Based on numbers like calories per acre, I'm a huge fan of leeks. I'm trying a particular sort here this winter: elephant "garlic". I already cook with it, and the cloves I planted a while back seem to have sprouted just fine.
I also have had good experiences with fava beans in my climate.
If I wanted to live off a small plot of land near my current location, I would try to spend the summers growing sorghum, mung beans (and/or black-eyed peas, soybeans, black beans), and squash together, and also grow sunflowers, nightshade crops, amaranth, sesame, and chia. Winters would see more production, because there's near zero precipitation over summer and no hard frost here: potatoes, fava beans, quinoa, and alliums all seem appropriate for winter growth here. Olives and nut trees would also be important, in the long term.
If I were really trying to subsist on a fixed plot, I would also keep rabbits or, if enough neighbors could participate, milk goats, plus a few laying fowl. The bulk of food calories produced this way would ultimately come from inedible plants, via either the stomach flora of ruminant or pseudo-ruminant digestion, or via detritovore species, and I would try to choose a number of layers that could be supported by available garden/kitchen waste and other undesirable food sources. At the limit of low supply of food, two quail would help a lot, for what they would require.
I'm not sure field corn would work that well here. Looking at rainfall & temperature, and assuming no irrigation, it looks like the best time to plant it would be toward the end of February. Rumor has it, that would be a complete disaster.
I've read that bitter lettuce (Lactuca virosa) has some of the same medicinal properties as opium, but without the legal issues. It grows like a weed in my part of the world.
I'm probably the person on this forum who mentions tree of heaven most often, partly because I see it everywhere, and partly because it is such a special plant. I knew it was useful as a source of herbicide, and to support a certain breed of silkworm, but I hadn't heard of its use in human medicine...I would treat such medicine with a lot of care and respect, to say the least.
Seems like an interesting book, but I would be inclined to take some of it with a grain of salt.
Scotia Scott wrote:Forests are the lungs of the Earth, you know.
I didn't know that...I had thought it was the oceans.
Anne, a blogger whose work I have enjoyed in the past, recently began a new blog. Her article there about the cultural context of medicine is not to be missed!
Using the story of two hypothetical people with heart trouble, who take different paths in health care, she illustrates how it is impossible to separate the practice of medicine from questions of values, even within the context of a supposedly uniform American culture.
She wrote these two stories to illustrate a much more general (I would say universal) point about the workings of medicine in context, which I think should be addressed any time we compare different modes of health care; particularly, she addresses herbal remedies and manufactured pharmaceuticals, both of which are topics she seems to have gained professional competence in.
What are your criteria for whether or not a health intervention "works" in your case?
P. S.: It might also be worth looking at her more-recent article on the barefoot doctors of China. It seems that experiment has a lot to say about how we might care for human health in the context of permaculture, with abundant examples of both "do"s and "don't"s. If only the Cultural Revolution had been more committed to openness and truth, there might be even more to learn from it.
It contains an endocannabinoid breakdown inhibitor. Endocanabinoids play an important role in coordinating the body's responses to food, pain, and information. Inhibiting the breakdown of these substances allows them to continue working in the body for longer than normal, and so subtly magnifies their effect.
Most people experience the effects of chocolate as enhancing and prolonging the satisfaction they get from eating well, but it's also common for people to use it in conjunction with exercise, to prolong the "runner's high".
I have a strong suspicion that it allows some of the body's signals regarding healing to stay more active, for longer, in association with its effect on pain. It's widely used to decrease the severity of scars, for example. It makes sense to try it on sunburn.
It just pries up one end of the hive, using a luggage scale and a pulley: the bees don't even move an inch as you use it.
This is still a decent amount of work. I would like to see a more automated system some day, that sits under the hive at all times and is powered by the PV cell and battery from a solar yard light. Ideally, the system would measure the hive's weight every five minutes or so. It could even be built to post updates to Twitter each day, with the weights and times that important events occurred on that day (maximum weight when all workers have returned, local weight minimum in the morning, time when maximum foraging is occurring...etc?).
Travis Philp wrote:Joel: Ugh, you've got me picturing climbing a big apple tree with hand pruners, cutting bud by bud...
Oh, no way did I mean that.
I was thinking more about using one's imagination and thumbnail on the youngest trees, to influence their final shape toward something that requires as little pruning as possible, then maybe using a hoe or similar to remove buds beyond reach, in a few special cases.
There might be more than two essentials to this field, but it would be interesting to hear some perspectives if anyone can think of a good two-item summary of Permaculture.
In an earlier discussion with John Michael Greer on his blog, he stated "one of the reasons I tend to be a bit wary about permaculture is that I have yet to hear a simple, clear, jargon- and promotion-free description of what permaculture, as a contemporary social movement, actually means." I have given up on this issue with him, specifically, but I do think this topic could help address similar concerns from other people.
So: if we assume, for the sake of discussion, that "for every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important,” what are the Two Things about permaculture?
stalk_of_fennel wrote: i did something like this recently.[/url]
Edit: what I had intended to say:
They might get more bugs to eat, and the manure and woodchips might become soil sooner, if they were rotated through several patches of deep bedding, and a detritovore population were allowed to build up in their absence.
I wonder how much of this is a question of management style, with a spectrum from coppicing to un-controled growth, and another spectrum from using a chainsaw to nipping things in the bud.
I only brought it up because I think it's important to guard against conditions where self-interested actions end up being globally harmful: while I, too, would say that exposing children to a debilitating disease unnecessarily to further one's own political career is evil, I think that makes it doubly important to distinguish anti-vaccination decisions founded in an informed decision or cold political calculation, from decisions founded in ignorance or superstition.
You seemed ready to lump all such decisions together, and I think dividing them offers a more productive path forward.
And like you mentioned, I'm also sure there are cases where vaccination is not worth the cost or risk, locally or globally.
You might consider building a very deep compost pile, perhaps including wood chips to allow for aeration, and intermittently breaking into it so that chickens can have fresh bugs to eat.
I would expect some epigenetic effects, but likely the most important effect would be in choosing a line of clones from among the many varieties available.
Breadfruit trees have been cultivated into quite a few varieties, so sex isn't entirely necessary for adapting plants to their environment, but I will stipulate that it makes things much, much more rapid.
Jonathan_Byron wrote:Essentially no one in the west is killed or crippled by polio any more, although it remains an issue in parts of the world where vaccination has not been carried out...The rational approach to vaccines and antibiotics is not whether we will use these tools, but when.
In the sense that an economist would use the term "rational," I might disagree. Some leaders find it worthwhile to maintain power over others by preventing the use of vaccines.
In Nigeria, for example, leaders have spread rumors that the substance being offered will not protect against Polio, but rather is intended to spread HIV or to cause infertility. Because the health of children is of no immediate benefit to current political leaders, and because international agencies have such a strong interest in the matter, this can be an excellent position from which to bargain.
For backpacking, it can actually be important to have a high fat content: More calories in a given pack weight/space, lower amount of human waste generated, and typically less packaging needed to prevent spoilage.
I've read that traditional-recipe pemmican is the best trail food. Equal parts dehydrated, lean meat, and rendered fat, thoroughly blended. No fruit etc. in the mix, or its shelf life goes down from years (reportedly decades, if grass fed) to weeks.
I like a trail mix made mostly of nuts, with chocolate chips, dry sweetened cranberries, and flake coconut helping to round out the flavor and nutritional profile.
Alegrias are excellent in many respects, if a little bulky: 7 parts popped amaranth seeds to 1 part honey, mixed thoroughly and pressed into bars. Press a few peanuts, raisins, etc. into the top if desired.
Traditional sourdough bread has a good shelf life; making a loaf with things like olives and sunflower seeds blended in might help boost the calorie content. California miners used to keep a pouch of sourdough starter tucked away in their clothing (hence the football mascot, "Sourdough Sam"), which seems like a sensible practice. A large batch of pancakes each day could provide two or three meals.
Seeds for sprouting might be a good thing to take along, especially for very long trips. They can manufacture nutrients, especially vitamin C, that do not keep well.
It might be worth looking to a different kingdom: mycelia can grow very quickly; I imagine there's a clever way to get a good mat of fungal fibers to hold the surface together, in parallel with the development of plant roots.
Here in Northern California, there's an excellent local variety of giant sedge, that was traditionally used for thatching and boatbuilding. Even seaworthy boats can be built from it, if they have a willow frame; vessels are strong enough for use within the SF bay and delta when made with just stems and twine.
It's called the tule, and parts of it are edible. The variety with a triangular cross-section is reportedly better for use as thatch.
Now that you mention reeds, but I bet tule would make a good roof for a modern house, as well as making a good structure in the traditional way.
Pam wrote: Joel: has mustard flour been used in this sort of way before? I tried to look it up but couldn't get past a trillion food related sites.
I'm not aware of it having been used in exactly this way.
Allyl isothiocyanate (volatile oil of mustard) is the reason that most recipes of mustard sauce never spoil, and also seems to play a major role in the use of mustard as a traditional medicine. Mustard powder contains a two-part mix (kept separate in whole seeds) that releases this chemical when wet.
I had seen passing mention of sticky rice mortar, and at your suggestion, I looked it up. It works much differently: the sticky rice is a minor additive in the wet masonry, and seems to function by altering the way that the mortar cures. It interferes with the growth of largest crystals in the mortar, resulting in a cured mortar made of smaller crystals of calcium carbonate. These small crystals improve toughness, for the same reason that flint is tougher than rock crystal.
Willow NyteEyes wrote: 1. Is pee sterile? for example, would putting it directly into the soil that grows food create a germ loop? 2. Does all types of composting kill/remove dangerous pathogens from poop? including vermicomposting? 3. Will non-plant/non-animal substances be composted or ignored and passed into the plants? (Alchohol, parafin wax, plastic wrap?) 4. Are (vegitarian/aerobic) compost piles stinky like rotting veggies in the trash or does that indicate an imbalance/problem?
1. Chances of a germ loop strike me as low to zero. Urine has some of the same negative effects on soil health as purified chemical fertilizer, though (kidneys do a lot of the same purification a factory might do), and so it's important to take steps to maintain high organic matter content if using urine. That is to say, almost all the carbon in urine itself, and some of the existing carbon in soil, will evaporate as microbes break the urine down into a form plants can use. Composting urine (using a straw bale as a urinal, for example) solves this problem.
2. To some extent, yes, but the pasteurization that occurs in thermophilic composting is much more effective, more rapid, and more broad-spectrum. I think it's wise to carry out thermophilic composting, and then allow detritovores and other living things to complete the destruction of any pathogens while the compost mellows. I'm not sure I'd trust worm castings, from worms fed a diet of human waste, to be free of pathogens: I'd try not to eat root crops grown with them, and to avoid walking barefoot over soil fertilized with them.
3. Paraffin and iron can be expected to compost completely, as long as they aren't too thick and the rest of the material present can keep them moist. Go easy on the zinc and copper, unless you know your soil lacks these, but soil can handle nearly unlimited chrome without causing a danger to plant or human health; it might be annoying to have little flakes of chrome in your soil, and "hard chrome" includes nickel and copper, which might be best to avoid, but the little chrome-plated steel staples in teabags are entirely fine. Most synthetic organic chemicals that don't include Cl or F can be composted if they are dilute enough. Very few plastics are compostable, and in my opinion it only makes sense to choose such plastics for things like the waterproof lining of a paper coffee cup, where composting already makes sense to do. Plastic wrap won't compost.
4. Putrid smells are a sure sign of compost going wrong. Each smell means something different: alcoholic or fruity smells mean too much starch or simple sugar, ammonia is a sign of too little carbon, and hydrogen sulfide (rotten egg smell) is a sign of too little air. Wood shavings, straw, or coarsely-ground charcoal would fix any of these three problems, but it's possible that what you have on hand to compost with would fix one of these problems, but not the others. Sandy soil will help improve aeration, and sawdust will correct a C/N imbalance, for example, but sawdust tends to choke out air, and sand is essentially inert.
If the ground isn't frozen yet, it might be worthwhile to scatter a few berries of winter wheat, sparsely, in various parts of the pasture. Especially look for places where they won't be disturbed until late spring.
Silver hydrosol, aka colloidal silver, aka silver nanoparticles, has an important and limited place in the treatment of disease.
Heavy metals require care and informed thought. I would be slightly more willing to use silver-based medicine in my body, than lead-based pesticide on my garden, but I would give it the same sort of consideration: it seems like a measure to take only as a last resort, and definitely not frequently.
I believe that silver is not passed out of the body through mammary glands (or by any other mechanism), and so it might be appropriate for diary animals, but I would not advocate its use in meat animals.
Some people who have over-dosed over the course of their lifetime, have developed blue skin. This is somewhere between a full-body tattoo, and an exposed photographic emulsion. I suspect there are also less-superficial effects from high doses.
Walk wrote:this figure includes all of the high-frequency transistor switching noise that motors and transformers simply convert into heat and vibration ("hum").
Good news!
While you can't (cheaply) build an inductor with zero electrial resistivity, the impedance of an inductive load is not dissipative: it stores energy as a magnetic field, rather than releasing it as heat.
You're right that the hum is from magnetostriction of the core material, which dissipates energy, but that's mostly un-related. Smoothing out of high-frequency aspects of the AC by motors and transformers is, in large part, accomplished by very briefly storing energy as a magnetic field, and bleeding it back into the circuit as electric current a very short time later.
I think the quoted efficiency figures are pretty much correct.
There are a lot of ways this technology can go wrong. If they're placed somewhere that isn't very windy, they might consume more energy than they harvest. In some cases, the time to payback of their embodied energy is many times as long as they are expected to last.
I'm a little more positive on this technology than the tone of that article, though. I think it's important for people to learn, and some waste always occurs in the process of education, research, and development. Simpler, more-robust, less energy-intensive, more localized, and less condition-sensitive designs will result from a broad-based deployment of small and medium wind turbines, and it makes a lot of sense for tinkerers to begin with small designs.
Wind turbines can also be useful to charge batteries off the grid, in which case even a failure to pay back embodied energy is OK, as long as it is better than hauling generator fuel to the site.
The "sand" they sell for ashtrays is silicon carbide, which has extremely high thermal conductivity.
It will chew through fabric faster than ordinary sand would, if used as a cushion, because it's so sharp and hard, but it still might be worth considering.
For the summer, I could imagine hooking up the exhaust of your RMH to a solar chimney, and the intake to the basement or some other source of cooler air. On clear nights, that same solar chimney will radiate heat out very quickly, and air will flow backward through the system, chilling it a little extra before dawn.
I think the options are to find somewhere far enough from a healthy economy that you can afford the land, or to work on land that you don't own.
Santa Barbara might be progressive enough to be interested in doing interesting things with their public land. Similarly, there might be someone with a lot of land and money, who wants to become self-sufficient in case TSHTF.
Land ownership seems like a harsh game to play, in an expensive area.
There's the option of seed germinating while you're still digging.
Steve Solomon has developed a homebrew hydroseeding method, where seeds are sprouted in trays, and just as they begin to germinate, they're gently mixed into some gruel, and applied using a plastic bag with the corner snipped off (essentially, a pastry bag).
The starch from this method will also add some degree of early erosion-resistance.
I can't rely on frost to kill much of anything in my climate.
Might I recommend amaranth as a seed-mat-former? I've noticed it's also quick to germinate. I've read good things about millet in that regard, too, but don't have much experience with it.
NB Permie wrote:[corn growing] would only be on a small scale, as I don't have enough land cleared for the amount of corn these pigs would eat.
How well do you suppose wheat would do, sown in a section of pasture the pigs have just been removed from? I've read that it's competitive enough to produce fairly well even with some weed pressure, and I suppose you could time it such that the pigs could self-harvest during the "dough" stage of kernel development if they don't enjoy the dry stuff.
For layer #4, collect some standing-dead wild mustard, thresh it, and mill the seeds into a flour, which is then (carefully! it can blind you) dusted between the layers of newspaper.
Then, if the newspaper does happen to get wet, it is immediately treated with a strong antimicrobial agent. Also, the thickening properties of the ground up seeds will help it to seal together into an impermeable layer.
The mustard powder will also tend to keep larger things, like insects, out of the paper.
By the way, wild mustard tends to be stronger than the tame stuff.
from the 1906 edition of Dudley Leavitt’s Farmer's Almanac:
Profitable Feed For Swine
An Aroostook county, Maine, farmer, who has great success with hogs, writes a farm paper as to his system of feeding. He says: "I raise peas, buckwheat and turnips for my hogs. I boil the turnips and peas together and mix the buckwheat with them. A few raw pumpkins are cut and fed each day in addition to the grain ration. I never had hogs do better than on this class of feed."
The permie way might be to let the animals harvest and eat whole plants, rather than processing the feed. Buckwheat, especially, seems like it would have a lot of nutrition still in the stem and leaves, as the first seeds are beginning to drop.
I've read that turnips, pumpkins, and winter squash store well in a clamp over the winter. I think hogs would be happy to open up the clamp on your behalf, if there's some elegant way of controlling their access to it.
A distinct sort of keyhole bed, especially suited to desert conditions, has a compost pile in the center. This conserves moisture and nutrients, and saves a lot on hauling.
I think we've strayed a little, but demographics and economic trends are probably relevant to the topic.
Potentially, hyperinflation could make us all "millionaires," but the spirit of the thread is to use "millionaire" in the sense of having much more wealth than a typical person. Trends in typical people, and in the growth or decay of wealth in general, are pretty salient to that point.
Jonathan_Byron wrote:I have seen some permaculture designs for small waterways that are made of ceramic or concrete - it makes use of sine wave flow, and the channel alternatively narrows and widens. These design elements increase turbulence and friction in the stream channel, which reduce the energy.
It sounds like you mean flowforms. This is an anthroposophic design, not necessarily a permaculture one. Probably useful in a wide range of circumstances, though.
May I recommend putting the straw or leaves on top of the manure? If the manure is a little "hot", excess nitrogen will be used to break the leaves down into humus, but if not, the nitrogen will go into soil. This buys you some leeway in the amount of fertility you apply.
If there is nitrogen-poor material on the soil surface, it will draw fertility from the soil until it is decomposed; nitrogen-rich materials on the surface can release ammonia and other foul-smelling substances.
I think having chickens living above the soil, intermittently, would give you much of the same benefit you would get by applying compost tea. It may be worthwhile scheduling the placement of chickens in a particular area and the application of mulch to give detritovores have a chance to do their work for a few weeks, before they're scratched up and eaten. Mulching a manure-covered area with leaves should allow the worm (etc.) population to explode, and chickens will be happy to turn over the leaves or straw once they're allowed back in that section.
NB Permie wrote:We were winging it, really...It was touch and go for about 3 days, where he just laid on his side in the same spot, and didn't move. We fed him with a water bottle every 2 hrs or so, and somehow he bounced back.
So glad he made it through that time! And I didn't mean to sound as critical as I did.
I just read that turnips, peas, and buckwheat can be a nearly complete diet for pigs.
