Rebecca Norman

Rebecca, have you ever done canning? It's really easy to can fruits that are acidic, because generally they only require water-bath processing, not pressure-canning. It's really easy to can juice or puree, and then they are shelf stable. Months later you can open one and add a little to water to flavor it.

The Humanure Handbook is an amazingly useful reference book for composting toilets, even if you are not using its bucket system.

The book recommends using sawdust that has been left to be damp and weather for at least a few months. Rougher things like wood chips or shavings leave gaps between them that small flies can climb through, whereas sawdust makes a tighter layer, but is still light and quickly decomposed.

I mix coffee grounds from a cafe with sacks of dry sawdust and water the sacks till damp. They heat up within a day, stay warm for a couple weeks, and then cool down. The resulting cover materials is a silvery grey weathered wood colored sawdust, pleasant smelling. Good stuff.

If peat moss is giving you flies, try fine sawdust. If it's too dry it rolls off and doesn't make a good seal, so it's better to have it predampened and preweathered.

I've ground various different dried fruits and vegetables in an Indian "Mixer-Grinder" which as far as I can tell is the same as what is called a blender (countertop blender) in the US. Indian ones usually have a choice of 3 different jars, all stainless steel, with slightly different blades. They are generally in the range of 1000 - 1400 W.

The key has always been to have the fruit or vegetable bone dry. If it's still got a little leatheryness to it, it won't grind to a powder, but if it's absolutely brittle dry, it will.

Powdered dried fruits like apricots and tomatoes run the risk of absorbing humidity from the air and then glomming into a big hard lump which is very hard to break up again.

Powdered apricots or apples can be sprinkled right onto buttered toast as an instant jam and are very delicious.

Powdered tomatoes are incredibly delicious, and form an instant puree or paste.

Powdered eggplant is sweet, unexpectedly so. But it's not super useful. I thought I'd use it to thicken things but somehow I never needed to.

Traditional thick rolled oats and instant oats are both whole grain and both rolled.

The difference is that instant or quick oats are steamed more before rolling, are rolled thinner, and are fragmented so they are ready quickly for the consumer. Even a soak in hot water is adequate. The traditional rolled oats are steamed to soften them for rolling, but not steamed enough to cook them, and of course they are not rolled as thin, and they don't flake apart as much.

I found this on wikipedia:

Rolled oats are a type of lightly processed whole-grain food. They are made from oat groats that have been dehusked and steamed, before being rolled into flat flakes under heavy rollers and then stabilized by being lightly toasted. Thick-rolled oats, or old-fashioned oats, usually remain unbroken during processing. Rolled whole oats, without further processing, can be cooked into a porridge and eaten as oatmeal; when the oats are rolled thinner and steam-cooked more in the factory, these thin-rolled oats often become fragmented but they will later absorb water much more easily and cook faster into a porridge; when processed this way are sometimes marketed as "quick" or "instant" oats.

M.K. Dorje Sr. wrote:Hmmm, I'm still perplexed as to what happened. I'm surprised that your kale plants get cabbage worms in the summer, those pests are usually only a problem here in Oregon on cabbages in late spring.  

Oof, I've gotten cabbage worms in any month of summer in two continents. Unpredictable and certainly not only springtime, for sure.

Susan Mené wrote:Does anyone have advice for garlic mustard?  I have an abundance.  When is the best time to harvest?  Can older plants, flowers, and/or seeds be used?

This year in the US I used garlic mustard, first time for me. I noticed it at the same time as I noticed nettles, June, so I used them together. Mostly, I made pesto of both of them along with olive oil and walnuts. Good stuff.

I tried to find out from the internet when is the best time to use it, and found wildly contradictory advice. Apparently at some stages it can have a fair bit of cyanide precursors (similar to what is in fruit pits), but weirdly, different sites said this is an issue in first year garlic mustard or in second year garlic mustard. I don't know. So I figured I won't eat huge volumes of it and any single time or on a single day.

My house in Ladakh, high in the Indian Himalayas, is heated by a seasonal attached greenhouse. It's UV resistant greenhouse plastic and I put it up in October and remove it in May (though I've gone into the previous or following months sometimes).

I love it.

I have greenery to enjoy in winter, a place to take my morning coffee and doodle around in the greenery. Winter greens like cilantro, dill,, lettuce, arugula, spinach, kale, parsley -- they don't mind freezing solid overnight and thawing in the day. Also flowers in winter -- one or another tazetta narcissus will bloom every month even Dec and Jan. Asparagus comes up in Feb -- only one little bed so it's not enough to take to the kitchen and cook, but I eat a raw spear every couple days in Feb and March when no other local vegetables are fresh, so it's inordinately exciting.

I've got grapes going blazes. I'm not sure if they'd survive and produce and ripen outside. I put some outside to test but they're not big yet. Anyway the ones in the greenhouse cast much needed shade in summer. They leaf out early because of the greenhouse, so I believe it helps. They produce a lot of grapes.

I start warm season veggies, first on a warm spot in the house in March or April, and after germination take them out to the greenhouse for the day, and back in for night. Then when the greenhouse doesn't seem to be dropping below freezing I leave them out.

I had a sink put in, in the greenhouse, a concrete platform kind of sink, so it works as a potting table, a place to wash carpets, etc. Indoor plumbing is a new thing there so we didn't think to put a shut off valve indoors, so the outdoor tap has frozen and cracked twice over the years, oops!

My experience with sawdust and shavings in simple composting toilets includes some of the following observations and learnings:

Shavings break down MUCH slower than finer sawdust, remaining somewhat intact after a urine-soaked year in a pile of poop. If you can get sawdust rather than shavings, you may find that you end up with compost after much less time and fewer steps of mixing, turning, and remixing.

When I mix used coffee grounds and sawdust (at least 4x sawdust to grounds), it heats up quickly and stays warm or hot for a few weeks, but then stalls at a grey sawdust stage. This seems ideal for cover material for our compost toilet.

I get sawdust in big woven plastic sacks, so I put an empty sack next to a full one, and transfer the sawdust over, layering/mixing in coffee grounds and occasional autumn leaves, removing junk that comes in the sawdust, and sprinkling water in gradually to get the sawdust all damp. The sawdust being hydrophobic is a bit of an issue, but after a few days it gets damp and the mix heats up. With slurry the moisture issue should be easy.

For your purpose, if you want finished compost, I think you might have good results mixing it a second time with more hops slurry and coffee grounds after the first round has cooled down. Especially if you are using shavings rather than sawdust, this might be necessary. You'll do a first round, learn and change your method, and eventually you'll have a lot of compost. Might take a couple years to get there, though, if you're using wood shavings.

I like spicy hot. I tend to prefer red chilli flavors better than green chilli flavors. In India, often a friend found the curry (made with dried red chilli) verging on too hot whereas I loved it, but they were nibbling on a little Indian green chilli on the side through the meal, that was too hot for me.

The capsaicin can irritate the urinary tract, so if you are recovering from, say, prostate problems or a UTI, you may find that eating spicy hot foods makes your problem worse.

Sorry, no creative suggestions, but I just want to add, that although my clothes are not predominantly synthetic, I did find that the washer lint I threw down the composting toilet did not decay and emerged after the two-year cycle intact, much the way coconut shells and intact mango pits did. I found lots of little gobs of blue-grey lint. This was lint from the lint trap in a washer, not a dryer. So I stopped throwing it in the compost.