• Plums are easy from seed
  • Cold strat in pits, then crack from seeds to plant in soil
  • Once sprouted, plant out to pots!
• SI planting apples:
  • Tremletts Bitter (Geneva)
  • Porters Perfection
  • Binet Rouge
  • Brown Snout
  • Piel de Sapa Goldrush
  • Texas King Crab (Redbyrd Orchard)
  • Pink Pearl
  • Normanisch
  • Winnals Langdon
• Some folk in QC using wild apples for cider
• Interesting to see how well these wild apples might graft
• Barry M is experimenting with pears for perry
• Skillcult is breeding pink apples
• Mushrooms!
  • Oysters fruiting with early warm weather (February!)
  • Indoor fruiting of lion’s mane on barley can be successful
  • Wine-cap inoculation of wood chips under fruit trees
    • How to keep these perpetuating?
    • Wine-cap sawdust spawn from North Spore
  • So many factors to fruiting mushrooms!
  • If using hay, you can soak hay in a base solution to purify for oyster inoculation
  • What if you left inoculated logs laying over water? To keep humidity high?
  • If logging trees, inoculating stump would be an efficient way to stack functions
• Chickens!
  • JH Raised Freedom Rangers for meat
  • What about Cornish Cross?
    • “They’re dumb”
  • SI was running Freedom Rangers through an orchard
  • Fermenting chicken feed; 3 day ferment
    • JH had anecdotally heavier birds (20%!) on fermented feed vs. non-fermented feed
    • Ensure feed is soaked, and covered with water for 3 days before feeding
    • SI mentions that there have been experiments where chicken feed in feeders goes further than throwing it on the ground (less is lost)
  • SI is running Freedom Rangers to improve the soil in young food forest aisles
  • JH runs chickens through aisles of young food forest
  • Brooder plans
  • Assumed rooster ratio is 10:1
• Later summer / Fall seeding
  • Will try white plastic tunnels
• Winter seeding with natives; throwing natives on top of the snow
  • Snow / freezing can actually help with germination; moisture and soil contact
• Hot beds!
  • Cold frame on top of a hot compost pile
  • Capturing heat from the decomposition
  • Good for propagation / early seed starting
  • Possible to grow through the winter!
    • Or keep figs + tomatoes alive through the year
  • Needs to be properly insulated;
    • Sawdust or waste wool would work
    • Straw/hay bales would also work
  • A bed of hot manure could be 3’x4’
  • Great for growing out starts to get ready for planting out
  • Idea: What about creating a biochar pit and using the heat from the burn to warm up and jump-start the compost pile?
• Water management
  • Lots of trailering of water for livestock and tree watering
  • Thinking about new water systems to make things more efficient
    • Drip irrigation is efficient
  • Tree diapers are an interesting innovation
  • Could using waste wool for mulch help retain/replenish water?
• Wool as mulch; slugs don’t seem to like it