Oblio13 McCoy

No need to reinvent the wheel. The predominant source of calories for most people for most of human history has been: Acorns. Oaks grow throughout the temperate zones, and produce storable starch by the ton. They require processing before they're edible, though, and there's a lot of ignorance and misinformation on the internet and in print about it. (I think Samuel Thayer is the best authority. His book Nature's Garden devotes a full chapter to it.)

And to continue the tangent this thread has gone off on, because it's important: Animals eating a plant emphatically does not imply that it's edible for humans. Squirrels will eat Amanita mushrooms that are deadly to us. Birds will eat stones. Deer will eat acorns, hellebore, skunk cabbage, loco weed, deadly nightshade, poke and woody browse, all of which are toxic to humans, at least without significant processing. Take a little bite of raw skunk cabbage and see for yourself. It won't kill you, but it'll feel like a mouthful of bees, and it'll sure convince you that we have a different physiology.

It's pressure-treated wood, so it should last as long as I will.

If I were going to do it again, I would use the kind of post-and-plank construction described in The $50 Underground House book (which I unfortunately didn't read until after I'd built this). I would also have dug a drain-to-daylight and used a rubber roofing membrane just for peace of mind.

I did once, when it poured in around the door. I collected some buckets of really gooey mud from by a beaver dam and used it to form a slope away. It set up almost like concrete. No problems since then.

We live in zone 4.

It is, essentially, a ventilated root cellar.

Got to paddle this twenty-footer made by Penobscots. It was a work of art. As light as anything short of kevlar or carbon fiber, paddled beautifully, and it even smelled good.

paul wheaton wrote:... hauling in lots and lots of rocks and stacking them around his wood stove. 

I do that with my tent stoves if I'm going to be in one place long enough to justify the labor, like during deer season. (I pitch my tent in the same place every year, for a week or two.) The rocks will stay warm for a couple hours after the stove goes out. Plus, I don't have to worry quite so much about my sleeping bag, pad, etc. touching the stove.

Our Warre hives have screen bottoms to aid in mite control, and they're up on stands to keep them out of the grass and away from mice and skunks. You can look up from the bottom to see how much comb they've made, and know when to add another hive body.

Emerson White wrote:
Had you ever been affected by PI before Oblio?...

Yes, I had it many times.

Euell Gibbons wrote about eating poison ivy in Stalking the Wild Asparagus. His arguments were very persuasive, and I've been doing it for probably twenty years now. I have not had poison ivy in that time. I pulled some by hand just a couple weeks ago, too. I don't pay too much attention to dosages, I just occasionally eat small leaves beginning when they first appear in the spring. I pick them by the stalk, and just bite them off, being careful not to touch my lips. My best friend is a doctor, and he's appalled that I do this, by the way.

nicollas wrote:
I was wondering if one can do a chicken/bamboo connection : will chicken eat young shoots and therefore contain bamboo expansion ?

if someone can make the experimentation, its worth doing. I'll test this when i'll got bamboos, chicken and a land ...

Nicollas
(first post here, hello to all, and excuse my lame english i'm french)

Hello Nicollas -

We have bamboo planted near our chicken coop. I've never seen them eat it.