ffj's Early Retirement (round 2)

[ffj]

@Henry
I made some blackberry wine a few years ago that would put you on your ass. I don't know what the alcohol content finished at ( I wish now I had tested it) but everybody I gave it to raved about it. It was a semi-dry wine with a monster ALC that wasn't too sweet. I think I could have sold it to be honest. At least they weren't talking about some douchey IPA's.

@suo

OMG, that is real life, haha. I'm at my last stage in the process for my latest offering, practically giving it away. I guarantee you somebody will lowball me yet. Good stuff.

@7






Top image is my personal patch I planted 3 years ago, bottom pic is the patch I pick. I'm thinking you are on to something about how I have limited the tip-rooting these past two years. That and the original plants are old. I may have been better off letting them revert to wild status if nothing else to establish new vines. It's just so hard to pick with a mountain of weeds in your way. We'll see what happens by July, even sooner as they will bloom soon.

[Henry]

a monster ALC that wasn't too sweet

That's what they were droning on about. Something that tastes good enough to satisfy the connoisseurs with an alcohol content that would satisfy Laura Ingalls' family.

[7Wannabe5]

@ffj:

I think the "problem" might be that the grass is winning in the war between the grass and the trees in the lower picture. Bramble fruits generally want to live right at the chaotic edge of the war between the grass and the trees, either at the edge of woodlands or waterway or in disturbed* soil in open fields. The fence in your upper picture is to some extent simulating a bank of small trees. However, I put "problem" in quotes, because blackberry is a rugged survivor towards aggressive invader, so even if you fell asleep like Rip Van Winkle, when you woke up there would probably be a plethora of blackberries to harvest at that site. Probably better to focus your energy and intelligence on tasks such as protecting your crop of tender peas from that dratted hedgehog or organizing the cloches for blanching your asparagus or fussing over your Chrysler Imperial roses.

* "disturbed" generally meaning that humans somehow did some form of first level warfare against the grasses such as plowing.

[ffj]

They're here. My woods are alive with thousands of these noisy guys trying to mate. This is a 17 year brood and although my wife hates them as they terrify her, I find them interesting. Completely harmless, somewhat ugly, and they suck sap. I find it fascinating that they've been underground for so long beneath our feet quietly siphoning off of the roots of trees. Soon the off-spring will drop to the ground and start the process once again.



@7

I've done some more research on the blackberries and according to the University of Arkansas commercial growers replace their plants every 7 years or so. The plants that I pick are approaching 12 years of age if not older. So in order to have bountiful harvests each year every 4 years one needs to start another garden(crop) as it takes 3 years for new plants to maximize yields. My guess is that due to land constraints each plot is on a rotational basis so that no one year is bereft of fruit. I also learned that they fertilize the plants with simple nitrogen with some calcium and nothing else. Other than mulch I would guess.

They also had a trellis that would fold down so that when the blackberries started the flowering process they could train the plants to flower only on one side for easier picking which was interesting. They would simply fold the vines over so that they would flower towards the sun. Anyway, my new plants are starting out well:






I have declared war on a plant after eradicating the bush honeysuckle on my land: Johnson Grass



Let me clarify, I have declared war on this insidious plant only in my gardens. I don't have enough lifetimes to rid this spawn of Satan everywhere I encounter it. Fortunately I can mow most of it but the garden is another story. So far I have dug up 10 five gallon buckets of this crap and there is still more that is slowly presenting itself. The problem is that they spread by tubers and air-born seed. And the seed loves disturbed ground, such as a garden. If you cut up the tuber, such as by tilling, it will sprout each new section. Such a horrible plant.




I checked my paw-paw trees the other day and happily discovered fruit! Not a whole lot, but actual fruit! It's early in this process and there is still no guarantee I'll get to eat one of them but I'm really looking forward to picking at least one of these.






The shingle making continues. The key to success is to work only as long as you enjoy it and then walk away and do something else. Hence, it is a slow process to make the 700 or so that I think I'll need for the roof of the treehouse. I much prefer the splitting of the shingles to the flattening of them with a drawknife. It's tedious for sure. But again utilizing small blocks of time frequently produces results, which is a technique I use for many other unpleasant forms of work such as digging up Johnson grass.

[ertyu]

Johnson Grass

Brings back childhood memories. My grandma also hated that fucker

[7Wannabe5]

They also had a trellis that would fold down so that when the blackberries started the flowering process they could train the plants to flower only on one side for easier picking which was interesting. They would simply fold the vines over so that they would flower towards the sun.

Interesting. This would also somewhat mimic their natural tendency to grow at edge of clearing and fruit towards sun. I think cultivation methods for blackberry in terms of permaculture would largely depend on which Zone (distance from house=frequency of maintenance) you wished to have them occupy. The home orchard would usually be in Zone 2 : Semi-Intensive Use (visited frequently but not daily). Zone 3: Moderate Use would be lower maintenance field crops, and Zone 4 is towards Managed Wilderness, and Zone 5 is Unmanaged Wilderness. So, blackberries could be cultivated anywhere from Zone 2 to Zone 4, and the commercial grower's method would most closely resemble a Zone 3 moderate maintenance method. Zone 4 cultivation/maintenance might just entail hacking/maintaining a path through an existing patch, and a variety of more intensive maintenance methods appropriate for integrating blackberries into home garden in Zone 2 can be found by searching keywords "blackberry" and "potager" on YouTube or similar. IOW, since blackberries don't require much protection (unlike for example tender lettuce), the main trade-off is between acreage allotted and maintenance required.

[Stasher]

It seems so foreign to see someone plant blackberries intentionally in their yard or garden. Where we live the Himalayan Blackberries are one of the most prolific invasive I have seen around, never have I see something grow with such ferocity. The upside is that in the fall everyone goes out around the community and gets ice cream buckets full of the largest most amazing blackberries you can imagine.

https://bcinvasives.ca/invasives/himalayan-blackberry/

https://www.instagram.com/invasivespeci ... EhEH5v1w2/

https://www.tiktok.com/@invasivespecies ... 8775651589

[theanimal]

1,200 shingles! You'll be a pro by the end of it. That's a good approach to making them as long as you find it interesting to avoid burning yourself out quickly. One of the summer residents where I used to live in the Arctic wasa forester in New York and loved working with chainsaws. He was known for making all kinds of furniture and even made shingles for the hunting lodge there and his cabin with a chainsaw. The end result came out looking rustic but nice. Much faster than a froe, but he can't hear for shit though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A9MNij ... artinDodge

[ffj]

@ertyu
We have lots of invasives here, mainly from some part of Asia. Bush honeysuckle, vining honeysuckle, burning bush, callery pears, multi-flora rose, Japanese knotweed, kudzu, autumn olive, Johnson grass etc. Not to mention the bugs such as emerald ash borer which have destroyed billions of ash trees. All of these problems are sort of like roaches, if your apartment neighbor has them, you do too. Once you develop an eye for these problem children, you see it everywhere. And a high-five to Grandma, she knew a problem when she saw it.

@7
They actually took it a step further and had the plants flower on the shady side for picking so the workers could stay out of the sun while harvesting. Having picked a lot of berries in the brutal July sun, I can appreciate this.

@Stasher
It is interesting how invasives become invasive. One mans curse is another mans blessing. That hideous Johnson grass was imported from Africa as an animal feed and livestock will eat it to some extent. Problem is that it dominates and smothers any other beneficial grass. Same for kudzu.

The blackberries I grow are a domesticated thornless variety called Triple Crown. They won't "escape" per se as they need more conditions met than their wild cousins. I have watched videos of what you are talking about, mainly in Australia. When I was eradicating the bush honeysuckle off of my place, I cut or pulled thousands of them and I still have to watch for new sprouts. But that was easy compared to the Johnson grass or I would guess the Himalayan blackberries.

@theanimal
Yeah, small doses of draw knifing for me. But I'm under no timeframe so it doesn't matter how long it takes. It is frustrating though as I would personally like more progress but the whole project is a back-burner.

I watched a video the other day of a guy that made wooden shingles out of pallets. He just cut the main pieces off of the runners and viola! shingles. And they looked good too on his chicken coops and outbuildings. Why didn't I think of that, haha.

Props to the chainsaw guy, maybe he can try out the battery operated ones they offer now. The pros are using them so they must be good enough.

[loutfard]

Your froe and draw knife shingles are beautiful. Plus, as you undoubtedly know, splitting instead of sawing makes them a lot more durable, even without any treatment. In our corner of the Baltics, poplar(!) used to be popular for shingle making. From what a local craftsman told me, easy splitting along the grain was not the only reason. In the local climate, a kind of natural protective layer also grows on top of the shingles, making it last much longer than expected.

[theanimal]

Thanks for mentioning the pallet shingles. I hadn't heard of those before. I need to put a roof on my woodshed and have been hoping to piece together tin sheets. After watching probably the same video as you, I'm going to give the shingles a go.

[ffj]

@loutfard

Thanks. I think they are going to look good on the roof. A bit rugged but perfectly befitting a treehouse. As it is currently raining an absolute downpour at the moment, I hope they keep the water out completely too.

And yes on retaining the strength by splitting. I know that chair makers will split their blanks for spindles before they turn them, thus making them quite strong. No cross-grain or run-outs. Are you referring to moss as a protective layer? Or lichen possibly?

@the animal

I went to our local Tractor Supply to score a couple of free pallets last week and the guy asked how many I wanted. Just two I replied. Oh, he said, how about a hundred or so? I've got no place to put them anymore and I need them gone. You can have them all. I left with two, haha. Post some pictures on your journal when you get going on that, I'd like to see it.

[loutfard]

@loutfard Are you referring to moss as a protective layer? Or lichen possibly?

I'm not sure I remember everything correctly, but one thing I definitely do. Poplar at least has a somewhat waxy juice. Split really fresh wood - as it happens in the traditional Latvian technique shaving rather long and thin shingles - and you'll notice. This wax is supposed to offer some protection to the wood.

[ffj]

I'm in a bit of a quandary at the moment. I am currently volunteering for Habitat for Humanity building a house for a mother with 3 children. I enjoy the work and the people but at the same time they are driving me crazy. I just don't know how to escape the human experience haha.

Here's the problem: A lot of the volunteers are limited in their construction abilities, and most of them are old, 60's, 70's, 80's even. It physically pains me to watch them make mistakes or to use methodologies that take 4 times as long to do simple tasks. I've tried to be helpful but I don't want to come across as an asshole correcting everyone all of the time. So I sit back and watch them fuck up something or do a technique wrong that has no benefit knowing we'll just have to do it again. The biggest mistake I see them make is getting the order of operations wrong so that whatever task they do negates the next step or highly complicates the following procedures. So many of the drawbacks we've encountered could have been easily prevented if a couple of minor procedures had been done first. Every time I turn my back to focus on something I return to them re-doing something or being oblivious to what they just screwed up.

Collectively, they are all great people. And the final product so far has been corrected enough that it's fine structurally. But as I watched them yesterday undoing all of my prep work (for their success) I finally confided to another volunteer that this place was driving me crazy. His response? Me too, I'm going home. At least two of us understand.




Last of the big timber for the treehouse. Each of the TABS (tree attachment bolts) supposedly are rated for at least 5,000 lbs a piece so in theory I could load them for 20,000 lbs since I have four of them. I even called the manufacturer to confirm because these timbers are heavy. He said even if they were to fail, which they won't, they would bend rather than shear off. I'm thinking of building a bend indicator just to allay my fears because of the shear amount of mass I'm adding to this build.



Found this beauty next to my garden. Harmless milk snake, may he find many mice to dine upon. My useless cat certainly isn't helping. I took a hoe and picked him up to move him across a fence so I wouldn't mow over him. Just as docile as he could be.


I helped out an Amish family whose house got taken out by a small tornado. You could see exactly where the tornado touched down and it was a perfect straight line to the house and another house down the hill. Then it lifted, almost as if it had two targets and mission accomplished.





I was there the first day of clean-up and we probably had about 60 people show up to help. It was impressive what got done. I left after 7 hours and they were still working hard. By day three, they were already rebuilding the house. All of the accolades about resourcefulness and hard work about the Amish are true.



One of the boys found this fawn in the debris, no sign of the mother. He took it home to take care of it.

[Stasher]

The photo of all the ladies putting the potluck meal together and everyone else coming together to clear and sort through the debris is a great sight to see for what community is all about.

[Scott 2]

With volunteering, I found it helpful to recognize an organization serves the volunteers as well. If seniors have a place to socialize and feel useful, that's successful execution of the mission. Maybe not the stated one, but it's implicit to every cause with free labor. Those people later become, or may already be, the donors.

[ffj]

@Stasher

Whenever they come together like that they call the occasion a "work bee". And you will never go hungry. What I find fascinating is that even though some of them will not drive a car they are allowed to operate machinery such as a skid steer and they absolutely dominate those machines. At one point we had four skid steers working simultaneously and they were impressive on that muddy hill side.

@Scott

For sure, including me. It's been nice to have a reason to leave my place three days a week for a purpose. To talk with other adults. I have a buddy down the road who will call me and tell me to come visit for a home-cooked meal. He'll tell you straight up he gets lonely on his farm and needs to talk to something other than his sheep, haha.

Tomorrow I will play it cool and stop complaining. Do what I can. It's not like they can't do this without me.

[Stasher]

While more secluded and not integrated into the community like the Amish, where I grew up in the Canadian Prairies we had countless Hutterite communities. The communal support network and looking out for one another is something our modern individualistic capitalism focused society could really learn something from and realize that was a way of life we too soon stepped away from.

[Henry]

I helped out an Amish family whose house got taken out by a small tornado. You could see exactly where the tornado touched down and it was a perfect straight line to the house and another house down the hill. Then it lifted, almost as if it had two targets and mission accomplished.

Is that a car in the middle of that field? It makes you realize how dangerous a tornado can be to the well being of an Amish community. One day everything's peaceful and pious, and the next day a huge wind blows and everyone walks out to Amos' secret porn stash strewn throughout the village.

[ffj]

@Stasher

I do think one needs to keep the whole picture in perspective. While this is clearly an example of charity at its best, the reality is that these communities live in a hive where dissent isn't tolerated. Now I personally like the community because I enjoy the honesty they exhibit in their thoughts and actions, it's quite refreshing, but I am also aware that I could never come close to living as they do. My biggest negative issue with them is the practice of shunning, which is more common than you think and to us outsiders sometimes over the most trivial issues. The groups in the pictures above are considered progressive and I personally know several of them whose family have shunned them for their lifestyle, as in having no contact. It's crazy once you start delving into the whole situation.

Like you though, I do wish more charity existed in the world, neighbors helping neighbors. I think it would solve a lot of problems organically and early in this world. I have no problem cherry-picking what is good about these groups and discarding the rest.

@Henry

More likely scenario is finding a belt instead of a pair of suspenders... Blasphemy!

Funny though you mentioned secret stashes. I started the fire service in the mid 90's before the internet and cell phones were common or even existed. After a fire, one of the things you do is called overhaul, simply removing anything that has burned and "opening up" meaning checking for fire extension behind walls and the like. Oh the porn stashes we would find. Or toys or secret weed growing spaces.

But that all changed with the internet, gone are the magazines, VHS tapes and DVD's. I once had to overhaul an attic where there were literally hundreds of mags partially burned and every time I shoveled a load out the window onto the snow twenty feet below most of them would open up to the centerfold and land perfectly, exposing the best the mag had to offer. It was the funniest thing ever looking down on a sea of centerfolds juxtaposed against the snow.