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 update, thank you to everyone who donated. Here’s the present status:
As of today, the Power Cube II is over the brim, and the others need work. The total collected so far is $1575, or 34% of the total $4700, which is decent for the half-way point of the month funding period. Read the announcement to get excited about what we are doing – and then chip in if you can. We’ve got more vision than money, still, though we think this can turn around any day if we get a couple of sales from our first Full Product Release. It appears that this will take more than passive marketing on our side – but we are now well-positioned to produce The Liberator, with our new 150 ton hole puncher and heavy-duty drill press added to our capacity pool.
We’ll be migrating to beex.org for crowd funding purposes – as one of our True Fans is behind this platform, and we are discussing how beex.org can provide support in collaboration, networking, and branding towards the goals of post-scarcity economics.
Back to the agriculture report – we grafted half of the existing trees on rootstocks from our nursery, and the other half was donated apple rootstocks. We got about 90% success rate on the apples – even though some of the scionwood was already starting to bud out. By keeping the apples in a cool place as it was warming up, they made it well.
Our orchard needs some major mowing, and we need an agriculture person here in general. We prioritize tech development, because things like the Full Produce Release of the high-performance Compressed Earth brick press put us on the map – more so than growing apples or sweet potatoes. We look forward to the day when we can provide healthy food, though – as we certainly miss it – and are reduced to the big box stores for most of our food at present. Yet the local option is preferable, as a simple part of resilient community infrastructure – from bread, milk, cheese, chicken, veggies, fruits, oil, flour, seedcrop, grain, ferment, salsa, processing… We’ve done a little bit of salsa and pickled cucumbers in vinegar this year, we pickled deer, made comfrey and jewelweed salve, and we do make the Factor e Bread – report on that forthcoming. We still have a long way on the food – but all it takes is the doing.
The soil pulverizer needs most help on the funding baskets at present – see this to get more excited about what it does:
Soil Pulverizer Prototype 1 Complete from Marcin Jakubowski on Vimeo.
consider a good anatolian shepherd, dutch shepherd, or jindo breed dog instead.
Please consider espalier:
http://openfarmtech.org/index.php/Espalier
[…] good progress on LifeTrac – Prototype II of the open source tractor. We have managed to fund its completion via crowd funding. We’ve got just about all the parts in, including hydraulic components. We will use Power […]
Hi OSE folks, have you considered growing trees as a sustainable funding source? They are very cheap (or free) when small, and don’t require too much work while they hang out and grow. Every year they just get more valuable, and they’ll make your place look nice while they are growing. There’s always good demand for quality trees. Of course digging or transplanting trees can be hard work, so there’s an opportunity to make another tool. A tree spade would be a great tool to implement. They cost a lot commercially, but are simple technology and could be fabricated as a plug-in component for gvcs fairly inexpensively.