Bert Bates

R Scott wrote:Depends on where you are. Some states mandate pressure balancing or temperature regulating fixtures for anti scalding safety so that is all the PLUMBER can install, and probably the only thing you can buy locally. You could order a simple valve and DIY the install. You may be able to replace just the valve body inside the fixture with an old style one depending on the brand.

There are ways you can connect the lines to an air compressor to blow them out.  You also could remove the valve body to let air in to make your drains work like you hoped.  

It is not easy to build a frost tolerant plumbing system these days, the code has basically said that should never happen and doesn’t leave a way to deal with old houses where it does.

That's a great bit of info, thanks. Indeed, Washington does mandate temp. regulating fixtures, sigh.

I have a "cold" bathroom. When the weather gets too cold I need to be able to drain the water out of the pipes in that room to avoid bursting.

I had burst pipes, and I asked the plumber to add shut off valves and drain valves so that I could drain those pipes when necessary. But when I go to drain the system, and open the drain valves, nothing comes out.

The plumber says it's because the new shower fixture they installed is "pressure balanced" and even when it's open it doesn't let air in, so there is a vacuum. His "fix" is for me to disassemble the fixture everytime I need to drain the system.

This doesn't seem right to me. It seems to me that there ought to be a different shower fixture that lets air in when open. And if that' true, that's the kind of fixture the plumber should have installed.

So the question is, do such fixture exist? I know that when I open the sink faucet, air is let in.

thanks!

Anne Miller wrote:I really like the suggestion to pee on the composting manure.

In the fall leaves are usually abundant on street curbs.

Tree trimming, garden chop and drop or any organic matter would help.

https://permies.com/t/5072/human-pee-horse-manure

We're fortunate that our horses are NEVER in stalls. They are always outside, unless it's too sunny, then they can choose to go in a shady shed. (As an aside, they don't go in the shed when it's cold or rainy or windy, only when it's sunny

So they pee wherever they want to. I could capture our household pee I guess, but honestly it would be the proverbial "drop in the bucket". My gut is that we'd need 100 times the pee to impact our big manure piles. Same with our household compost pile, it also would be a drop in the bucket.

Nina Surya wrote:What about clover? How is that for horses?
Or having dirt tracks, but then strips or islands of different herbs (people call them weeds!) between the tracks; nettles, cleavers, Robert's geranium (Geranium robertianum), plantain, dandelion, creeping buttercup etc etc.? My horse enjoys eating cleavers and dandelion and nibbles at the other mentioned species. Variety is key, and the horses could use the plants as their nature apothecary. So moving on the dirt tracks and nibbling from the islands?

That's a cool idea! My description of the tracks was a bit simplified. We do include what we call "turn-outs", i.e. places along the track that are wider. Those might be good places for the islands of herbs you mentioned.

Anne Miller wrote:Most dirt tracks that I have seen do not have anything growing so that the track can be maintained with a tractor.

These are raked daily to remove poop and debris that might blow onto the track.

If you wanted to plant grass the native grass called buffalograss would be good. Where I live it stays very short so would not be effected by the use of a tractor.  Whether it can have staying power due to horse running on it is questionable.

Agreed, most of the tracks I've seen are bare, i.e. no plants.

I was thinking that it might be more "permie-compatible" if there were plants to help fix / maintain the soil. But I'm gathering from your response, that you wouldn't be too worried about that?

Thanks!

Harold Skania wrote:I imagine that spring grass is super sweet for the same reason that maple trees run sweet sap at the end of winter. The plants are taking sugar out of their roots and pumping it up so that it can put out a lot of new growth. Would it be an option to simply keep the horses off most of the grass until it has grown to its summer length?

That's what we've been doing, but the downside is that they move less   For horses and humans "motion is lotion".

So ideally, we're trying to find a year-round way to keep them on their tracks.

We use very, very little bedding.

This is a continuation / amendment of a thread I started a week or two back. I hope this is in keeping with permies culture / conventions?

Things have evolved a bit since I started the last thread, so the newer summary is:

We need to create long, narrow tracks to keep our horses healthy. For the sake of discussion, let's say we're gonna create two, side by side tracks, each about 20 feet wide and 1000 feet long. So on the order of an acre total.

(As a recap, these long tracks are now seen as the best way to use an acre of land for horses. Much better than anything like a 210 x 210 foot square acre)

The current thinking is that these tracks should have nothing growing on them! So here's the challenge:

I'm trying to really embrace the permie worldview. So I'm not thrilled with creating an acre of bare dirt   Seems like I'll ultimately be destroying a lot of topsoil and so on?

One reason for the no-growth advice is that Spring grass can be dangerous for horses, I know, very weird. (And in fact, two of our horses are in distress because of too much sweet Spring grass  )

If humans could discover which plants might both protect the dirt, AND not get eaten by horses, we could build a better world for humans and horses. (As an aside, my wife creates popular, super-horse-friendly horse training videos. She has thousands of students and followers. So if we can cook up a solution, it could have a BIG impact around the world!)

Any thoughts, questions, brainstorming would be awesome!

Our horses generate a lot of manure

The other thing we have a lot of is "bad" hay. Hay that is somewhat disintegrated. We don't have much in the way of other materials. I guess we can add water

So with only those ingredients, what might a better approach be?  (I've tried making manure / disintegrated hay lasagna, so far the results are "meh")

I've had horses for years, and I've always made piles of their manure, turned them occasionally, and after a couple of years I have some very nice compost.

Now I'm reading Paul's "Backyard" book (it's great). The book has me questioning whether my approach is really eco-friendly or not. Something about releasing greenhouse gasses I think?

I've done a little experimenting layering cut pasture grass into the manure, seems okay but not earth shattering.

So any ideas? Can I do composting "better" ?