William Bronson

I was weeding a patch of ground at my sister's house to plant an American Plum and found 4 elm trees and a hickory of some kind, in a 4'x4' patch!
I pulled 3 of the elms and left the other one and the hickory.
Looking up elms, I wouldn't plant one in my urban yard, so I'll probably cut the last one down.
Will I be potting up the other three for the the community garden free nursery?
Maybe?
I would let the hickory grow, but I don't think my brother inlaw would want a huge tree so near the house.
I will try to save that one for the nursery

Where would you draw the line on these trees?
What about other trees, what do you save, what do discard?

I looked into the pressure cookers with souse vide options
At least one  Cosori pressure cooker,offers precision control.
What the range is, I don't know.
Even the manual was unclear on that.

I found a permies post on fermentation that suggested plugging a crock pot into a thermostat controlled outlet.
There's no insulation in that setup, but you could just place it in a cooler.

By expanding my search to skillets I found this:

Presto Precise® 16-inch
Tuxedo™
digital precision skillet multi-cooker

It goes from 100 to 400 degrees and has a digital display.
No insulation.

R Scott wrote:Have you looked at sous vide cookers? Fairly low power, extremely accurate temperature control, and will hold temp like a hay box if you insulate it well.

I'm curious about this.

Most  sous vide cookers are built like a "stick" with an immersion heater and something that circulates the water.
Would it work directly in soup, or would the food particles foul the mechanism?
Even with pot style sous vide cookers,the circulation mechanism could be compromised.
The Insta pot style pressure cookers usually have a sous vide setting, but I don't think you can set the temperature precisely.


If a  sous vide cooker won't work directly, it could be used in a cooler full of water.
Cut  holes in the lid of the cooler, one for the sous vide stick, one for a stock pot.
Much simpler and cleaner than my industrial level diy double boiler, much cheaper than a commercial one.

Since I'm cheap, and I like screw around, my ideal solution would involve an derelict electric water heater, insulation intact, cut down to about 36".
Cap that with ridged insulation, then cut a hole for a giant stockpot to fit down into.
Make a ridged insulation lid to go over the stockpot lid.
Wire a 120v plug appliance cord to the 120v hearing coil.
This would be highly insulated, and gigantic double boiler.
To moderate the temperature, plug the cord into an  thermostatically controlled outlet adapter and insert the temp probe between the insulation and the stock pot, then set the desired temperature on the thermostatic outlet adapter to 205 degrees.

Here's a purpose built device:

My experience with wonderberries makes me unexcited to meet Solanum nigrum, but I'm open to it.
The tomatoes that grew here last year were kinda a Matt's Wild Cherry type.
I say kinda, because those were my first volunteers, but I buy in some cherry tomatoes plants every year, and I hope for  some genetic mixing.
We give tomatoes to the chickens, both our homegrown ones that spoiled, and lots of dumpster tomatoes.
The chicken compost is vector for spreading these tomatoes to multiple parcels.

This is nother bed at the Village Green.
Made from a 2x3 pallet collar, it was planted last year with peas and later, volunteer tomatoes transplanted from other beds.
This time the volunteers came up in the bed and I cleared away the other "weeds" to give the tomatoes a better chance.

I will probably plant onion sets into this same bed, and also sow cilantro.

A short article on solar powered steam engines in the 1870's.

My unsung hero of science: William Adams, the Bombay bureaucrat whose vision of a solar future was dashed by colonial conservatism https://share.google/oPAVp91Qda7WVVoYS

Today I planted Amethyst String Beans at  one of our community garden plots.
I planted with a young friend, Steve, my sharecropper?
No, I'm not charging him anything, I just rent beds there and then foist them on my friends!

The instructions called for 3 feet between rows but 8 seeds per foot!
This bed is only 4' wide, so we ran two rows, a foot in from either side.
We covered the seeds, then walked down the rows for better seed to soil contact, and watered it heavily.

I love to dig, but I balk at the idea of digging a hole big enough for a chest freezer.
The compressor will certainly have some gick in it and it will eventually escape into the soil.

A garbage can seems like the better choice.
Plastic barrel might be even better.
Maybe dig a trench into the slope and lay the barrel or trashcan into it, one end lower than the other.
Less digging, easier access, and you can pile more dirt on top to make up for it being a shallower hole.


Another idea, for a walk in root cellar.
To avoid having dig so deep, I would lay out a 16 foot diameter octagon of   55 gallon barrels, remove one, then fill the rest with water.
Then dig out the inside of the circle and the spot where we removed the barrel.
Double stack two barrels in the center of the hole, then fill them with water.
Top them with  bicycle tire rim, screw it directly into the top barrel with self tapping roofing screws.
With 2x4 lumber , span the space between the center barrel and the perimeter barrels, and secure the wood with self tapping roofing screws.
Cover these rafters with snow fencing, stretched tight and stapled place .
Cover the snow fencing with thick plastic sheeting, secured with battening.
Cover the roof with layers of soil and cardboard.
Berm the perimeter barrels with layers of soil and cardboard.