Judith Pi

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since Aug 21, 2019
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Biography
Off-grid woodland dweller since 1995 with an incurable case of OCD - Obsessive Creative Desire. Will have to make a to-do list for the next incarnation to finish it all.
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Pembrokeshire
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Recent posts by Judith Pi

Chris Kay wrote: A form of Caroxylic acid (Oxalic acid) can be found in Rhubarb



... and Japanese Knotweed
4 days ago
As for the corrugated polycarbonate someone said went brittle after about a year, maybe it was actually PVC or Perspex sold as polycarbonate, or the sheets were installed the wrong way up. PC is usually UV protected on one side only. My experience with non-PC corrugated sheets was that they were very brittle anyway, and didn't last long. I covered my porch well over 10 years ago with corrugated PC and it has lasted very well, even through some pretty stormy weather. One little recognized advantage of it is the fact that the corrugation actually makes the panels "elastic" if they are screwed down with slightly more spacing between the humps than recommended (I did every 5th hump on 3" standard corrugation). I've seen the sheets flex in strong winds as the elasticity dampened the force. The ends have been torn free once or twice, so that is where you might want to add some extra fixing or weigh it down in windy weather.
4 days ago
Another possibility for obtaining glass cheaply or possibly free, is from glazing companies - miss-cuts. Some years back I worked at a waste transfer facility near a village which had a glazing company cutting and making up double-glazed panels and single pane tempered glass door panels to customer specification. From what I understand, the tempering has to be done after the cutting, so there is no way to re-use panes for smaller panels if the glass is tempered or made into double glazed panels, and with made-to-measure panels they couldn't sell them easily for anything other than DIY jobs. They occasionally came to the facility with a trailer load of small off-cuts and broken bits and had to pay for disposal. I found out that they kept back some of the miss-cuts (measuring mistakes or customers changing their mind) to sell at pennies to the Pound at the workshop, or chuck when they ran out of space. At the time I was about to build my tiny house I got a load of the tempered door panels and double glazed panels for next to free. I  designed my house around the windows, which I've heard, other tiny house builders do as well, and DIY greenhouse builders too, of course.
4 days ago

Burra Maluca wrote:Photos and write up to follow when the results are in.


I look forward to the result. Try the tip with washers. If it works, you can hang them securely on a hook near the stove.
2 months ago

Burra Maluca wrote: We suspected it wouldn't work as well as on a gas flame as the funnel thing is designed to capture the gas flame and shoot the heat up into the oven and away from the bottom of the pan.


The oven works on a convection principle, and should work on the solid stove top if the hot air is allowed to rise and circulate. Try placing three coins or washers under the funnel part. I've read that it works with the Hajka camping oven. The Hajka is a new stove top oven similar in principle to your oven, the Omnia, Petromax and the Nonna, but without a hole going through the middle (it has a larger hole at the bottom and a deflecting plate above for the hot air to rise around the edge).
I wrote a post on my website about these camping ovens for a friend of mine. It is not linked from the rest of the website and still in draft form, and is also UK focused. As it was posted in May 2025, some of the information will be out of date. The Hajka I described was the version 2 kit. The current version 3 kit is slightly different. Lots of links for sources and videos, and still useful information. Apropos videos, I forgot to mention in the tips section on translating videos, that it relates to YouTube videos.
http://www.judyofthewoods.net/off/camping-ovens.html
2 months ago
Thanks for the book. Looks a great resource.

On that topic, there is also another way of consuming the protein of any leaves and grasses, as long as they are not toxic. That said, some sources say, with this method you can even eat the extract from toxic leaves, though I would not chance it. You make leafu, aka leaf curd, leaf protein or leaf concentrate. Extract the protein through juicing the leaves and then coagulating the protein part through dribbling the juice into either hot or acidic water where the protein will flocculate and can be filtered out with a fine mesh. A bit laborious, requires equipment and  a fairly large volume of leaves for a small amount of protein, but the raw material is plentiful, and the nutrient concentrated. You could consume the filtered mass as is, fresh, or press like cheese or tofu (hence "leafu"), maybe even dehydrate to keep longer. To give you an idea of output, I made some from about a laundry basket full of nettles (particularly high in protein) and got about a 1/2 to 1 cup of sloppy curd before pressing. It tasted very similar to cooked nettles, but with a less gritty texture. The flavor did make me think that more than just protein got into the mass, and it was still green, thus it convinced me to avoid toxic leaves. Not tried it on anything else to compare and evaluate. But with brambles exploding presently and in need of reducing, I might give it a go. Eat your problem.

Here is a free downloadable manual (first link on page) on how to make it in volume, but you could use a masticating juicer for smaller quantities as well, plus related links.

https://www.leafforlife.org/gen/download-docs.html
7 months ago

r ranson wrote:There are lots of other ways to have a low-water clean.  I think the Romans use to use olive oil and a scrappy stick.  Other cultures enjoy a sauna style.  Some scrub with rough towel and others sand.



I read the book "Walkabout", supposedly a true story, about a woman going walkabout in the Australian outback with aboriginals, very minimally clad. They came across a swarm of a certain type of fly and she was told to stand still for a cleaning. The swarm alighted on their bodies and ate all the dead skin, oils etc. The most bizarre cleaning I've ever come across. Not for the fainthearted, and you need the outback.
10 months ago
Nooooooooooooooo! Me falling down the rabbit hole...
10 months ago
art
I've come across a novel way to mow the lawn with guinea pigs. A smallholding near me is doing that with a paddock and movable runs similar to a chicken tractor. Can't remember their reason for it, but it could be done to keep the grass down. It might not work too well where there are guinea pig eating snakes, but worth a look. Maybe use extra mesh with small holes the snakes can't get through.

11 months ago
I love that sunflower fabric. Looks like a 1950s pattern. Talking of 1950s, the photo below shows what the top "pinking shears" would be used for. I suspect the bottom ones are for a similar edge decorating purpose. Very popular with scrapbooking.

Jojoba seems an appropriate ingredient to give the cloth a little more flexibility. Technically, jojoba is not an oil but a wax with a low melting point. Brilliant stuff and useful for many things. It has great lubricating qualities but doesn't go sticky like vegetable oils, and is useful for lubricating anything in contact with food, even skewers. But I also use it successfully on squeaky and/or stiff hinges. What I haven't tried yet, but think it will be successful, is using it as a substitute for things like almond oil in lip balms mixed with the beeswax, as it probably won't go rancid like oil does.

11 months ago