Amending soil with rock dust can help with productivity with the advantage of the added minerals persisting for years if not decades.
In terms of self-sufficiency it would be ideal to source the minerals locally. I found a basic guide to identifying minerals:
You can crush those rocks/minerals with a ball mill and get a soil amendment that works for you.
There are lots DIY ball mills out there but this is a good one:
Hydroponic growing. This is a video from a company in the business of selling hydro supplies but it is a very good primer for people that donāt really understand what is involved.
A little strange for me to be promoting this when I am shifting back to nearly all soil based growing this year and putting a lot of effort into rehabilitating my garden. In truth conventional growing is the only way for the average person to produce a lot of food. Talking about hundreds of pounds of various vegetables. To get those kinds of yields hydroponically requires significant expense for infrastructure. However even the small grower can significantly add to their soil based produce by being able to grow year around even on a small scale without much expense. Consider how many heads of cabbage or lettuce you really consume and which cannot be stored fresh. One or two a week maybe and easily done with constant scheduled starts. With a small heated greenhouse even fresh tomatoes and peppers and most other salad crops can be grown twelve months a year in any climate. Fresh foods to supplement what you have canned, frozen or dried. Food is being weaponized. Hopefully you are aware that all these bird flu jumping to cattle and then humans is all a plan to force people into reliance and compliance. Small farms and even peoples gardens are being targeted. Itās possible that the individual growing food to eat will require the stealth the pot growers have relied on.
Iām not quite the pessimist. The feds are trying to cut the trade deficit among other things. Food is -14b.
Pot growers did a good job driving prices down and the fresh veggie market isnāt that far behind. It is a slightly different skillset with higher output per sqft. But necessary items have dropped in price like the 30 dollar tds/ph meter is good enough. Led lights are cheap. Kratky is cheap, but even pumps arenāt that expensive anymore.
Compared to the costs of a garden, and garden equipment, in not sure what is cheaper if you are starting from scratch.
No weeding is definitely a plus though 
Really good guide to producing and using bio-char.
Tomato and cucumber plants on the way, it will be interesting to see if the corn and brussels sprouts worked in the new house, not so pretty but, it will be a little warmer than outside.
Those are super nice Jan. I see you built the one in the field. Was the one against the house a manufactured kit? What is your last frost date?
I wish I had the space you have Jan. Nice build.
Tom, I live about 50 miles north of Jan. We call the first week of June iron nights. Most years thatās the last frost nights. We keep a few tomato and cucumber plants inside the glass doors of the rear porch just for fun, but they still got some frostbite during this past week.
No, I built that greenhouse against the house a few years ago.
I built the new one in the field behind the earth cellar, so as not to obscure the view down to the lake, fixed water there last year, for the vegetables.
After I get my starts going in the house I move them to the greenhouse JO. About a week ago it got to 39F in there. 27F outside. Didnāt faze the tomatoes or peppers but killed 20 cucumber plants. 
I have their replacements sprouted already. It was really too early for them anyway but I like to get them some size before I transplant them to give them a fighting chance against the cucumber beetles. Our last frost date is May 31 so your climate isnāt way different than ours.
This is how to innoculate your biochar. Living Web Farms is an -excellent- resource for organic small market growers. some of the people and info they have is just stellar even if the videos are long. Others it isnāt applicable to my situation or I have no desire to go down that path.
Prepper I have not seen before.
Actually I was just wondering the other day if live would not have been better if I had been oblivious all these years. Of course that wouldnāt have been completely possible since my generation spent once a week diving under our school desks so we would be ready because the soviets were going to nuke us at any time. I had just turned 15 when the Cuban Missile Crisis drama was played out and it triggered a bunch of visions of future events. They have continued, on and off, for the rest of my life. I later figured out that they were probably geo-physical rather than nuclear armageddon but regardless they tainted my whole life. Took over 60 years but now the planet is moaning and groaning and the idea of a nuke conflict just got way greater the past couple days. People in my gene pool generally cash in their chips right around their 80th year so here I am teetering on the edge of the grave and all the years of knowing, worrying and prepping didnāt really matter. Now Iām just tired in a way that sleep wonāt fixā¦
Well TomH.
One of the very best modern Day-After survivalistās books I read had the old PaPa set-up out in the way-back U.P.?
He actually age stroked or heart-attackāed out, as I recalled.
Day-After his adult daughter fought her way out of the shitcity. Pick up a male ex-military PTSD apartment neighbor. And they trials and tribulations made it finally up to PaPaās place. Sheād visited and been shown the security. They found, and they buried 'ol PaPa.
PaPa loved so much that heād had notebooks on how to operated his simple basic systems. Had set up a library, seeds, tools and such. Hoping some day one of his relatives could benefit.
Sure. More trials and tribulations. Endured. Overcome. Then along came baby and Life went on.
Damn good story book.
Ha! But STILL no awareness of woodgas at all!
Chicken shit gunpowder though. Huh!? Yep. True. I search out and got that pamphlet. Got the chickens. Got the old lead-acid batteries for the lead and the reclaimed sulphur. Always had the wood-charcoal. Actually planted some willow trees then for their better charcoal.
Indeed. To have lived a good life being a good man sometimes it is what you had set up and leave behind.
Regards
Steve Unruh
Iāve been dealing with preppers and homesteaders for a long time now. No one ever thinks about wood gas. 1980 Mother Earth News was the first I heard of it. Then nothing until they did the article about Wayne. I guess the Europeans keep the ball rolling after WW2.
Read that one a few years back Steve, enjoyed it very much. My wife ordered it for me out of the back of a backwoodsman magazine. I like the way the author wrote it as a how too.
He continued the story in the second book but it wasnt as good. Didnt have the same feel as the first. More of a ātrying to cash in on the momentum of the first bookā or so it seemd to me.
There was another series i readā¦ had quite a few books to it. It was a shtf typeā¦ furthur into the series their āblacksmithā started building these wood powered vehicles for them to use for travel and as war wagons to fend off marauders.
Thinking back on it. (It was 4-5 years ago that i read them) it was probably some type of fema gassifier unit. author didnt cover any complications or pit falls with them. I got a kick out of how the characters didnt seem to have any learning curve to driving them. They just stooked them up and off they went. Lol Books were still entertaining though.
They certainly did. My personal take, is they have more incentive. They pay more for fuel because of taxes and refining and distribution costs. Most european countries are import most of their oil, it works in their best interest to import less.
In the US, woodgas got a bad rep because it is ādirtyā, and it was either illegal or shunned because you werenāt paying the road tax.
If you donāt think ādirtyā is applicable, it is the reason why diesels were pushed out of the market in the US for consumer vehicles. Simply, they were smelly and stinky. You pay more for fuel, but you donāt stink up the neighborhood.
Anyone used a seed stick? Would it work in untilled soil?
Iāve cobbled one together. Just a stick clamped to the end of a piece of conduit (3/4" ?). Hole in the stick to slide on the conduit, wood screw through a band saw cut to clamp it. To get the planting depth somewhere close, Iād kick the conduit sideways and down to the desired spot, then drop the seed in, move the planter and cover and firm with my foot. With the one in the video, Iām not sure what depth youād get. Not super fast, but easier on the back than stooping or crawling along (not guessing 
). I didnāt bother with a funnel, but itās a good idea.
You may ask how it worked out. I think it seemed to work pretty well when I checked as I was using it, but I canāt remember what grew or didnāt grow.
iām trying to figure out if it is worth building. My soil is extremely hard, and I was looking for the quick and easy solution without having to drag the tiller out. I was just going to scalp the grass down with the mower and a drop seed in. BUT I think I need something with a point to poke the hole, and then a tube to drop the seed in. I donāt have to go more then an inch. I doubt the commercial ones with spreader at the bottom can move this dirt.
I am thinking about sunflowers because they have a long strong tap root that might be able to penetrate this soil and look nice. But I might do radishes if I canāt find something simple. Those can be broadcast.
The only things I direct seed is peas, beans and corn. Everything else is started in some sort of cells or cups. I canāt see this being helpful for any of my direct seeds. I just use a triangular hoe and make a furrow. Because Iām planting so much more outside this year I have several beds that have been fallow for several years Sean. They are filled with compacted soil and the rhizome rooted grasses. I am just using a mattock to dig up the first four or so inches and get most of the root masses pulled out. I did a four by twenty five foot bed for potatoes in about half an hour like that this week end. Weed barrier to keep the grass between the rows knocked down. Shredded leaves on top of that. I wasnāt planning of doing this much conventional growing anymore so I havenāt been putting a lot of effort into making compost. The no-till growers just keep loading new layers on top every year. I know the No-till guy, Jesse, buys truck loads of compost.
