towards actually sustainable farming in Ahualoa
Lots of people make small batches of biochar in kilns, retorts, rings and pits. To move the char, most people shovel it out. When your batches of char get bigger, unloading is a lot of time and energy. How to improve that? There are two main challenges: moving the char out of the kiln, and …
Power tools are slowly moving from gas to battery, and dozens of companies are jumping in. Some are big general companies that have making battery tools for a long time (Makita, DeWalt) and some have traditionally made one gas-burning thing (like Toro for lawnmowers, Husqvarna for chainsaws) and now reluctantly, belatedly going electric. As they …
I’ve spent a couple weeks researching, and this is what I’ve learned about milling your own wood with a chainsaw, and in particular a battery-powered chainsaw. Note that I have not actually done any milling yet, but after so much reading, searching, shopping and youtube-ing, I feel like I’ve learned enough to share and be …
After a few weeks of research, I think I know what new chainsaw to buy. For context, battery chainsaws have not been considered “serious” in the past compared to gasoline models, but now (as of Summer 2022) there are abundant powerful options, for up to a 20″ bar. For nearly 4 years, I’ve been happily …
I bought a new lawnmower on 2022-05-13 – here’s a comparison to my previous mower. Toro model 20340 (“Toro Recycler® SmartStow (22”) 163cc Personal Pace® “) Makita XML08 (“36V (18V X2) LXT® Brushless 21″ Self-Propelled Commercial”) Typical cost: $450 $700 (includes 4 5Ah batteries) Caveats: I can really only compare these two mowers, so this …
I did the harvest today, and here are the results, in terms of grams of potato per plant: Yukon Gold 144 Dark Red Norland 113 Kennebec 283 Red Gold 244 Kattahdin 75 La Ratte 13 Papa Cacho 27 This is pretty awful. For comparison, just planting random store-bought yellow potatoes gives around 250 g/plant, while …
Here’s the chronology on the potato trial: 2020.07.20: planting day 2020.08.16 (day 16): all the potatoes have emerged and are growing nicely, except for the smallest varieties (Laratte and Papa Cacho), which are barely emerged and tiny plants. 2020.09.03 (day 38): The plants have been mounded (hilled) with regular garden soil. Nearly all plants are …
Concerning volume. In my previous biochar post, I summarized that my two rectangular lined pits were producing around 1.3 cubic yards of char per firing. Since then, I’ve been told that a simple earthen pit could produce as many as 5 yd3 in a single firing! Let’s calculate how large that would be. A round pit …
Today I examined the seed potato that we got for the trial. 7 varieties. Many were starting to decay. No doubt proper potato storage would involve a temperature or humidity controlled environment, but we don’t have such a thing, so a few were lost. Nearly all were at an advanced staged of growing eyes, many …
We’ve always grown potatoes occasionally, since I was growing up here, but recently I became more interested in really knowing potatoes and hopefully increasing production. To this end, I started a spreadsheet to track planting and harvests, and ordered some seed potatoes for variety trials. Background: We used to just use organic potatoes from the health …