Purecajn, I'm beginning to think that you're the single Permaculture pioneer species in Louisiana! And by that I don't mean weed, rather the harbinger of awareness and conscious living. Keep up your good work ... you'll find like-minded folk!
Well it seems to have taken me forever, but I may have found someone nearby to consult with. He's out of texas, but we're supposed to meet this weekend. He has his PDC licence if I remember right so am very excited about the visit. Maybe I can even talk him into running a course thru my property, lord knows I have the room for overnight guests.
not as eventful as I'd had liked.He had taken a course online, but had no real world experience. I showed him around the property while explaining my views on plant placement, but he had no input other than encouragement. He said he understood the theory of permaculture, but didn't know enough about local plants yet to be of any assistance. S i'm back to square one. now I just talk to the local nursery's for local produce and buy a little exotic in from time to time. Wasting a bunch of cash in doing so as well. lost my kiwi, key-lime, moringa's, banana's, and all kinds of veggies.
ah, well, ... it's rare for me to find anyone that knows anything about permaculture around here either. i just keep on doing what i can, like yourself, persistence and learning as i go. did you lose the plants by cold spells?
usually, yes. I also seem to have some type of problem with my soil. I've tried to grow some of the local vegetables, but my plants don't ever survive. Heck, I can't even get corn nor okra to grow taller than my knee whereas the local farms have it at least 7-10+ feet tall.
hau purecajn, I'm in Vilonia, Arkansas. Have you gotten a soil test done on your property? If you can, lay out a grid pattern and pull samples from each section, label them and take those to you local extension service for testing. You want to ask for a micro nutrient test, that way you will get results that are more comprehensive than the basic test. This will tell you exactly what is going on as far as nutrient levels, pH, std. PKN levels. From there we can devise a method of amendment to get your soil to where it needs to be for good soil health.
and it helps if you can describe your soil. if you don't know how to evaluate your soil you can find many guides on the web that will describe the process.
Will do Redhawk. I've been putting it off actually. I Figured I could just repair the soil with generous lvls of organic matter and it is working, but it seems to take forever that way. Ex. All the plants put in the ground around 2011 are just now having growth spurts and/or producing heavily. On a side note, I have noticed that if I let whatever weeds wanna grow within a 6' diameter around a blood orange tree seems to have a steroid effect when cut down only in the spring and laying same where they fall. As such I've found the localized chop and drop is much more effective than hauling in chop and drop debris from other peoples property.. It makes sense now that I think it thru. after all the weeds repairing the soil are specialized for that individual spot whereas what I haul in was specialized in repairing the soil from their original location. As such I'll be using the same technique for all my trees now.
Ah, you have found one of earth mothers secrets and are putting that new knowledge to work for you. Most all "weeds" are here to make soil better, in fact many of what most call weeds are mineral miners and each time they die back, the purpose is so their decomposition results in those nutrients getting into the upper levels of the soil. Plant succession actually depends on these specialized plants, each level comes to where they can get what they need to thrive, as the soil becomes healthy enough for the next level in the succession tree, the previous plants, that built that soil to the next level, move on to worse off soil and begin the process again. We can use this knowledge to speed up the soil health improvement by growing things on purpose, where we want the improvement to occur, at the time we want it to occur. This is what permaculture is supposed to be, using nature to improve nature so we can thrive along side nature.