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Belatedly

2022/05/19 Danielle 0

Well, it’s been a ..I want to say year, but in fact closer to four years since I updated this. In the meantime, we actually moved out and into town for 2 years because roadworks on the main road up here were making our commute to our on-premises, in-town day jobs miserable. Then there was Covid-19, and a few changes of job situation, and the roadworks finished (finally!), so we moved back in. The farm is still going, in spite of 2 years of not living on the property, and slowly, slowly, our plans are coming together. Not helped by […]

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Farm Club

2018/05/06 Danielle 0

The first rule of farm club is..  please do in fact talk about farm club. Tell anyone you know who might be interested. Encourage other people to start their own versions – maybe we can make it into a movement. Farm club is a combination of a (hopefully) practical co-op for food sharing and an attempt at a real-world version of a gifting/barter economy. The idea is that members offer “shares” in whatever they produce, along with what they need back to keep producing the thing, and other members sign up for those shares. So in our case, we produce […]

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Fruit Trees from Seed

2018/04/16 Danielle 0

The received wisdom of gardeners and horticulturalists everywhere (I’m generalising, go with it for now) is that it’s pointless to grow fruit trees from seed because they don’t come true to type. (True to type means that the fruit of the daughter plant will be the same, or very nearly the same, as the fruit of the mother plant.) There are exceptions – mangos and mot citrus produce what are called polyembryonic seeds, which means that there are multiple embryos in each seed, and only one is the result of sexual recombination – the others are asexually produced, and will […]

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Planting for Pascal’s Wager

2018/03/25 Danielle 0

For those who don’t know, Pascal’s Wager is a philosophical thought experiment about preparing for the worst case scenario even if you don’t think it will turn out to be true. The original argument was made about religion and the existence of the Christian God (and has some fairly serious flaws), but the general idea is more widely applicable. It’s a good shorthand way of talking about risks, and about worst case scenario preparation as a rational response to a low probability but high consequence event or situation. For example, the current global socio-political and ecological situation. I mean, I […]

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slow starter

2017/01/16 Danielle 0

New Years has come and gone, and I’m still just starting to settle in to 2017. It feels like a really slow start to the year somehow.   The hot weather has arrived, and we just went through a 24 hour power outage because the lines gather dust during dry weather and then a cool spell or a drizzle of rain (water falling from the sky! Weirdly, that does happen sometimes, even in midsummer) can cause fires on the lines or in the transformers. Which seems bizarre to me, but that’s how it is. It’s prioritised our desire to get […]