Obtaining plants when you have no budget

Ah, my perpetual conundrum.  I've had to accept that I will need to grow most things from seed to keep my costs down.  Well, seeds, and any cuttings that I can scrounge off of the neighbors.

For example, through the summer, I collected apples, Italian plums, and mulberries, and stuck them in the fridge to stratify them (something I didn't know about until I read up on growing apples from seed).  I'm going to plant most of them in the ground, as soon as possible, but they'll be fine in the fridge for now.  After all, I started collecting them long before I had staked out the positions of my future trees.

For the apples, I collected some from early, mid, and late bearing trees.  One of the early-bearing trees was on a patch of neglected city property, full of blackberries and alder, but it was lush, heavy with small red apples, and clearly had done well without ever being pruned, so I figured it was a good candidate for a no-work garden.  One of the mid-bearing trees was untended on the easement portion of someone's property, so I figured it was ok to grab some apples without asking permission.  These were huge and pale yellow-green.  There's one tree still bearing dark red apples that I have my eye on, but I'm bashful about approaching the owner.  

When I picked these first apples, I took them from off the ground, and I took what I could get, regardless of size or how chewed up they were.  I didn't know until later that you should pick the biggest, ripest, best looking apples.  

Another thing that that I didn't do is taste the apples to see if they were worth growing.  But here's the thing: that would really only matter if I was cloning the tree from a cutting.  When you clone a tree (via a cutting), you're getting a copy of the tree and thus getting the same flavor profile.  With seeds, you're rolling the genetic dice.  I'm fine with rolling the dice on the apples.  I'll be planting at least three seeds in each spot for one tree, spaced apart so that they have room to grow until their first bearing.  I'll pick the best tree out of the three and remove the other two.  

Why not use cuttings anyway?  Well, I found out from a permaculture video on YouTube that with apples, those that grow from seed are stronger because they develop a deeper tap root.  Since my goal is a no-work, no-pruning food forest, growing from seed seems the best approach.  At least for the keystone trees of my food forest.

This weekend, I planned on getting cuttings from a walnut (to back up my plan to grow some from seed), a fig, and a mulberry tree, because I love the taste of the fruits on these particular trees.  In order to prepare, I got three kinds of soil (home-made, Black Magic, and Miracle Grow), planning to test the cuttings in each of the soils.  


To create a propagation tank, I set up an old fish tank that my neighbor was giving away, put an upside-down propagation tray in it for drainage, lined it with the insulation from an Amazon Fresh delivery box, and put an old heated grow mat in the bottom.  


I wanted containers that were deep and narrow: deep for the roots, and narrow to fit as many in the fish tank as possible.  So, I used doubled-up paper lunch bags, and put a strip of masking tape around the outside layer in case the bag disintegrates before spring when I'll want to safely lift the individual plants out of the tank.  


I bought RootX Rooting Hormone, sanitized my shears, and left the house with a bin of 6 bags full of soil.  


I stopped first at the neighbors who own the walnut tree.  I'm anxious about meeting new people, but they were awesome!!  The wife came out to watch what I did, and she helped me collect nuts too!  Then she showed me her gorgeous garden, and gave me a gorgeous purple dahlia!  We made plans to swap cuttings and things that we're going to dig up in the spring (I have a smoke bush and a honeysuckle going out of control, and she's got some... flaming- or fire- somethings that I know are good for ditches).  My experience couldn't have been better!  She's an awesome neighbor!!

Next, I went to the neighbor who has the mulberry and the fig.  Before I got to him, he had taken 4 cuttings of each, and he did something interesting to them.  He used a carrot peeler to take about 3/4" of bark off the bottom of the cutting.  He also told me not to remove all but 3 leaves.  (I had done that with the walnuts.)  Other than that, I dipped them in the rooting hormone just like I had done to the walnuts.  I'm worried that I should've treated the walnut cuttings the same way as he had treated the fig and mulberry cuttings.  Or vice versa.  Oh well.  It's all an experiment.

Here's a shot of all of the cuttings I got, in my patchwork propagation tank.  I need to make another, because I have more cuttings to take now that I know I'm going to share our smoke bush.  I have a clear plastic bin I'll have to use. 

Did you know that you can test the viability of a walnut nut by seeing if it sinks in water?  I didn't, until I looked it up.  Thank goodness I tested the walnuts we picked, because holy moley, only 7 were viable, out of 25!

My weekend ended before I could plant the walnuts and the apple seeds, sadly.  It's because I found out late that you want to put a metal screen over any walnuts that you plant, in order to keep the squirrels from digging them up.  So, I went crazy for a couple hours as the sun set, creating little metal tents for the walnuts.  I've never sewed with metal wire before.  My hands are all scarred up now.  I didn't want to rely on the little dollar store zip ties that you can see holding the seams together.

Maybe I'll have time to plant the walnut nuts, and the apple, plum, and mulberry seeds before next weekend.  I'm just so tired.  I'm glad I took the weekend off of spraying JMS.  Walking your entire property is exhausting.

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October 12, 2018

Well, I finally got the nerve up to plant the viable walnut nuts.

In the two spots I had earmarked for the walnut trees, I cut up a square of sod about 6" deep, flipped it over, chopped at it a bit with the shovel to remove large air spaces, pushed three walnuts into the soil, spaced apart, and patted down the soil.  Then I sprinkled with straw and a little horse manure.  I spread clover seed around and stepped on the seed.  I didn't have a way to pin the little wire cages in place, but hopefully they'll keep the squirrels out.

I had one walnut left over so I buried in on the north side of my property by the neighbor's fence, giving it the same straw/manure/clover treatment.  

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October 26, 2018

Hmm.  No animal disturbed the walnut that didn't have a wire cage.  I wonder if the horse poop deterred them.  That's handy.

Also, the straw is almost decomposed away, but the area where I spread that and the manure is raised up from the rest of the lawn, so it's very noticeable!  That's awesome!  I was worried that I'd lose the location of the walnut, but the raised ring of clover makes it super noticeable.  That'll be good for when we mow--we don't want to mow down walnut saplings.

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October 28, 2018

I killed all of my cuttings.  The heat mat dried out the soil so fast, and also I'm an idiot and didn't check them often enough to see if they needed water.  And also I had the tank in a spot that got the last of the autumn's direct sunlight for at least 4 hours a day.  They're all dead, Dave.  Oh well.  As my dad always told me, "You always seem to have to learn things the hard way."

Dead spot is not so dead anymore

For all four+ years that we've lived here, there's a roughly-circular shape in the lawn where nothing grows--not even weeds.  The previous owners won't say what caused it.  They just told us to sprinkle grass seed on it every few months.

It's been there since before we bought the house.

Here's the Google enhanced-satellite version, from around the same time period:

After two weekends of spraying with JADAM microbial solution (JMS), look what's happening.

I know--correlation is not causation.  Anyhoo, I'll update this post over time with newer pictures.

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December 17th, 2018

And that day is today!  Check out how lush the spot is.  It's more weed-free and lush with grass than any other part of the yard, and we're 2 months on from when I last posted.  

I've emailed the previous house owner to beg him to let me know what happened on that spot.  The idea that JMS might be a bioremediation method for whatever caused this dead spot is super exciting to me!

Brewing microbes, and spraying my property once a week

Hoo-boy.  Here we go.  The simplest way to start healing my soil is by adding microbes.  And the simplest method of obtaining microbes is by brewing my own JADAM microbial solution (JMS).  There are other things you can do:

• Buying some EM, https://growingorganic.com/probiotics/how-to-use-effective-microorganisms/, but this costs more money.
• Making IMO or other KNF inputs, https://naturalfarminghawaii.net/learn-natural-farming/application-guide/, but the ingredients cost more than JMS, and the processes are longer and more complex.  I'm not ready for that.

If you haven't read my first post, you'll have missed the part where I discovered that our property has zero nitrogen, and I found out that my neighbor had been spraying the ditches that border our property with RoundUp twice a year, for years.  The chemical in RoundUp kills the microbes that fix nitrogen in the soil.  So, now I need to help them get back to a good population level.

Why microbes?  There have been many studies lately that confirm that soil with healthy microbe populations:

• Holds onto moisture better.
• Converts organic matter and rock particles into nutrients that the plants ask for.  (How do they ask?  They reward the microbes with sugars exuded from their roots when the microbes unlock the nutrients that the plant wants.  It's not a decision thing or a conscious thing or a mystical hippy thing, it's just cause and effect.)  

The results are: no need for fertilizer, and less need for watering, which is important in the global warming scenario.  You do need to keep adding organic matter to your soil, or rock dust.  I'm using mulch and bringing in other people's grass clippings and horse poop, and I might spare the expense on some rock dust once a year.

Here are some links about the importance of microbes:

• https://colsa.unh.edu/nhaes/article/2016/12/soilorganicmatter?ABk
• http://www.handsonpermaculture1.org/

So, I've started a weekly routine of making JMS, using Chris Trump's method, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Uuy8DxGjA.  

For the "good soil", I grabbed some from the wild apple tree whose apples were the first apples that I gathered for seeds.  

It was hard finding what Chris called the "microbes".  They looked a bit like mycelium.  In my first batch of JMS, I used mycelium that I found growing in some of the horse poop my neighbor delivered.  MAN!  Was it powerful.  It smelled unpleasant but healthy.  After 2.5 days, it was a serious bubbling crude!  After 6 days it was dead and useless (no bubbles) and had some serious stank.  Chose not to do that again.

My second batch of JMS, I used mycelium from some wood and some leaf mold that I found in a conservation area.  Instead of cheesecloth, I used nylon sprouting bags that I had previously used to cover some jars of Rejuvelac that I made.  The resulting JMS smelled like... REJUVELAC!  Is it possible?  Could there have been some lactic acid bacteria on the nylon sprouting bags that started reproducing in the JMS?  Anyhoo, the JMS smelled healthy and good.  (I need a microscope to start identifying exactly what's growing in my JMS batches.)

I bought a 5 gallon backpack sprayer to spray the diluted JMS over my entire property.  It's exhausting, but if I listen to some good music, it's enjoyable.  Almost meditative.  And seriously good exercise.  I clogged the sprayer after my first use, though.  The little pouring basket that comes with the sprayer didn't filter out enough silt.  I took the fracking thing entirely apart before I discovered there was a super-easy-to-access filter sleeve in the stinking handle!  ARGH!

Now, when you make 4 gallons of JMS, and you need to dilute it with water in a 1:20 ratio, you're talking 80 gallons of water.  I don't want to pay for that every week.  Plus, our tap water is chlorinated, and I don't have enough bottles and containers to fill and let sit for 24 hours to off-gas the chlorine (chlorine kills microbes).  So, I finally set up our rain barrels (after two years!).  The first one filled and overflowed during the first rain, so I set up a second to catch the overflow from the first, but it didn't work because apparently I such at engineering.  I've got things working well enough now, until I can properly set them (and future barrels) up.  Now, I have a ready supply of more than 80 gallons of rain water.

What we're starting with

We have about an acre of open, sloped land.  This is an aerial photo from probably 2012.  Look how burned the land seems.  The home-owner used pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers for about 20 years.  We bought the property in 2013.

The land slopes downwards to the right, with a bit of a leveling off in the middle.

Here's a photo from Google's enhanced satellite, taken probably around the same time or shortly after.  Notice the difference in burned spots.  Every summer is different.  Patches move and grow.  It's odd.  (Flash forward to now, 5+ years later, and the green stripe you see below is a bit wider to the right, covering the entire leveled off patch.)

Last year (2017), I took soil samples from various spots all over the property.  The results?  No nitrogen anywhere, except for a tiny amount in the green stripe (mentioned below).  And the soil was highly acidic everywhere, even where there aren't any evergreen plants.

Luckily, shortly after the tests, my kids caught my neighbor spraying something along the south and east ditch, which is 10 feet from our property lines.  We don't own the ditch, but neither does he.  I knocked on his door, and his wife told me that he sprays the ditch twice a year with RoundUp, "to keep it looking nice".  I said, "he's spraying someone else's property?"  She said, "he got permission from the property owner."  I said, "the rain water drains from all of our ditches straight into the lake in the conservation area east of us.  We're polluting that water.  Additionally, I just tested the soil all over our property, and we have zero nitrogen everywhere.  RoundUp kills the microbes that fix nitrogen in the soil.  If I get permission from the owner of the ditch to maintain it, will you please ask your husband to stop spraying RoundUp?"  Later, I got permission, and our neighbor agreed to stop spraying.  So, we're now a year without RoundUp.

This is an aerial shot from around that time (2017), but sadly from Yahoo Maps, which doesn't allow for better focus.  Regardless, you can see a vertical green strip, which is the left half of where the ground levels out a bit before sloping downwards to the east again.  That spot of leveling-out is acting like a massive, shallow swale.

We plowed the manure pile into a 70' by 70' square, almost in the middle.  This was before I found out that tilling destroys soil structure.  But hey, we didn't do anything with the land after that, and the soil structure recovered.

This past summer (2018) was the worst yet, in terms of heat and rain.  Imagine the same picture as the one above, but even more brown.  We have a huge variety of weeds, dead grass, and moss.  But all through this past summer, the 70' by 70' square always stood out, always slightly more green than the rest.  I wish I had taken a picture from when you could actually see the edges of the square.

Here's a more recent picture, taken at the end of September 2018, looking eastward after a weekend of rain.  You can still sort-of see the edges of the green square, which I've drawn in with white lines.

The pile of poo you can see is a new pile.  Our neighbor on the left got a horse and graciously drops off the manure for me to use.  I have plans for it, to spread it thinly over scattered straw like in The One Straw Revolution.  

You might have noticed little pylons in the photo.  Those are garden stakes with pool noodles fitted on them to make them highly-visible.  The blue ones mark the edges of two 70' by 70' squares that are earmarked for a food forest, and the edges of the future veggie swales.  Pink noodles mark the locations of the main trees (apple and walnut).  Orange noodles mark the mulberry and Russian olives.  

In order to stake these out, I had to have a plan.

After 5 drafts and lots of thinking time in-between, my plan is pretty well set now, though not in stone.  I'm using guidelines from the permaculture book Gaia's Garden, the no-till, do-nothing book The One Straw Revolution, and the principles of Korean Natural Farming and JADAM.  For the veggie swales, I'll use Winter Gardening in the Pacific Northwest.  This next picture says "Plan 4", but with all of the modifications, I consider it Plan 5.  :)  One modification not shown is that the two super-guilds are going to make a U-shape instead of a Z-shape, in order to create a permaculture "sun trap".

These are the plans for each of the two super-guilds that will make up the food forest.

Here's a little pic that helped me place the stakes on the diagonal from the corners of the two 70' by 70 squares.  This probably isn't interesting to anyone but me.  A quaint reminder that, yes, you will use high school math again.  I had to use the Pythagorean Theorem to get the right distance.

So... here we are.  A month ago, I started the actual work.  My budget is skimpy, and so is my time.  It's going to take 10 years until it looks like the picture in my head, so I won't beat myself up about it too much.  

Wish me luck.  :)