Eino Kenttä

Hey Lana, welcome to Permies!

Curtains and drapes can make a tremendous difference, especially in a poorly insulated house. My parents' house is old, and although they've done a lot to improve the insulation, there's still more to be done. The door between the entrance and the kitchen is quite drafty, which leads to the kitchen sometimes getting quite cold in the winter. A cotton bedcover hung as a drape in front of the door really helps surprisingly much. I imagine the difference would be even bigger if it was a heavy wool cloth. Likewise, heavy curtains in front of the windows can help keep the heat in during the night, or in winter cold snaps, and a drafty floor can be instantly improved by means of rugs.

I think one could do a lot in the curtains and drapes department without spending any money at all, by repurposing any unused cloth one has already. Plus, with some imagination it could make the house cosier than it was.

Ac Baker wrote:
Well, I've learned a lot .. The ones I left in the ground, seem to have got too wet & rotted away.  The ones which I put into pots in the shed, got too hot in the unseasonable heat we got in April, and shriveled.

Only the seeds which I shaved have grown. But, I've had success with overwintering yacón in compost on a shady windowsill in my house.  So, this winter I plan to try overwintering some Phaseolus coccineus tubers in the same way!

Oh, okay, if they have a problem with wet winters, they'll most likely not overwinter at our place, like ever. My plants grew, but never flowered. Guess I shouldn't expect too much from a year like this, though. Apparently, it's the coldest/wettest summer since 1981 in our area, so yeah, I'll just write it off as a lost year and try again next year. Plus, even with all that, they did grow...

Mikel Salazar wrote:
Is this bark processed industrially or collected manually? How are joints managed? How does it behave with mechanical forces? It should be possible to put earth on it and then walk over both of them.

Very much manually collected, at least in our case, though I believe it is possible to buy it in some places. You just take a knife and make a cut along the trunk, top to bottom, and then peel the bark away from that. The fibres in birch bark, unlike those in most other bark, run around the trunk rather than along. Other than the knife, no tools are strictly needed, except something to weigh the sheets down during storage (it has a strong tendency to curl up as it dries otherwise).

Joints are managed by overlapping adjacent sheets maybe 10 cm, and by having more than one layer. Minimum three layers is recommended. It's definitely possible to walk on a green roof made with birch bark. People used to let their goats out to graze on the roof as a means of maintenance, to get rid of the tree seedlings that would otherwise wreck the roof over time.

Birch bark is rather strong, at least in one direction (it tears more easily in the other). I think the main concern with walking on the roof wouldn't be the bark breaking, but rather slipping. Traditionally, it isn't fastened to the roof, but held in place by friction and the weight of the turf above it. Slippage is probably not an issue unless your roof is very steep, and/or the layer directly beneath the bark is very smooth (planed planks aren't recommended for this, since the bark needs more friction to hold it in place). Also, I imagine a thicker layer of soil might well mitigate any risk of slipping by distributing your weight.

Don't know if you have access to it where you live, but how about birch bark? It's waterproof enough to make canoes out of, and three or more layers of overlapping sheets is a traditional moisture barrier in turf roofs. It doesn't really rot, but doesn't manage UV light well at all, much like plastic. Well covered by soil it can sometimes last very long. I've been wondering if you could improve its performance further if you combined it with clay somehow?

I feel like I mention birch bark a lot, but it is a wonderful material. We'll be using it as the moisture barrier in our turf roof. Haven't built the roof yet, but we did gather the bark. About a thousand sheets, now piled up, weighed down by bricks and protected from the light by a pile of spruce branches, waiting for next year.

Isn't it just that the non-human harvesters are really adept at picking out the good nuts, and leave behind all the empty ones? It wouldn't really make sense for the nuts to reabsorb all the seeds that weren't eaten... If they did that, what seeds would germinate?

I read somewhere (possibly somewhere on here?) about a nut grower using squirrels as a work force, by placing buckets full of sawdust around his trees. The squirrels would harvest all the good nuts and bury most of them in the sawdust, and then the grower would take them, and leave some corn as payment for the squirrels.

Otherwise, it's probably very location dependent. The only time I have personally harvested any good amount of hazelnuts, it was in this weird and wonderful place that had a forest of hazel, elm and oak, which feels somewhat exotic to me, right next to mountains too high and barren for any trees at all. The nuts were all on the ground, brown and ripe, not even bug-infested as far as I remember, and there were lots of them. The area does have most of the critters mentioned, definitely squirrels, crows and ravens at least, so it definitely is possible to get a good harvest despite these. No idea what actually makes the difference though.

Ooh, that's a cool idea! As far as I can tell, it should neatly sidestep (at least some of) the toxicity issue with eating caragana seeds. The one toxin I'm aware of in these is canavanin, a non-proteinogenic amino acid, and since it's water soluble I imagine not that much of it would end up in the oil? Maybe?

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:One thing is certain: the pods are tiny and it will take a lot of pods and a lot of labour to gather an appreciable amount of seed for oil. I wonder, can you gather them in a late green stage (easier to handle) rather than ripe seed (exploding from pods), for pressing?  

In my experience, they don't shatter so much until they dry, so if there's a rainy day after ripening but before natural shattering, you can gather them all then and dry them indoors on a screen, maybe with a cloth on top to stop the seeds from escaping. Around here (Scandinavia) the seed pods often stay whole until late winter or early spring, but that might be because our climate is a lot more humid than in the native range of caragana.

You certainly would need a lot of seeds to get a good amount of oil, though. Plants For A Future claims that the oil content is about 12%, so way lower than hazelnuts for instance. Still, if you have a lot of bushes, I can totally see that it'd be worthwhile. Do tell us how it goes!

Hmm... A thought: did you plant the apricot close to where the old one was? Prunus fruits put out autotoxicity chemicals in the soil, so if it's too close to the old tree's site, that could possibly explain why it's not doing super well... If it started declining only after planting, that is?

...but sometimes for an entirely different problem.

Beside diseases, pests and soil nutrient depletion, there's one more factor to consider here. No idea how significant it is for different crops, but autotoxicity can definitely be an issue for some of them. Basically, it's allelopathy between members of the same species. Growing the same crop in the exact same place several years running can in some cases effectively poison the ground for that specific crop, reducing plant vitality and yields. If I recall correctly, the rose family is renowned for this, so it might be an issue with strawberries for example.

Then again, much like pests, diseases and nutrient depletion, I imagine autotoxicity is much more of a problem in monoculture systems than in polycultures. In a polyculture, the plants can move around to find a suitable place every year. Also, I wonder if the greater microbial diversity supported by a polyculture might degrade the autotoxicity compounds more rapidly. I don't know of any research that directly backs this up, but I think it would make sense. The microbial community in the soil definitely has an effect on the severity of autotoxicity, as per this:

Metabolomic analysis of peach orchard soils showed that amygdalin accumulated progressively in the rhizosphere with longer continuous cultivation. Exogenous amygdalin inhibited plant growth, with stronger suppression in sterilized soil, suggesting a protective role of soil microbes.

Stumbled on this interview with Professor Jayati Ghosh, about prosperity within planetary boundaries and why economic growth is ultimately a doomed strategy. Very interesting, she explains things in an impressively clear and understandable way, without economist jargon. Much recommended.