If there are any Bio-Engineers out there perhaps you should get cracking on a new animal that 'eats sunlight'. As a starting point may I suggest a cross beteen a chicken and a billiard table...

Trust me, these 'Pool-Head Chickens' are going to be the norm come the revolution and their legs will be tasty too given all the xtra weight...

Nick.

I raise chickens. Our dozen hens get no grain from green up (April) to 'no more bugs' (October), and about half the listed amount of grain the rest of the time. They do get kitchen scraps, but that's just preprocessing the compost.

Also four eggs/week is poor laying. Rather than almost four, you should get over 5. And a dozen chicken dinners per year: six retired layers, and six cockerels that you raised along with the six replacement pullets.

We had blossom end rot five years running. Then we read about putting a single "tums" tablet with each plant when planted. This year we've had no blossom end rot. Seems to work.

For the squash vine borers, I've found in my garden that planting a different species of squash, Cucurbita moschata, results in my having more squash. The borers are less successful in destroying the vines. One particular variety that I've heard called both trombocino and zucchetta is a bit like a long, curly zucchini. It's pretty productive for me down here in NW Georgia, without needing much more time to first-squash than regular zucchini or yellow squash.

Each year we generally find a wonderful new pest. This year it's flea beetles (destroyed my brassica crops).

Been gardening vegetables all my life. Diversity is one key to dealing with pests. Plant small patches of many different varieties, and interleave appropriate vegetables. There's a good book called (IIRC) "tomatoes love carrots," which is a store of useful information on that subject.

I've also just encountered the flea beetle for the first time in my life. (New country, new pests). I had fair success with a "mechanical" pesticide: Diatomaceous Earth. Google it and take a look for yourself, my guess is that it is okay for organic use because it's not a poison. Conquered the flea beetles... :)

Solomans books are the tops in the field.I use them like a bible.

Plant a whole bunch of different types of fruit trees...some will do well one year,some will do well the next.The most steady suppliers I have found is a chojoro Asian pear,and a Sparatan apple.At the elevation I am at,and the location.[Your milage may vary]

I think that's incorrect generally, perhaps correct specifically. If you live in an area where the sunlight is so strong that it kills plants (as I do) then overcrowding actually helps.

Why is it "safe to assume" that as soon as they come into contact they are competing, if soil contains higher concentration of nutrients across a broad spectrum than plants require then the overcrowding will reduce ion concentrations in soil in a helpfull way.

There are also several good reasons to overcrowd from a pest control point of view. Take cabbage moth for example, it flies around quasi-randomly lobbing on anything that looks cabbage like, if after several tries in a particular patch it fails to find a cabbage it will wander off into another patch. So, hide your cabbages in amongst non brassica plants.

(I thouight this was new age bullshit when I read about it but I actually observed cabbage moths performing exactlty this behaviour only 3 days ago. )

Progressive thinning to select for the strongest individual is the only point of yours that I would agrree on.

To each his own however and may your harvest be bountiful whatever your method.

I have been following the low input Solomon approach in subtropical Australia with a few adaptations and I have found he is right on the money. We have just gone over two months with no rainfall and I am only just now considering watering my vegetables from a rainwater storage tank. The key is to store your rain when it comes within the soil by cultivating deeply but gently, and by providing ample nutrients to your crops so they dont have to use up all the soil moisture to access them. And spacing your plants generously, while weeding religiously, means you can balance the water demands of your crop with the available rain water. As an example of how superfluous watering by hand is I have had pumpkins germinate and a crop of fair quality lettuce grow in my garden from directly sowed seeds through two months of zero rain, and no hand watering. Just put them into properly prepared and maintained soil and up they come like magic. The time otherwise spent waving a hose around is better spent gently mowing down the weeds as they germinate with a good quality sharp hoe.

The only modification I have made of his method is to divide my garden into two halves, one for a summer crop of heat loving veggies, and another for the winter crop of frost tolerant ones. The summer crop gets the end that is heavily shaded in winter, the winter crop gets the side that is more dry and exposed in summer but gets good winter light. When the crops arent growing I put in dense rows of green manure crops (just packets of food grade broad beans, and whole animal feed oats) that get cut by hand multiple times through the season (and some tossed to the chooks). This does amazing things to soil texture- and it is far more time effective than turning a concentrated compost heap and digging it in everywhere. It also means you can water them with urine to enrich the soil without worrying about contaminating your crops.

Best of all it means I get to sow my crops at the perfect time and can let a long running crop like eggplants finish off properly since they don't need to be shifted to make room for the next rotation.

I would also agree with the estimation of about four to five people per acre of staple crops as a safe estimate for reasonably fertile soil with about 1000 mm of rain a year. Under ideal conditions you could manage double this, but halving it leaves a margin for error for crop failures. It also gives you enough surplus to feed stock in the good years and improve the quality of your diet. Drought years then mean just having less chicken dinners, rather than actually starving.

To my mind novice gardeners are often setting themselves up for unneccesary trouble growing vegetables. They dont realise that some are very robust and easy (kale and collards) while related versions can be extremely finicky (cauliflower, brussel sprouts). Reliance on store bought seedlings is another major problem- the sooner you learn to handle the power of seeds the better, but be aware that most store bought seeds are terrible quality. They sometimes take on too much species diversity at once, rather than picking out a smaller subset of new species to get a handle on each year. You can tackle these two problems together by making sure you buy multiple strains of a type of vegetable (eg beans) from lots of different sources to grow side by side the first year. This will show you how much seed quality can vary, and also show you how different varieties will perform very differently in your garden. Next year you can just grow the best two or three that serve different purposes, preferably from your own seed. And finally they put too much emphasis on watery vegetables and neglect to master growing life sustaining staples like starchy root crops and drying legumes. In the short term home grown vegetables offer the best economic and quality advantages over store bought ones, but you need to have experience in growing staple crops in case you ever need to really feed your family in times of need.