. I read somewhere that it takes a football sized field (US) to complete one person diet.
I think that this urban homesteader would argue that it takes much less space than that if done properly;[/quote]
These people are not providing their complete diet exclusively from such small amounts of land!
Growing the plants requires just a small part of the total food "footprint." If they don't use "inputs," they will quickly wear out their land. If they do use external inputs, they should account for the area of land needed to produce those inputs in order to paint an accurate picture of how much land it takes.
Mind you, I applaud anyone who grows food anywhere, on any size of plot. But saying one person can completely feed themselves from a city lot ignores the complex web of life that is needed to support each of us.
We have about 1/3 acre total garden with our combined two patches. Our inputs are horse manure and local vegetation that we cook in a compost pile. The four horses have 76 acres to graze and we still buy around 700 square bales of hay each year plus their feed.
I am under no illusions that I have a sustainable system, but at least we are recycling our manure and building our soils. There is a lot of land used to create the inputs for the 1/3 acre garden.
Listening to this young man's story, I cannot help but to imagine just how devious the whole fractional-reserve-system is. In that over history - ever so steadily - our ability to create and sustain our own needs has been systematically taken (taxed, inflated, robbed) right out of us - in the name of freedom. Bravo! www.thebookofgardens.com
Thank you for bringing your incredible story to the world. What I appreciate is that you took your ideas from the classroom directly into the field/garden. In that process, the highly engaging and experiential nature of the "work" became an agent of knowledge, inspiration and transformation. Your life's work was been revealed! A lifetime of Meaningful Work is your destiny. The LOVE is evident in all that you are sharing.
For those in CA, you have access to the original biointensive pioneers at Ecology Action. They are located in Willits CA. You can spend time on their farm as a visitor, intern, or participant in workshops. I recommend that you check them out. Note: they sell books, seeds, and hand tools as well.
Frankly , if you want to supplement your food from a small kitchen garden, you really need to rethink your waste stream. Composting everything is a darned good start. All non-meat kitchen scraps, all yard waste, and shredded cover crops are a good start. But in a crisis situation, we may not be so squeamish. Using humanure, and your nitrogen-rich urine may not sound palatable, but if it means the difference between eating and not eating, you'll use them.
In the meantime figuring out ways to decrease your waste stream is just sensible prepping. If the collapse is slow or sudden, either way eventually no one is gonna come and tote your excess packaging off to a landfill. Might as well get into the habit of using your resources properly. Cooking from scratch is VERY EASY and often just as fast as heating up some pre-packaged junk. Your body and taste buds will thank you, too.
I swear, every time i look at the supermarket flyers with their advertised specials on "convenience foods" with all their packaging and unhealthly ingredients (ingredients trucked in from god-knows-where with additives from some lab) - every time I read those flyers, I am struck by what an aberration this whole modern system of feeding ourselves is.
Stop carting your fertilizers off to a landfill, folks. Those organic (in a chemical sense), non-meat scraps belong in your compost pile. Will composting and a kitchen garden be enough to feed you on its own? Not hardly, But this is another example of do what you can, edging our lives in the right direction.
You can certainly compost meat! It just takes longer, and so you may want to put it in a separate pile. (It still needs N and C to work with it.)
When our chickens die, I just dig a hole in the compost, and bury the chicken in there. By the time we use it, there's only bones left.
[quote=Wendy S. Delmater]Using humanure, and your nitrogen-rich urine may not sound palatable, but if it means the difference between eating and not eating, you'll use them.
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Urine and wood stove ash are perfect complements. Urine is about 11:0.5:1, and stove ash soluate is about 0:10:10.
We soak and strain our stove ash, and combine it with one part urine and eight parts water to make a nice, gentle 1:1:1 organic liquid fertilizer. We pump it through our greenhouse irrigation system to "fertigate" via dripline.
When mixing potting soil in the greenhouse, I drink a lot of tea, but I never leave the greenhouse with a full bladder!
We must close the nutrient loop!
Bytesmiths please say more, add links, start a new thread, or PM me with info. I am interested! I have plenty of wood stove ash and, of course, plenty of urine. Sounds like a great method. Thanks! And closing the loop - yes!
[quote=Don35]Bytesmiths please say more, add links, start a new thread, or PM me with info. I am interested! I have plenty of wood stove ash and, of course, plenty of urine.[/quote]Not much to it, actually. I have the cooled ash about half-full in a 20 litre bucket, fill to the top with water, stir well, let it settle well for several days, then carefully pour the soluate off the top.
Then mix an equal amount of urine, with five times as much clear water. So you end up with 10% urine, 10% stove ash soluate, and 80% water, for a gentle organic 1:1:1 fertilizer that isn't hot enough to burn anything. We had corn in the greenhouse that shot up a foot after giving it an hour of fertigation!
If you're going to put it into an irrigation system, be careful not to pour any of the sludge off with the soluate, or it will clog your emitters!
We mix up a thousand litres in a "tote" and then feed it via a centrifugal well pump into our irrigation system. Here is one of three manifolds, one in each 24' x 48' room in the greenhouse. The top valve goes to clear water; the second valve goes to the fertigation tank via the pump. Below that is a four-port garden hose manifold, feeding a manual wind-up timer (no batteries!), a pressure regulator, and a valved "Y" that feeds the two halves of a greenhouse room separately. The main lines are 1" LDPE, the headers coming out of the "Y" are 3/4" LDPE. The two headers each feed 33 driplines, each 11' long, with a 1 gallon/hour emitter every foot. Each dripline can be controlled individually, so we can have fallow beds without wasting water on them. So either side takes about 300 gallons per hour, which is about the most you can get out of a regular hose outlet. (The entire 3,500 sqft greenhouse is fed by one garden hose!) But we can run half of one room on clear water, while running half of another room on fertigation. Or we can run more than half a room at a time, knowing we're going to get less water out of each emitter and leaving the water on longer. Here is the greenhouse, with 242 cucumbers (left foreground), 121 tomatoes and 121 basil plants (right foreground), and physalis (middle room). The far room has 242 more tomatoes and 242 peppers.
Hope this is helpful.
You have to be careful using ash. I learned this in my master gardener course. Trees are miners, constantly bringing up minerals, but they also bring up salts - and the salts can build up.
I use ash sparingly. It also lowers the pH of your soil, which is not necessarily a bad thing but there is a pH range most pants need to do efficient mineral uptake (major and minor nutrients) and slanting the pH too far to the "base" range can harm plants.
We heat with wood, and have plenty of wood ash, but test for pH before using it. And it should never be used on certain plants that require acidic soil, like blueberries.
[quote=Wendy S. Delmater]You have to be careful using ash.[/quote]Thanks for the reminder.
Unless you live in an arid region with calciferous soils, you probably have the opposite problem. Annual agriculture, with annual ploughing and subsequent low organic material, tends to make for acidic soil, as does silaceous or clay soils and adequate rainfall.
So most people don't have to worry about getting their ph too high if they are working with their local soil that has been in agriculture for some time. If in doubt, get a soil test kit or even a cheap ph meter. Ones designed for garden use are under $20.
Be careful if you use other amendments. Potting soil and such have been balanced to a neutral ph, and might be pushed basic with wood ash. And as Wendy mentions, keep acid-loving plants happy. We save all our coffee grounds (very acidic!) for blueberry mulch!
But unless you live in an area with basic soils, careful use of ash should not be a problem. Treat it like you would lime, and you should be okay.
Several years ago I analyzed almond ash by XRF. Values are actually oxides (CaO, not Ca) and fairly solid analytically above ~1%. Values below this level are more questionable. I don't know how this varies by tree species or soil types.
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