From the Comments

Terrible drought in NC this year. Do you have contingency plan for a season or two of drought?

If we have electricity, I will water the gardens. I have trickle irrigation installed in the Eaton Rapids orchard. The tree in the ER orchard are on smaller root-stock which are more vulnerable to drought.

For modest droughts, I don't practice square-foot gardening. One of the weaknesses of SFG is that each plant has very little volume of soil from which to pull nutrients and water. If either drop, then the plants are stressed very quickly. It is like flying a plane very close to the ground, there is very little time to recover from sub-optimal circumstances.

For example, commercial cabbage growers will typically allocate three square-feet per plant. I am not running a business and don't count on what I harvest to cover the payroll, mortgage and taxes and I can plant them farther apart. This year, I planted them 24" apart in the rows with the rows 40" apart. In terms of square-feet per plant, that is 6.7 square-feet per plant or less than half of the plant-density of a commercial grower. 

The Hill and Upper Orchards are in another part of Eaton County. Keeping the grass cut short (scalped) reduced water competition from the ground-cover. Most of the apple trees in the Hill and Upper Orchard are grafted on G.890, MM-106 and M-26 and MM-111. MM-111 and MM-106 have a history of good drought tolerance due to deep, plunging roots. G.890 is too new to have much data. M-26 is not known for drought tolerance. 

Frequent commentor Dan wrote: Unfortunately it's not possible to contractually negate legal risk via contracts. Courts and rogue judges routinely toss out such agreements. Contract law is now more of an informal agreement than a binding enforceable instrument. Judges have destroyed most of the legal framework this country was founded on. 

Some of that is related to WHERE the court is. Courts in large cities, the Mississippi Delta and the Rio Grande valley are notorious for seeing businesses and successful people as lambs to be fleeced.

If that were universally the case, wealthy people (who can afford very good legal counsel) would never bother with pre-nuptial agreements.

I do agree that it is common. I also deplore how that trend has made us all poorer. Not that long ago it wasn't too hard to find somebody who would loan you a trailer (for instance). Now it is a case of having to buy your own or pay high prices to rent one for a very short period of time.

Also from Dan but on the ADHD essay: It's genetic/biologic. A significant percentage of the population are incapable of seeing the future. To them next month is a haze and next year does not exist. And they live their lives accordingly.

Many are incapable of connecting actions with consequences. It's why so many low brow people are literally shocked and stunned when they willingly commit a serious crime and are then sentenced to prison. They are not capable of connecting the two.

We are divided into two species. Homo Sapiens and Homo Stupidicus. And the latter group is rapidly out breeding the first. Also they are indistinguishable by appearance. You have to wait for them to start gum flapping to see the difference.

I agree.

Where I was trying to go with the ADHD post is that even animals as stupid  as chickens, pigeons and carp can be trained to do certain things if the task is narrowly defined and the reward/punishment is immediate.

"Make people more intelligent" is not narrowly defined.

"Stopping for a second and asking yourself, "Will this get my ass kicked"." is a narrowly defined task. 

Unfortunately, the current fad in criminal justice defers punishments out of a misplaced sense of "mercy" and the pliable twig is not straightened and thence continues to grow into a warped tree. 

From Michael: Have you given thought about a (Joel Salatin) style mobile coop for (the ducks)? 

Yes, Michael, I have.

Joel Salatin developed the "Chicken Tractor" concept in a very specific context. He was fine-tuning his Management Intensive Grazing methods. He raised beef cattle in (I think) western Virginia. He was thinking very specifically about the rapid cycling of nutrients and the best ways to retain them in the most active parts of the biosphere...say from 1mm above the surface of the soil to 50mm below it. He was also thinking about labor efficiency and attempting to gain additional revenue streams.

One key point that gets glossed over is the scale which Salatin was working. He is grazing hundreds of acres.

He concluded that the ideal situation would be to configure a system where natural creatures, following their hardwired instincts and habits, did most of the work. Chickens scratch apart cow-pats and scatter them. They eat the maggots growing in them. They spread fertilizer widely but it is concentrated where they roost for the night.

So, he decided to make a mobile chicken coop that he could move behind the mob of cattle as he rotated them. It is very rainy in western Virginia. By the time he rotated his cattle back into the paddock, the cow poop scattered by the chickens would not be repugnant to the cows and they would not leave big islands of ungrazed forage.

When he followed with the chicken tractor, he deliberately put it in a different location in the paddock each time so the concentrating effect of the chicken poop at the roosting site was not additive. In fact, he would look around and make sure that he placed it on the site with the shabbiest looking grass regrowth.

The primary difference between Salatin's situation and mine are scale and objectives. 

Salatin's scale involved hundreds and hundreds of acres or in linear distances...maybe a 2000 feet. If I put the duck-jail in the center of the plot that includes my Eaton Rapids Orchard, the fenced in garden and the two potato plots (one planted, one fallow), the walk to the farthest corner is about 120 feet.

So far, my one duck who is still laying eggs reliably lays it in the corner that is opposite the corner where I have a spike-light adding supplemental lighting in the morning. Note that the shelter is a truck cap and she lays it at the end with the gate that opens-and-closes

Salatin's primary objectives were rapid nutrient cycling, fly control and broiler production. My primary objectives are snail control with egg production being secondary. So there is some overlap...but not much.

Another reason that I haven't pulled-the-trigger on making a chicken tractor is I cannot make the cost-benefit numbers work.

I look at what most people call "chicken tractors" and see running-gear (wheels and axle assemblies) that will self destruct in six months. Why not start by laying down some 2-by-4s for skids and dragging it if you are going to be consigned to that in half a year anyway?

If I want more mobility than simply being able to expose where the animals were pooping at night, then I can use "sandwich" building techniques where I have a table under a partitioned-dormitory with doors under an aluminum truck cap. Each subassembly, although awkward to move, isn't very heavy and two medium sized kids can easily move it 30 feet.