jo blick

John F Dean wrote:Hi Jo,

We have a commercial composting toilet.  We have always mixed in diatomaceous earth and have never had an insect issue.

Hello John thanks so much for the tip.

I read in the humanure handbook
https://weblife.org/images/humanure/chapter8_2.html
that "kiln dried sawdust" is too dry, and the poplar wood we have sourced ours from is very very dry. I think that's our issue so I've fetched a load of cedar sawdust and we'll be seeing how that goes.

I should know in a week

But the diachotamus earth sounds like a good store cupboard thing to keep handy if you have a dry toilet.

We've used cedar shavings for about five years now. It's worked very well for us and I recommend it.

The smell is wonderful
Hardly any odor in the toilet...we also have a black solar air chimney flue.

We have two outdoor compost areas both about 2m square.
Bins are 60litre, and we have a urine diversion funnel. Some of our urine gets poured into the humanure heap once it's outside

We swap between each compost area each year and we use the resulting compost after three years, just around trees.

We switched to Poplar shavings about a month ago, because of a supply issue, but suddenly we have lots of smell and an uncontrolled infestation of compost flies inside the bins before they're full.

We also have the same flies problem in our food compost bin, where there's the same sawdust in smaller quantities.

We're going back to cedar to check this is the issue

I'll try to remember to post results here.

Abraham Palma wrote:I have the same doubt.
We have a grass here called gramma grass which is very similar to bermuda grass, and experienced farmers hate it to the heart, and it's widely used in parks and gardens. Whenever farmers can, they remove it.

However, in the year I am learning, I have not weeded it once, only before I seeded my crops, I cleaned the spot first. So far, gramma has not been an issue to my crops (water and heat are).

My rule of thumb for now is this:
Is this weed touching the crop? Yes -->
    Is it of the same family than my crop (root vs root, herb vs herb)? Yes --> Chop at ground level.
    Is there already enough mulch?
      No --> Drop it as mulch.
      Yes --> To the compost bin.
The reason to use the compost bin is that the soil is very dry, so droped herbs don't become naturally humus, but instead they become dust. In the compost bin there's some humidity.

I also try to grow very intensively, so the bed leaves no room for weeds.

Maybe in the future I will learn how evil this grass is, but for now we haven't had an argument.

Hello😎 I'm new to permaculture so might be barking up the wrong weed, but I thought cropping and dropping or mulching with anything is more likely to conserve water because it prevents evaporation.

Even if the mulch material is dried out, it covers the underlying soil, shading the heat from reaching the water for longer.
Also even if the plant material appears to turn to dust, that dust will still contain more nutrition than the bare soil will.


I have a wire deer fence around my no-dig lasagne beds, which is impossible to strim for mulch, so I'm having to hand pull the grasses from it. It's a right royal pain in the posterior.
But the grasses are seeding all over my beds and over a metre talk in places. The other alternative is to remove the fence, strim and replace the fence.

My rule this year has been crop or pull and drop is seeds aren't present, otherwise pull and compost

I can't say I've identified any friendly weeds yet,  it all seems to be grass and bindweed. Oh yes, I leave the clover until it gets too big for it's boots. And dandelions are heavenly.

🥕🍅🌍⛈️

Interesting thread.
I'm a nearly 60 yr old working class woman.

My mother, and her friends who were so poor they had no shoes when the war broke out, were partly emancipated by washing machines, électricité, public and private transport and working plumbing.

I've had my fair share of limited resources, built my eco cabin lifestyle by having to exile to France because of the utter devastation that's called "the UK housing market".

It's backbreaking time consuming stuff, handwashing everything. My hubby thrived on it, for years but he's a smelly greasy biker who hardly ever washes anything and we have seperate bedrooms, so that's ok. He uses the machine fine.

There's no way I'm advocating handwashing everything... or ringing everything out, unless you need to lose weight, are able bodied, are jobless or so rich you don't have to work.
Even rudimentary hand operated washers and ringers are ultra time and labour consuming.

Anyway
I've solved it by buying a secondhand top loading machine €50 incl delivery) which luckily accepts a single low pressure hose...a 12volt pressure pump (€29..runs the shower too) and a homemade solar water collector. (€175...with in line 12v pump) we have solar PV for the pumps.

It's great.

We're in France.

Washes better than a laundromat launderette.
Uses 210/240volt from an investor. I run it on "cold" as the water is usually pre heated anyway.

We also run fridge, freezer and small appliances. Our PV is 1200w

Winter will be sparse when it's cloudy. So we have a 250w windmill...hand made from a car alternator built in the USA ❤️

Sandra Ellane wrote:Hi there,

I’ve been toying with ideas about bottle walls. There’s quite a few websites that have photos of various walls. (here’s a nice one: http://inspirationgreen.com/glassbottlewalls.html )

I’ve tried to find sites that discuss the properties of these walls- insulative properties, thermal mass, strength, R-values, yada yada and etc. This site comes the closest: http://www.greenhomebuilding.com/QandA/recycle/bottles.htm. ;

I know this is a pretty broad topic and could go in many directions, but I’d like to start a thread so others can offer input, perhaps sharing any experimental info you’ve done on your walls.

A thought that comes to mind: Most of the walls I’ve seen are built with the bottles laid perpendicular to the wall and the open end of the bottle facing inside the structure. It seems like this would eliminate the possibility of using those bottles as thermal mass/storage. Wouldn’t it better to close them?

Also thinking of using them in conjunction with a rocket mass heater or woodstove, but then I started thinking about how much heat the bottles can withstand. It’d be terrible if they shattered.

Just some things to tuck in the back of mind for mulling. Thanks for any input!

Sandra

I'm so glad you posted this question thanks

it's exactly what I've been looking for. I don't want to be spending lots of time cutting bottles I want to match bottles up with jars.
I think the finished result will be more more interesting and I like the idea of having a mix of bottles on their ends and on their sides.
lots to be reading tonight...

I'm making a window rather than a whole wall. it's set into a prefab concrete wall section.

I'm building my window frame and constructing the bottles and cob on a table first... then hoisting it into the wall afterwards...
... because it's winter and I need it for my living room so I want it ready to add, before I cut the hole in the wall.

which then made me think.. if it's successful, it might be a way of making a bit of money!

"ready-made bottle windows in frames"

we'll see how it looks if its good enough!👣

Howdy doodies😁

I've just fired up my first RMH build. (Chuffed to bits)

It's quite small - 8cm × 8cm.

So, I made a P-channel (using an old stove shovel) but it was quite a bit too deep and I fumbled the re-cutting of it badly. It was too loose. Grrr.
 I gave up on it and settled down to lunch.

In an earlier post I asked some growies "what's the best wood for burning in a rocket mass heater" - and a great growie called Peter helped me realise my bamboo is far from useless but perfect.
Fast growing.usefull for all sorts of other stuff. Makes a fab windbreak and provides enough good food to keep  a pet panda.

https://permies.com/t/126398/permaculture-design/permaculture-projects/tree-feed-rocket-mass-heater

Anyway- I threw in a bit of hollow bamboo and "WHOOSH"...ITS A NATURAL P-CHANNEL.

So instead of taking space and fiddling about trying to make another one I shall simply add a whole round bamboo section for each burn load. Job done.

Oh joy oh joy. I love this community.

allen lumley wrote:High all : So I've been talking to a gentleman in So.east Asia who wanted to burn plastics for the energy. I believe I have talked him into investigating
into running it through a gasifier system to reclaim the original petrochemicals! Now my question, and I am playing Devils Advocate here, due to the
omnipresent waste stream everywhere in these locations with no end in sight, would it be wrong to call such an operation sustainable ! ? !

For the good of the Craft ! be safe, keep warm !  PYRO Logically Big Al ! - As always,your comments and questions are solicited and welcome ! A. L.

If you search out some of the results of what waste professionals call the waste heirarchy, you can see that ENERGY RECOVERY as an aim is itself very low on the priority scale or could also be called a by-product.

The order of priority has always been and probably always will remain(because of the laws of physics)
•1.REDUCE
•2.REUSE
•3.RECYCLE

Energy recovery itself only becomes sustainable when it fits into that heirachy.
If your contact has the goal to encourage a system based purely on energy recovery he will definitely be swimming against the tide needed to create sustainable development.

In other words it's not what you do it's the way that you do it

To clarify, I mean that if he encourages the maximum possible reduction,reuse and recycling AS FIRST PRIORITIES, Then,and only then, does energy recovery from the residue become part of a sustainable waste system

I bought some fireclay from the UK in the end...I was on holiday so it wasn't off my travel route.
not being able to source anything nearby in France it seemed like the best option

It seems a bit unusual not to find any clay at all in the soil but I'm not much of a soil expert so I assume there's no point keeping looking. I live right by a river just next to two sand quarries. So I guess it makes sense.

it was £14 for 25kg from Bath Potters supplies which turns out to be not in Bath but in Mid Sommer Norton


The shop was great. They were very helpful.

https://www.bathpotters.co.uk/fireclay-dried-amp-pulverised/p5968

I didn't spot Inspector Barnaby.🤪🤩

Sebastian Köln wrote:I have seen plenty of willows growing in the deposited sand next to the river here. Alder seems to prefer a bit more clay. (The willow does not appear to like the clay soil here.) Also some thorny shrubs/trees with some kind of small black fruit… but they are probably quite hard on any tool to cut them.

Hello Sebastian are you nearby?