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Episode-1145- Listener Calls for 6-7-13 — 39 Comments

  1. On a side note. My silver came in, actually last week. I just picked it up. I spent the week in Ohio at the annual Pathfinder Gathering. Looking at them now… NICE! Great Job, Mulligan Mint and TSP.

  2. I believe the new beds are just not “activated” yet. The mycorrhizae association has not been achieved yet like it did in the old beds. When you started the plants on the old bed all those roots provided a ideal atmosphere for the mycorrhizae association to form. Check out some of my videos and you may see how truly important the mychoriizae association is. I used more of a cover crop of peas, beans, mustard, greens, and radishes to build the fertility. MY PLANTS ARE ALL POLYCULTURED STUPID THICK!!! CHECK IT OUT, YOU MIGHT LEARN SOMEHTING

  3. Hey Jack,

    I have great news that program you are looking for already exists, though it might not be quite as easy as you described it almost is. I use it everyday, to design my barns. I learned from downloadable tutorials and videos on youtube, and I had a good working knowledge on how to use the program in about a day, of course you can go much deeper and get very detailed if you want to, but you can keep it very simple to.

    Best thing is that it is free, it’s called Sketchup.

    Here is an article describing how a permaculture designer uses it.

    http://www.ecologicaldesigns.co.uk/index.php/technology-for-permaculture/technology-for-permaculture-article-list/sketchup

    There is also an online warehouse of models such as plants, and some permaculture components.

    http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/search?q=Permaculture&styp=m&scoring=t&btnG=Search

    Have fun with it!

  4. Hey Jack, don’t worry about the weakness in drawing, Rod Serling of Twilight Zone fame rarely wrote or typed a word of his scripts, he was a brilliant writer but hated the act, so he recorded them all in character on an old real to real type recorder and had hid secretary type it out later, in fact most of the Twilight Zone episodes were written while he was sitting by his pool enjoying a cocktail.

    Thanks for all you do !
    Shannon

    • God I loved that show, been watching the first year on netflix lately, thanks for teaching me a fun bit of trivia.

  5. I love the show and have managed to get my wife hooked too. Saying that… I am bummed at the answer you gave on the chem trails question. You say its true but you also claim its a conspiracy.. Well this conspiracy, if it is true, will directly affect farming, gardening etc. I would love for you to do some more research on this because I think it directly affects the self sufficient/reliant lifestyle you promote. What good is growing your own food when it is being polluted ? What good is the investment in food production if this chem trails program prevents us from growing our own food in the long run.
    Thanks Jack!

    • I have done plenty of research and I didn’t say it was a conspiracy. You guys are the ones that call yourselves conspiracy buffs etc. What I said was there is work being done that does things that could be called chemtrails. I also said all the damn videos of jet contrails from passenger jets you guys are running around posting to youtube are nonsense and they are.

      • Jack, the caller does not mention commercial air craft. I do not mention commercial air craft.
        I believe neither of us our conspiracy buffs as you claim. We are only looking for answers to something that is going on. We claim something is going on by just looking up into the sky. We also know of the program called haarp. I think the caller and me and probably a whole bunch of your listeners were hoping that youay have some info on this to ease our minds. You are a source of knowledge for all of us and it bums me out that you would just write this off because of the people out there that you claim are “tin hat” buffs. I ask you to do more research, not because I think i know more than you.. You have , i beleive, many more resourcrs than the average listener. I believe, the caller was trying to extract that knowledge from you. As i was. If you do not want to speak about it . Thats fine but to resort to name calling is not what your listeners are looking for. Thanks again for all you do.

        • @Val I am sorry that you are BUMMED that I gave you my HONEST OPINION. HAARP, that is a fricken non starter waste of energy. I fricken said that there is something to the concept, that things are being done that should not be. I also said when you start looking at all the damn contrails and saying it is proof of anything you are out of your fricken mind.

          If that bums you out, so be it. I am not here to tell you want you want to hear but what I know to be true or my best guess at the truth based on the facts on hand.

          Video after youtube video of so called chemtrails are complete and total bullshit. If you want to believe it go ahead and listen to Alex Jones he will tell you it is all real.

  6. Jack, great lesson on herbal preparations. The instruction was spot on.
    I would like to add a clarification, if I may.

    High proof alcohol, in general, is only ever used at full potency with fresh plant material, or highly resinous dried herb. The reason high proof isn’t used on dried herb is because most herbs have both alcohol soluble and water soluble compounds. For dried herbs, the menstruum of choice is vodka.

    Here’s a great reference book for this stuff…http://www.amazon.com/Making-Plant-Medicine-Richo-Cech/dp/0970031203/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1370699265&sr=1-1&keywords=richo+cech

    • Yep I get that, I guess I wasn’t clear the point I was trying to make is even if you used Everclear the volume of alcohol you consume for a dose of a tincture is meaningless.

      • I was thinking this the whole time. “We’re not drinkers.” I was thinking…. then don’t act like my friends back when i was in high school and drink it to get intoxicated. (Robo-tripping). You drink as recreation, a calming effect, or because you have an “addiction”. Those are very different situations than enhancing the effects of a health stimulant.

  7. Jack, thanks for saying it like it is… chemtrails per the Alex Jones, tinfoil hat types is just bull.
    I’m a pilot and awful tired of hearing about it because I get asked about it. As you said, there is not space or payload enough on commercial airplanes for that stuff in addition to all the easily-verifiable passengers and their bags full of stuff.
    Further, there’s no way to hide it. If they were actually doing this, the infrastructure would be un-hideable and undeniable. To pull it off, you’d have to have entire fleets of trucks dedicated to just the “chem” in chemtrails. You’d have to double the number of tank trucks at every major airport in the country. It’s simple meteorology and physics. Good grief.

  8. One point about pill bugs I’ve heard mentioned a couple times.

    They will in fact eat leaves on living plants. They also like chewing away at the stalks of young starts. Their tastes vary, but they sure seem to like eggplant leaves and young stalks of squash and cucumber. Fortunately, they are easily mitigated by watering in the morning or late afternoon instead of evening and they LOVE LOVE LOVE fruit rinds. So as long as they have plenty of stuff they prefer, they don’t go after your actual plants too much. I learned this the hard way over time, thinking pill bugs don’t eat plants and wondering what was destroying some of mine. Then I caught them in the act by going out at night (a couple hours after watering) and seeing them everywhere. Sort of like this pic.

    http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/pests/msg0416454922110.062012209753.jpg

    But if mitigated with just some rinds near the base of your plants you want to protect, they are a net benefit as decomposers.

    • Strawberries is where I have problems with pill bugs. The berries themselves, since they are close to the ground and nice and soft.

      • Don’t grow many strawberries myself for this reason. I have one set in a terracotta pot I keep closer to a driveway area, we’ll see how it goes.

    • I’ve had problems with strawberries and found out that slugs were the culprit. Not pill bugs. I know that my pill bugs eat mostly decaying matter and are a beneficial part of the breakdown process for healthy soil, thus making them a BENEFICIAL critter. I wonder if the problem of pill bugs eating live tissue could be a symptom of some underlying issue with your garden? Perhaps it’s a better idea to investigate that instead of exterminating all of your pill bugs.

      • Yep they get the blame for so many things they don’t do. Sure a pill might nibble on a berry, if so likely it has already begun to rot or been damaged by something else. They wouldn’t touch an intact healthy berry.

        • I have pill bugs EVERYWHERE if i dig, or on top of my mulch. No questions asked, I don’t have any problems at all with them. My problems are with these g damn caterpillars. Luckily i’ve been catching them early enough (within a few hours) that they haven’t COMPLETELY decimated my plants.

          But pill bugs, man I have so many of these guys its nuts, but no problems what so ever. As far as eating small seedlings and what not, 100% its the slugs (for me). I’m not even 100% convinced they didn’t do it because the plants were really weak, indicating if they were bigger they would have been alright.

    • Have lots of pill bugs which I suspect eats lots of my young starts. Put diatemaceous earth out around the seedlings to help keep them away.

  9. I am not sure on the chemtrails thing and remain a bit puzzled. I think I keep hoping something more definitive will come out. – but I wouldn’t just blame conspiracy theorists for the ignorance of everyone else, but that’s just another conspiracy that disinfo is used to create conspiracies that can be proved false. It’s a conspiracy in itself and just adds another layer to the complexity so that people won’t believe it because it seems too complex, but I just try to figure out the truth regardless of what other people may think.

    We did see an amazing number of trails from aircraft one day at my mother’s house that litteraly seemed to turn a clear blue sky into an overcast day in a matter of hours. My mother commented on how odd it was and she hates Alex Jones and is not much of a conspiracy person other than JFK and things like that. She brought it up without any input from me.

    My understanding is that stuff is supposedly mixed with the jet fuel, I don’t see people mentioning that but that would make it somewhat transparent.. I also have seen that geo engineering is admitted and goes on. I think there are geo engineering conferences. I have also heard that aluminum dioxide has been found in high concentrations in some soil samples such as mount shasta.

  10. I called in about a year or so ago asking the same question about vacuum sealing seeds and you answered the caller exactly as you answered mine; then you suggested I try it. So I took some new Basil and Scallion seed, and vacuum sealed it and I am going to open them in about four years. I also set aside the same two seed packs (purchased same day) on a shelf. So if we are all still around in three more years, I will report my findings…

  11. I too have heard that chem-trails are due to an additive in the fuel.

    Simple solution, have some fuel jockeys get samples of fuel (Very dangerous) and have the samples inspected. Of course this would require knowing which planes get said tainted fuel.

    A am thinking that the people who refuel the jets would notice if some tankers were only used rarely or on certain jets. Unless all the fuel is tainted.

    I catch Alex Jones some times. If everything he reports is true. We’re boned. I’m inclined to think he’s a vacuum cleaner on conspiracies. He sucks them all in and then spits them out on his show.

  12. Jack,

    I can tell you without a doubt the spirko beds here (wood core, with wood mulch) is doing extremely well here in south-eastern Louisiana. However, I definitely do not have sandy soil. It is much more of a clay. I will also say differently than you, the trees are NOT freshly cut. I pulled mostly pine (and two wild cherry trees) that had fallen in the forests next to my house out and some were quite decomposed.

    I will admit that I”m starting to use pine straw (brown bailed straw) and I’m seeing better water retention with it than the pine bark mulch that I’m using (there is no hardwood mulch here). The top inch or so of the beds are pretty much dead dry, but after that is quite moist. If i’m not mistaken every plan that is in the wood core beds were transplants that I grew from seed in pots.

    I’m definitely finding out that anything I want to plant right now, has to be transplants, and they have to be big dudes otherwise they get completely toasted. I lost alot of peppers recently putting them out without raising them up too big.

    • Good to hear. I get some blame here on some of this. In stripping the beds it looks like the students at the shop didn’t do the 3-6 inches I asked for, some places are more like 10!

      Anyway I am having fun with polyculture and just getting a little ridiculous with it to see what happens.

    • 10 inches of mulch? Whoa! haha. Not only is that a lot of mulch in one area, that’s a lot of work to get that mulch on there. I have also heard you mention before about the mulch coming off, or at least addressing that issue, in general I’d say the mulch stays on there pretty good but it does come off. But if you put in the water “retention” systems (mini swale with a “sill”) they stop at the sill and you can just easily scoop it up and put it elsewhere.

      I’m experimenting now with a keyhole variety of the bed. They’re not wood cored (I simply don’t have that much wood, a chainsaw, nor the desire to spend what little time i have in the forests finding good bed building logs), so I’m using sheet mulching techniques with pine straw. The sheet mulch material i’m using is packing paper (from a recent move). Basically its blank raw paper with no ink on it (about as friendly as paper gets). The keyhole beds are raised about a foot or so high, and the walk ways are sunken in with a sill leading down hill. (The beds circle around from west, north, to east). Whenever it rains it fills up the circle and kinda sits around for awhile (blocked by a sill). A better approach could have been going south that way the water leaks into the middle of the bed…

      • Man let me know how the pine straw works it should murder weed emergence but everyone is afraid of it. You should get a cheap PH test kit and test now and end of season. It might help a lot of people get over a silly myth based fear.

        • Will do. i’ve been meaning to do some PH tests anyways, so that would be a good idea. It’s plausible that SOME of my blossom rot could be due to low PH (supposedly its extremely common around here, a friend of mine says some of his is in the mid to high 4s…. youch)

          About 90% of what I read online says there is no or little acidic effect of pine straw. Perhaps the super fresh stuff maybe. Similarly I did see a study on the aleopathic effects of mulches which in general the only ones that were of concern where cypress mulch (boy is that a common one too). Pine straw had a slightly aleoathic effect than the rest and the control, however, after I think of a month being down it was completely gone.

          I’ll tell you how it goes when I get some effects. Right now I”m growing tomatos, peppers, and rosemary underneath thick pine straw mulch.

      • I was like who is this douchebag replying correcting me on my soil type….. OH… whoops….

    • Well to be more specific it is sandy loam (maybe 6 inches) with a clay rich B horizon… Mr. The New Mike 😀

  13. As for DE I wouldn’t recommend using it in a garden. As Jack mentioned it will harm all bugs and it will do this for a very short period of time until dew, rain or water is applied. The best uses I have found for it on my farm are feeding animals(yeah the whole if it gets wet is useless thing seems not apply in their guts for some reason), and as part of a mixture for dust bathes for chickens. There was talk that food grade mind you, DE causes problems in the lungs. I understand that is not the case. Since I stopped worrying about it I haven’t noticed a scratchy throat of cough after handling it it which I do a minimum twice a day.

    There is something up with chemtrails but I believe it is being tested more than used outright. One problem is that they utilize nanotechnology in the particulates and one of the things they use is aluminum based. That could actually have a negative effect on soils especially those that already have aluminum problems with their soils. That is why it is good to test you soils twice a year using the correct soil tests so you know how things are going.

    Which gets me into my next point. I would be weary of adding too much nitrogen to wood beds or wood mulch. Especially wood mulch as it will seep through the mulch and go into the soil. It’s less of a problem depending on your source–say green sand or kelp meal. But be careful as if you add to much nitrogen into the soil you can cause other minerals to get locked up in the soil. Constant use of chop and drop of polycultures and a high variety compost should help any future issues as the different minerals should help bring balance and unlock the locked minerals. Of course the other problem with nitrogen is too much can effect the taste of some plants and cause fruiting plants to grow huge with minimal fruiting.

    Great show.

  14. You state that the government may be spraying, but you say chemtrails are a conspiracy. Kind of a confusing contradiction.

    I live 10 miles from SFO and I have no problem telling a contrail from a commercial liner versus a government plane spraying something.

    By the way, had my first fly over from a drone… frustrating!

    • See your problem is you think conspiracy means not true that isn’t what conspiracy means at all.