Projects – Page 4 – Gallifrey Forest Farm

Pasture

2015/12/03 Danielle 1

I’m sure anyone who reads these posts regularly knows that we’re pretty keen to increase our menagerie, but I don’t think I’ve explained clearly why that is. It isn’t just for the milk and meat that we want to get goats and a cow, although they are part of the reason. It’s for the soil. Soil is the heart and the root of any ecosystem, including farm ecosystems. Healthy soil is absolutely essential if you want to grow healthy plants, and produce any sort of yield from the ground. The modern methods of land management call for huge inputs of […]

free mulch

2015/11/26 Danielle 0

One of the ideas about permaculture which resonates with me quite strongly is that everything you need is available to you, you just need to learn to take advantage of the resources you have. This isn’t the radical self-reliance ideal which has been so problematic for many people suffering various forms of disadvantage, from mental health problems to fiscal difficulties; this is the idea that you make your own luck by paying attention and taking opportunities when they present themselves. I really like that. The latest illustration of this idea is embodied in some free mulch. A lady I work […]

aesthetics vs utility

2015/11/17 Danielle 0

One of the things which many, many permaculture practitioners seem to struggle with is a particular type of hoarding. I have this problem myself. You hold on to things because they might be useful, and because the idea of simply throwing them away is distasteful. After all, we know where “away” is in this context – it’s the mid-ocean garbage patch, or the local waterways, or at best the local landfill. I can throw away biodegradable things without a moment of guilt, because I know that they’ll just rot down and return to the soil. But those things tend to […]

supper club

2015/08/04 Danielle 0

I haven’t posted much about plants or animals recently, which is mostly because it’s winter and cold and nothing much is growing. And most of my attention is on the house-building project. The chickens are moulting, and so laying fairly sporadically. The quail are still laying, although one of them got sick and we had to euthanise her. We ate her afterwards because (a) I feel that eating the carcase shows respect tot he animal, and not eating it is wasteful and disrespectful, and (b) the illness was a beak disorder, so there was no health risk to us. We […]

Plausible marketing options – initial thoughts

2015/06/30 Danielle 0

I’ve been thinking about agriculture – well, for some time now, actually. Thus the currently-in-progress Masters of Sustainable Agriculture. But I’ve been thinking of it in our specific context for the last few weeks. I would like our farm to be more or less self sufficient. I don’t mean in the homesteading survivalist sense, although producing as much of our own food as we can would be cool and is one of the goals. I mean in the overall part of the local economy sense, that the things we produce can either be sold directly or used by us to […]