Local Food Systems

100 More Fruit Trees and Update

We just planted out 100 more fruit trees – which we grafted back in spring. We upgraded the string trimmer to a chain, mowed down a path, planted, fertilized, and mulched heavily:Regarding the funding baskets deployed 2 weeks ago in our progress...

June Agriculture Walkthrough at Factor e Farm

Here is a video produced by Sean, on the agriculture overview of Factor e Farm: The bottom line is that resilience in food is not difficult to come by, but it presently requires more energy than we have with 2 full time people – engaged fully in...

Pickled Deer

About a week ago we had the fortune of being given a lot of dear meat by our neighbour. As it happens we did not have enough fridge or freezer space to freeze the meat so we decided to adopt a different approach. We got out some canning jars, cleaned...

Zero Turn MicroTrac

MicroTrac achieved zero turn motion. If one walks around rapidly, one can turn the walk-behind tractor around in place. MicroTrac is turning out to be a beautiful freak: Play this freak show. To do this, we added two small, freely-turning wheels to MicroTrac....

Opportunity abounds at Factor e

From my initial survey I would estimate an ideal population of this site to be about 20-30 people. Rules of thumb for estimation go at 5 people per intensively cultivated acre, in practice the number is higher but that’s good for a rough estimate....

First 3 Raised Beds

We have a total of 11 organoponic raised beds now. No more clay hardpan. We are taking the chainsaw to some pallets, screwing them together, then filling the bed with straw, compost, a little soil, plus mulch on top. The whole garden will be filled with...

Fruit Propagation Workshop

Yesterday we held the Plant Propagation Workshop. It snowed the same day, but inside the greenhouse, we propagated raspberries from root cuttings, and grafted apple and peach trees. We used a grafting tool to do the latter: Here is the transcript of the...

Factor e Live Distillations – Part 7 – Local Food Systems

In today’s episode, we discuss the OSE program for agriculture. What did we learn so far, and how can we apply this to creating local food systems? We are proposing the integration of perennial agriculture, living gene bank, open source equipment,...