Author: Mr. Homegrown

Chill Hour Calculator for California

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Fruit Trees, Gardening
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Please excuse another California-centric post, but if you’re in the Golden State and like to geek out on keeping track of your chill hours here’s a handy tool bought to you by UC Davis: Cumulative Chilling Hours. Each year this page keeps track of chill hours between November 1 through end of February. If you know of a similar resource for other states/countries leave a link in the comments.

As cool (so to speak) as this tool is, what constitutes a chill hour and what kinds of fruit will grow in a particular climate is a complex question. For more on this debate see a provocative article on the Dave Wilson Nursery website, “Chill Out“.

CoEvolution Quarterly Online

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Appropriate Technology, Gardening, Resources
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While hunting down old appropriate technology resources on the Internet, I was delighted to find the winter 1978 issue of CoEvolution Quarterly, put out by the folks behind the Whole Earth Catalog. This issue of CoEvolution profiled Robert Kourik (which CoEvolution spells “Kourick”) who practiced permaculture before Bill Mollison gave it a name:

[Kourick] is developing methods of growing edible and ornamental plants together for maximum beauty, minimum upkeep, and a self-sustaining yield of food.

He does it by concentrating on growing perennials that do not need to be replanted each year and annuals that reseed themselves spontaneously. He uses ground cover plants that fertilize other plants, such as the beautiful pastel-flowering lupin which puts nitrogen in the soil. . . Kourick’s goal is to develop what he calls a “self-reliant” garden that produces all of the nutritional needs of each plant. “The gardener,” he says, “can then supply his own nutritional needs by adapting his diet to the garden’s produce.”

Amen is all I can say to that. A garden that requires fewer inputs is exactly what I’m working on right now.

In the same article Kourik mentions incorporating fruit trees, kept pruned small, into his gardens,

Robert Kourick believes that tree crops can be a mainstay of any garden, and he has discovered a plant breeder in Modesto, whom he calls the “new” Luther Burbank. This man is Floyd Zaeger [I think that should be “Zaiger”] who has developed genetic dwarf fruit trees that are strong on adaptive qualities and perfect for Kourick’s garden.

Floyd Zaiger, incidentally, is the person who developed several of the fruit varieties I mentioned in yesterday’s blog post including the pluot, the aprium and the necta-plum. He developed these varieties through a herculean breeding program involving hand pollinating something like 150,000 trees.

Robert Kourik went on to write an excellent series of books, Drip Irrigation for Every Landscape, Roots Demystified, and Designing and Maintaining Your Edible Landscape Naturally

You can read CoEvolution Quarterly and the Whole Earth Catalog for free on the Interwebs at wholeearth.com or download individual pdfs for $2. One of these days I’ll put up a separate page of links to more free appropriate tech and prepping resources when I get the time.

Dave Wilson’s Top 21 Fruit Trees for the Southwest US

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Fruit Trees, Gardening
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A Necta-plum from our tree harvested in July 2010.

Do you live in a warm climate and have less than 500 chill hours? “Rock star orchardist” Tom Spellman, with the Dave Wilson Nursery, has some suggestions for low chill fruit tree varieties based on productivity and performance. His recommendations:

  • Dorsett golden apple
  • Fuji apple
  • Pink Lady apple
  • Cot-N-Candy Aprium
  • Flavor Delight Aprium
  • Minnie Royal cherry
  • Royal Lee cherry
  • Arctic Star nectarine
  • Double Delight nectarine
  • Snow Queen nectarine
  • Spice Zee Necta-Plum
  • August Pride peach
  • Donut peach
  • Eva’s Pride peach
  • Red Baron peach
  • Burgundy plum
  • Emerald Drop pluot
  • Flavor Grenade pluot
  • Flavor King pluot
  • Splash pluot

Of the trees on this list, we’ve got the Spice Zee Necta-Plum, a beautiful tree with pink blossoms and  red leaves in the spring that produces a super sweet fruit. It’s still too young to evaluate it’s performance but I’m happy to have it in our garden. We also have a Fuji apple that’s a few years old which is growing but has yet to produce fruit. Last year we also planted a Flavor Delight aprium (in a less than ideal location), and it’s also too early to evaluate its performance.

We sourced almost all of our trees by mail through the Bay Laurel Nursery, which carries Dave Wilson’s trees (Dave Wilson is wholesale only). Get your orders in now as Bay Laurel sells out of many varieties by the time they ship in February.

You can read the complete list of Tom Spellman’s low chill fruit suggestions with his  comments here.

If you have mature versions of any of these trees please leave a comment and let us know where you live and how your trees are doing.

Thanks to Ari Kletzky for suggesting this list.

Gingerbread Geodesic Dome

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Design, Food
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Scout Regalia Reel 02: Gingerbread Geodesic Dome from Scout Regalia on Vimeo.

Now you can bake your own version of Drop City without getting “baked” yourself! Some local designers, Scout Regalia, have cooked up a gingerbread geodesic dome and offer a kit for making one.

Now when it comes to geodesic domes as shelter I’m with former dome builder Lloyd Kahn who concluded that “Domes weren’t practical, economical or aesthetically tolerable.”

But when it comes to gingerbread domes, I’m all for it!

Via the Eastsider.

Three Power Tools Every Urban Homesteader Should Own

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Tools
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On nearly all the work I’ve done on our house, everything from chicken coops to wood floors I’ve used just three power tools:

  • corded drill
  • circular saw
  • sabre sawjig saw

While I also own a router, a miter saw, a sander and a few other miscellaneous power tools, the three tools above I consider essential. Even if you don’t own a house, but would like to build some furniture or help a friend or relative with a repair project, this great triumvirate of tools will get you through 99% of all jobs. For that 1% of problems that require an exotic tool, you can rent one.

I prefer corded tools as I hate it when a battery dies in the middle of a day’s work and corded tools have more power. That being said, there are a few times when I wish I had a battery powered drill. I’d also recommend spending a little extra to get high quality models of these three tools. They’ve all lasted 10+ years of heavy use.

I’ve got a non-powered backup for each of these tools, with the exception of the drill. Sometime before that that zombie Apocalypse/Mayan 2012 meltdown thing happens, I’d love to learn how to use hand tools. But in the meantime, I’ll stick with electricity.