David Culver

I'm brand new to growing mushrooms. At this point I am just lining up supplies but haven't purchased them yet.
Where do you purchase spawn bags?
I don't want 1000 bags. I want a 0.2 micron filter on a 8 x 5 x 18 bag. I've looked at suppliers online and am not finding what I want. Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks.

I ground up 15 bags of leaves yesterday. It sucked in wet leaves easily. It was a success. I have a video of it in action but I couldn't include an mp4 here to show you.☹ Best wishes to you all.
David

I made a chamber that goes under my mower. I lower the mower deck down on it and I feed leaves into the chamber from the opposite side from the grass catcher.

The first iteration was made with cardboard and pink foam pieces. It sustained damage from bits of flying debris requiring a remake with plywood, lumber, and aluminum plate.

The concept was proven with the first iteration. That day the leaves were dry. They got sucked into the chamber easily. The latest collected leaves are wet and I haven't used the new chamber yet. I hope the wet leaves will still get sucked into the new chamber.

The pictures are of the first iteration plus one picture of the new version. The ground leaves end up in the grass catcher bags. It worked very well. I did 15 bags of leaves the first time I used it. Those ground leaves are in the metal screen thing in the picture.

I'm going to make leaf mould with the ground leaves. After learning about leaf mould, I dragged leaves out of a pile that wasn't really composting and mowed over them creating a wonderful rich dark material that is almost like soil. They say leaf mould only takes about 6 months to make. We will see.

My soil here is heavy to clay and rocks so my garden is in raised beds. I made two no-dig beds with those ground leaves from the pile. They had lots of worms and worked very well.

Thank you Glen for your input and suggestions.

I have the book "Rocket Mass Heaters" by Ianto Evans and I attended a workshop where we built a rocket mass heater for a greenhouse.

This was just a cook stove for an emergency. The clay I used was gray modeling clay I got at amazon.

I really appreciate your data about the relationships between different parts of the stove. I will study what you suggested and will think about changes needed.

Thanks to Permies and all of you who offer opinions and advice on such a wide range of subjects. I feel like I am home here. 🙂

Hi everyone.  I live in an all electric home. If the big one happens, cascadia subduction zone earthquake, I could be without power for a year or more. I tried making a rocket stove out of a 5 gal metal paint can but it didn't work well.

Then I remembered I had some spare metalbestos stove pipe up in the shop. Here is how it looked. It worked very well. The firebox piece I had welded up for a different project. The clay I used between the firebox and the stove pipe was not fire clay so it didn't last. I have some woodstove door gasket material for next time.

Thanks for all of the great posts you made to this thread.

Hi everyone.  I have lots of south facing windows and I finally completed window shades for most of them.

A few years ago I hung a long piece of shade fabric from my south overhang fascia, trying to keep more solar gain from getting into the house. It was a disaster and got blown down by the wind right away.

Now I have repurposed that fabric into individual window shades. The shades cover the entire surface of all but two lower windows. They block out some light but all of the upper windows are open and they allow lots of light, but no direct sun, into the interior rooms. The sun line is half way up the lower windows so we were getting lots of solar gain that we didn't want. These shades solved that problem. In October as the outdoor temperature drops I'll remove the shades and store them for next year.🙂

The shades for the openable windows are attached only at the top so I can hold them to one side to open the window. I have upper openable windows also so when they both are open that natural ventilation removes heat and lets in cool morning air. 🙂 Thanks for listening!