Pitiful-Equipment-21

Hey how did you build the foundation? Do you have frost where you live?

robo advisor was fine for when I wasn't comfortable investing directly myself. once I learned more I switched to xeqt to save on fees.

Woah okay, yep that's the move for me I think

And for specific ETF's, XEQT included, they allow fractional unit buys, so a fixed dollar amount can always be 100% invested, without any leftover as cash. Fantastic for a regular contribution plan.

That sweet! I won't have like $18 sitting there every month haha

Hiring an advisor online is not a bad idea. What your describing is a fee-only advice only planner. I understand the desire to not pay fees for investments and instead pay cash, just know depending on your asset levels that may or may not be a good thing.

You get what you pay for, I’m sure you could find someone for $300 but your going to get the below average advice your clearly expecting.

Yes thank you! Appreciate your help, this has helped me.

Fake check scam. They'll send an amount far over your asking price, and then ask you to send some amount back. Once the bank realizes the check is bunk, they'll deduct the full amount of the check from your bank account and you'll be left holding the bag.

What if you accept the cheque, but don't send them any amount back and just block them? Then I guess the bank would just take the money and you'd have wasted your time and given personal info to a scammer?

I love this: I personally don’t believe in burn piles as I think it’s as waste of good material, so around my property line, I push loads of the dead brush and logs that I’ve cleaned up from other areas. It’s turning into a kind of wall now with tons of animals in it and I love it lol.

You're retaining so much carbon on your property which is the main driver of soil life. Good job, you will reap the benefits for many years. No offence to OP, but this burn pile mentality is pretty shortsighted

Cool I signed up. Seems super cool

If you just save seeds from the strongest plants you might get a little bit of selection for local conditions. If you waited years and kept your eyes open growing multiple strains you might detect some spontaneous hybrids, but they are rare under my conditions at least. One good indicator for whether Amaranth is a scaleable crop under your conditions is to look out for wild weedy Amaranth species (there are dozens of them). If you have a local weedy species you could attempt to hand cross it with the grain variety to transfer some vigour into productivity (though would likely need to back cross to the grain variety a few times to improve the output). You don't have to take all this on in the beginning. Just pay attention to which species of all crops grow without too much bother in your soil and climate.

WOW this is insane. How have you learned all this? I'm following your blog on substack.

Lambsquarters growing wild for you is a massive good sign that amaranth might be worth breeding with. My native soil is so mineral depleted that amaranth family only grow where I build up manure or burn a lot of biomass.

I did not put a foundation in my post and beam greenhouse, just floored it with 3/4” gravel and woodchips. But I sided with just a layer of cement board siding. Your idea of a stone foundation is great but may sink in places and become uneven. A deep, well-compacted footing is crucial. If the foundation is going to hold up the walls then concrete may be the way to go.

Ooh cool, do you have any pictures by chance?

Be really careful using gasoline. The fumes can ignite and burn you badly.

Thank you! I learned that lesson the hard way and almost seriously injured my friend. Now I spray the pile, move the gas can 30 feet away then carefully throw a match from a few feet away

You can douse it pretty good with kerosene or diesel and get the same results without taking that chance. My dad got burned pretty badly using gasoline and I hate to think about anyone else going through that. In fact my husband got burned at a bonfire when an idiot put gasoline in the kerosene jug and nobody knew until we put a match to the pile.

Ohhhh okay thanks for the heads up. I don't really know much about any of this so I'm just going to not use it anymore. Thank you for your help

All three of the articles essentially just say, "average temperature goes up so things are slightly more dry and easily combustible"

Ohh I'm sorry, I was wrong and you actually have an interested and nuanced point. Apologies, I get heated when I see climate change misinformation because it's such a pressing issue, but going too far the other way like I did isn't helpful and can turn away people. Apologies to you! Sorry about that!

Sure to a microscopic degree, but I doubt that's the primary reason. Takes a lot more than a few extra degrees of heat from average global temperature to light a fire

I searched "climate change forest fires". It was so easy to find this information that I have to assume you aren't posting this in good faith, so I won't engage more. I'll just leave a few of the results here:

I do this in my cold frame. Very small, but could work on bigger areas theoretically. I sprinkle a bunch of lettuce, kale, swiss chard, brcolli, corn salad and other cold hardy crops. I just did this even though it's still super cold out. They will germinate when they're ready and make a little green forest that I harvest all spring. I didn't let it go to seed last year, but I suppose I could

Generally speaking, this idea is cool but a waste of money. If you want to buy a bunch of seeds and haphazardly throw them around, go for it! With the understanding that your seeds are not likely to establish well.

I hate wildflower mixes. I had a natural species expert come and look at my place. She said not to use wildflower mixes. I was like fuck it, I already bought it might as well. I sprinkled it in my lawn and they looked pretty enough I guess, but not a single pollinator was interested. Not one.

The thing that really bothers me about these mini-documentaries is that they always focus on the cultural aspect of owning and operating a small scale farm like this. They never get into the weeds of it. What are you growing? Why did you choose those crops? What influenced your design? What parts did you put work into that didn't work out in the end? Show me how you got from A to Z for the area that you're in.

Yeah absolutely. Owning land at all is prohibitively expensive for most people.

Okay cmon that is fucking insane

Right?! More like fanciest pole barn I’ve ever seen

I love the bent sticks worked in, I'm gonna try a way shittier version of that for sure

Chat GPT, as usual, is wrong I'm afraid. I'm glad it works in your test cases so far though! let us know when it doesn't seem too work! :)

Ohhh for real?? It works perfectly for me. It spits out the date as a string like "Feb 1" and it gets it right so far. Do you think it will stop working or something? What's wrong with the code?

errmm .. I read that all wrong.

looool

Hello

150" of snow is something like 130lbs/ft2 of snow load on the flat. 10'x16' of coverage means it needs to support over ten tons of snow.

Holy shit, okay then lol. That makes a lot of sense why I don't see flat roofs around.

The number one concern for using straw or any other organic material as a main building component is moisture. Water plus straw equals mold. Gotta source dry material. Gotta keep it dry during storage and construction. Gotta build in such a way that it Never gets wet. Very difficult to do. Except in brochures and fairy tales.

I know multiple people in my area who built them and said it was pretty easy, but I hear you even a little bit of moisture will completely ruin it.

Children don’t matter. I have them. The eldest said she’d sell the farm and buy a penthouse in the city. Younger one too early to tell.

You don't have to be a subsistence farmer. You don't have to be 100% self-sufficient, which isn't even possible. It's totally possible to just have a nice rural piece of property, care for your crops and animals, and maybe supply 50% of your food needs without working yourself to death. Of course, you'll also need to have some other source of income.

Last year I grew all of my seedlings (flowers, herbs, and veggies) in Organic Mechanics seed starting mix (preferring to opt for peat free, which is much more sustainable and not quite popular in the US for many seed starting options), but I found it to dry out too quickly and be a little too chunky for tiny seedlings like lavender and rosemary. This year, I watched a few of Charles Dowding's youtube videos and became empowered to make my own mix. I used 1:1 of Organic Mechanics seed starting mix to vericompost, e.g. 1lb of each, rounding up that weight with 10% of vermiculite granules to help with moisture retention, a little sprinkle of kelp powder, a few drops of fulvic acid, and a dusting of mycorrhizal powder. It was like baking a very very strange cake. Within one week, I've germinated most of leeks and onions, still waiting to see from strawberries.

Cooool, yeah he's been my biggest inspiration too. He uses straight compost for a lot of stuff. That really opened my eyes. A lot of the info you hear is marketing by companies that want to sell you their product. Making your own seems like the most sensible option if you plan to do this a lot. Even in this thread someone was posting ads that looked like articles about bokashi and how it had "more nutrients" according to... the company that sells bokashi starter lol

Seedlings don’t need a high nitrogen media. In fact, I believe seeds would just rot if planted into straight worm castings or compost.

Regular compost gets too hot and destroy some of the mikrobi. Bokashi creates healthier, more alive soil. Also there is no need for a huge compost which is a bonus.

That's only really true over 160f, and even then the microbes just move back in when the temps go back down. You'd have a difficult time getting a home compost pile to 160f all the way through.

Ok. There are more nutrients and a wider variety of mikrobi in bokashi that has been studied. Anyway any well-kept compost is great be it bokashi or tradiotional of worms whatever. With bokashi I have gotten best results in my garden, my plants seem to tolerate bugs better. They still come, every summer, but won't do as much damage. Also a huge bonus for me is that here traditional compost is frozen big portion of the year and cannot be used. Happy composting! It's wonderful how much joy can literal garbage bring

Woah really?? Can you send me some resources about how bokashi has more variety of microbes?? I should definitely look into that. I'm sure it's very good to add higher variety of microbes!!

I am aware that some towns and municipalities are partnering with electric food waste companies and their are lots of pilot projects..

Just imagine indeed..One small step for man , one giant step for the planet, there is so dam little I can control in this climate crisis at least I can attempt to take a modicum of control of my own waste stream

Love everything in this comment.

Ehh.... Really depends on how often you'll use it. I mean don't get me wrong, having a sawmill is rad. But they are large, involve maintenance, and dry storage if you don't want it to go to pot.

This comment really helped me because I was assuming it would be cheaper to buy than pay someone, but I'm reconsidering.

Cool I should really get into this!

Buy older tractors. You can't fix most things your self watching youtube videos. the modern ones are always breaking down and its usually the electronics.

I would but I would rather just invest in a new/newer one that has been safety features. I'm on a big slope so rollover is a serious concern and I have literally no experience. I'd use it for 5-10 years getting stuff set up and then sell it. They hold value pretty well from what I've seen. But yes, if I was more experienced or good with mechanics I would definitely do this

Getting a donkey to use as a tractor makes about as much sense as the people who are asking me to bury all my logs and brush in hügelkultur mounds by hand instead of burning it. It’s the naivety of homesteading ambition vs. practice. Just find a cheap 1980’s tractor that runs and can be repaired. You’ll end up dropping some money, but then at least you won’t need a tractor to bury a dead donkey.

Haha I am burying a bunch of my cut logs to make hugelkultur mounds! I have a decent amount of brush and I'm burning it in a trench to

You should check out this video (and his follow up) about mixed species cover crop being used concurrently as a spring cover, then living mulch for the pathways and slash-mulch for the growing rows around the establishing plants. Depending on the size of your homestead growing areas and length of your growing season, you might appreciate how it all works in one area without crop growing downtime.

Awesome! Thanks, I love takota coen. I bought his "Building your Permaculture Property" book and it's really good.

Definitely something I've been planning to do, although I don't have a lot of land. The deer pressure is extreme here though. Anything not fenced will be eaten.

That's a good thing! Deer eating your cover crops is fine because they'll give you manure in exchange. It will also keep pressure off your vegetables because there's abundant food around for them.