greg mosser

caveat: i haven’t used this sort of heater but i’ve lots of experience with all sorts of materials interacting with fire and heat.

if the bricks and pot are truly dry all the way through, it should be fine. the potential for danger is when there’s water hiding in there - water expanding quickly from heat can lead to the dreaded ‘blow-ups’. the pieces could be heated on a low heat in the oven for awhile to make sure they’re fully dry.

i stopped counting when i passed 50. nearly thirty pawpaws, 15 or so pears (mostly asian but a few euro), apples, persimmons (mostly topworked wild trees), mulberries, cornelian cherries…and a handful of other oddballs here and there. we’re on 5 acres (half of which is steep, heavily wooded, and north facing) in a long ditch in the north carolina mountains.

even if they don’t technically sprout, there may be enough in the way of chemical changes just from the pre-sprouting ‘malting’ period to make them more readily digestible. worth some smaller-scale experimenting, anyway!

the bricks don’t have to be that warm to get a decent amount of evaporation from a vessel on top. not as much as something on a hot wood stove, but maybe enough to move the needle on your dry-air throat stuff.

going back to nancy’s buckwheat, i’ve grown two accessions of perennial buckwheat, including F. dibotrys, and that looks reeeeally similar. maybe you did move some…

that one’s definitely a chenopodium. in my area i’d call it lambsquarter, Chenopodium album. less sure of species for your area…

it’s available! i have a decent amount (10+ lbs) of pin oak flour right now, with a bunch of southern red oak that will be starting to leach next week, and eventually white oak (probably in february) too.

please direct any requests or shipping questions to me via pm, if possible!

it’s really quite rare that avian flu jumps from birds to humans in the first place. that you are using any PPE at all probably makes you pretty darn safe, in my opinion. only you know what will assuage the particular fears that you have, but keeping homestead chickens is not at all a serious risk in my book. and my mom was a virologist.

yep, i’d second a buckwheat of some sort.

you may be right! to my eye, there aren’t strong enough horizontal ‘dotted lines’ to be a prunus, and they will frequently have clearly darker heartwood, which i’m not seeing in the pics. in my area, sweet birch could also look like that without different colored heartwood, but they’re not native, so probably not common in ireland.