Emilia Andersson

Brilliant, friendly permies. Thanks for the responses.
We also grew them for mulch (and shade), although rust-proofing trucks also sounds like a brilliant use.
I'll stop worrying and maybe try letting the collected seeds sprout with a bit of soil in the same bucket they're in now.
Happy December!

Hello!
We've allowed two ricin plants to flourish in our near-vertical gabion cage garden, mainly because they shade the terraces during our harsh winter. (Harsh in a different way - our Mexican mountaintop winter is dry with piercing sunshine in the day and cold nights). They're about 4 m tall and their branches spread out to an approx. 5 m diameter. Now we've learned that the seeds can be super toxic if chewed. Nobody in our household has shown any indication of picking and chewing the seeds so far, but who knows, visiting children etc. And the plants are ridiculously prolific, sprouting new clusters of seeds constantly.
Earlier we've cut down the seed clusters and left them in a bucket with lid to grow mold and, we hoped, eventually turn into useful compost because it's a lot of biomass. But we may need to get more proactive and maybe dispose of both the trees.
US websites seem to propose cutting down the entire plant in full hazmat gear, boiling the plants "in a large pot" (this makes me think the person who wrote the articles have no clue, because we're talking medium tree-sized plants), burying the soup three feet deep and double/bagging then disposing of the hazmat suit, the pot and the tools at your local hazardous waste treatment centre. HA!
Do you permies have more common-sense suggestions?
We live in a dense urban area so "burning the plants on a windless day well away from people and animals" is not an option.  
Apparently the ricin dissipates once the seeds germinate and sprout, so maybe letting them grow for a week and then murdering the seedlings would work?
Our roof terrace gets extremely hot with the abovementioned sun, might the seeds die broil and stop being toxic if left in black bags out there?

Appreciate ideas!
(P.S. getting the plants to stay dead will be another issue, they are ridiculously determined to live and sprout new leaves constantly in response to pruning.)

Pearl Sutton wrote:
Got the pallet on plastic by the fence (that's a heavy water flow area, had to put plastic all over and under it) and then started getting OCD and space folding it all. Failed to get a pic of the first layer, I used the little 2 foot sections of metal to fill the cracks, and made a stable base for the rest, then started stacking arcs.  

...see if this was me this is where I'd abandon the project and leave the trampoline parts for future archaeologists.

William Bronson wrote:
I'm going to suggest ribes, like currents and gooseberries and canes, like blackberries and raspberries.
They generally take of themselves, they are delicious and they are easy to propagate.

Hi Inez! I'm with William on this. I inherited my grandma's cottage in Finland and the 20 blackcurrant bushes were alive and kicking after years of neglect. They needed pruning and they like fertilizing (with your home-made mixes!) but even without extra care you get a delightful harvest. You have to spend a few days picking currants and then you have some fantastic eating options: jam! (my favourite) or if your parents don't want to spend time stripping the berries off their little stalks, you can make blackcurrant juice concentrate with a Nordic steam-juicer a.k.a. "Mehu-Maija". Redcurrants are tarter than black ones but they seem to be a bit hardier and also make delicious jam or juice (or pies, frozen berries, smoothies, muffins, dehydrated, jelly, etc). Gooseberries are super delicious too, a bit harder to pick because of the thorny branches.

If your parents want zero labour input you could plant species for non-humans... blossoming things for pollinators, birds, special bat habitat, sanctuary for threatened local species, soil construction???

Permies delivers... the way you (we!) all take time to think about other peoples' problems and post solutions in complete sentences just warms the heart. Special thanks to Phil Stevens who cross-referenced my compost query!
Interesting point about tradescantia thriving on being disturbed. It's a great pioneer plant, brilliant ground cover, it just covers everything else as well.
It does flower so I guess it is spiderplant, maybe I can make friends with it too (while maintaining limits!).
I feed my snails to the neighbour's chickens, haven't tried tradescantia... in case they miss out a piece it'll engulf their garden too... better not.
Looks like I'll be spending more time in the garden. Instead of boiling tradescantia cuttings (ripped-up fistfuls in reality) I'll try smashing them into a black plastic barrel and leaving them in the sun. I'll get more coffee chaff from our friend with the coffee roastery, maybe grounds as well, for the compost. Give the most fibrous compost a second go in the anaerobic barrel. Make a new potting mix from what we have to hand: compost, clay and sand, not brilliant but that's what we have in terms of "soil" and if you buy it in sacks off other people it turns up full of pine needles anyway and the sacks decompose into really pesky microplastics.
I don't mind pootling around the garden, but hauling large amounts of matter is a problem: I mostly cycle, usually with the four-year-old in the bike seat and keeping an eye on the dog so she doesn't leap in front of traffic. Hence carting coffee grounds, chaff, manure, leaf litter etc is an issue.  

Ooh, Marvin, tell me more about Ribes tolerance to juglone. I've planted a black walnut about ten m from my cherished blackcurrants.

Marvin Warren wrote:
I've sort of carved a niche out for myself as the local juglone expert, and in the process I've gained a lot of firsthand experience with our lovely native walnuts. Here's what I've personally tried  and witnessed so far that I haven't seen already listed:
...
-Ribes
sally considered 'permaculture plants', but they all have their uses, whether food, medicine, groundcover, early-season nectar, etc.
Also, where's this wiki? And in the original post, when you say sorrel, do you mean Rumex or Oxalis (or both)?

Linda

Oh dear, I planted two walnuts on my cottage in central Finland last year, specifically hoping to start a food forest! It's still just a sapling but definitely within 16 m (those 50 feet) from the mature blackcurrant orchard, potato patch and apricot. Sigh. Maybe the winter or the deer will have eaten them and solved my problem of whether to wait and see re. juglone damage, or just panic and destroy them while they're small.

I often use coffee grounds on gunky  or burned pans. I soak the pan, then add dishwashing liquid and the puck of spent coffee out of the espresso mocha, scrub. As a bonus the coffee plus gunk can be scooped straight into the compost.
Glad to hear vinegar and baking soda worked for you!

Hello! We are working on a minimum-effort agroecological garden around our house in Mexico: elevation 2200 m, soil clay plus building rubble, north-facing (good since climate change is heating up this place like crazy), no rain for 6 months then daily deluges in summer.
We could really use more compost but we have a bottleneck in brown matter: we don't have a lot of garden offcuts to mix in with the kitchen waste. However, the whole place is getting run over by a trailing tradescantia. I need to prune it aggressively or it grows over everything, but then I have a dilemma: how to kill this stuff in order to use it? Piled up in the heat and dry it keeps fresh and green. In a compost pile it starts growing happily with extra nutrients. In a sealed bucket, submerged in water, it seems to turn aquatic. I've got six square m of it under cardboard and thick black plastic to see if it'll die of the lack of light; it's been two months and I don't dare lift an edge thinking the five seconds of UV light will set it off again. I guess I could put it in a blender and make tradescantia sludge but, did I mention minimum effort?

How are people dealing with tradscantia? Oh, ours isn't the picturesque purple striped stuff, just bog-standard green.

More about our garden sitch in case anyone's interested or has tips: Our front garden is steep terraces held back by gabion cages. We're letting lots of "weed" trees grow temporarily to give shade and organic matter to the Japanese guava, magnolia and peaches that we want to nurture longterm. Rosemary, agaves and lavender grow bravely (and the tradescantia), everything else including nopales struggles. In winter/the dry season we irrigate with the dishwashing water.

16,800 posts on Compost, I gave up searching and did a new post, apologies...
We have been making compost for ten years but the resulting compost doesn't work well as a substrate. The harvested compost turns dry and hard and crumbly and our plants don't thrive in it. Help!
My hypotheses for what may be going wrong:
- Too much kitchen waste and not enough carbon - the compost is mostly kitchen waste that we "mulch" with either coffee chaff, sawdust or dry fallen and partly decomposed cypress needles. We don't have a huge amount of garden waste to add, most of our garden is covered in tradescantia which is unkillable and I don't want to give it new cushy homes in the compost.
- Too acidic: my husband decided that the compost needs a pre-digestion stage and we now start the compost in an airtight barrel, where it pretty much ferments. Weirdly, this sometimes seems to preserve the waste rather than breaking it down, like a giant mango peels and carrot tops kimchi. When the barrel is full we turn it out into the aerated compost bin, and it stinks (sour, not putrid) for a couple of days.
- Too acidic from those cypress needles: the compost bins are under a big cypress that drops plenty of needles all around. Many of those are decomposed and I often grab a handful of them for covering up the kitchen waste. But might they still be "active" and allelopathic, like pine needles?
- We have lots of earthworms, both pink "Californian" ones and grey, vigorous native ones (living in southeastern Mexico). Can the earthworms have eaten all the nutrients?
I just emptied out a second-stage compost (the areated bin where the fermented stuff had already broken down, full of earthworms) and it seemed perfect: moist, dark brown, fibrous, easy to pull out the avocado seeds and maize fibres that hadn't decomposed yet. I used this for sowing some seeds and for some potted plants. But where we've used the last batch of compost the plants don't seem happy, the soil forms into little gravel-sized nodules.

Context: we live in a town in Chiapas, Mexico, at 2200 m altitude. It's dry from October to April with cold nights and strong, lethal sun. From May to September it gets warm and rains nearly daily, often with crazy deluges. The soil is thick unbudgeable red clay and we're planting on top of that and building rubble, slowly creating soil. We're adding plenty of mulch and cover crops which in turn invites snails and slugs. Sigh. Special plants need to be nurtured indoors where it's an all-or-nothing laser sun or shade situation, hardly any indirect light. The sun weakens the plants and they often succumb to (I think) powdery mildew. Sheesh.