We’re learning more slowly than we would like what works and what doesn’t in the wonderful world of fruit orchard trees. Here are a few notes from the orchard.

Amanda planted five different varieties of okra in the spring, and every one of them has had its moment in the sun during this growing season. We think it’s about the end of the season for okra, although we thought it would be finished by the end of September, and […]

With this edition we celebrate our first complete year of podcasting from Longleaf Breeze. With the help of our daughter and announcer Adrian Lee Borden, we take time to reflect on what has remained the same and what has changed during this most eventful year.

If organic subsistence farming is a sound strategy for us, as we believe it to be, we must get better at it. Whether we can may soon graduate from interesting puzzle to life-and-death touchstone.

Growing in central Alabama and not in the Black Belt, we’ve suspected for some time that our soil pH was low. It’s practically a given, because all the soil around us tends to be acidic. Our guess was right, and then some.

We get 20 gallons per minute of water from our 228-foot well, powered by electricity from Central Alabama Electric Cooperative. But we’re becoming convinced that the US electrical grid is overtaxed, under-maintained, and increasingly brittle. What happens when we can no longer depend on our grid power to be there?

We’ve never thought much of persimmons. After all, doesn’t every southerner have a childhood memory of some unsuspecting person being coerced into tasting one of those astringent nightmares from a the forest?

I try to check our electrical power usage occasionally, just to make sure we’re on the right track with our energy consumption. Monitoring our power use gives me one more “sanity check” on the work we do here at Longleaf Breeze, to make sure nothing’s dramatically out of kilter.

Woo-hoo! Our 50th podcast. And how fitting that we use it to acknowledge humbly how little we know about this whole “subsistence farming” gig. We had nice visits this week with a young farmer and an old one, and learned much from each of them.

It may be fall on the calendar, but those voracious grasshoppers think it’s still summertime, and they’re eating everything we plant. The row cover is the only thing saving our fall veg.