Bootstrap @ Rippling Water – Bringing the Lessons Home

My time at Rippling Waters Organic Farm is drawing to a close, with only a few days at the farm each week to help wrap things up. The bulk of the work, from seed cataloging and selection to harvest and cleanup, now falls on the shoulders of the journeypersons who will be taking the farm over next year under the guidance of our farm manager Julee Applegarth. The farm will be in good hands with Molly and Brenna-Mae taking the reins and planning out... Read More

Bootstrap @ Rippling Waters – Swales

Last month I gave a few examples of how we battled with the elements all season here at Rippling Waters. I am going to keep with this theme and wrap up the remaining challenges I faced here in Southern Maine and how we are going about fixing them. The earth challenge, the soil challenge; everyone’s soil seems to give them one issue or another, if it isn’t the structure it’s the weed bank, if it isn’t that it’s the calcium levels or the acidity,... Read More

Agroinnovations Podcast

  source: Mr.Bojangles from BackyardChickens.com Here’s another resource for sustainable ag and appropriate technology learning, in handy dandy podcast format.  Frank Aragona, also the Director of Research and Development at Holistic Management International, interviews people throughout the movement, focusing on permaculture and other strategies for community relocalization and ecosystem regeneration.  There’s a blog too!    Read More

Bootstrap @ Rippling Waters: Mandala

 Last spring our farm manager, the venerable Julee Applegarth, was looking out over the top of one of our fields and musing out loud to a gathered crowd upon the fact that previously she was unable to get much to grow in the hard-packed soil there. She stamped her foot, I recall, illustrating the hard-packedness of this particular quarter-acre field. She said it would be planted with members of the brassica family but because of years of tilling... Read More