potushead posted:LandBeluga posted:
potushead: do you have any experience constructing and/or using cold frames?I do not, unfortunately, although that is on my list for next year's expansion projects. i have two raised beds with fencing that i'm going to turn into mini greenhouses with removeable sheeting, but i think cold frames technically require glass? which i'm not terribly comfortable messing with. i'd be happy to scan in the Homesteader's pages on making cold frames if that would be helpful for you
Please do. I'm tentatively planning to build some this summer or fall and I'm sure I'll find whatever resources you provide helpful.
pictured: 1x plymouth (black one) 2x rhode island red (the two reddish ones next to the black one) and 2x golden sex link (the gold one in the foreground next to the black one and the gold one off to the side)
theyre all about 2-3 weeks old, the foreground golden is the youngest and the rightside golden and leftside plymouth are the oldest
Tsargon posted:
there will be other better ones later, but for now
the chickens of color are standing together in solidarity and exiling the white chicken. you have maoist third worldist chickens.
LandBeluga posted:potushead posted:LandBeluga posted:
potushead: do you have any experience constructing and/or using cold frames?I do not, unfortunately, although that is on my list for next year's expansion projects. i have two raised beds with fencing that i'm going to turn into mini greenhouses with removeable sheeting, but i think cold frames technically require glass? which i'm not terribly comfortable messing with. i'd be happy to scan in the Homesteader's pages on making cold frames if that would be helpful for you
Please do. I'm tentatively planning to build some this summer or fall and I'm sure I'll find whatever resources you provide helpful.
Learn to love;
Scrap PVC tubing and PVC joins
Scrap lumber
The RE Store (a home improvement wing of the Goodwill charities)
Plastic sheeting
A battery powered skill-saw, or asking to borrow one if you don't own one yourself.
With that list you can make almost any home-scale agricultural structure you can fathom short of a goddamned grain silo for under fifty bucks. 100-200 if you need it big enough to walk around in.
fringe bonus: the ability to make the second sketchiest home improvement order in human history for legitimate purposes.
gyrofry posted:
grover?
seriouspost; we used so much goddamned insulation making our mushroom grow chamber hold heat in oregon we could barely give it all away after we tore it down, lmao
GoldenLionTamarin posted:
i grew oyster mushrooms once. i was not expecting them to shoot spores everywhere
well generally you want to pick them before they sporulate like that since the spores are kinda bitter compared to the shroom's flesh, and by that time they've started to hemorrhage water weight now that the mushroom is basically at the end of its life cycle having done what it was meant to do (make spores) and so lose a lot of the tender deliciousness that makes for Peak Tasty imo.
but yeah. oysters will spore over every goddamned thing real hard if you give them a chance.
WillieTomg posted:LandBeluga posted:potushead posted:LandBeluga posted:
potushead: do you have any experience constructing and/or using cold frames?I do not, unfortunately, although that is on my list for next year's expansion projects. i have two raised beds with fencing that i'm going to turn into mini greenhouses with removeable sheeting, but i think cold frames technically require glass? which i'm not terribly comfortable messing with. i'd be happy to scan in the Homesteader's pages on making cold frames if that would be helpful for you
Please do. I'm tentatively planning to build some this summer or fall and I'm sure I'll find whatever resources you provide helpful.
Learn to love;
Scrap PVC tubing and PVC joins
Scrap lumber
The RE Store (a home improvement wing of the Goodwill charities)
Plastic sheeting
A battery powered skill-saw, or asking to borrow one if you don't own one yourself.
With that list you can make almost any home-scale agricultural structure you can fathom short of a goddamned grain silo for under fifty bucks. 100-200 if you need it big enough to walk around in.
fringe bonus: the ability to make the second sketchiest home improvement order in human history for legitimate purposes.
my half-completed chicken coop is all made out of trash AND DOESNT LOOK HALF BAD IF I DO SAY SO MYSELF. the trick is just grabbing as much good looking scrap as you can wherever you can
the house next door is bank owned so my dad and I are up to our old tricks again. whenever I find a stone in the garden that I dont like (or anything I dont like) I toss it over the fence, and my dad took the opportunity a few weeks ago to sneak over the fence and prune a huge branch off a tree that had been shading the garden. so the garden will be in fuller sun this year than last. Thanks finance capital.
one thing I should say about my dear mother who I love is that she doesnt understand composting, she throws everything that isnt a metal can or a plastic bottle into the pile, so there are whole coffee filters, tea bags with strings attached, all kinds of nominally decomposable shit mixed in with legitimate stuff like grass and kitchen scraps. I chop everything up as finely as I can and hope for the best, basically.
I remember a book called 'the indians new world' that made the argument that the invasion of european crops and european agricultural methods was actually more jarring for native peoples than initial settlement was for europeans, and so it wasn't proper to talk about white men boldly striking out into a new area because white men were more or less reproducing europe in america whereas america was rapidly changing for indians. in the great basin that's probably even more true than it was in virginia (where the catawba, the subjects of the book, lived) because overgrazing wiped out all of the edible plants the indians had relied on. shennong probably knows more than I do about this
Ironicwarcriminal posted:
self-sufficiency is about as counter-revolutionary as you can get. Boasting about producing your "own" food is Wrecker nonsense, you guys should have learnt the lessons from the Kuklak "reforms" and New Hampshire Free State projects.
u gotta learn to walk b4 u can run, b r o
potushead posted:jools posted:
teh main thing i've got "growing" on hahaha is a bay tree. it used to be 15ft high but i chopped teh fucker back and now its only 8ft.
also a plum tree and an apple tree.
i really really recommend a plum tree if you have the space and whatnot, though they arent big at all. youll start getting good crops pretty fast and soon you'll be shitting profusely from the overdose of roughage. make jam.a plum tree is a really good idea, how big does it get, can you keep it in a pot? i have a dwarf lemon and a dwarf lime tree and they are seriously not doing a whole hell of a lot of anything
hi sorry i didnt notice this earlier... how big they get basically depends on what rootstock you use i think. i will defer to the as always Really Good royal horticultural society bit on it. http://apps.rhs.org.uk/advicesearch/Profile.aspx?pid=321
basically you want a dwarfing rootstock, even semi-dwarfing rootstocks will get quite big after a decade or so.
a good idea for a pot is like a 20-us gallon rubbish bin or "trash can" with 2 inches of gravel in the bottom, drainage holes drilled, filled up with a mixture of like, manure and compost.
best to use a compost thats got a loam:peat/whatever:sand ratio of like 7:3:2
but really thats fine-tuning it to an extent that you might not even notice it
training them on a frame can be a good idea.
apologies if the variety and rootstock info is no use
glad i didn't move everything out of the closet yet
Here's our chicken getting to know a rooster from the neighborhood
She's currently nesting on 12 warm eggs.
burritonegro posted:
Here's our chicken getting to know a rooster from the neighborhood
She's currently nesting on 12 warm eggs.
i would not mind getting my hands on that rooster
there are a lot of feral cats as well as raccoons and coyotes in the area so i'm pretty surprised nothing has gotten to them before (but i'm not sure what could undo a latch,) what kind of chicken security measures are they missing?
potushead posted:
lol i might have to put my gardening on hold for a while
glad i didn't move everything out of the closet yet
in late april? wtf do you live
Ironicwarcriminal posted:potushead posted:
lol i might have to put my gardening on hold for a while
glad i didn't move everything out of the closet yetin late april? wtf do you live
australia maybe?
i wish we got snow here
Ironicwarcriminal posted:potushead posted:
lol i might have to put my gardening on hold for a while
glad i didn't move everything out of the closet yetin late april? wtf do you live
they called for snow in southern ontario but I haven't seen any yet
the blossoms are gonna be fucked
Ironicwarcriminal posted:
in late april? wtf do you live
south of ithaca ny, this is more snow than we had the entire past winter and we're gettin more tonight yeaaaaah
burritonegro posted:
Here's our chicken coop
Here's our chicken getting to know a rooster from the neighborhood
She's currently nesting on 12 warm eggs.
that's a prime coop sir nice job
Groulxsmith posted:
the other chicken about six feet up in a pine tree
i had no idea this was possible
LandBeluga i have not forgotten those scans, i'm a shitty host with unreliable electricity so i'll try to get them up tomorrow along with more info-posting
swampman posted:
chickens might be the dumbest animal there ever was
from my limited experience: agreed
potushead posted:
south of ithaca ny, this is more snow than we had the entire past winter and we're gettin more tonight yeaaaaah
whoa. I grew up in Ithaca I can't remember the last time they got hit with that much snow so late. it hasn't seemed to snow that much upstate at all the past few years but who knows I'm in Philly now where it snowed maybe twice the year.
My roommates are growing leeks, tomatos, spinach, peppers and corns, which rules. I need to help out more but its kind of their thing and their space.