Rumblings in my Tumblings

The Friday before my birthday and all is more or less well in the House of Gretton. I spent a good chunk of last night staring at the ceiling and thinking about sustainability, which naturally makes me think about Cottonwood Gulch. When I woke up and got going, I did a bunch of research on the Gulch improvements that had been chasing themselves around my brain. On impulse, I went ahead and called up Jordan Stone to see how he was doing.

Low and behold, he's already got a major head start on 90% of the stuff I was thinking about. I guess that makes sense... he is the Assistant Director. Apparently the Gulch is going to continue the farm stuff, with a new prospective farm lady that Jory says will be a perfect fit. We chatted about composting for a while (he already was looking into getting a woodchipper, so that idea fell flat) and I hope I was somewhat helpful. I think that if the goal of the farm at the Gulch is to actually produce enough food to offset the costs of feeding the kids, a ton of work needs to be done on improving the soil, and that means compost compost compost. That and catch as much water as possible.

Thinking about mushrooms at the Gulch: it would be easy to use spent substrate to help speed along cold piles of compost. Harder would be systematically cultivating them, though I found a FAO doc with pics of a solar sterilizer which make me think it might be possible. Especially if I am getting tons of woodchips from a chipper.