Douglas Alpenstock

I'm going to try Startpage on my Linux systems.They have a plugin for Firefox that makes it the default search engine. Handy.

Johnny Jump-Ups. They are our first flowers in spring, and they are such tough and cheerful little dudes, popping up in places where nothing else wants to grow.

Ac Baker wrote:There's a lot more work to be done on creating a culture & community of giving and sharing, however. It only needs one person to recognise what they see & start taking more than the plants can bear, to damage the garden.

Yes! Somehow people need to collectively bond with the food forest and protect its health, rather than treating it like a grocery store. The mind shift is as important as the forest.

Jay Angler wrote:This is becoming more and more important, not just for the food it represents, but for the cooling effect, trees, particularly groups of trees, have on a city. If we *need* to plant more city trees to protect lives during heat waves, why not make them mini-food forests?

There is no doubt about the value of urban trees for cooling. Though in my area the strong thunderstorms have been knocking them down all over the place, and in a city they always hit something expensive on the way down. I hope that's not the new normal.

But when it comes to urban food forests, permit me to point out some possible problems.

I want to believe. It's a good idea. It looks beautiful on paper. Except then you add actual urban humans to the mix, and the shine comes off.

The City of Saskatoon, Canada, recently spent $360,000 CAD to install a food forest. I don't know if that includes maintenance costs while it gets established. But it's a lot of money. Will all the citizens who pay for this also benefit from it? Maybe, but despite the hypotherical openness of the resouce to everybody, the practical fact on the ground is that possession is 9/10 of the law. My recent personal experience suggests that people are quicker to "take" than to "share."

A related example: when a local city installed a free water tap for homeless people in a tent city, it didn't take long for a local street gang to start charging "rent" for people to use it.

My 2c. I hope I'm wrong.

Dunno. Given the cybersecurity nightmare out there, that's a really big ask.

Hey Chance, if you have a link or two, please share it. Interesting stuff.

Wow, big decision to make in a short time.

I can't speak to the engineering of the rocket stove / RMH. It seems like a finely tuned beast.

That said, there are many ways to draw or push hot smoke through a thermal mass. This has been done throughout history.

Can you give me specific product names? Then I can look up the SDS and other documents and offer a more informed opinion.

The challenge, as you say, is that it is 99% good organic material. There has to be a practical way to reuse this without doing harm.

Personally I would be cautious about using this on food producing areas. I might be less fussy if it were for shelterbelt trees in a place that would never be cultivated -- the good might outweigh the bad.

But could this be used as a medium for fungal bioremediation on sites that are already contaminated? Maybe.

Shavings are good insulation, and yours are 99% natural. Would I have an outbuilding with your shavings as insulation instead of styrofoam? Sure.

Would I sit in a beanbag chair stuffed with your shavings instead of styrofoam packing peanuts? Absolutely.

my 2c.

Tereza Okava wrote:I wanted to come back and say, hey, I'm about 99% certain Douglas isn't going to chop down his bushes. Maybe 99.5%.
But I sure can sympathize with wanting to, in the heat of the moment, faced with someone being jerky.

Tereza, you called it correctly.

Thanks everyone for patiently listening. I appreciate your wise comments.

I've blown off some steam and I'm back in a strategic headspace.

This morning, I went down to the patch to pick my fair share. It gave me time to think and observe.

While I was there, another neighbour stopped on his morning jog and expressed admiration for my berry patch. Like many others, he's been grabbing a handful as he goes by. I mentioned my ongoing interventions and he suggested it would be amazing if we could create a wall of berries stretching all the way around the corner. Nice to have a positive interaction.

I realized I wasn't mad about the berries, I was mad about being treated like a doormat. I think I deserved better. Some people don't understand respect or boundaries and so it's necessary to be blunt and draw a line.

So as always happens in the Zen of the garden, a strategy emerged. When I next cross paths with the offending parties, I'm going to suggest that instead of getting hissy-pissy they might want help me expand this patch as a community resource. I sincerely doubt they will lift a finger, but I will have taken the high road. Cheers.

I guess no good deed goes unpunished. I had an unpleasant encounter yesterday and it left a bitter taste. Pardon me while I rant.

Right beside my long steep driveway there is a bit of a hollow. A few Saskatoon bushes were struggling to get a foothold, so I started helping them. Over five years, summer and winter, I diverted snow and runoff water into the hollow, added a bit of compost and raw char, and introduced soil building plants --sweet clover, white clover, red clover, alfalfa. I cut out competitors (poplar) and nuisance plants (wild rose). Small, small actions that add up over time. The patch expanded vigorously. This year the patch was loaded with berries.

Technically it's on the public road allowance, so I can't claim ownership. Yesterday, a group of people showed up without notice from a neighbouring property, stood on my driveway and started picking. I know these folks, they have my cell number. They could have been courteous and reached out, as I would have if the situation were reversed. I don't mind sharing.

After the group had been picking furiously for an hour, clearly intending to pick the patch clean, I made a passing comment that it would be nice if they left some for me and explained some of the things I had done for years to make this patch productive when others were not.

Instead of appreciation for my patient and thoughtful curation, I received angry drama and a string of vitriol.

Result: There's a 50/50 chance I will chop the whole thing down. It's not worth the hassle. The source of conflict will no longer exist. And the world will be a better place, right?