Tater Mater Forums

Otherwise I would have fallen in love with an livelihood that actually earned income!

Well you'll be sittin' fat and sassy as unemployment rates keep climbing and prices keep rising ("stagflation"). Lot of folks don't have any idea at all how to make money, including fresh graduates with very expensive degrees paid for with loans...and some of them had to work hard for engineering and science degrees they can't market. 

I'm planning to write a report regarding some ideas for what to do about it on a personal level.

Lots of folks have too much debt too. That's a harder problem; they assumed if they could get the loans they could pay them back (for the rest of their lives...). Student loans are particularly onerous at the moment. Inflation will eventually erode its value but the "stag" part of stagflation makes it a horrible burden.

Defeating possums...
Leo put a hook in one of the rafters in the barn, from it he hung a chain.  I bound up the corn, sorghum, and mesh sacks of other things and hung them from "S" hooks off the chain.  At the very top Leo put an escutcheon. Now the rats/mice can't get by the escutcheon to climb down (he used a cheap funnel).  And those darn possums can't get at it from the floor.  They spoiled a whole tray of tomatoes!


As crazy as this is, I still have sorghum and tomatoes. 

The chains are easy, because at the the end of the season, I can just use an S hook to hang them up higher.  I need to use a ladder to hang and get things down.  Just about the time that all the corn got processed I was able to use them for onions.  I was also able to put in a row of them to keep everything up where it is warm and dry. 

We read that sorghum cross pollination is about 6%, so we will probably grow the Bicolor bird resistant in our front garden or as our only sorghum. 

I am resourceful, but dumb as a fence post.  Otherwise I would have fallen in love with an livelihood that actually earned income!  I sent Castanea a bouquet of what came up in my yard.  Darn stuff is very hard to thresh!

Thanks Holly.

You are a remarkably resourceful person. One thing I have noticed, is that contrary to nasty Hollywood stereotypes, farmers are not dumb. Most of the ones I know are pretty smart. That's because the dumb ones sold out or went bankrupt a long time ago; only the smart ones survive.

I forgot to tell you about the Sorghum.  The reason there's not much is because the possum ate it. Most of my hard-earned harvest. This is what happens when you don't have good drying and storage facilities.

Got a fairly good harvest for this far north of the dwarf white before the possom ate it. BTW it's short but no more so than most sorghums nowadays. Shaped different though, a skinnier plant.

Anyway you've got enough to plant a short row and decide how you like it. Should grow great gangbusters for you.

I'll send more of the perennial Sorghum next year when I know that it's really perennial--I mean, seed from survivors. I suggest using that as chicken-food (or beer). They're nice-looking little plants. Should be interesting to see how they do for you; they tiller readily and I would guess you'd get full heads on the tillers.

Help yourself to some of the 3rd type, the bird resistant, just don't mix it up with the others for obvious reasons. It looks a lot like the sorghum whose pix you posted, which I think is typical of commercial types. It is neither as early, nor as cool-tolerant, as the other two, which is why I need your help on it. I got about a dozen kernels from one single plant that bloomed in time. The La Nina threw it for a loop, but that's typical of Sorghum up here anyway. The other two are more tolerant of the weather here--but they were bred in Oregon, where they had to deal with nearly empty heads until they grew enough generations to acclimatize it.

I should send some to Castanea. He's been frustrated trying to find grain sorghums. There are not many in public domain. Between all of us, we'll build up a few.

For a really well written paper on Cereal Grains,
browse for "Small Scale Production of Cereal Grains in Maine" by Mark Fulford.

www.heartofmaine.org

And darn, every time I find something cool, don't you know it's East Coast?

Also on the E.C.  NOFA...about the most the most helpful farming organization I have ever come across.  I buy BPA free canning lids from them. 

Rob, I love it when you rant.

I spent all morning looking at small combines, treadle peddle threshers, and seed cleaning machines.  I am not going to even attempt to do wheat by hand.  I've spent 2 days in the barn cleaning broccoli, cabbage, zinnias, marigolds, sunflowers, parsnips...the list goes on and I feel like I haven't even made a dent yet!  And then I went into the long barn to start assembling canning jars.

So, in our budget there's a table top seed cleaner from seedburo, the mini batt from riecchardt and I'm still waiting for a proforma invoice from Vidhatindia.  I ordered the catalog for Cecoco, and darn it this year, I'm going to be start collecting appropriate farm equipment
  Mahaweli Agro Mech, (no website), Industrial Complex,
    Thambuthagama, Sri Lanka   ph. +94 25 2267212
 www.vidhatindia.com ph. +91 562 2242690   
  www.seedburo.com  ph. 312-738-3700

I keep waffling between low tech, no power, and get 'er done and fast.

I also received your sorghum, thank you very much.  I hope to be able to help you and Tom as much as I can.

Although I have delivered produce to restaurants, they have not proved to be reliable customers.  My CSA is excited about the grain IF it can be ground properly before they receive it.  My first grinding of the polenta was too coarse.  I put yours in my coffee grinder, let me know how it is.
 www.riechhardt.com Minibatt micro-combine 701-356-4020

I have inherited 20 dozen canning jars.  They are taking on a life of their own.  Each canning jar goes out and recruits another.  I believe that these canning jars will somehow be useful to our seed storage.  If I can get my son to come up and get potato starts from Tom, I'm going to send you guys a bunch of these quarts.  They are terrific for seed storage, and the way they are breeding, we'll have a never ending supply.

Leo (my spouse), had one of his scathingly brilliant ideas about seed storage.  We have an old restaurant salad bar cooler in our barn (220v).  I don't have 220 in that part of the barn, but Leo thinks that with some work, this useless hunk of junk could become a very good seed storage machine, freeing up both barn fridges for their intended use of short term vege storage for the CSA. 

Not all of us are capital-starved...there's that one percent, now would be a good time for one of them to THINK about the future and invest in local farming/seed/processing.

I love your writing.  It's always so well done.  Thank you.

Holly, we really need to organize. We need a "guild" of small farms connected to "eat local" restaurants and stores, local/specialist seed sources, and small-scale processors who can own and run shared equipment, or rent out equipment when they're not using it.

Even my dad--who's married to a former investment banker--thinks that the current globalized mega-plantation system has gone too far, and production needs to be "right-sized" and localized to take advantage of what would otherwise be wasted land and resources.

The key commonality seems to be "local". There are customers who WANT fresh, local produce from people they know and trust. They want to know what's in their food (or more precisely, want to know that there's nothing controversial in it).

Tom and I are going to grow more food this year than we can eat ourselves or sell as seed. Some of it will get tossed into storage, but we'll have more than we can store too--best bet would be to sell the surplus (God willing that there is any, and we don't have a massive crop failure). I would love to sell some to local bakeries and breweries, if they were interested. But the whole network needs to be developed.

One problem I perceive is that ALL of us are capital-starved.

Something that might make sense, is for those of us who have some capital to act as "incubators" for people willing to try providing the missing services in the network. The folks to thresh and warehouse the grain, for example.

Might even be able to supply other resources. For example, my farm has some unusable acreage. Someone could use it for processing and warehousing once the infrastructure were built; I just can't be involved on a daily basis.

It's ridiculous that it ever got to this point. Asia is not like this; they have giant conglomerations AND tiny farms and factories. Everything is "right sized". But they still have factories; we don't. Too many parts of the supply chain are missing, and it becomes cost prohibitive to special-source everything. Items as simple as equipment the right scale for a small farm have to be special-sourced and are very expensive for us.

A lot of our supposed free-market advocates were actually closeted central-planning fanatics (Dr. Milton Friedman, among others). Prof. Ludwig von Mises got himself blacklisted jumping up from a meeting he was invited to when he arrived in the States, shouting "you're all a bunch of Socialists!" (well, central economic planners of one stripe or another anyway), and slamming the door behind himself. I could rant for a while but I'll shut up now.

I’ve been growing ‘Desiree’ potatoes for the past few years, and think that they have promise as the kind of potato you described. I saved seeds last year and will plant the most promising tubers from them this coming spring, so we’ll see. They store well, not sprouting too early, produce well under short season conditions, but the foliage is frost sensitive like all the rest. I’d be interested in running a trial up here if you had seeds. I should mention that I live in Canada, in a remote location in the mountains, so a good place for trials. As far as edible berries that are somewhat feral, how about edible Honeysuckle (Hascaps)?

Harvey, don't remember if I answered you or not--keep in touch. We do need some trial locations. Growing season around here is long but cool--poor place to test potatoes for resistance to temperature extremes.

Holly, solarization is a good idea especially in your sunnier, drier climate. Here, it is utterly hopeless, as the spores are too ubiquitous, and "ride the wind". Recontamination is almost instant. Our only hope is resistance--Phyto is here to stay.

Unfortunately there is a great deal of misinformation online. One of the university pathologists claimed that "Phytophthora can't survive winters in temperate climates"--something like that--and the same opinion was copied all over the place including on local white papers among people who should know better. The winters here are not cold enough to kill it--it's highland tropical and temperature ranges similar to its homeland except only slightly colder for brief stretches--but wouldn't matter anyway as it is able to "hide" in ubiquitous leaf piles and other organic matter, and I would guess that over time it has been getting more resistant to cold--I keep hearing from friends in colder climates who say it's starting to spread into their areas.

Summers here are not hot and dry enough to kill it; it goes dormant but lurks and wakes up fast with the autumn rains. Actually we have several species and some of them grow warm and kill Rhododendrons right through the summer (the entire family Ericaceae has almost no resistance ). They've tried Trichoderma, but it doesn't help; it's not active for long enough during the year to outcompete the Phyto.

We now get "late blight" both spring and fall (kills tomatoes when you try to put them out--have to wait for several weeks of warm dry weather), and in parts of Europe they're now getting it all summer. I suspect they have some particularly virulent strains there.

Be thankful that your summers are hot enough and dry enough to set it back and potentially even kill it. Cool la Nina summers might be a hazard though.

We have read that the difficult to thresh grains can be thrown directly to the chickens.  As organic feed has jumped to $30 for 50 pounds, that would be an incredible savings.

Yeah, I know, it's even worse here. I've got to start growing stuff for our backyard hens. Good thinking. They like pecking at grain stalks--satisfies their natural instincts to find food.

We've got a couple of acres of Barley that Tom says is special. I don't know what the status of it is. In any case I think all our Barley is hull-less. It's the perennial grains and also Spelt and Emmer that give us trouble.

For food security, it seems as though most of us should balance cold-hardy cereals (rye, barley, spelt) with warm-season grains of tropical origin (rice, sorghum, maize/corn). Unfortunately that does not cover the possibility of drought, though Sorghum has some drought tolerance, and I think Emmer can survive with less water than wheat (not 100% sure--but I know they grow it on thinner soils, traditionally). Some older types of maize/corn are less thirsty than modern types, and were used for dryland farming in places you wouldn't think that was even possible.

Maize/corn is one of the few cereals whose kernels are so fat you have to crack them for chickens.

Rob,
My favorite boss was a mad scientist (Plant Pathologist) and most of his work was on Phytophthora.  Although there are a few species of it, most are activated by too much water in the soil and once there...well it's hard to get rid of.

So, before replanting, do soil solarization.  If you goggle soil solarization and Phytophthora you can probably find the article by Wakeman and some others from UC Davis.  I actually got to see a field that that pretty much a dead zone, after the solarization and subsequent replanting, it looked really good.  Here, for specific plants that we know are susceptible, we raise the soil level to get better drainage. 

Last year we had freak early rains, that didn't stop.  We had planted some crops in late September and by October we were shut out of the field.  We were not able to cover crop and the tilled soil was just one big mucky mess.  The rains kept up, blights were rampant in some varieties of tomatoes.  There were also hosts of other bugs that spread blights around.  As soon as we spotted it we yanked up those tomatoes and solarized that field.  It was interesting that even the nurseries around us were losing tomatoes.  Carol Deppe accused me of stealing "her rain"!  We planted the rest of the tomatoes in a different area.  The solarized field did fine later in the season.