Dave Bross

Ooooh boy, just like my struggles to use billboard tarps as end doors on my military truck maintenance tent (great big canvas quonset hut ) that's used as my shop.

I finally gave up other than rolling them down in freezes so I can drag frost sensitive stuff into there.

When it's frosty here it's usually no wind.

As far as stopping the sides flapping, the tent came with large hooks  all the way down the sides, like the speed lacing hooks at the top of hiking boots .
It worked to use these and holes punched in the edges of the tarps to lace up the sides against the wind much like you would lace up a shoe. Much work required there every time you do that.
It would make it easier to have put hooks on the tarp also. I did buy some small coat hooks that looked like they might work, but never did try it.

Bigger pulley blocks on the ropes rolling the tarp up and down were a big upgrade.

I'm using the same basic rope lifting  setup illustrated here.
I used a long 2x2 with the tarp stapled to it instead of a pipe as a roller. Pipe would have been better.

Nice description here. Love the updates and "wrecks" too.

Oh yeah, a wind up kitchen timer is one of my best tools too.

For:

Not overfilling the greenhouse reservoirs

Not forgetting to switch or turn off irrigation

The aforementioned cooking escapades, not turning things Cajun...as in blackened

A reminder system for my inevitable flaw of attempting to multi task and forgetting all the other task but the one I have my nose in at the moment

appointments

And on and on....

I carry it around in my pocket when in use...which has led to some humor when friends ask "What's that ticking noise?" and my comments about mad bombers.

One thing to know if you've never used these before.

You have to wind them all the way around then back to the time you're setting.
I hate to admit how long I struggled until I learned this.
No instructions come with the newer ones and the way I found out was an old US made one I got at a yard sale had a sticker on it explaining this

Tradeoffs here.

I eliminate all the conifers because they act as a lightning rod sticking above the canopy and if you don't burn off the pine needles then one dry season day you'll be faced with the hundred foot wall of flame rapidly destroying everything in its path.

The native folk burned off the pine woods regularly to avoid the wall of fiery death and open up the understory for hunting.

Ii sometimes wonder how pine was the dominant species when Florida was first "discovered" by white people...and the answer may be the original natives biased things that way via burning.

In the last few years a large market has opened up here for "pine straw," which is baled pine needles, so that may be one use for the pine needles.
They do make a long lasting mulch, which is spread out enough to minimize fire hazard.

Much like using petroleum, machinery, and plastic, perhaps controlled burning  begins the process, enhances fire safety, and gives you results until you can figure out a better way.

Another perfection may be the enemy of good?

I think being alert to not overextending yourself on timelines for completion is important.

Or, to simplify that, not to not bite off more than you can chew at one time.

Easy to say, but I'm guilty of repeated offenses here.

If you're going to be dumb, you've got to be tough...the perils of excess optimism.

On the lighter side, a major motivation is the ever increasing amount of homegrown foods I get to eat, the visual treat of the increasing greening of my little place, and benefits like watching windbreaks grow into maturity and do their thing..

I'll qualify what I'm going to say ...

I had a glassblowing studio from the late 1990s until the 2007/8 financial crash and did (and sometimes still do) a good bit of work on glass chemistry.
There's even a glass named after me, Brossphate, because I was able to sort the problems glassblowers had forever with getting phosphate glasses to melt smooth without chunks of crystals in the glass. Originally that was overcome with a high percentage of lead. My main desire in going deep on glass chemistry was to eliminate as many toxins like lead as possible.

https://www.davebross.com/GlassTech/whatarefurnacebeads.html

https://www.davebross.com/sitemap.html


Many furnace glassblowers have done production lines with recycled glass but it's difficult to work, requires additives,  and will never be "crystal" pretty as a clear glass.

A LOT of "third world" glassblowers use recycled glass and cooking/drain oil to heat the furnaces and tough it out with the difficult working characteristics.

In spite of all they're working against they make some awesomely creative stuff.

https://www.voanews.com/a/kenyan-company-turns-glass-waste-into-artisanal-products/7936413.html

The sea glass market was flooded years ago and selling it would be difficult.

It takes a LONG time to tumble out a load of glass. I used to finish my furnace glass beads that way and it was tedious.

One of the problems with glass and glass as concrete aggregate and the like is that it will devitrify and become fragile. Glass is sand, alkali and modifier, the modifier being lime, zinc, or a few other things.
If the glass was formulated without enough modifier (not uncommon) the alkali will dissolve out of the glass, leaving a fragile skeleton of silica that will crush easily. That escaped alkali would be a mess in concrete. You could make it work but every batch of glass would have to be tested for possibility of devitrification.

If you try melting glass don't do it in a graphite crucible like one of the vids here. At full melt temps it's likely to foam and boil over. Use clay crucibles which are available from mine supply and assay outfits.

On the positive side, recycled glass can be remelted for utility items a number of times.  The problem is the sheer volume of recycled glass out there.

I worked for a recycling outfit in Seattle in the 1990s and a good bit was able to be used by the Ball canning jar factory there if it was sorted correctly. The rest piled up until they had to landfill it.

The reason plastic took over from glass was shipping weight.

We could do worse than to put deposits back on glass bottles and mandate glass packaging. I think Oregon still does this.

I'm loving all the pics that were posted. Wonderful creativity!

A little historical input.

My builder/carpenter  friends tell me a number of the older block houses here in hot and humid Florida have mold growing on the hollow insides of the blocks.

Mold is a major problem here in any building.

Pure permaculture would be nature doing its thing, with niches of humans able to survive and thrive within that niche without knocking it out of whack.

The original native tribes here in the US were doing that for thousands of years.

Fast forward to today and all the basic things you would have enjoyed in your native permaculture niche, like food, shelter, companionship, are now mostly only accessible from a giant and damaging "machine" that our cultures have given over the power to. A machine that wants a major piece of your time and resources to feed it in trade for mere survival, and never does achieve equitable distribution of the benefits from the resources it gobbles up.

So it's a sliding scale backwards to the pure native from the machine owning you, and your requirements to live that we're working on.

I figure as long as we're moving backwards from the machine to the native we're doing OK, and need not feel guilty that we're not the pure embodiment of the large scale ideal.

Our approach as we work on this gives us hands on experience and frees our creativity to come up with more ways to move towards the ideal.

Every tiny move counts as a positive.

In an urban setting if you're growing food under lights, in containers, in allotments, getting around via public transit/bike/walking (one less car) or whatever else you might enjoy doing in the way of tiny "in house" permaculture, you're still on your way in the best and most satisfying direction.

Even though you may need some resources from "the machine,"  like grow lights, electricity or plastic, you're on your way.

OK, seems to be working now.

Thanks!

Logged out, signed back in using dave@bavebross.com, reset my password, and I seem to be locked out of all my info like past posts.

It does show my name in the upper right corner but when I try to access past posts it takes me to a page asking what posts I want to see but won't go beyond there when I choose "all"

I give up for now, I have to get back to what I was working on, please let me know if you can sort this for me.