Potatoes!

So I stopped draggin my feet and got around to ordering my seed potatoes today. And thank goodness! My beloved Purple Vikings are sold out virtually everywhere! What has been taking so long is that I wanted to source as local as possible, but our local seed potatoe provider was already oversold. [...]

Co-Gen Hybrids

I drive a 2001 Honda Insight.  Its blue, and I love it.  I love how small it is.  I love how useful it is (built in cooler!).   And of course I love its 70+mpg in the summer and 55+ in the winter.  And this year with the addition of dedicated snow tires it has handled [...]

Let the Planting Begin!

A week ago, I was covering a second shift for a peer, and availed myself of a rare afternoon at home to visit the Hoop House. Air temps were a balmy 9 degrees (F), and I used snow shoes to get to the greenhouse. However, it was a beautiful and [...]

Flu

Sorry for the lack of posts, but the house is on lock down with the flu (round #3!!).  This iteration involves persistent and mid/high fevers (102-104) and viscous body aches combined with either very upset stomach or bronchitis depending on the sufferer.
While our son is doing quite well in his public school system, being seriously [...]

Chicken/Rabbit Tractors: Sub Acre Ranching

One of the most perplexing challenges of my Sub Acre Agriculture project will be to consistently and sustainably increase fertility in the soils to optimize yields over time. While this can be done exclusively through green manure cover crops, it is more efficient to combine a planned cover crop rotation with livestock manures. [...]

Urban Farming Thoughts

A reoccuring theme on Onestraw is my faith in Suburbia’s ability to produce enough food to make it a viable alternative the ag land it paved over.   It is an undeniable fact that our current urban planning system is completely addicted to the automobile and cheap oil.  My example is typical.  I drive 19 miles [...]

Updates

It’s happening again, the distinct ying/yang effect of the amount of blogging waning as my amount of doing waxes.  Here are some quick updates to where some of the projects are at.
Market Garden 
BIG NEWS: I have permission to utilize as much of .5 acres as needed!  This is at the site about 4 miles from [...]

Edible Flowers: Eat Beautifully

I have gone gonzo over edible flowers this winter. It started last year when the stand of our favorite farm at the market was giving away pints of nasturtium blooms with any order over $20. Our daughter loves flowers, so I decided to bring them home for that evening’s salad to see if [...]

Eco-Victory Garden: The Sustainable Salad

I posted recently about an idea for providing low cost garden systems that came to me while blog surfing. There is so much buzz about Michael Pollan’s new book, and at the same time so many of the Garden Blog set have Spring Fever and are challenging each other to various great ways to [...]