The heat wave finds Stephan with his beloved ladies. I read in an australian eco mag that 'natural' swimming pools are all the rage, no chlorine, just bio-filtration via vegetation beds to keep the water so low in nutrients that it doesn't get green. Its really really easy to do. Stephan's been doing it for about a decade WITH the extra load of all that nitrogen coming from several big fish fed on high protein food, and its never gone green, nonetheless. A normal swimming pool would not have this nitrogen load. Our filtration volume to pond volume is about one to four though. The bio-filter is filled with shredded hard plastic and reeds absorb some of the nutrients. The walls are very slippery so you have to walk carefully in the pool. One of our friends keeps fish and two boisterous male children in his swimming pool.
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I'm reading a lot on the VIABILITY of small farming at the moment, and of course most of the posts are made by small farmers in the USA, and conditions in South Africa, or in Europe would be very different. Has anyone got personal experience or knowledge on the ECONOMICS of small farming in Europe or South Africa ? For example the presence of farmer's markets in the US is just not reflected in South Africa, and organic farmers in the townships here... their produce is priced so that only the rich can afford it, by rich I mean richer than me...people earning upwards of ten K a month, and yet from personal stories, though it may help people with extreme poverty, it doesn't exactly get you to the rich 10k a month level very soon.... not growing vegetables anyway... not in a backyard. I know about the NGO's and other bodies that use volunteer labour, it is a different model and only the growing knowledge is transferable, if that, as growing under commercial pressure and growing as a political idea in a co-operative environment are going to shape the actual acts and behaviour of growing differently...I'm more interested in profitable old school business models, on about an acre or using leased land, because I want to use it to survive well, with farming as my main occupation....are there any people who have researched a lot on how to make such a farm economically viable, and can direct me, or who have experience thereof ? In the US the small farmer's blogs frequently state that organic vegetable growers with small parcels of land do not make enough money to live and they all have second jobs, a lot of them appear to be bloggers, working with volunteers in internships or selling vegetable growing education and would not be able to survive except by training up other people and using their labour, or selling their lifestyle to other people while concealing their own poverty ... R1200 or fifty dollars for a downloadable booklet on growing vegetables is an example of the business on the side. It makes sense that anything you grow that is available as a 'commercial' product, say at Woolworth's or Shoprite Checkers, is going to be subject to fierce price competition and may not be worth your while, even if it is organic, as commercial organic growers will undersell you, and niche produce is the answer. I hope someone will be interested enough to reply to this with their thoughts or experience or political analysis. Information is power. I will post my extracts from this morning's research under garden diary today, if you would like to give feedback on any of it.
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Authordraftswoman, recent student of Linguistics, Jill of all trades, planner of green new world.. Archives
October 2017
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