composting in the fall has already become soil, so it seems like this load of chips will serve as a matrix for other compost rather than providing much nutrients itself.

 I think the key point of Ruth Stout's method or Gautschi's method is the same--the traditional way we conceive of gardening or farming is just incorrect. Gardening is really all about soil building, and soil building is not really difficult. It's the natural course of things. The idea that the complexity of the woods needs to be reduced to a sort of mathematical form--stripped bare soil tilled into uniform texture is just a delusion.

The first principles approach on the problem is to come up with an in-garden compost scheme that works for your area, your property, and the materials you have readily available. Our property is mostly wooded. The forest builds the soil with leaves and twigs and animal waste and tree roots.

There are places in our woods where the leaves completely smother the soil, but in 99% of the woods, the leaves and trees form a hummus producing mixture. It seem like a mix of twigs, sticks, and leaves leads to decomposition to nice soil, where a mat of leaves with no routes for air produces something like a tarp that kills plants. So basically, we just have to reproduce that mixture and avoid that tarp-like-mat composting and it should be successful.

Squirrel Net Solar Wifi Network

original concept

I've wanted to do a hands-on solar project for several years and finally got around to it. My original concept was to mount a small panel on an enclosure that also serves as a squirrel or bird house. I built the enclosure and powered it with a small solar panel (25 watts) and a 7 Amp*Hour battery.

With winter weather and sun conditions, the battery and panel were not able to last through a couple of overcast days, so I quadrupled the panel capacity to 100 Watts and jumped to a 100 Amp*Hour battery. The larger panel seems to be a necessity. On a cloudy, snowy day where the sun isn't visible through the clouds, the panel can collect 8-10 Watts.

The Raspberry Pi is only drawing 4-10 Watts, so the system is able to top the battery off every day during peak sun hours.

The concept of attaching the panel and battery to a birdhouse or squirrel house is not practical. The battery weighs too much (70 pounds for a lead acid 100 Ah battery) and the panel is 2 feet x 4 feet, more or less.

current concept

The smaller battery and panel would work for a load that's not running 24/7. However, I wanted to use the Raspberry Pi as a wildlife/security cam system too, which will run 24/7, so the overcapacity is necessary.

From the cost perspective, it probably would make sense to basically have a solar power station back in the woods and power cables running around... but that's also pretty bad aesthetically.

After a trial run of a couple of months with the current design (at right), I'll do another iteration that's back farther in the woods. I think I need four additional hotspots to cover the entire property.

Chair Factory Falls

Jordan Creek is a tributary of Big Creek that drains the area around Girdled Road between 608 and just west of Ravenna Road. It's really inconspicuous until it gets close to Big Creek. Lake Metroparks has a trail off the Greenway that visits the Chair Factory Falls, where there use to be a Chair Factory in the early 1900s.

Big Creek and its tributaries used to be bustling with commercial and industrial activity in those days, which is actually sort of hard to imagine when you walk around or drive around the region today.

Unfortunately, there's not a lot of information available about the chair factory, other than an interpretive sign at the park. The site was probably a strategic location back in those days--water power, access to a railroad, and access to local markets via roads. Not a trace remains of the chair factory which stood right next to the spot where the photo at  the left was taken.

Investing in Soil

Cross Section of Humus and Topsoil
in the Woods

A few weeks ago, a falling limb gouged a foot deep hole in the forest floor in our woods. It provided a good glimpse at the different soil layers and showed how thick the humus layer is in the woods compared to our yard, which has probably been treeless for 100+ years.

In that particular spot in the woods, the humus layer is several inches thick. The organic material decomposed to dirt, but it's mixed with all kinds of failed-young tree roots, thousands of seeds from nearby black cherry trees, the carcasses of old leaves, sticks, twigs, animal waste, etc...

It's possible that humus layer has been undisturbed by human activity, but my guess is it was farmed in the past centuries, so it might only be 100 years old more or less.

It seems like almost all the animal and insect and plant activity that goes on in the woods builds the soil. Small mammals dig tunnels that aerate the topmost soil. Deer leave their waste and also aerate the soil with their sharp hooves. They also mechanically break down old rotting limbs and trees by stepping on them or kicking them. They're all in on the project, whether they want to be or not, of building soil.

The forest floor is a mostly better at dealing with heavy rain or snow melt than the rest of the yard, which has been covered in grass for several decades. Rain or snow turns the yard into a mud pit, while the forest floor is well drained. Previous owners of our property allowed some patches of the yard to revert to scrubby new forests--mostly juneberries and young ash and maples. When the rest of the yard is totally saturated, those patches remain stable.

We've got christmas trees growing on a part of the yard and they grow rapidly, but it might make sense to allow rapidly growing trees, like juneberry take over open spots so they can start to deploy their root network and help break up compacted or very poorly drained areas.

Some Local History and Our Farm

Huntoon Road from 1900 to Today

When settlers moved into Geauga County in the early 1800s they relied on waterways for transportation and power for industries. The early part of the 1800s was the era of the canal and water wheel. A creek, like Big Creek, or even a modest stream like Jordan Creek could power a small enterprise's saws and power hammers, or turn a grist mill, or a wool mill.

The GIF at the top of the page shows the end result of a shift away from waterways being important. The part of Huntoon Road, which used to descend to the forge in "Howe's Hollow" (aka Liberty Hollow), is abandoned, then cut by I90 (and the railroad disappearing into the Green Way). In the early settlement days, the topographic features and water features defined how people related to the land. In our time, waterways and topography are barely noticed out the window of a car as we drive to a job in the city.

The people back then used renewable energy, but they were as far from being "green" or environmentally conscious as is possible. They made no effort to adapt their methods to their new home. They were human locusts.

By 1900 they'd cut down every single tree of commercial value and converted it into money and converted almost all the forested land into farmland or pasture. They literally killed every animal they could trap or put a bullet in. White tail deer, which we're so used to seeing all the time, were hunted to extirpation in a few decades. It boggles the mind that elk, bears, and bobcats once lived here in abundance. When you read their journals and histories written at the time (or shortly thereafter) it's apparent that they not only wiped out species that were competitors to their agricultural endeavors, or that had commercial value, they killed animals out of total wanton desire to kill. They put a bounty on squirrel pelts! Nature was their enemy.

It's pretty hard to imagine what was lost. Ten thousand years of primeval forest floor must have produced an incredibly rich and productive soil. The settlers turned that soil into food, pasture land, and of course money until it was washed away year after year. The lumber was milled for wood for local use (or to be shipped to other markets), but most of it was just burned. A tiny portion of that ash was used for fertilizer or to make household chemicals, but most went into the fields.

1906 Topographic Map

By 1900 newspaper accounts showed regrets at what was lost and communities started to change course. Also the patterns of land use started shifting toward our modern use. The property that Red Squirrel Farm occupies is on a tributary of Big Creek on what used to be a farm. (likely area of the old farm shown above. It was subsequently subdivided numerous times.) There are trees on our property that are almost certainly predate 1906, but most of the land was probably clear cut and used for agricultural fields or pasture land for dairy cows.

We've been here a year and we're in the very early stages of deciding on a direction or even trying to figure out what it means to "manage" woods and land like this. We've investigated the tree-farm scheme that the State of Ohio supports, but we're not interested in doing commercial timber harvesting or production. If you spend a lot of time in the woods and try to understand it in its own terms rather than look at the trees as a crop, the conclusions about what to do (if anything at all) are completely different than the commercial foresters approach.