Ravnor Chanur

There ought to be some well-established mass/age curves out there somewhere for common species. This is a big deal in the pulpwood and chipwood industry. I don't know where you would look, though - maybe university forestry extensions and USDA Forest Service research stations in your area would have the information, or know where to look.

Asbestos is really only hazardous when it's airborne. I think the safest thing you could do is to cover it to a sufficient depth that it won't be accidentally exposed in the future by you or the chickens, and them avoid unnecessary digging (i.e. no root crops) that might stir it up. The fibres are too large to be taken up by plants.

Elementally, asbestos is silica, magnesuim, and oxygen, all common elements in the soil, and it won't form any chemically harmful breakdown products.

If the disks were treated with other chemicals, that might pose other problems.

I usually toss the coffee grounds out the back door when I'm done with a pot. The dog will run over sniff them if he sees my throw them. He's never shown any interest further in them, but I only put out a pot's worth at a time and I don't mix them with other things he might consider food.

If you have food scraps or good smelly compost mixed with the coffee grounds, she might be more likely to eat them.

There has been some interesting work recently on the relationship between wolves, coyote, and fox, for example:

http://www.cof.orst.edu/leopold/papers/Ripple_2013_BC.pdf
http://www.cof.orst.edu/leopold/papers/mesopredators.pdf

The theory is that wolves suppress coyote and coyote suppress fox, so the extirpation of wolves from much of north america led to an increase in coyote (and large game, which wolves hunt but coyotes do not) and a decrease in fox (increasingly harassed by coyotes) and some small/midsized game species. The pre-contact fox population, particularly in the western U.S., may have been much higher than it currently is.

Is the sinking trench a problem, either for you or for the shrubs? If the plants are doing well (e.g. not waterlogged or rotting at the base from being too wet), this seems like a lot of work for not much benefit.

I've successfully transplanted trees and shrubs after a year or two in the ground before, but there's always a loss of roots, particularly on plants with a long taproot, and it will slow their growth until they reestablish roots.

Water only flows one direction on it's own - downhill. If you want to have circulation in your system, you'll have to provide some external energy input to get the water back to the top so that it can flow down again, whether than energy input is in the form of an electric pump, a windmill, or standing beside the tank lifting buckets.

Thanks!

I looked briefly, and most of the literature seems to deal with industrial-scale incineration and smelting - I didn't find any good resources for what the health hazard would be on a small scale like that. Compared to emissions from everywhere else, it's probably pretty insignificant, as long as you don't stand in the smoke.

If you could burn at a high enough temperature, that would solve the problem as well.

Burning driftwood or wood treated with salts as preservatives can form dioxins.

http://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/driftwood-and-wood-stove.aspx#axzz3FzULIp9a
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dioxins_and_dioxin-like_compounds#Sources