Eino Kenttä

I actively stopped myself from trying too many new things this year, with the idea that that would give me more time to care for the things already planted, and it did... somewhat. Not enough to be really worth it, though, so next year is back to wild experimentation

I did grow quinoa for the first time this year, though, and even though they didn't get all the way to seed (as far as I know - I haven't been on the land for more than a month now, and they were flowering when we left) they did well enough to be decidedly promising, especially considering that they were growing in a very bad spot. I've ordered seeds for a few more varieties, and will sow them in better soil next year.

Great topic!

Anything physical works well, or just going outside. I find that when I'm indoors, my thoughts have a tendency to move in circles, making me feel trapped in my own head. This gets expoinentially worse if I spend too much time in front of a screen.

I remember this one time when I had just gone through something very stressful and traumatic. I called this nice old couple I knew, and said "I need to work with something physical. The heavier, the better. What do you need help with?" They had me break off pieces of rebar sticking out of some concrete blocks by hitting them repeatedly with a hammer, and then me and the old guy used those concrete blocks as support for one corner of their sauna, which had been sagging a bit. It was brilliant stress relief.

Wikipedia seems to suggest that late blight generally doesn't survive for very long outside its hosts.

P. infestans survives poorly in nature apart from on its plant hosts. Under most conditions, the hyphae and asexual sporangia can survive for only brief periods in plant debris or soil, and are generally killed off during frosts or very warm weather. The exceptions involve oospores, and hyphae present within tubers. The persistence of viable pathogen within tubers, such as those that are left in the ground after the previous year's harvest or left in cull piles is a major problem in disease management.

As for the oospores, which can apparently remain viable for years under some conditions, I just had a random and somewhat (but not entirely) off-topic idea. I heard somewhere that you can reduce the time clubroot fungus remains in the soil by boiling cabbage or another of its host plants, and then watering with the liquid. Some compound present in the decoction will apparently signal to the dormant spores that there are host plants in the vicinity. The spores will germinate, and when they fail to find actual host plants, they'll starve and die (unlike the ungerminated spores, which persist for a very long time indeed.) I wonder if late blight oospores work the same? There has to be some signal for them to germinate and start growing, right? And once they do, they'll probably be less persistent. So what if you could use your blight-infested tubers to reduce the amount of blight spores in the soil? No hard data to back this up, I don't even have a source for the clubroot thing. Just a random thought.

Yeah, I do wonder if they'll eat onions? Most non-human mammals don't. Do you have any tasty wild alliums in your area? Ramps or such?

As a side note, it doesn't have to be iron sulphate. Almost any iron salt should work, including rust.

This is actually a consideration when making bark-tanned leather. If it comes into contact with rusty iron while wet, it gets black marks. You can use this to make nice patterns on the leather, for instance by making a shape from rusty steel wire and laying it on the leather surface while wet. It might need to be weighed down to get a solid-enough contact with the surface. I've only seen this done right as the leather comes out of the tanning bath, i.e. before softening and oiling. I don't know if it'd work the same on finished leather that you re-wet. Also, from what I remember, it's hard to get the iron-blackened leather quite as soft as you would without the iron. It might also weaken it a bit, I think?

If you make unintentional marks, they can be erased with oxalic acid. Apparently, it "steals" the iron ions from the ferrous tannate complex to form a complex of its own, which is colourless. This might work on paper as well. One could try with rhubarb juice, or maybe sorrel. Though I guess any plant material would leave its own marks on paper...

Jay Angler wrote:That's a big "might". A friend tells me that fructose is broken down by the liver, and tends to get turned into stored fat, unlike glucose, which feeds the brain. Even if "sweeter" isn't bound in the inulin, it may have other effects which are less than ideal.

It would take much more research, which hopefully permies out there in the right growing ecosystem will do! (My land (read - Mother Nature's Deer) kill sunchokes - I have to choose my battles!)

Yeah, fructose isn't ideal human food, especially not in refined form. On the other hand, many fruits do contain lots of it, and people have always eaten fruit. From what I've understood, the bad effects of fructose are somewhat mitigated in whole foods by it being mixed up with dietary fibre, which slows absorption in the digestive system so the liver doesn't get too overwhelmed. This is a bit off topic though, I was just thinking of sweet taste as a potential easily spotted marker for less-farty sunroots, although I do agree that they'd probably be somewhat less healthy.

Does anyone know if sunroots store any starch at all, or is it exclusively inulin? If they do have the ability to make starch, that might be the basis for an extremely interesting breeding project...

Did you see this study? It sounds a bit promising.

The geographical location of the places where JA was grown determined most of the chemical composition of the tubers. Significantly higher amounts of inulin, crude fiber, crude protein, endogenous amino acids, and magnesium were produced by the cultivars tested in Poland. On the other hand, tubers grown in Lithuania were characterized by a higher content of crude fat, true protein, total amino acids, essential amino acids, and nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, and sodium.

Otherwise, I was thinking that since inulin is a polysaccharide built mainly from fructose, it might be worthwhile to try and find (or select for) varieties with sweeter tubers. Sweet taste might mean that less of the fructose produced is bound up in inulin, and therefore less inulin produced.

One more vote for boiling. I did it this year, when I wanted to compost potato scraps in situ, in a bed meant to grow potatoes the same season. I boiled two rounds in a 10-litre pot, not only the potatoes but all the other kitchen scraps we had available too. As an extra plus on top of rendering it sterile, it also breaks down super fast in the soil. By the end of summer, the only still-recognizable food scraps I noticed in those beds were bits of egg shell and one or two avocado stones...

Oh, sorry, confusion over species. I was thinking of Bistorta vivipara, which generally doesn't set true seed. (I do hope to coax it to set seeds in order to breed it, but that's a very different topic.)

Nice project! Here's a random idea: does Himalayan balsam (Impatiens glandulifera) grow anywhere near you? It's fun foraging for the seeds, but a bit challenging since the seed pods explode when touched and fling the seeds all over the place. It feels like it wouldn't be impossible to get to 10.000, although I don't have any data on actual calorific value. They certainly taste like they contain quite some fat, though...

Me and my partner gathered about a cup of (cleaned) seeds between us in about an hour, but I'm sure there are more efficient ways to do it.