Christopher Weeks

Congrats, all! And thanks for keeping this place going.

I've grown potatoes and squash and kale and tomatoes in rotting hay-bales. The yield for me has always been lower than planting in good garden soil, but still worth doing. And you can use the bales to occult the grass and weeds from the sun for a year and then once the bales sag/break down too much to use them that way, they're a source of mulch right where you need it. (I can't get straw that I trust, but I do have a source for unsprayed hay, which is full of weeds, but so's my land.)

My maples stopped running for a week. Because I'm new to this, I didn't know if they were done for the year or just taking a break while it froze. Looks like the latter. I just brought in ten more gallons of sap! The one that was most productive remains most productive, but three of the other four are now producing enough to be worth the tap. Now I just need to keep up with the boiling...

I'm pretty deep into fermentation and have a lot of success under my belt, but I've made three 1-gallon batches of miso and none of them were nearly as good as what I purchase (though all were edible). I've decided, at least for now, that it isn't worth the time and effort for a product that doesn't live up to my expectations. I don't love that that's how it is, but...

Yeah, that's crazy! Does Andrés' embed work for you? (nevermind!)

Oh that's interesting! Maybe it's an artifact of our nations? I don't even *have* a Vimeo account and it didn't ask for anything from me. Though that's a little weird since it's made by an EU organization.

I just created this post: https://permies.com/t/370621/lecture-called-Plant-breeding-Nature#3757849 because I thought the talk would be interesting to other permies, but the embed didn't work. Is there something I need to do differently?

Webinar Plant breeding on Nature's terms-dr Walter Goldstein 2026031


(ETA: https://vimeo.com/1176218246/45943ee1ac if the above isn't working.)

This video was pointed out to me by the Going To Seed social media account. It appears to be about two and a half hours long, but the last 45 minutes is just silence you can skip.

Dr. Goldstein from the Mandaamin Institute talks about breeding maize/corn and liberating good genes from old commercial varieties and making sure they have old Hopi (&c) genes for nitrogen fixation and many other topics. It was really a great lecture and helped me reify my belief that maize has a permanent place as a restorative annual on my property even as I continue to tip my efforts toward perennial production. He also spoke at length about the role of endophytes and Dr. James White's work.

I think the single most important gardening thing I do is save seeds. I make selections and put seeds away for next year. But as you note, one year can be a fluke. So when I save seeds, I mix them back into the supply of seeds from the last several years plus whatever commercial elements have caught my eye to be added to the mix. So taking maize for example, on any given year, I'm planting out of a mix of: the wide grex I started with, the elite saves from last year, the elite saves from the four years before (in descending quantity), and maybe anything else that I've gotten from shops or trades and just mixed in. That practice has built-in resiliency to perturbations from the norm/trend.

Also, realistically, if there's any theoretical such thing as too much organic matter in soil, I'm not ever going to reach that point on my glacial till, so I just keep putting as much carbon as possible into my soil because that's always going to be good.

And finally, I plant a wide variety of goodies. Some years I don't get as much as I want of things x, y, and z, but I get *something*.

I prefer to come up with practices such as the above rather than designs because I'm not smart enough hold great big designs in my head all together to see how they interact, and especially over time.

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:It must not be outrageously cold to use, even in winter.

This seems like the hardest target to hit. You could build it deep underground to take advantage of thermal inertia, so that it would be cold but not outrageously cold. Or you can heat it. Nancy's suggestion of something like a Jean Pain compost heater seems like it would work with the right design and supply of feedstocks. Or a wood-fired mass heater built in could work, but you'd have to warm it up ahead of time. Or an electric or propane heater for on-demand applications.