Phil Stevens

Monsteraikonabi?

I think your theory of mutant cross pollination is very likely here. I get all kinds of weird brassicas popping up like cauliflower + purple sprouting broccoli, and my broadleaf mustard appears to either crossed with a purple cabbage or spontaneously thrown out a bronze-leafed strain (which is really nice to have so I've been saving seed from it).

I used to grow a lot of daikon in my cool-season garden in Tucson. When we had rainy winters, like a couple of years in the early '90s, they went nuts and the root grew as much up out of the ground as it did beneath the surface. I would harvest some that stood up to mid-thigh height when I pulled them and the tips were snapped off so I know there was still more in the ground.

I was going to ask about the gap, Gerry. Some builders talk about sticking cardboard in there. Good to know you're managing not to dribble too much in the void. I suppose you could suck it out with a shop vac and a really narrow nozzle attachment or use a bit of thin scrap to get the chunky bits. But I can't see a little bit of excess mortar causing a problem in there.

Peter Chauffeur wrote:This is not your typical build of the "mud and straw builds" that are ubiquitous on permies and I have a profound dislike of using thin gauge oil barrels as bells for the builds I see on this site.

I'm a big fan of horses for courses...deploying technology that is appropriate to the situation. In my case, I have a glasshouse I need to heat over the winter, but not every night. We only have freezing overnight temps about 20-25 times on average. So I built a 4" J-tube, "by the book" with cast burn tunnel, fireclay+perlite riser, a 30-gallon drum as the radiator (NOT a bell because there is no mass), and a cob bench with the flue piped through it. Materials costs were about $100 for castable refractory mix, fireclay and perlite. The drum was free from the local scrap metal dealer. The cob was free for the digging. I spent about a week or two building it, total labour around 12 hours.

It's been in service for 8 years now and I cut out the warped thin steel from the top of the drum and replaced it with a round piece of 5mm plate. Best griddle ever. I've rebuilt the burn tunnel with firebrick (the cast one disintegrated after three years) and replaced the heavy clay riser with a 5-minute one. So there was an additional material cost, maybe another hundred bucks, and about 3-4 hours to dismantle and rebuild the core. The drum is fine and gets a coating of linseed oil at the end of each season. It does exactly what it needs to do, which is to shed some of the extreme heat after the exhaust leaves the combustion zone, and enhance the system draft via the densification of the cooling and sinking gases. Temps on the cooking surface (did I mention what an awesome griddle this is?) approach 300 C. Readings on the side of the drum usually go from 180 down to 120 from top to bottom. This is not a bell. The thin metal is performing a function quite different from a mass of stone or brick.

The heat storage happens in the cob bench, which warms up to around 35-40 C during a burn and is a really nice place to sit on a cold, rainy night. Someday I might tear it down and replace it with a stratification chamber using barrels cut in half lengthwise, because cleaning out the pipe is not fun and there is a bit of ash in there that is hard to reach from the cleanout ports. But the basic design is performing brilliantly, and the humble RMH should give many more years of service with minor maintenance.

I've made lots of hot compost, and am no stranger to 75-degree piles, but I think it's overrated. The more a pile heats up, the more C and N you're losing to fast exothermic reactions, and more bad stuff is going into the atmosphere. I'm a fan of just throwing stuff in the bin and letting time, bacteria and fungi, insects and worms all do their thing.

I know some people like the autoclave effect and are big on cooking weeds, but even my best hot piles still had plenty of viable seeds at the end.

Willows here are often the first to go yellow and drop leaves. They happily take up lots of nutrients (see threads on willow feeders), so once it's got its legs under it I suspect it will appreciate the extra goodness from the chickens.

Kathleen, if parasites are an issue where you are (they're a massive problem here, to the point where the commercial sheep farmers are talking about Drenchageddon) you might want to try feeding biochar. Lots of studies and anecdotal stories out there saying that biochar will reduce or eliminate intestinal nematodes and also help with general health. My sheep like small pieces, like the size of whole grains, and screened to remove dust (makes them sneeze). I mix some sea salt minerals with it for some extra enticement, and they butt one another away from the trough when I give it to them.

On the browse topic, I feed lots of tree branches whenever the pasture growth slows down. I grow a lot of coppice willow for this purpose (as well as to produce feedstock to make more biochar -- stacking functions), and make tree hay in the summer with that and fruit tree prunings.

Don't despair. It's autumn where you are, right? The tree might be getting ready to drop its leaves and take a siesta. It might surprise you in the spring with a flush of new growth once it's established.

Mulch! Lots of it. Any kind, but lots of us are having success with wood chips.  And biochar! It holds 3-4 times its own weight in water.

I get rainfall through the growing season here, but it gets noticeably drier and in most years decent dumps are few and far between from about January to March (when the crops need it most). When I switched to no-dig methods and started using deep mulch and biochar, the need to water during the summer went way down and now it's only to get new plantings established, or if there's a really dry spell.

I was impressed by the way that once their water was sorted, the villages had the means to deal with other issues. Great initiative and it was a wonderful rabbit hole to go down the other evening.

To avoid the problem of leaks, how about filling with sand?