Gina Smith

DeeDee Stovel has a book called The Pumpkin Cookbook, I have it but haven't dug into it yet and so I can't tell you whether they are good or not, but it had good reviews on Goodreads.

The most interesting thing I found on goodreads was someone from Australia who was saying that there Pumpkin is an absolute staple and used in everything and therefore the recipes in this book were not revolutionary enough for her. So I wonder if our Australian friends have a wealth of recipes on their cooking sites?? Could be a good place to look.  Here's a few https://myfoodbook.com.au/search-recipes?search=pumpkin and https://www.allrecipes.com/search/results/?search=australian+pumpkin

I was reading that you can also feed pumpkins to cows and goats over the winter, so I think it's a great staple to grow instead of potatoes, although really you could do both in some zones.

Thank you both so much.  This design is so simple and elegant and relatively easy to build, I think I will try it.

Characteristics you are looking for in a seed-starting cabinet are high humidity, temperature regulation, especially at night, and enough space for your amount of trays.

A wooden box will need something to help with insulation and warping bc the high humidity is going to want to warp plywood and if it gets below optimum temps (even below freezing) where you are, the box needs to hold temps "in range."

An old refrigerator or upright freezer works fairly well for seed starting, you can put a crock pot at the bottom plugged into a temperature regulating switch outside of the (unplugged) refrigerator to keep the temps and humidity at your desired range.

The cabinet need not allow light in, necessarily; once seedlings emerge, pull them out for sun during the day, and protect from severe temperatures at night somehow but without coddling them. A sand table with electric coil under a row cover, inside a greenhouse, may be warm enough to leave the seedlings there at night in some areas but definitely it will be specific to your weather.

As the subject line says, this is a thread about everyone's solar dehydrator builds and their relative wonderfulness. A neighbor of mine built a plan he found on the internet that is ***similar*** to Missoula/Wheaton style (tall cabinet at the back, long sun slope at the front) and it didn't work that well for him, although the concept looks so nice. I am hoping it was the details of that plan that was the issue (he got his for free off the internet) OR hoping to find out I should maybe go with a different type of plan OR to find a specific plan to try.  

We have supposedly 210 days per year of sun here, which is above the average, but we have high humidity also. I don't know what specifically my neighbor's build had for design failures, he just said it didn't dry the food well. I am tooling around with a modification of the Missoula/Wheaton style that has maybe some kind of forced air, or a more vigorous heat sink to create more heat vortex air circulation, but I don't have the spoons to build multiple models and am not an engineer, so I thought maybe finding a plan someone loved could be a better option for me. Characteristics I am especially looking for are: a design that *doesn't* need to be repositioned often across the year (if that is even physics-possible,) could be modified to use glass instead of plexiglass, and could be built from wood instead of plywood.

If you love, hate, or meh your build, please let us know what you think. Thank you!!

It is possible you may run into a small issue over time using only one element (at a time.) They are designed to do half the tank, if that makes sense, so they will be working harder and may wear out faster. You could lay in a supply of replacements... and if you figured out some preheating system, that could take some load off. I am reading this thread with interest for my own use, I want this idea to be a thing! Thank you all for sharing.

for the tin can wasp houses, place these a bit away from where you will be working because as the season lengthens and they have more offspring in the houses, they will get more defensive, which can limit your access to your produce.  Any upside down tin can will work pretty well, they will use ones that are open or just a pop top if they can get in, and they dont normally blow off of the bamboo. They will also nest inside of cracked bamboo, which can be an unpleasant surprise if you aren't expecting it.  Both of these are mostly used by paper wasps, which do plenty of useful work and pollinating and ignore you unless you are near the babies.  

those are both great ideas and easy on the engineering muscle, thank you!

Thanks for responding!  

I have a few acres of pine saplings, that are about 3-6 inch diameter, I want to dry those and use them to make some tiny houses - something like this diameter. There will be a fair number of those but I may not be able to harvest them all at once anyway. I thought about stacking them in a check pattern so that they would dry faster.

The dimensional lumber, there are 16 pines at 70 ft tall, it's probably cheaper to do those all at once, so that is probably the main concern.

I am picturing this thing being something I can disassemble after using the lumber, and replace with something smaller (eg a little low tunnel) for drying bamboo on an ongoing basis.

Hello everyone,

I am wanting to design and build a place to dry wood that I am cutting at my place. Most of it is pine, but I think the theory is the same - I need a dry ventilated area. I can look into the shipping container idea on this other thread, Drying Sawn Lumber permies dot com but I was picturing something somehow less expensive than 3-6k,

I am basically asking if people can weigh in with design suggestions?

I have for one option a set of garage door tracks   not very good stock photo of garage door tracks (doesn't show the legs well)  and I thought perhaps to string them together with some 2x4 I have laying about, then put a billboard plastic on top of a corresponding size such as from this random example of a used billboard plastic reseller

I would love to keep cost to like 200-300 and have it be a project that doesn't need to have a year of planning and thought and cost ton of money, where I can dry bamboo, a lot of small pines I am clearing and want to do some experimental log buildings with, and some large pines after it is sawn into dimensional lumber for a tiny house.  


many thanks to anyone who can suggest some design ideas, they do NOT have to involve the materials I already have. I just haven't seen a plan for a place to dry lumber and I need to make one.

Cheers!