Green Workshop - Natural Living. (pix galore)

Bitchin!!!
Last years tobacco seed from my crop is viable!
this mean I'm sitting on about $500 worth of organic non GMO seed. cha-ching!

Piss! This weather has sucked major ballz for growing anything this year!



Last month was the coldest, wettest May I can remember. The tomatoes aren't getting warm enough to grow and all that is growing is the cold weather stuff. I've already had to plant cantelopes, tobacco and beefsteak tomatoes twice. Our average temps are 20-30 degrees below normal this year.
This garden should be producing by now:



About all that's growing is the clover and field grass......I've already mowed 6 times and it needs it really bad now but it's been way too wet.

You should move your garden indoors. Oh yeah and get rid of all that veggie crap and grow weed.

j/k (not really)

I was in a commercial building not to long ago off some random street in some random business park that was converted to an indoor grow for medical MJ. I wanted to take pics of me surrounded by chron (all hydroponics) but didn't have the nerve to ask. It was weird enough just being in there (smelled awesome BTW). My buddy is a huge pothead and I texted him after I got out "DUDE YOU WOULD CUM IN YOUR PANTS IF YOU WERE JUST WHERE I WAS!" LOL

I've thought about getting a growers' card/license. I think I could sucessfully grow it without smoking it faster than it grows. I'd have to hire you and your buddy to travel up and do QC work. We'd just have to keep the stuff top-notched for all the medical patients, now wouldn't we?

Pressure's on against the feds and thier WOD: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011...110602?feedType=RSS&feedName=worldNews&rpc=76

A handy by-product of growing my own tobacco: nicotine!
All natural, organic insecticide.
this year, the bugs are eating my veggies a lot faster than the cold weather will let them grow. here! have some nic!

The tobaco tea works better than Dursban!

Not a lot of growth in the garden, but it's starting to produce a little now that the nights are right around 50 degrees.





We've gotten a half dozen meals out of the garden thus far, usually we're eating full time garden veggies by now. Wierd weather pattern this season.
Strawberries are at least a week later this year but they are large.

The leafsets are actually bigger than my fist (for size scale):



every three days :unibrow: :



I tilled an additional 350 Sq.Ft. today for the tabacco which is ready to go into the ground:







As always, Maxcat is on duty manning (catting) his post:

Looks nice, a lot of people I know are just starting to plant things because spring has been so late.

About a month late here. We're basically getting BC's weather even this far south. The decline has been happening for the last three seasons with the change this season being the greatest. Our weather should be in the 90's by now and it's only in the upper 60's to mid 70's.

The weather just now started getting decent enough to grow some veggies. While the garden has sustained us with fresh veggies everyday
for the past month, there's been no surpluss to can yet:



Now that the temps are good and dredging season has begun, I decided to get down to the creek and clear some overburden in prep for dredging a new stretch of bedrock:





in all, I moved around five tons of rock today. That boulder (measures 36"X30"x24" and weighs close to 1/2 ton) in the center of the creek was burried 4/5 of the way and I'll roll it to the bank and lodge it to help hold the bank in high water conditions:

Yep, the last few days have been amazing all across the PNW. Keep up the good work, I might find myself doing something similar soon...

Gold mining, gardening? or both?
in Washington, you'll need this for mining: http://wdfw.wa.gov/licensing/mining/

Hopefully your mining regulations in washington aren't anything as prohibitive as the ones unconstitutionally and illegally imposed
by Oregon's DEQ: http://www.waldominingdistrict.org/oregon-gold-mining-legislation-permit-information/issues.html

Gardening slash living semi-off-the-grid.

I've decided that I'm going to come back to the northwest next summer (instead of spending the whole year abroad) and live on my friends property on the island, where I posted the pictures from the 4th.

Good deal! it's not a lifestyle for everyone. The biggest hardest adventure I ever undertook was to follow through on deprograming the commercial material way of thinking I was born into. The wife still has a fit with it but I've become accustomed to either doing without or producing for myself. She's like most, and would much rather run to the store to buy
everything and throw away anything that isn't perfect any more. She grasps the concept of self sufficiency but can't seem to wrap her head around being responsibly sustainable
in all our thinking. She's a work-in-progress I guess.

Let me know if you ever have any luck changing her way of thinking about anything. I've had basically zero luck with my wife. We do things my way because I'm basically here standing guard and enforcing my will 24/7/365. The moment I walk away she goes back to various bad behaviors.

Anyway, sounds like a good direction 950. Self sustaining and carbon neutral. What about electricity, or high speed internet? Travel to town for internet, and maybe a few solar panels?

Try to change a woman!? Not me, it won't happen. :lol:

What I can do is lead by example and teach her about different approaches to solving aquisition problems. She has learned
that self reliance will not fail a team like the dependency based rat race we left behind could. Wether she utilizes anything she learns is up to her.

People tend to equate anything that's not totally dependent on what society has become as caveman-ish off grid living. It's not black-or-white, there's a lot of ground between the extreems.

Sustainability doesn't equate to off-grid. It's more a philosophy of not wasting resources and being as self dependent and in harmony with the environment and all it entails as posible. In the proccess of reaching for those goals a person sometimes notices how much bullshit the world's built on. Nobody says we need to give up tech to be in compliance with being sustainable. Even though the world does look different when having the latest I-Pad or I-phone isn't a priority at all.

I guess I should clarify. I still plan on leaving the country once summer is over to travel and volunteer around Mexico/Central/South America/Where ever I end up.

However I've decided I will be returning to the northwest next summer and living up on my friends island property, where I was for Independence Day (on my blog and the thread I started the other day). He is trying to turn it into a farm and build a house, and all that. I'll spend at least the summer, maybe more, up there working on the property. He may have a small shack built for me to stay in, or maybe I'll just live in a tent, not sure at this point. The property has a hand-pump well for water, and it does have electricity. That said, I'll be using pretty minimal resources out there. I'm going to keep the Baja for now at least so I can get around next summer, but that will probably be a once-a-week trip off the island or something. The island has only one 'general store' but the other islands around have more in the way of population and infrastructure. As for internet, I would like to keep up my blog out there, and maybe even start a new blog for my friends farm since eventually he's trying to promote it as a place to hold weddings, but I haven't really looked into the options. I think there are some wireless prepaid internet services?

Sounds like a nice arrangement. I'd definitely try to get materials together for the cabin though, tent living for more than a few weeks can be pretty brutal. Moisture, mildew, etc. Hell, if he'd allow you to fell enough trees you'd only need fastening/window/door hardware, and maybe some plywood.

All fine and dandy if there's going to be no kitchen, a 'kitchen" is defined as a room having a sink in it other than the bathroom. A kitchen would make it a residence and two residences on a lot is prohibited in most all places other than multi-family zonings. So long as it's a minimum 60' from the main structure and under 500 sq. ft in floor size, it can be permitted as a gueast house. It would qualify as an aternative use structure without a kitchen, but still require permits and inspections. The only way around permits is to be a temporary structure (mobile) or tent. Zoning is a bitch and limits building what you want, where you want.

A victim of housecleaning. This thread is now destined to sink to the bottom. Inundated and buried by threads involving dandelions and the like.

This thread took a lot of effort and time.....too much according to missuzwiskas. Thanks guys for your comments and participation.

I was just wondering yesterday how your garden was going!

It's growing strangely this season.

Yah, like everything in the NW...

The only bumper crop" thus far is spaghetti squash. I have tons of the stuff....litterally hundreds of them on the vines. The acorn squash is a close second. Tomatoes and beans are starting to come on finally, corn did nothing, but strawberries went nuts.

The garden produced thus far.
The peas are just about done but are still putting out. Tomatoes are coming on and green beans going crazy. Squash is going nuts. I've already had some spaghetti squash for several meals and lots of crookneck and zucchinis. Those sunflowers in the back are over 9' tall!



I dug spuds yesterday. We planted the same amount as last season but doubled the yield. We also halved our green beans and peas but are right on target with the same yield as last season. Strawberries and blackberries are looking to increase yield by at least 7 fold. must be doing something right despite the weird weather this year.
What does two hundred pounds of spuds look like?
This (and this isn't even all of them):



The biggest russets are minimum 8" long!! The big cases weigh 50 pounds or better.

So...... What's wrong with these two pics?