We got the golf cart home without any trouble from the local sheriff.

Our mechanic found the problem. It was a worn bearing. I was highly impressed with the way he was able to replace it with a bearing that normally fits in a car. You can't get Club Car parts online, only from a local dealer.

I think he talked us into upgrading the back springs, which will help with the heavy loads we tend to haul.

If you've read my lunchtime series on Voisin grazing as well as this one on mob grazing, you might be wondering which method is better.  I suspect the answer depends on what kind of animal you're trying to feed, and on how healthy your pasture is to start with.

Mob grazing has two major benefits --- it heals the soil quickly, and it also allows you to keep ruminants on pasture all winter without feeding hay.  On the other hand, Voisin grazing's tender grasses and copious clover make this method more appropriate to non-ruminants (like pigs and chickens), and to dairy animals that require high quality feed.

Can you mix and match the two systems to suit your own needs?  I'm not positive, but I suspect you could treat different paddocks in different ways, stockpiling winter forage in one while grazing another one close and often to promote the growth of clovers.

I'd be very curious to hear from those of you who have tried either system.  What did you like about it?  What problems did you run into?

I started my most successful forest garden island very simply.  I planted the tree in a raised bed, then dumped weeds around the bed's edges for three years.  The mounds of weeds rotted down to expand the original raised bed, creating rich dirt that extended beyond the tree's canopy.  I highly recommend this method since it requires you to maintain your focus on the centerpiece tree, giving it a few years to get established before the tree has to compete with anyone else.

The photo above shows the three year old peach tree in August 2009.  At this point, my well established peach was ready to handle understory plants, so I transplanted comfrey and bee balm into the partial shade beneath the peach's canopy, and fennel, echinacea, rhubarb, and Egyptian onions in the sun.

May of the next year, the forest garden island was in full swing.  In less successful forest garden islands, I had planted comfrey under younger peach trees in poor soil, and the comfrey stole nitrogen from the tree.  But this more established peach had no problem shading the comfrey enough that the understory plant behaved.

You'll notice that fennel, echinacea, and rhubarb have disappeared --- these plants didn't like being transplanted in the summer heat.  However, the Egyptian onions were thrilled with their new home and thrived even during my summer neglect.

That spring, I seeded poppies amid the Egyptian onions, which added a lot of beauty, but won't be repeated.  I love puttering in my forest garden islands in the winter, but in the summer I'm too busy in the vegetable garden to give them any care.  Since annuals tend to require bare ground, which has to be weeded, they're out of the running as forest garden plants.

This second year of the forest garden island was when our peach started producing --- over half a bushel that summer.  Meanwhile the ecology of the island seemed to come into its own, attracting birds, insects, and wild mushrooms.




Last year was the third year of forest garden experimentation.  The peach had achieved its mature size and was starting to shade out the comfrey and bee balm closest to the trunk.  That allowed me to add another type of understory plant --- shade lovers.  I transplanted ramps right around the tree's trunk and daffodils helter skelter throughout the island.  Both of these plants are early spring ephemerals, which are active in the spring before the tree canopy shades them out, then die back when summer arrives.

Where will the island go from here?  I'm experimenting with more shade-loving species this spring --- goldenseal and ginseng.  Meanwhile, if I get around to it, I plan to transplant some flowering perennials into the sunny zone --- probably bee balm, echinacea, and fennel, since I have them around in excess.

A wild elderberry sprang up at the edge of the forest garden island a few years ago, and I left it alone since it seemed to be far enough away that it doesn't compete with the peach.  Pollinators seem to love the flowers, and the birds enjoy the fruits.  (I know elderberries are edible for humans too, but I'm not enough in love with the taste that I feel the need to fight off the birds, who really love the taste.)

The island has stopped expanding since the peach has achieved its final size, and I can feel the ecosystem starting to reach a steady state.  Annual maintenance is now about the same as it would be for any other fruit tree, but I suspect the tree is healthier for the diverse ecosystem under and around its canopy.  Plus, we get to enjoy a bit of beauty right outside the kitchen window.  This is one of our most successful permaculture experiments, and I highly recommend you try it out around your own fruit trees.

Our 14 foot long metal roofing panels came in today.

The guy we hired said he won't have much trouble walking the material across the creek and back to the barn.

Yes...he actually has seen the creek and driveway first-hand when he came out to give us the estimate. I'm guessing he has plans to make some sort of stretcher so a guy on each end can lift maybe 4 or 5 at a time?

Well planned pasturing systems can heal the earth --- and can take advantage of natural systems to keep the livestock healthier.  Greg Judy puts up tree swallow boxes since one adult can eat 8,000 flies per day, leading to happy cows.  Meanwhile, he pays close attention to the critters in and on the soil, watching dung beetles roll manure down tunnels into the earth and counting 462 worms in a single cow pat.  He considers spiders to a prime indicator of pasture health since these predators need to eat lots of insects to stay alive, and insects thrive in rich, organic matter-filled soil.

Other parts of Greg's pasturing ecology seem less intuitive.  He believes that careful mob grazing can heal gullies and riparian areas.  He mob grazes steep sided gullies three or four times per year, knocking the banks down so that vegetation can gain a foothold.  While I'm not sure his system would work in very wet climates (his waterways tend to dry up in the summer), Greg's system has created vegetated waterways that capture his neighbor's eroding topsoil (and precious water) each time it rains.  "It doesn't matter how much rain you get," said Greg.  "It matters how much you keep."

I saw Mark peeling the bark off the walnut logs we were stacking into the woodshed and realized that he was right --- barkless logs will probably dry faster.  Even dry bark doesn't make good firewood, so I decided to snag the biomass for my garden.

My first impulse is to see how the bark fares as the kill layer of a kill mulch.  I never have enough corrugated cardboard to go around --- maybe a couple of thicknesses of bark will do just as well?

I've been experimenting with alternative heating methods for the new Rajkumar oil expeller.

The soldering iron pictured above failed miserably.

It did a good job of heating the metal, but those things were never designed to be left on for more than a minute, which is why it has a push button trigger instead of a toggle switch. I knew this, but thought it could handle just a few minutes more. That's when the plastic case around the heating element melted. Now I need to find a new soldering iron.

The next round of experiments will involve an electric pipe heater.

Many of us get so excited when we learn about multi-species grazing and about rotational pastures that we want to create a vibrant ecosystem overnight.  But Greg Judy cautions us to slow down.

If you already manage a pasture, he recommends not increasing your stocking rate or expanding into multiple species for at least two years.  It will take you that long to improve the quality of your soil so that it can handle more feet.

Meanwhile, Greg recommends that you figure out what your centerpiece animal is and learn the intricacies of its care before bringing new animals in.  Yes, adding more species can make the patsuring system work more efficiently, but so will focusing on what's most important rather than scattering your attention in five different directions.

Meat animals make much better starter livestock than dairy animals do.  Making milk requires a lot of energy, and it's tough (although possible) to keep dairy animals healthy on pasture alone.  In addition, a quality milk cow is worth a lot more than a meat cow, so there's less financial risk as you muddle your way up the learning curve.

Finally, Greg recommends that you pay as close attention to yourself as you do to the pasture.  If you work a full time job and plan to pasture livestock in your spare time, don't start with a complex dairy cow rotation where you need to move animals seven times a day.  On the other hand, if you're unemployed and are willing to put in the time, you can feed many more animals on the same acreage if you're willing to rotate often so that high quality food is always available.  Maybe in a few years, you'll be able to run half a dozen different kinds of livestock on that same pasture.

I hope that when I reported that the Persephone Days were over, you didn't rush out to plant your spring vegetables.  Once daylength is longer than ten hours, surviving crops like kale will start growing again, but that doesn't mean the ground is warm enough for seeds to sprout. 

Lettuce, onions, and spinach can all handle soil temperatures as low as 35 while most other spring crops like the earth to have warmed to at least 40 degrees Fahrenheit.  I tested the soil temperature in the sunniest part of our garden last week, and the ground underneath our quick hoops was just barely 35 degrees, while unprotected soil was hovering right around freezing.

Most of the plants under my quick hoops are starting to grow again, but the tatsoi totally perished in the winter cold.  That means I had a spot just waiting to plant spring lettuce!  Rip out a few weeds, toss down a bucket of composted manure, then sprinkle on lettuce seeds, and the first garden bed of 2012 is seeded for March harvests.

The driveway was frozen enough this morning to risk getting the golf cart through the mud.

We recently found out that our local mechanic has the same golf cart and is willing to take a look at ours.

It did great through the frozen mud. The mechanic is just down the road, which meant maybe a fourth of a mile on our local country road and another fourth on the main highway. I was a bit stressed at the prospect of breaking down half way, or getting a ticket, but traffic is pretty light around here, especially at 9:30 in the morning when most folks are already tucked into their job for the day.

A guy at the garage suggested that a Farm Use tag mounted on the back might be enough to reduce the risk of trouble with the police for occasions like this. Not sure if that's good enough for the law, but I'm guessing it would help.