How To Build Bad Soil In a Dry Land

Desert Soil:  Oxymoron?

Those two words seem like opposites when you think about it.  A desert doesn’t have soil really, does it?  Living in a dry climate doesn’t necessarily mean you’re in the desert.  Your home could be situated in a semi-arid “Mediterranean” zone that gets far less water than many places but still supports a variety of plants.  Whatever the ground is composed of, that’s your growing medium.  I firmly believe most “soils” can be recovered, but you may be starting with more of a dirt than a soil.  And that’s okay.  If your goal is to create or improve a landscape with little rainfall (clouds occasionally hovering but not always releasing their magic for the ground to soak up), you can focus on improving your soil’s capacity to hold what water does fall onto it.  This is one step toward moving it up the scale in terms of how well it will grow plants.

I recently tried to find information about how specifically to improve a special type of clay soil but didn’t find much at all.  Most people familiar with what I was looking for were adding it to their existing non-clay soil.  I wanted to know what to add to it in the case where a property’s soil was made of it.  The soil type in question?  Bentonite.

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March 6, 2022 0 Comments

Permaculture Gardening During Food Shortages

Permaculture Gardening For Food Security

Since early 2020, just about the entire world has been through one major media-reported crisis after another.  The stories now are of course around Russia and Ukraine, but there are also a lot of articles coming out about impending shortages in the food supply.  In this article, I make a case for incorporating permaculture gardening into your lifestyle.

image: permaculture gardeningThe blocking of truck deliveries across borders, the delay of ships off major ports, the tripling of materials and shipping costs, American energy independence gone, and the trucking industry protests in Canada and the USA all contribute to forward-thinking concerns about the supply of food.

A friend sent me this photo from downtown Los Angeles, California.  I’ve already noticed that my local grocery store has had sparsely-stocked shelves two or three times in the last two months!

The Rockefeller Foundation released a report in February calling to defund farms and ranches and centralize control of the food supply of the globe.  In a ‘messaging guide’ for the report, the foundation states that “one of the consistent needs expressed by those seeking to transform the food system is a shared narrative.”  IMHO, globalist entities shouldn’t be granted solitary control over anything, so hopefully the Rockefellers aren’t successful in defunding farmers and ranchers!

In the meantime, We the People can (and should) prepare our own resilient systems of food production that WE control, rather than some outside entity.  If peaceful trucker protests against forced injection in Canada resulted in frozen bank accounts, then perhaps permaculture gardening ahead of any food crisis will assure food sovereignity if the planet’s food supply is taken over.

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image: permaculture food forest garden
November 17, 2020 0 Comments

Permaculture Food Forest Garden

Grow A Permaculture Food Forest Garden

With the global pandemic scare given renewed energy by the mainstream media and the year we all just had, the availability of food and water is of concern.  If you are image: permaculture food forest gardenwondering if store shelves will be sold out again like when all this started, growing a permaculture food forest garden assures you an abundance of low-maintenance, nutrient-rich, high water-content food.

Not only does a food forest feed you in times of food scarcity or emergency, but if done right it will heal the landscape around your home or in your neighborhood.  That means the land itself can recover from degradation.  Most landscapes are degraded.  We’ve grown used to the English chem lawn with a few shrubs or trees thrown in to flip a house.  But this leaves out essential ecosystem components, keeping your property under-performing.

Why depend on food delivered in trucks when you could grow your own?

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