Dylanfm

I also use it for tea regularly in Spring/Summer. Once they're seeding I use the seeds for tea. If I have enough time to collect them I'll store the seeds for a garnish over winter.

The firewood can be harvested as part of a coppice rotation too, e.g a woodland broken up into 8 coupes with one harvested selectively each year, then starting again at the beginning after regrowth is sufficient. Friends of mine do this and it works well. They replant as necessary as they go.

It sounds like there have been some changes to the Guardian and Observer lately, such as the sale of the Observer to Tortoise Media. [0] Journalists were concerned enough to strike. [1]

[0] https://broligarchy.substack.com/p/who-is-the-money-behind-t... [1] (PDF) https://www.nuj.org.uk/asset/18CD4D84-FD26-4CDB-AF43E11F6A6C...

It's not as simple as just installing more wind turbines. The grid needs improvement and we need things like regional pricing. See https://wastedwind.energy for example.

There's a 3 part podcast series on good bread from the great UK-based regen farming podcast Farmerama https://farmerama.co/arable/good-bread-part-1-what-is-good-b... Dips into this and talks to people involved in the good bread movement.

Here in the northern Scottish highlands it's hard to find good bread. Which led us to learn to bake our own sourdough. But there are some good things popping up, like a local baker who is now doing a People's Loaf pay as you can https://www.northern-times.co.uk/news/sutherland-artisan-bak...

Another interview with Jon Moses: https://novaramedia.com/2023/07/13/novara-fm-revenge-of-the-...

Putting the 'right to roam' movement in a greater context. Coming about after de-peopling of the land, trying to counter the effects that has had on people. By returning land access to people, people will regain a connection with the land and care for it more.

There's also a recent interview with the same title on the Debunking Economics podcast https://debunkingeconomics.com/episode/yanos-varoufakis-on-t...

I love growing (and eating) Frank Morton’s lettuces. If I recall correctly, a lettuce variety he bred was grown in space. Here’s a good podcast interviewing him, also touching on Open Source Seeds and patents: https://osseeds.org/free-the-seed-podcast-03-hyper-red-rumpl... there’s another good episode on the Seed Grower podcast too.

I wonder if they knew they were coppicing the tree, rather than killing it. Thankfully the tree will continue to grow, I think the land managers have chosen to leave the tree there. Many of the oldest trees around (at least in the UK) have signs of coppicing and pollarding. Those who cut the tree have unintentionally extended its life (e.g https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-203131...). The only issue is it wasn't done at the best time of year.

You can read more about coppicing on the national coppice federation: https://ncfed.org.uk/public/coppicing/

I've been building a private app on the side for market gardens (veghub.co) to manage their knowledge, plan their growing season and manage their weekly tasks. It's a really interesting little space which I could ramble on about for ages. When I got into market gardening and began seeing tables etc in books with crop timings, spacings etc, as a developer my brain immediately wanted to build something to help growers think less. Most growers don't want to spend their time in spreadsheet land (although there are quite a few farmer spreadsheet wizards - e.g Dan Brisebois). There's a small demo from a year ago recorded here: https://youtu.be/0FuAF95GceE?t=401

Some interesting aspects that have been fun to code with (the app is Rails + Elm btw).

- one key detail is Days To Maturity (DTM). This changes between varieties, time of year and latitude. A seasoned grower will know what to expect from a crop they have experience in on their ground. Local knowledge networks are important. The best market gardens know their DTMs and will be tracking it, using it to inform their growing on the fly (maybe their plans need adjusting). Doing things like this should be easier.

- an efficient market garden makes sure they don't have empty space. When a crop is harvested or terminated, a bed flip occurs where it's prepped and the next crop is put in (sown or transplanted). You want to have this planned, ideally in winter before the season starts. You need to know your crop timings (DTM, days in nursery, harvest period (once off harvest or repeat harvest for _n_ weeks). This can be used to ensure you have your succession sowings ready.

- efficient market gardens will most likely have a standard bed width & length, organised into field blocks. A grower will have spacings (distance between rows, in row spacing, multi-sow count). It's easy to calculate the number of plants, rows, seeds for a grower when they're sowing (taking into account a safety factor too). When knowing a seed weight you can also calculate a seed order. This also leads to being able to predict harvest quantities, which leads to knowing how many veg boxes could be filled etc and when coupled with pricing data, can predict yield. You want to know your $/bed-metre and use that as a metric for comparing crops and making decisions.

- if you imagine a weekly veg box scheme, that has _n_ customers (shares) of varying box sizes (e.g a 0.5 box, 1.0 box and 2.0 box), with a season from Some Date -> Some Date. You aim for _n_ number of different vegetables in the box. You can imagine some questions that are helpful for experienced growers and also newbie farmers:

  - if I have _n_ acres, what's an efficient way to divide up my field into beds and field blocks

  - if I have entered in my crop plan, can you show me what's going to be in the veg boxes each week?

    - actually, I don't know what I'm doing, can you just fill in all my beds with a crop plan as a starting point? All I know is how much space I have

  - ...how many shares can I support ...how much money will that bring in?

  - if I have a sense of prices of my crops, how much value are my customers getting?

  - At the weekly harvest: we have harvested and have all the different crops with quantities. We have a box scheme composed of all these shares & share sizes, divide up the harvest evenly so that we know what to pack in each box. Usually this is done each week by hand on a whiteboard or similar in a packing shed. It should be easier (and ideally predicted).

We have a similar invasive worm in Scotland and elsewhere in Europe: New Zealand Flatworm and Australian Flatworm. I've lost count of the number of NZ flatworms that I've killed in salty water over the past few months. I'm losing hope of removing them from our small market garden. There are far fewer earthworms in the patches the flatworm flourished before I found them.

I am very interested how organic growers in NZ deal with them. If they're a problem in their native regions.

I think the exterior insulation is kind of taking the place of the cladding or rain screen here. I suspect it also as an air gap. But I suppose you could affix a rain screen to it, although I am not sure if that's worthwhile.

There's some more info here: https://www.designingbuildings.co.uk/wiki/Rainscreen

I hear the term "rain screen" fairly often to describe open cladding styles. Scroll down to "timber cladding profiles" and then "open cladding": https://www.thousandhuts.org/walls Rather than a more closed timber cladding, like shiplap or board-on-board, there would be a gap, maybe 8mm between the cladding boards. Rain can get in, but with an effective membrane beneath, it's waterproof. And there's always ventilation, so it dries out more quickly. If the wall is built for it, the membrane should be vapor permeable and allow the building to "breath".

I'm not sure if this is as appropriate for your local buildings if they have exterior polystyrene etc. Where I am in northern Scotland many of the buildings from the past several decades are timber frame inside + cavity + a wall of concrete blocks. Those concrete blocks are basically the cladding. They have the same renders as you linked on them. While a lot of people are skipping the blockwork and just cladding the building with timber or metal instead.

As others have said, circumstances have changed (Brexit).

The handling of Covid was a reminder too. Consistently rules would (or would not) be made in the south, yet here in Scotland we'd have a firmer stance and/or clearer guidelines to follow. For example, lifting mask rules and so on. I know opinions differ on this subject, for many people that I know the difference in the Scottish gov's handling was appreciated.

It's also interesting looking at result maps for the Brexit vote and the last General Election. These maps show the Scotland / England border, yet that's just a result of showing the differences in how these nations vote.

For anyone interested in the kind of timber framing used in these buildings, here are a couple of videos that I've been enjoying:

Carl Rogers & family are restoring an old French farmhouse and have a series of very well made videos about the process. There are separate 1-5 videos of this barn build, but here's a shorter version that's combined: https://youtu.be/K75pQ2HxRgM

Another good channel has this recent video showing a legit medieval castle being rebuilt in France using simple tools and traditional methods. There's a section on working with green oak where they use a side-axe to square up some lumber https://youtu.be/Ajqort8ldXA

Mr Chickadee is another high quality channel for expert timber framing using hand-tools only https://www.youtube.com/c/MrChickadee

The midges are definitely still here. Not sure how it compares to the past, but I haven't heard anyone say they're getting better.

North coast of Scotland, as far north as you can go on the mainland. Dark winters and long summer daylight. Didn't move here to start a farm (moved for the surf), but started a small market garden as a side-project a couple years ago. Also developing software for running a market garden, good to be my own user.

There's a woodland on Hoy, Orkney's wildest looking island, which is a great snapshot of what a real native Orkney woodland would look like. There are no deer on Orkney, so the woodland gives a great impression of the different layers of species that form when given a chance (the rest of Scotland has a herbivore problem).

Here's a great post on the woodland by a very knowledgeable person: https://alanwatsonfeatherstone.com/a-day-in-scotlands-most-n...

I live on the mainland across the Pentland Firth from Hoy, with our place looking across to the hilly island. We've planted 1,000 trees or so over the past couple of years. I'm growing a lot more from seed I collect locally from woodlands that weren't planted by someone (true local seed stock). There aren't so many native woodlands in this area and it's almost impossible to source trees grown from local seed. It's great to see proof that even on Orkney these sorts of woodlands want to thrive.

I recommend whathappenedlastweek.com for a thoughtful, curated weekly email summarising under-reported news. Helpful for resisting the urge to hunt news out.

Another good resource is https://www.neighbourhoodconstruction.org e.g their page on Thermal Envelope > Bio aggregate https://www.neighbourhoodconstruction.org/bio-aggregate/

This also occurs in Australia, resulting in mammalian meat allergy. Some more information here https://allergy.org.au/patients/insect-allergy-bites-and-sti...

I've started a small market garden here on the far north coast of Scotland (https://www.instagram.com/burnlea.farm). Growing veggies for the local community, trees from local seed stock and this year I'm growing some old local varieties of barley (bere barley).

The soil on our croft is in a good way, having been left undisturbed for decades (aside from being cut for hay). However, we still need to build fertility and are doing so through compost, ramial woodchip and biodynamic preparations. This combined with a no-till (or minimum till) approach is helping to develop build soil and enhance soil structure. One issue we need to address with this is water management, as it can get very wet here (although we are a few weeks without rain now).

For keeping track of fertility in your soil a simple test that many people do is measure organic matter. This isn't something I've done yet. You can also do worm counts. And more detailed soil tests.

There are apps out there such as SoilMentor by Vidacycle that guide you in tracking this. Here's a good overview of their tests, which can be done by farmers on site with minimal equipment https://soils.vidacycle.com/soil-tests/

You can get a sense of the baseline when starting a project by doing this. But a good indicator would be looking at what plants are growing there already (if any) - weeds etc are indicators of soil characteristics. For example, compaction and drainage.

Personally I haven't taken any soil tests yet, I'm just keeping an eye on our crops and getting the sense of things that way. I'll take some tests at some point soon. Simple approaches to this can be pretty handy, for example I've been scything our 2 acre field and it allows me to step over each part of the field noticing how the vegetation changes species-wise and in vigor.

Supporting this, I'm also developing an app for market gardens to use for crop planning and record keeping. It's great to be your own customer, plus I'm tapping into a good network of established markets gardens here who are helping to shape the product.

I recommend anyone starting a project should read Mark Shepard's new book Water For Any Farm. His master line system, built upon PA Yeoman's keyline and scale of permanence is valuable, especially at an early stage. Equally valuable in dry climates as it is in wet ones.

Lovely project.

Something that jumped out to me as I browsed around Edinburgh is the app highlighting Japanese Knotweed as a "very rare" tree. It's actually a very invasive species that's almost impossible to get rid of.

These days many new builds are using air source or ground source heat pumps. And existing dwellings are beginning to be retrofitted for them. I don't have numbers, but I expect that it will soon be the norm for new builds for places without gas infrastructure. Especially with any new legislation around heating for new builds (e.g. https://www.gov.scot/news/new-build-homes-to-be-more-energy-...).

Farms have continued to grow, echoing Earl Butz' (Nixon's Secretary of Ag) "get big or get out" philosophy. However, there are several studies out there showing that a greater portion of the world's population is fed by small farms:

- https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5... - https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/12/1... - http://www.fao.org/family-farming/detail/en/c/284666/

Small farmers need support, it's worth learning about local arms of organisations such as https://viacampesina.org/en/, for example https://landworkersalliance.org.uk

Also his latest book Regenerative Agriculture. Mostly composed of varied farm enterprises with financial details amd so on. Pick and choose the enterprises that appeal to you and work with your land... e.g. market garden, tree nursery, pastured eggs and mushroom cultivation.

https://www.regenerativeagriculturebook.com/

I prefer to aim for community sufficient, rather than self sufficient. You probably won't do a good job of being entirely self sufficient. A small healthy community could be, or almost.

You're going to design your farm according to your context and the needs of your crops.

For example, a farm in the UK may follow the Wakelyns approach: https://vimeo.com/256082580 Alleys oriented to maximise the sun for the crops they're intending to grow. With tree species selected for various reasons, e.g. their size and if they fix nitrogen.

In the Sahara, maybe you want shade. Many growers intentionally use shade nets to reduce evaporation and heat stress. It depends on your context and your aims.

I expect there's some degree of trade off. Lose a portion of productivity of your annual staple crops, in exchange for the benefits of mixing perennial crops with annuals. Depending on your situation you may be able to control much of this when designing the farm.

I was planning to grow a small amount of bere this year through a seed sovereignty program here in Scotland. Lockdown disrupted that, and the seeds didn’t arrive. Hopefully next year.

So glad to see something from Toby Hemenway recommended on here. He has some other interesting presentations, such as:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_lJf46i9pI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0nzIMJGuEY

https://soundcloud.com/permaculturevoices/pvp125-tobyhemenwa...

I really enjoyed the 12 Byzantine Rulers podcast too, along with the accompanying book Lost To The West

https://12byzantinerulers.com