Heat from a row of stones for your sprouting fall crop...you are not only a smart cookie, you are very imaginative. Thanks for sharing your gifts with the rest of us. Never would have thought of something so simple.
Small animals like Garter snakes will appreciate those rocks, too. They love to use them for shelter and sun themselves on piles. Thank you for the update video! -Matt, Calgary
There are so so so many growing systems that could be happening that would provide food for people and be tolerable to people who hate to see farms in yards. Would be an interesting channel for someone to develop and share notes on. "How to trick the HOA into allowing resilience"
There's a winter squash variety you might want to try out called Jarrhadale, I'm bringing it to your attention because of it's exceptional shelf-life. Apparently it has a storage life of up to 2 years which is multiple times longer than any other variety of winter squash I'm aware of (food security).
That is interesting for food security, thank you! I do plant spaghetti squash every year because it keeps well (at room temperature) from September to May-Jun next year yet we do have lots of fresh vegetables and fruits all year round (MX) although their price is increasing and the quality of own grown veg/fruits has not comparison with the comercial grown ones.
Seminole squash (heirloom Native American variety) is purported to have a 2 year storage life as well. Both my mother and I grew it this year for the first time, so we shall see. It was vigorous and is supposed to taste great as well!
Looks great Sean, I have found that using leaves as mulch and then aged mostly rotted hay alternating years in my permanent tomato rows has worked beyond awesome........huge worms underneath and each year my tomatoes are larger and more tolerant to drought this morning I picked several 1 lb. Tomatoes and my San marzanos are1-1/2 diameter and 4 inches long this year...plants are just loaded.
That is so wonderful to read. SO reassuring that focusing on the core important work of healing soil directly translates into amazing crops. We see it all the time and it is just so nice how much nature shares.
I stand before you humbled, I thought I had a lot of rocks but I've never seen that many stones in a garden which looks wonderful! Thanks for sharing !
It is nice that you donate the potatoes surplus. I do exchange or give away some of my produce. A friend had lots of early tomatoes, so I got quite some from them and I get lots of strawberries from other friend. I gave them boxes of pears because my tree is huge (it was already in the plot that I bought) I gave them also, green beans, cabbage, tender zapallo (squash used like zucchini), etc..and I will share with them my tomatoes in a couple of weeks.
They really are. So subjective... The Hickory babies are growing in under the massive arching leaves of kale (for now) and the chestnuts provide shelter for the tiny beets. It all change over time!
You might want to look into 'Bigger better butternut' It is an open pollinated, short season, storage moschata squash. It was bred by Carol Deppe in the pacific northwest for less sunny, shorter season areas. It is very similar to Waltham, except it has a longer neck and matures much faster. It's a 60 day squash that keeps setting female flowers. So my vines which were direct seeded in mid July have fruits that are almost ready to pick.
I always used a fork for harvesting potatoes. (I gardened on clay so I tended to use a fork rather than a shovel for most tasks but there were actually forks designed to harvest potatoes.)
You guys are aways pushing the boundaries. We get alot of inspiration from your vids. I reckon we will also be inspired to do a sauna cross dehydrator that is wood fired. Sounds just perfect!
Living on the side of a granite mountain we have lots of stone, I’ve been lining my Swales with them as I take them out turning my Swales into granite edged raised beds I do occasionally steal them for other projects like continuing to build tiers on the sloped areas. Gravel, Stone and river clay are fantastic resources if your lucky enough to have them on your land. Great video.
Fantastic video as always. Love seeing what you folks are up to on the other side of the big pond! Our climates/seasons seem to be similar enough that everything tends to fall in around the same time. I also handpicked all of the last of my potatoes today and i am risking it with a quick heading brocolli raab i sowed in trays last month and planted out (quick style today straight after tatties were out, in the pouring rain💧💧💧to save me at least one job!)thats in the outside ring of the bed which will transition to garlic after the frosts come, gonna plant up some cabbage for spring in centre of the beds to see if the garlic will help to deter pests once everything kicks back into life in february/march. Seems like just last week i was commenting about harvesting half my garlic and being worried i had gone in too early! I hadn't, the wet weather and lack of any real heat meant most of the heads that were left had to be forceablably grabbed out from under the soil by hand and extra moisture in them means they are definitely not gonna store as well as my earlier harvest. I've already taken a note of the sudan grass to buy it for a nice wee cover/mulch/matter for next year and now just need to go out and beg some spoilt hay from the local farmers (using huge potatoes as their thankyou in return!) Much love to you and your family and friends as always, from soggy South Lanarkshire, Scotland 💙🙌✌🌎
Neat to know we are gardening in very far away places but with a lot of overlap in many ways! Hoping the Raab does the trick and sizes up perfectly for you :)
@@edibleacres it is cool to compare these things and i hope so too with the raab... my spidey sense says a warm autumn is in store (since summer passed without much sunshine!) hence chancing my luck! 🍀🍀🍀
Great update, thank you! I need to know how you manage to overcome slug pressure on certain crops. I'm farming in the same way as you - deep hay, potatoes, followed by garlic, then cover crop etc..., and it's working great, but I can NOT for the life of me get any beans, squash, or beet plants past seedling stage due to intense slug pressure. I'm dealing with voles and rabbits too, but the damage is manageable. It's the slugs. I've tried egg shells, diatomaceous earth, and coffee grounds. I've pulled back the mulch (their habitat) and they still find their way to the baby plants and consume them in a night. I've even tried transplanting bigger versions of these plants. Nothing seems to work. It's a lot of work just to feed slugs. You don't have ducks or chickens in the area and you're in the same type of surrounding vegetation as I am, so I'm curious about your experience with slugs. Perhaps you have better soil (it looks gorgeous), therefore giving your plants have a stronger defense/immune system than mine.
I hear you, that is frustrating for sure. In this field somehow the slug life is very very low so we are lucky so far. In our main garden we have pretty intense slug pressure and sometimes we can get crops to start and sometimes we lose a bunch... If we can use coarse woodchips near the beds in walkways as mulch and can be patient, a lot of time millipedes and other creatures of that type start living there and seem to really enjoy eating slug eggs... That seems helpful, and focusing on very rich compost and compost teas to support super healthy growth of plants goes quite a long way...
Great video, as always. However, lamb's quarters, although technically a weed, it is a nutritious and delicious leafy green and its roots will produce those precious roots exudates that will enrich your soil. (So, maybe you won't pull the next one you see?) :)
The 'weed' attribution is silly for sure, I get that, just a way to differentiate between what we're hoping to see grow and what shows up. We eat lambs quarters... We're steering the 'weed' population more towards the Golden Giant Amaranth since it is the same family and seems like it would love to live there, has very nourishing and edible leaves and also makes fantastically large crops of easy to process Amaranth seed that we love eating.
I was wondering if y'all could do a video about how you use acorns as a food/recipe if that's a substantial thing among all the wonderful nut harvests y'all access. There's a good crop of them coming on down here in Tennessee at the moment, and I have plans and schemes, but would love to hear about it (there's also all winter if you're understandably too busy now, they do store!)
Hi Sean. Do you have any experience with planting potatoes in fall with a deep mulch to overwinter alongside the garlic? I’m in 7a. Your content has been incredibly useful. Thanks so much.
@@adamsnyder7359 I saw a video by someone else in my zone and he had a good success rate but didn’t mention what variety of potato. I did get my hands on some seed potatoes off Amazon so figured I’d give it a shot and plant them at the same time as my garlic. Do you tend to have volunteers come in areas with a deep mulch or did it not matter?
@@AndYourLittleDog to be completely honest, the area I am remembering was horribly neglected year 1, very weedy and I had a hard time even finding the plants to dig potatoes. The next year I didn't touch the area, it went into early succession weeds and thistle, but toward the end of the year I walked through and noticed a few adirondack blue potato volunteer plants struggling through the mess. Each maybe had 2-3 medium potatoes. But they had survived 100% neglect and severe competition.
The Back to Eden guy plants the biggest potato from each plant back into the harvest hole on the day he harvests his potatoes. It's not unheard of and definitely worth experimenting with.
@@adamsnyder7359 thanks! I’m going to try it by my compost pile, which is currently passive and unmodulated with winecap spawn. Probably best go do it before the spuds start to chit. Wish me luck.
A cheaper option to a well is a large cistern and a catchment area. Look into what the ancients did. They built giant cisterns out of stones and natural plasters. The catchment area could be compacted clay earth up slope from the cistern.
Hey Sean, Can you plant currant cuttings in the fall? I ordered some from you and can’t find any info from you or the rest of the internet about sticking them in the ground in fall. Most info is about doing it in the late winter/spring.
100% you can. At the end of this video specifically I pan over beds of both currant and elderberry cuttings... Every single one of those was put in very very late fall of 2021. In fact, all of the smaller cuttings in the video were from cuttings left over after shipping. They were the 'throw aways' we skipped when sending cuttings to people!!! So... Very late fall, as an afterthought, with very beat up and old cuttings still yielded around 80-90% thriving plants. We only send extremely viable and alive cuttings as early as we can so you should easily be able to get 90%+
We'll keep it in early succession for the most part here, since his preference is to see the fields going in rotations. If he was open to it this would already be flanked in trees on the edges :)
I have about 150 feet of on contour sheet mulch row, covered in deep hay cut from right there. They're anchored by a handful of established, out of control, fruit trees that are soon to be radically chopped back. I'm sowing favas in mid October,.as a winter cover crop, a small selection of currants, gooseberry and friends, this fall. And some kale, onions and garlic as human food in the gaps. I hope to clone native elderberry into the "outer" row along the road this spring, along with some corylus cornuta in propagation pots right now. That's an experiment. My hope is to leave the road facing row in dense local fruit and nut hedgerow. And then bias towards human food in the next row in. We shall see.
I read in a reputable cover crop article that sudangrass has allelopathic effects? Does anyone notice this at all? Was trying to plant peas next to them this fall so the peas could climb the dying stalks but not if the peas will suffer
For what it's worth, sunflower can be quite allelopathic as well but the most successful multi planting i have seen of it was in very diverse mixes. I have theories on why this works that I won't bore you with but I do think the more diverse you can make the planting, the better it will do.
@@lisaalbarras3029 yeah.. . there are several issues with working under power line right-of-ways. Including that if they need to for any reason, they can and definitely will barge right in to work on the poles, lines, transformers, etc with zero regard for what you may have there. They do not care if you have a fence or garden or whatever there. You may own the land, but the power companies almost always have a legal right to access the lines and poles at any time. Check your deed for a right-of-way clause.
@@dogslobbergardens6606 Yes. They went around to try to get everyone to give them an easement of their entire yards here INCLUDING THE GROUND THE BUILDINGS were on. Most everyone did. We put up with a lot of abuse from the big corporations and the politicians they are in bed with - not to mention their fear mongering. We all need to wake up and realize that no human has a right to control and order another human around if they have done no harm and kept to themselves - including politicians who are human too. Government can't turn a wrong into a right yet it acts like it can every day. Voluntaryism results in real freedom. Instead of having money extorted from you to pay for your supposed "fair share" which goes to pay for wars and many things you might not want to support, imagine being able to choose and voluntarily support certain thngs and not others? Ancient and Medieval Ireland ran that way for some say 2000 years. All during that time there were no wars, no police and no prisons and everyone's needs were met.
Heat from a row of stones for your sprouting fall crop...you are not only a smart cookie, you are very imaginative. Thanks for sharing your gifts with the rest of us. Never would have thought of something so simple.
So important to have good relationships these days during the collapse
Small animals like Garter snakes will appreciate those rocks, too. They love to use them for shelter and sun themselves on piles. Thank you for the update video! -Matt, Calgary
I imagine some snakes enjoying these rocks and then hopefully hunting voles :)
@@edibleacres yes indeed, it's a wonderful thing when the animals keep each other in balance. 🙂
Not going to lie, that amaranth/squash combo looks amazing. A great choice for people in an HOA perhaps? It looks great!
There are so so so many growing systems that could be happening that would provide food for people and be tolerable to people who hate to see farms in yards. Would be an interesting channel for someone to develop and share notes on. "How to trick the HOA into allowing resilience"
There's a winter squash variety you might want to try out called Jarrhadale, I'm bringing it to your attention because of it's exceptional shelf-life. Apparently it has a storage life of up to 2 years which is multiple times longer than any other variety of winter squash I'm aware of (food security).
That is interesting for food security, thank you!
I do plant spaghetti squash every year because it keeps well (at room temperature) from September to May-Jun next year yet we do have lots of fresh vegetables and fruits all year round (MX) although their price is increasing and the quality of own grown veg/fruits has not comparison with the comercial grown ones.
Cherokee Tan pumpkin stores more than a year also. Quite tasty as a vegetable or in a dessert.
Seminole squash (heirloom Native American variety) is purported to have a 2 year storage life as well. Both my mother and I grew it this year for the first time, so we shall see. It was vigorous and is supposed to taste great as well!
Thank you all for the squash notes!
@@jamep1 I did check the Seminole squash out and it has a beautiful pulp color and a very convenient size (for me). I must give it a try. Thank you!
Looks great Sean, I have found that using leaves as mulch and then aged mostly rotted hay alternating years in my permanent tomato rows has worked beyond awesome........huge worms underneath and each year my tomatoes are larger and more tolerant to drought this morning I picked several 1 lb. Tomatoes and my San marzanos are1-1/2 diameter and 4 inches long this year...plants are just loaded.
That is so wonderful to read. SO reassuring that focusing on the core important work of healing soil directly translates into amazing crops. We see it all the time and it is just so nice how much nature shares.
I stand before you humbled, I thought I had a lot of rocks but I've never seen that many stones in a garden which looks wonderful! Thanks for sharing !
It is nice that you donate the potatoes surplus.
I do exchange or give away some of my produce. A friend had lots of early tomatoes, so I got quite some from them and I get lots of strawberries from other friend. I gave them boxes of pears because my tree is huge (it was already in the plot that I bought) I gave them also, green beans, cabbage, tender zapallo (squash used like zucchini), etc..and I will share with them my tomatoes in a couple of weeks.
So rewarding to have our respective abundances flow around to other people... Feels great to do
those chestnuts are an adorable little baby overstory!
They really are. So subjective... The Hickory babies are growing in under the massive arching leaves of kale (for now) and the chestnuts provide shelter for the tiny beets. It all change over time!
You might want to look into 'Bigger better butternut' It is an open pollinated, short season, storage moschata squash. It was bred by Carol Deppe in the pacific northwest for less sunny, shorter season areas. It is very similar to Waltham, except it has a longer neck and matures much faster. It's a 60 day squash that keeps setting female flowers. So my vines which were direct seeded in mid July have fruits that are almost ready to pick.
Really nice note here, thanks Daniel. I looked into them and they seem amazing. On the list to get for sure. Thanks for the heads up!
I’m so grateful for the time you take to teach us. Thank you.
Really happy to share with all you lovely folks :)
I always used a fork for harvesting potatoes. (I gardened on clay so I tended to use a fork rather than a shovel for most tasks but there were actually forks designed to harvest potatoes.)
So many people prefer a garden fork. We use a few different tools. For me, a shovel works very well but thats just me
Love the community ,sharing is caring💚💚💚🌱🌱🌱
Very inspirational! Really great to see how these relationships - both plant and neighbor - play out.
Thanks!
Thank you for this. What an inspiration these videos are. Create the surplus ….Share the surplus!
!
I look forward to the dehydrator/sauna posts!
Love the purple amaranth. So beautiful.
That type is entirely a 'weed' at this point... They show up in our compost and for the most part we're thrilled to let them do their thing!
@@edibleacres That is a beautiful weed.
You guys are aways pushing the boundaries. We get alot of inspiration from your vids. I reckon we will also be inspired to do a sauna cross dehydrator that is wood fired. Sounds just perfect!
Living on the side of a granite mountain we have lots of stone, I’ve been lining my Swales with them as I take them out turning my Swales into granite edged raised beds I do occasionally steal them for other projects like continuing to build tiers on the sloped areas. Gravel, Stone and river clay are fantastic resources if your lucky enough to have them on your land. Great video.
THey are amazing so long as you see them as a resource, so glad you do too!
Fantastic video as always. Love seeing what you folks are up to on the other side of the big pond! Our climates/seasons seem to be similar enough that everything tends to fall in around the same time. I also handpicked all of the last of my potatoes today and i am risking it with a quick heading brocolli raab i sowed in trays last month and planted out (quick style today straight after tatties were out, in the pouring rain💧💧💧to save me at least one job!)thats in the outside ring of the bed which will transition to garlic after the frosts come, gonna plant up some cabbage for spring in centre of the beds to see if the garlic will help to deter pests once everything kicks back into life in february/march. Seems like just last week i was commenting about harvesting half my garlic and being worried i had gone in too early! I hadn't, the wet weather and lack of any real heat meant most of the heads that were left had to be forceablably grabbed out from under the soil by hand and extra moisture in them means they are definitely not gonna store as well as my earlier harvest. I've already taken a note of the sudan grass to buy it for a nice wee cover/mulch/matter for next year and now just need to go out and beg some spoilt hay from the local farmers (using huge potatoes as their thankyou in return!)
Much love to you and your family and friends as always, from soggy South Lanarkshire, Scotland 💙🙌✌🌎
Neat to know we are gardening in very far away places but with a lot of overlap in many ways! Hoping the Raab does the trick and sizes up perfectly for you :)
@@edibleacres it is cool to compare these things and i hope so too with the raab... my spidey sense says a warm autumn is in store (since summer passed without much sunshine!) hence chancing my luck! 🍀🍀🍀
I'm reading The Good Life by the Nearings... they are always "harvesting" good stones for their buildings. :)
I should read that book, head so so many good things.
Very intersting video!!I need me some Sudan grass for chop n drop.
It is a very reasonable price for the seed and if you start some early summer you can easily save your own seed.
Great update, thank you! I need to know how you manage to overcome slug pressure on certain crops. I'm farming in the same way as you - deep hay, potatoes, followed by garlic, then cover crop etc..., and it's working great, but I can NOT for the life of me get any beans, squash, or beet plants past seedling stage due to intense slug pressure. I'm dealing with voles and rabbits too, but the damage is manageable. It's the slugs. I've tried egg shells, diatomaceous earth, and coffee grounds. I've pulled back the mulch (their habitat) and they still find their way to the baby plants and consume them in a night. I've even tried transplanting bigger versions of these plants. Nothing seems to work. It's a lot of work just to feed slugs. You don't have ducks or chickens in the area and you're in the same type of surrounding vegetation as I am, so I'm curious about your experience with slugs. Perhaps you have better soil (it looks gorgeous), therefore giving your plants have a stronger defense/immune system than mine.
This year I am overrun with slugs!!!! 😩
I hear you, that is frustrating for sure. In this field somehow the slug life is very very low so we are lucky so far. In our main garden we have pretty intense slug pressure and sometimes we can get crops to start and sometimes we lose a bunch... If we can use coarse woodchips near the beds in walkways as mulch and can be patient, a lot of time millipedes and other creatures of that type start living there and seem to really enjoy eating slug eggs... That seems helpful, and focusing on very rich compost and compost teas to support super healthy growth of plants goes quite a long way...
Great video, as always. However, lamb's quarters, although technically a weed, it is a nutritious and delicious leafy green and its roots will produce those precious roots exudates that will enrich your soil. (So, maybe you won't pull the next one you see?) :)
The 'weed' attribution is silly for sure, I get that, just a way to differentiate between what we're hoping to see grow and what shows up. We eat lambs quarters... We're steering the 'weed' population more towards the Golden Giant Amaranth since it is the same family and seems like it would love to live there, has very nourishing and edible leaves and also makes fantastically large crops of easy to process Amaranth seed that we love eating.
Very nice.
Awesome 👌
Beautiful. Inspiration.
Shout out to Darren!🙌🙌🙌
He's a really rad neighbor. We're lucky to have the connection.
I was wondering if y'all could do a video about how you use acorns as a food/recipe if that's a substantial thing among all the wonderful nut harvests y'all access. There's a good crop of them coming on down here in Tennessee at the moment, and I have plans and schemes, but would love to hear about it (there's also all winter if you're understandably too busy now, they do store!)
We have collected them before at scale but somehow always forget to work with them! ha! I bet there are some much better resources out there...
Looking great! keep it up
Thanks!
Hi Sean. Do you have any experience with planting potatoes in fall with a deep mulch to overwinter alongside the garlic? I’m in 7a.
Your content has been incredibly useful. Thanks so much.
I've had volunteer potato plants pop up the next year from missed spuds in zone 5b. Seems like there may be more variables with fall planting though.
@@adamsnyder7359 I saw a video by someone else in my zone and he had a good success rate but didn’t mention what variety of potato. I did get my hands on some seed potatoes off Amazon so figured I’d give it a shot and plant them at the same time as my garlic. Do you tend to have volunteers come in areas with a deep mulch or did it not matter?
@@AndYourLittleDog to be completely honest, the area I am remembering was horribly neglected year 1, very weedy and I had a hard time even finding the plants to dig potatoes. The next year I didn't touch the area, it went into early succession weeds and thistle, but toward the end of the year I walked through and noticed a few adirondack blue potato volunteer plants struggling through the mess. Each maybe had 2-3 medium potatoes. But they had survived 100% neglect and severe competition.
The Back to Eden guy plants the biggest potato from each plant back into the harvest hole on the day he harvests his potatoes. It's not unheard of and definitely worth experimenting with.
@@adamsnyder7359 thanks! I’m going to try it by my compost pile, which is currently passive and unmodulated with winecap spawn. Probably best go do it before the spuds start to chit. Wish me luck.
I need to move somewhere it rains. Out west you must have a natural spring or a well. I can’t afford either.
Hoping that happens for you.
A cheaper option to a well is a large cistern and a catchment area. Look into what the ancients did. They built giant cisterns out of stones and natural plasters. The catchment area could be compacted clay earth up slope from the cistern.
Hey Sean, Can you plant currant cuttings in the fall? I ordered some from you and can’t find any info from you or the rest of the internet about sticking them in the ground in fall. Most info is about doing it in the late winter/spring.
100% you can. At the end of this video specifically I pan over beds of both currant and elderberry cuttings... Every single one of those was put in very very late fall of 2021. In fact, all of the smaller cuttings in the video were from cuttings left over after shipping. They were the 'throw aways' we skipped when sending cuttings to people!!!
So... Very late fall, as an afterthought, with very beat up and old cuttings still yielded around 80-90% thriving plants. We only send extremely viable and alive cuttings as early as we can so you should easily be able to get 90%+
Awesome! Thanks for the response! Can’t wait to receive them and get them in the ground.
this is some early succession you got going on right here
We'll keep it in early succession for the most part here, since his preference is to see the fields going in rotations. If he was open to it this would already be flanked in trees on the edges :)
I have about 150 feet of on contour sheet mulch row, covered in deep hay cut from right there. They're anchored by a handful of established, out of control, fruit trees that are soon to be radically chopped back. I'm sowing favas in mid October,.as a winter cover crop, a small selection of currants, gooseberry and friends, this fall. And some kale, onions and garlic as human food in the gaps. I hope to clone native elderberry into the "outer" row along the road this spring, along with some corylus cornuta in propagation pots right now. That's an experiment. My hope is to leave the road facing row in dense local fruit and nut hedgerow. And then bias towards human food in the next row in. We shall see.
This all sounds super reasonable and thoughtful!
@@edibleacres thanks! Now just waiting on the rains. Hoping the fires stay away.
I read in a reputable cover crop article that sudangrass has allelopathic effects? Does anyone notice this at all? Was trying to plant peas next to them this fall so the peas could climb the dying stalks but not if the peas will suffer
For what it's worth, sunflower can be quite allelopathic as well but the most successful multi planting i have seen of it was in very diverse mixes. I have theories on why this works that I won't bore you with but I do think the more diverse you can make the planting, the better it will do.
I can't say I've seen reduced growth of plants nearby, but I never do any formal tracking of those things so I really can't say for sure.
@@argentvixen I like the subject so it wouldn’t be boring! Thanks
omg that soil is so dark looks like pure compost... want
It's a nice field we're lucky to be planting on
Those power lines will affect not only you but your plants as well, do some research and you will see why you got that land so cheap !
lol
@@kcrknp Ignorance is a cure for nothing !
where I live they spray under the lines very heavily about every three years.
@@lisaalbarras3029 yeah.. . there are several issues with working under power line right-of-ways. Including that if they need to for any reason, they can and definitely will barge right in to work on the poles, lines, transformers, etc with zero regard for what you may have there. They do not care if you have a fence or garden or whatever there.
You may own the land, but the power companies almost always have a legal right to access the lines and poles at any time. Check your deed for a right-of-way clause.
@@dogslobbergardens6606 Yes. They went around to try to get everyone to give them an easement of their entire yards here INCLUDING THE GROUND THE BUILDINGS were on. Most everyone did.
We put up with a lot of abuse from the big corporations and the politicians they are in bed with - not to mention their fear mongering.
We all need to wake up and realize that no human has a right to control and order another human around if they have done no harm and kept to themselves - including politicians who are human too. Government can't turn a wrong into a right yet it acts like it can every day.
Voluntaryism results in real freedom. Instead of having money extorted from you to pay for your supposed "fair share" which goes to pay for wars and many things you might not want to support, imagine being able to choose and voluntarily support certain thngs and not others? Ancient and Medieval Ireland ran that way for some say 2000 years. All during that time there were no wars, no police and no prisons and everyone's needs were met.