ECHO Global Farm Goat House

It's taken me a while to post more of our pics from the ECHO test farm tour. Their test farm is amazing and approximates several different types of climates in order to develop multi-purpose crops using low-tech sustainable methods to be used in developing countries. Many of the planting techniques and actual under-utilized plants Jack and I've been interested knowing more about are featured there...it was exciting seeing so many all in one place!

This was their goat house. There was so much to fit into the tour, and we didn't get unlimited time to poke around and measure and fiddle to our hearts' content, but here's what we were able to gather at the time...

The structure was made as a solution to many third world farmers' dilemma...how to raise goats on small land parcels without sustaining damage to crops. Goats are an important animal in many cultures, useful for milk, meat, skins, bartering, and sometimes fiber.

ECHO's goat house was their working solution: an elevated structure made of found materials or available wood. It is large enough to comfortably accomodate several small to medium-sized goats, and the wooden slats are substantial enough to be strong, and are spaced to allow for air circulation on all sides...but to keep predators out. There was a feeding trough along one side, and the slats were spaced to allow goats to extend their heads to the trough for eating forage, but not enough to allow the goats to escape.

Beneath the troughs, trimmed limbs and forage leaves/plants were piled. As the goats finished what was in the troughs, the trimmings could be easily rotated upward to refill the troughs.

It's hard to tell in these pictures, but the building was positioned raised above a dirt slope. Animal droppings fall through the floor slats to the ground below, and are raked down the underneath slope into the open to be collected and used for fertilizer. Any uneaten twigs and branches from the fodder are put into the compost pile.

We've never had goats, but know enough about them from others to know they're talented escape artists. We weren't able to study the structure to see how they're prevented from getting out, but it's obvious this structure works well and has been used successfully for some time. The goats did not seem crowded, seemed to enjoy being higher up off the ground and in the shade rather than direct sunlight. And there was no way they'd ever be standing on wet ground.

Several forages are used for them...one is moringa, a multi-use tree good for animals and humans. Here is a stand of moringa, harvested 7 times a year (if memory serves) by what seems to be a coppicing method (or is it a pollarding one?) since the tree trunks are cut at regular intervals after harvesting their quick-growing branches. These can be fed to animals such as the goats, for fodder, harvested for human consumption (leaves), or for low-tech water purification (leaves again). Here is a stand of coppiced moringa trees. The trunks are 2 to 3 feet high and the branch growth was about waist high or so.

Here is a mature moringa, a different variety than the above. This one stores water in its trunk and can endure punishing drought.

That's all for now...we enjoyed seeing their solution to the goat dilemma. Goats can easily decimate a garden, yet this goat house situated in close proximity to surrounding gardens kept the cycle beneficial to not only humans, but supplied the goats with fodder that otherwise would have been a plant waste. In eating them, the goats gained nutrition, produced fertilizer and milk, and the garden benefitted again, continuing the circle.

More ECHO fun to come, as I have time to post!

A Total Revamp of Direction in a Mere 24 Hours

This post may sound suspiciously like it has nothing to do with homesteading, but it does...eventually. But first -- a scary little retro trip around the inside of my head. Y'know...the place songs you can't forget lurk...

You know your life is going to take a dramatic turn in a different direction when you can't get this radio refrain out of your head for the past four straight days:

Once upon a time I was falling in love But now I'm only falling apart
There's nothing I can do A total eclipse of the heart Once upon a time there was
light in my life But now there's only love in the dark Nothing I can say A total
eclipse of the heart ...

Poor Andy Gibb. (My husband just asked me who Andy Gibb was, no joke. Forgive him, Bee Gees). No, Andy didn't sing this, but for some reason this song catapults me to post-1980s sorrow for him over his breakup with Victoria Principal. Which happened HOW many decades ago??

Oh the silly pop culture concerns we had. My best friend of that era and I had simultaneous crushes on the Hardy Boy TV stars ...my guy was Parker Stevenson and hers was Shaun Cassidy.

Oh the imaginary dates we had with that pair. We would decide who went where with whom and what the most romantic settings would be, and if we'd doubledate, just us and Parker and Shaun. We decided these weighty matters while listening to Karen's Captain and Tenielle records...yeah, please don't do the math there (I think we were what, 12 at the time, and there was no such thing as dating till you were at least 16)



This was made all the more interesting by the fact that my parents raised us with NO radio-listening or record-buying of pop music at ALL. Zero. Zilch. But exposure did happen on a limited scale, which probably heightens its impact at that impressionable age. I can hum the songs from back then, because I heard the radio now and then with my friends in other settings, but I know NO words.

Except for a few refrains. Such as Total Eclipse of the Heart. And when I hear them now on the OLDIES (ahem) station, they're harder to make go away than a crowd of bad relatives.

There are as of yet no total eclipses of the heart going on around here (and no plans for those, either!), and yet BAM, there in the middle of the day, for NO reason, like a bad commercial jingle comes the turn around bright eyyyyyyyyyyyes, turn around BRIGHTTT eye-eye-eyes...

But in a foreshadowing of life imitating (bad) lyrics, there has been a turn around. No word yet on how bright anyone's eyes are, though.



-----------------------------------------------



This isn't a bad thing :) It has to do with what happened last night.


I've mentioned here a few times that we're researching biblical verses related to country living, agriculture, debts, and animal care. We're finding some very interesting things.


One of the things we've been chewing on is how to emulate many of the principles in our lives, as Jews, even though we don't live in Israel. Many of the commands that directly impact homesteader-sorts of ownership, gardening, and husbandry are preceded in the text by the phrase "when you come into the Land the Lord your God has given you." It's written in all the instructions Jews keep while living in Israel, since in the verses, God says it's a land set apart and which must be cared for in specific ways to maintain its being set apart for His uses. That's my quickie explanation to precede describing just what changed for us last night.


Some of the commandments are preceded by the "when you come into the Land" phrase, and others aren't. The 10 commandments aren't. You don't murder, no matter where you live in the world. You keep the 7th day as a day of rest wherever you live. But others are specific to the land of Israel, at least as we understand the simplicity of their construction.


One such commandment has to do with "7 weeks of 7 years," or a rest for the land every seven years, counted the same way as a week is counted...the first 6 days as days of work, and the 7th as a day of complete rest from any labor. Counting this way makes every 7th year of the Jewish calendar a year in which the Bible specifies that all growing of crops and vines ceases, including pruning and harvesting. It's considered by God to be a complete rest for the land, specifically the land of Israel. It doesn't mention anything about anywhere else, and most scholars agree it's an instruction specific to Israel.


The very VERY cool thing is that God promised that the Israelites who will keep that command will receive 3 times the normal harvest in the 6th year...enough for that year, the following year of fields resting fallow, and enough for seed and food for the year beyond that during which things are replanted. How COOL is thatt??? God is so incredible!


We looked it up on the Hebrew calendar, and discovered that year of rest for the fields and vineyards, THAT year, is NOW. It started last fall, the way the biblical months are counted, and ends this coming fall. Of THIS YEAR ....NOW. Eeeeeeps.

In the Land of Israel, that is.

Which sort of means we're officially off the hook, in a literal way. We're free anywhere else to do otherwise in that respect.

So, I had visions of tomato plants. I had counted them, planted them, and harvested them all in my imagination, as the summer approaches here.

There's nothing I can do A total eclipse of the heart

Arrrrggggghhhhhhh!!! Told you! I can't get it out of my head!

ANYway, we talked about a lot of things related to this, and read in Leviticus 25 about the 7th year sabbath and crops and such. As you know, our plans are to expand Bucketville into a fertile orchard-in-waiting till we can move and plant them as more mature specimens. And to fill the many, many wonderful buckets with other lovelies, such as Paul Robeson, Black Krim, and Black Prince tomatoes (the list is miles long in my head).

The conversation turned to something important to both of us: to keep alive in our hearts the desire to live in Israel, and to keep the love of Israel alive in our hearts while we live anyplace else...for ourselves and our children. It's a different expression than a lot of people have, and it's certainly just our own way of walking it out. It's NOT incumbent on Jews to do anyplace but Israel. And we're just fleshing this out as we go...just making it clear that there's no directive anywhere for our doing things quite this way. BUT...we want to "stay in practice" since we are on this as a learning journey. We want to learn to make this way of life our habit, even in exile as such.


So it won't look like anyone else's conviction, and that's fine by us :) But we prayed about it, and decided to sleep on it for the night...the decision of whether to STOP doing any planting this year, anymore buying, and (gulp) any tomato plants. (waving bye to Paul Robeson...)


Well, we did sleep on it, and this morning found us both energized and my wonderful hubby has a firm mind that we ought to carefully try to observe this command, as if we were in the Land, even though we're not required to. With all we want to do, keeping the WAY God set things up as central in importance is truly the foundation upon which we hope to build. No, we're not shooting for "brownie points" here...that's not the way we see this relationship and covenant with our Maker. We do, though, want to LEARN how to be more honoring of His ways, and want PRACTICE. We want to make things habits. For ourselves. To pass along. To be familiar with since many of the practices are very foreign to our surrounding culture.


One thing that sets apart my husband, to me, is a rare heart that CARES about pleasing God, and cares about learning more and attempting to put His ways into practice. I'm ALL ABOUT being a team in that respect, so YAY, what more could I ask for?? He thinks we ought to hold off on any planting (other than what we've already planted), well, so do I!


So look for some upcoming posts on our revamped plan.


We went to lunch today to have a date together (when we can!), and many things were discussed. The most exciting was the prospect of preparing our house to SELL. Whenever it is a better market or the opportunity presents itself. There are OH SO many projects we can be doing in the meantime, while NOT planting this year. Many many skills we need in other areas to develop till they become habits, a learning curve to continue along prior to being on our future land. Getting the house ready to SELL gives me chills of excitement...that's something very tangible TOWARD a nearer time frame to DO THIS :) :) How VERY much we want to be out of here and THERE (wherever there is)


More about what we're going to be redirecting and doing. We'll be making lists, and crossing things off (likely in lists with strikethroughs!) and getting ready to move, yayyy!


We'll also be filling ALL those buckets with soil...just not plants, and in the fall of this year, after the year of rest ends, we'll celebrate by planting a lot more trees in them. That's always good to do in the fall :) (And it should REALLY confound the neighbors NOW, since they'll just be pots of dirt, sitting there...lol

Till then we'll be crossing off other projects and working hard to bring down our debt, towards its eventual payoff.

There, I've typed nearly an entire post without You-Know-What-Song interrupting me.

I just reminisced a few minutes with my husband, to assure him Parker Stevenson is but a memory (lol). And then, oh then...

I remembered...

THEM

I will no longer turn on the oldies station at work. I do not want to know what changes the memory of Sonny and Cher foreshadows.

GLORIOUS IMAGES OF THE BEST FORGOTTEN EIGHTIES SUBCULTURES from these pages:

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVQtNK7JmdektCJQrIIyPJiuxt-wepiHw2hkYmRMxUig1zOrxaC6INt0WIAE_2aToemffzE1c4CH_kAMIAbv98Ln-Mkx3NL6AgPLJtsF4Xm-vQEB4SESg3ENssCsnr8-N2Dld5CkzslJU/s320/hardyboys.jpg&imgrefurl=http://fashionsreality.blogspot.com/2007/02/cruise-and-stiller-hardy-boys.html&h=307&w=271&sz=22&hl=en&start=27&tbnid=GIJlks7u4bxTQM:&tbnh=117&tbnw=103&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dhardy%2Bboys%26start%3D20%26gbv%3D2%26ndsp%3D20%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/9/9a/300px-Toni-Tennille-%26-the-Captain-56sq-555.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.answers.com/topic/toni-tennille&h=300&w=300&sz=22&hl=en&start=1&um=1&tbnid=0PK0lVIKpgmRZM:&tbnh=116&tbnw=116&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dcaptain%2Band%2Btennille%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://tralfaz-archives.com/coverart/S/sonny_lookf.jpg&imgrefurl=http://tralfaz-archives.com/coverart/S/sonny_look.html&h=400&w=400&sz=54&hl=en&start=2&tbnid=Lms5J5YozNVMsM:&tbnh=124&tbnw=124&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dsonny%2Band%2Bcher%26gbv%3D2%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG

The Collection Grows!

Those of us who are intently waitinggggg waitingggg waitingggg on the day when we'll finally have some LAND have to do something to occupy our curiousity and interests in the meantime...and so my hubby has grown very excited about our little collection of plants in pots...with a view to growing them to a more mature size and closer to fruit-bearing by the time we can plant them on Our Someday Land permanently.

I've mentioned recently how this wee collection was added to with raspberry canes, gooseberries, a couple of grapes, and even a currant start...in addition to the mango, papayas, and the moringa we had before. Glad to say, so far so good as far as their survival. We'll see how they weather the Florida summer temps and our own amateur attentions by this time next year...hopefully we're choosing ones hardy to our area, as we really don't want to be raising things that are so fussy and delicate that they can't hold their own with minimal care when mature.

So the experiment commences, and tonight we had the happiness of adding some more sale plants (thank you, Lowes!) to the family...little one gallon pots...a few meyer lemons, a key lime, and a Persian Lime. We use lemons around this place like crazy, so lemons will surely be welcome, and of course limes are a great Florida fruit, too.

Earlier today we tried locating some camellia sinensis plants, as those are the actual plants from which "real" tea is made, either green, or fermented and such. We found one grower in north Florida, but his aren't ready for sale for a few more months, and he described their survival as very iffy...so they're not on the Foolproof Florida Plant list. My enthusiasm for plants declines directly in proportion to their being prima donas and needing a butler or a nanny. I'd rather wait hand and foot on some farm animals, for all that. Or on Antonia Banderas when he comes for a visit just to say hello. Oops, did I type that? Well, in my dreams, the Banderases will be our neighbors and regularly need raw milk and deliveries of fermented foods and fresh made bread. I'm sure it'll happen...

OK now that I'm awake again...

The biggest addition has been the smallest...we just ordered online from a northern supplier...guess what?? Yes, a Western Soapberry tree, yeeha! It's a native plant used as a traditional soaping agent, and has a fruit similar to the Asian Ritha tree from which "Soapnuts" are currently marketed as a natural clothes and household cleanser...and from which a gentle and natural shampoo and body wash can be homemade. We're realllyyyyyy excited about this! In all the excitement, we never found any actual Asian Ritha trees for sale anywhere online, but we did find (after a long search) a source for packets of the seeds, and ordered one packet of 5 seeds. According to the description, when the tree is finally mature, it can provide loads and loads of the fruits/soapnuts yearly....enough for ourselves and others, too, if we can get some to germinate and survive till maturity.

Anyway, it's ordered and on its way! Oh SO fun to try new things, especially growing ones!

And now to get some chickens to mingle with the pots out there, in the Taj Mahal, oh oops I mean pieced-together shade shelter J wants to put up in our backyard to buffer the summer sun. After all, shade cloth would be put up around its perimeter, and what better than some hens...oops, I mean Exotic Florida Ground Parrots (chickens are illegal here supposedly) to keep the weeds down and the bugs eaten?? Heh heh...

By the time that happens, I could very well see a sheep there, and oh a couple of rabbit hutches...you know...for free fertilizer (so goes the persuasive attempts to reason with my hubby, lol)

Ah, well, for now we have baby trees!

And that's all I have to say tonight. Except that it's hard typing a post while my husband is watching and commenting every few sentences. Especially the Antonio Banderas part. But his middle name is Antonio, so I'm off the hook, I think. (He's laughing!)

What I suffer for my art...

ha ;-)

Agriculture/Earth Stewardship and the Torah: Greenbelts Around Cities

This is the first part of what will likely be a slow but interesting (to me :)) periodic series related to discovering how the Torah applies to homesteading today. There are a lot of instructions within the texts, and some are specifically mentioned to apply only in the land of Israel, while others are more broadly applicable. Since none of it has really applied to my family before now, I'm very unaware of most of these verses and how they will or won't apply to us in the (hopefully) near future.

I'm slowly trying to chip away at the different biblical teachings related to farming and environmental stewardship. Though I've barely scratched the surface, it's already turned up some surprises. I'm finding the topics to be very interconnected with compassion both to humans and animals, provision for people of lesser means, and recognition of fruitfulness as a blessing from God.

A beginning point for me, when finding specific questions in the scriptures, is a word search in any of the great (free) online sites that have concordances where the original Hebrew can be found, and from there all other mentions of the same word every other place in the texts. This helps to look at all the other verses containing identical words or phrases and examining them to see context and application. For instance, if I have a question about "seeds," I can look up on an online concordance program and it will show me the Hebrew word for "seeds" and also every other verse where the word "seeds" occurs, which helps me see a broader view of anything related to that term...including any teachings, how broad or narrowly the term is applied in different contexts, and any consistent or repetitive elements that link them. It's not hard, and I'm no scholar; it's amazing we have these valuable tools available to us for free.

There are a lot of commandments and mentions in scripture of topics related to agriculture, since the ancient world was highly agrarian; even city dwellers of that day had a different exposure to and awareness of agriculture than city dwellers of today's world, who might have never seen a cow...or a field being planted...or a vineyard. Apparently, citygoers often kept crops and animals of their own (see article below). Today it is difficult for many of us who weren't born into farming to readily identify types of trees and know which provide fruit and which provide different types of wood or sap, etc. Not so the ancient world. Of necessity, there was a closer inter-connection.

In fiddling around with trying to find agriculture and animal-husbandry and stewardship of the land sorts of instructions in the texts, I ran across an interesting find on AskMoses.com, since one of their categories of Q&A is Agriculture. It is about the provision of green belts around cities, separating "city" and "countryside," and to provide beauty, enjoyment, and citizen participation in agriculture and keeping livestock. It also, by measurement, contains the size of the city to prevent over-expansion. How very different our world today would be if developers were limited by law from developing such areas, and cities had to consistently incorporate these provisions. Here is a snippet of the full article (by one of the site's contributing writers Yosef Ben Shlomo Hakohen) that can be found here:

According to the urban planning of the Torah, city residents are entitled
to a green belt, and as the classical biblical commentator, Rashi, explains,
this open space is to serve as an 'aesthetic enhancement of the city.' This
green belt therefore gives urban dwellers a connection to nature; moreover, it
brings benefit to their animals, as they can roam and graze there. According to
another classical biblical commentator, the Sforno, this open space also enables
city residents to have 'beehives, dovecotes, and other such items'....

...These laws seem to be designed to maintain an urban population that
engages in agriculture – that is to be the basic model for the nation – and to
prevent the expansion of the cities into metropolises detached from the fields.
The cities already in existence must not expand beyond their limits at the
expense of the fields…When the population increases, new cities should be
established in sites that have never been used for agricultural
purposes...

...Cities serve as economic, cultural, and spiritual centers; however, from
the holistic perspective of the Torah, cities must provide their residents with
a connection to nature and with the opportunity to cultivate the earth. Even
urban dwellers are to experience the following messianic blessing: 'They shall
sit, each person under his vine and under his fig tree.'