VIDEO: The (Open-Source) Ecologist
News 21 from Berkeley, California visited Factor e Farm a few weeks back. They are currently producing The Ration, a food and health reporting project by UC Berkeley School of Journalism. Factor e Farm is the first feature in this series. This is an impressively...
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...
Strings Attached: Open Source String Trimmer
When the ragweeds grow to 12 feet at Factor e Farm, I guess it’s time to mow the lawn. In the usual bootstrapping fashion – today’s experiment was building and using an 8-foot diameter string trimmer powered by LifeTrac, with 1/2″...
Honey Extractor Tractor: The Craziest Thing Done with LifeTrac So Far
LifeTrac, our open source tractor, features extreme flexibility by design. We just used LifeTrac as a honey extractor. We mounted our universal rotor on the front-end loader, and used it to extract honey from comb. The process starts with a hot knife...
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...
Open Source Chicken Incubator – Working Prototype Complete
Last year, we have begun work on the automatic, open source chicken incubator – Hexahatch. It did not work well, primarily because the big rotor was too heavy. This year’s design – Hexahatch v2.0 – was changed to a simpler, still-air...
TED for Open Source and Open Source Clothing
Thomas Becker just signed up as a True Fan, after finding out about our work through John Robb’s blog, Global Guerillas. He is the “owner” of Lastwear – an open source clothing company based in Seattle, USA. The Last in Lastwear...
Springtime 2010
A week ago, the first signs of food plants appeared as winter passes away. The pictures show: (1), lettuce from last year self-seeding; (2), garlic; (3), stinging nettles – a great salad green when steamed, or eat fresh after rolling to rid of stingers;...
Budding Out
The fruit propagation workshop went well. Two people showed up. 2 weeks later, these cherry trees are already budding out: We got a donation of 50 more EMLA 111 apple rootstocks, which can be obtained from Willamette Nurseries for under 70 cents each....
Plant Propagation Workshop 2010
We will be holding our annual Plant Propagation Workshop on March 20. See the documentation from last year’s workshop – blog post and announcement. This year, our workshop will feature more raspberry propagation, plus grafting of apple, pear,...
