>>>>>specialty herbs for specialty restaurants on 1/4 acre and clear $300,000 to $500,000 per yearI want to raise specialty herbs!!! THAT's the kind of money I want to make. Please teach me how! 1. Start with market planning. Find your market. Specialty restaurants hire chefs who have specialty training. Those chefs will have their favorite specialty herbs they want. Find out what those are. Write down every chef and every herb on a list. After you have the list, you might visit with all the chefs again to see if they forgot anything. Go through your new list with them to see if they want anything that anyone else wanted. If you don't have any specialty restaurants with 'fancy' chefs within commuting distance, then you can move to that market or forget about this idea. 2. Revisit your market. Get an idea of how much they want, when they want it, and how often. Do they want it certified organic or simply pesticide free? How fresh is fresh? See if they have any special requests for packaging or delivery. See if you can find out how much he's paying now. If he cannot get it, see how much would be a ridiculous price and write that down. 3. Production feasibility. Don't start this until you have the full list of herbs. Using your list, determine what can be grown in your area. If you live in the northern hemisphere and the chef wants fresh cilantro in June, you probably cannot help him. Similarly growing vanilla bean orchids is probably out of the question. Eliminate the plants that will not grow in your area. Forcing plants to grow out of their adapted range is an exercise in futility. 4. Production costs. Estimate how much it will cost to produce the plants that will grow in your area. Compare that to what the chef is willing to pay. Prioritize the plants according to profitability. Remember that if you want to become THE provider of these specialty items, you will have to provide enough, all the time. Producers who cannot meet the demand may be dropped. When you are prioritizing, keep the production volume in mind. Also you might have to rotate your crops to maintain production. Some plants become susceptible to disease if grown in the same soil too many seasons in a row. 5. Before you put the first seeds in the ground, double check with the potential customers and let them know what you are planning to provide. Make sure they have the authority to buy, or approve buying, from you and that they intend to buy from you. 6. Then all you have to do is grow plants, harvest, process, package, and deliver. What problems could possibly come up with that?

Also for watering: the soil looks too dry too soon currently. Mine, too--and I have no real problems. The very top surface of the soil dries out really fast in sun and wind, but that doesn't mean there isn't water underneath. You can test that by pushing a screwdriver into the soil. If it goes in fairly easily (barring rocks), your soil is damp. Or drive a small trowel into it and separate it into a V shape by rocking it a little bit. That'll give you a direct visual on how deep the water is. Here would be my plan: for now do very frequent waterings to help really wet the soil, I'm not familiar with California (except for the part about moderate temperatures and no rain), but this doesn't sound like a good idea--it encourages shallow roots and lawn diseases. The standard is 1" of water a week, all at once (well, within a day to allow for on/off cycles to allow the water to penetrate). For sandy soil your mileage will differ because the water wicks out fast and goes very deep very quickly. I will also probably try milorganite as a jump start, as I fear my soil is probably pretty depleted. I swear by it, others don't (it is processed sewage, but heated enough to kill everything in it). The 18 lbs/thousand square feet I put down last weekend kicked in and it's a rainy week. The grass, since Sunday, has grown one and a half inches and gone a deeper green. Once it stops raining, I'll mow. I went high, but I'm going to renovate this fall--with a deep, heavy core aeration I want lots of organics mixing into the holes. I alternate it with alfalfa and soy. When I started (early last year), my soil profile was slightly silty clay, poor drainage, very poor water penetration, hard as a rock, and a light tan. It had been corn field for as long as I could remember prior to building, and even my parents don't remember when it wasn't. Call it 40 years of abuse. Now it's still slightly silty clay (nothing's going to change that short of a renovation down to a foot or more). Drainage is fair to good, penetration is good to excellent, the soil is still hard when dry (it's supposed to be), but spongy when wet. The top half-inch is black, another inch is deep brown, and a good three inches below that have turned a midrange brown. Everything grows better and more strongly. I'm very pleased. Some older photos are here. I have to update them--the grass has improved since these were taken and the season advanced a bit.

Texas-Weed wrote: > You can lay the sod now, just not the optimum time to do it... But you have raised a huge RED FLAG. You are in DFW and want to replace Bermuda lawn with Saint Augustine? Why? You just as well go to the Middle East and promote the USA and Christ as that will be easier, take less time, and more rewarding. ======== Texas-Weed wrote the above in a different thread but I thought I'd reply in this one. I'm an atheist, although I still enjoy attending Christmas services. I guess I just read too many science books in high school. I should have said ZZ-chromosome male frogs, not XY male frogs in my post above. Regading not seeding improved varieties of common bermuda into a vegetatively produced hybrid bermuda lawn, I imagine the bermuda experts may say the hybrid bermuda is a much higher quality lawn; it looks a lot better than a seeded bermua lawn, or so I'll guess that's what they'll say. I'm not an expert on bermuda though. I know zoysia much better since that's what I grow. Zoysia looks sooo good and it's much less work than bermuda. For example, you don't need to cut zoysia as low or as often as bermuda to keep zoysia looking good. You can even cut zoysia as high as 2 inches, just once a week, or even less frequently in times of drought. During this last drought, I only needed to cut my zoysia after 5 weeks! Zoysia doesn't grow vertically as fast as bermuda. Bermuda grows tall like a weed :-)

The depth of burial must consider such factors as frost depth and prevailing geological conditions. In my region the frost depth is 30" and all lines must be a minimum of 6" below frost depth therefore our minimum depth is 36" and maximum is 48". In regards to pumping, i fail to see why so many people insist on annually pumping a septic tank. If the tank and leachfield are properly installed and functioning correctly the only time it should require pumping is when there is a buildup of non-digestible waste such as plastics which effects flow. In my region the need to pump septic tanks is so seldom that there is only one pumping truck in the county and it is currently for sale because of a lack of work. The septic tank at my mothers house was installed in 1965 and it has never been pumped.