Vasily Kiryanov

Lucy Elder wrote:Vasily, they're lovely people. Absolutely flourishing permaculture garden. Seriously happy plants.

Just a permaculture garden? I was hoping they were doing a bit more than just permaculture gardening and conducting gardening courses... Well, that's a start, at least.

Lucy Elder wrote:

Helena, I am so heartened to hear you know young Bulgarians keen to keep the village way of living going by actually doing it. This was one of the reasons for my posting here on permies. I have not encountered any but knew there must be some somewhere..

Quite agree about a need to 'belong' especially with a young family. Are their some young Bulgarian parents interested in that idea too? Have you thought of contacting UK teaching colleges where young graduates with forward thinking ideas might come out? Combined with some more trad teaching from local Bulgarian teachers? I found an excellent young couple to keep my children up with basics when we travelled abroad. No pay - gave them the experiences instead of living differently. Worked out well al round.

Can I ask how you met the Bulgarian younger people keen to live a rural life? Are some networking too?

There is an educational/consultancy project - BalkEP at Shipka. They can acts as 'permies hub'. That's the least i can say. Hope to move to BG someday and check it out. Need to convince my wife though... She is very attached to her place.

John Polk wrote:

Burning fresh veggie oil is about as unsustainable as burning mineral oil.

I have to agree with that. Given the techniques used in BigAg, I see this as means to speed up the destruction of this planet.
I recently read a report that stated that if 100% of all current U.S. cropland was converted to fuel crops only, we would only be capable of producing about 10% of our fuel. And then, we would need to import all of our food.

Bottom line is that we need to burn less fuel, regardless of its source.

Dmitry I. Mendeleev said "Heat with burning oil is like heat with burning money" It was someitime around 1900, i believe...

Miles Flansburg wrote:Howdy Vasily, welcome to permies. Sounds like you may have done some work with algae? Do you have a system set up for that?

No, i haven't got a system. Not even tried. But i'm looking into it. There's a lot of working systems described in detail out there.

Tom Connolly wrote:I have often wondered this...people take used veggie oil and make biodiesel out of it inexpensively...as I understand it, if you can buy in bulk, making it out of fresh veggie oil yields a price not unlike actual diesel...is it possible to make it straight from soybeans? or other materials? i.e. go from the soy beans directly to biodiesel instead of first making veggie oil?

Burning fresh veggie oil is about as unsustainable as burning mineral oil. Okay. One person or another can do it (now). But did anyone count the amount of fuel burnt to produce that bulk of oil? Huge amount! Besides, if being implemented on a large scale (dream of agro-business), crop fields would require too much space, thus depriving us of natural environment and even basic habitat. On the other hand, blue-green microalgae also produce lots of fats, grow fast (as most aquatic life, as they do not need to work against gravity as plants do), and use energy more eficiently. In fact, algae produce x10 times more useful biomass than land plants, given the same amount of sunlight. There are bio-engineered strings that grow 3-4 times faster than natural, and produce up to 80% fat content, which (after being extracted, of course) can be used either raw, or, after methilising, pretty much as regular diesel. They can be grown either in a pond, or sealed reactor, depending on the source of CO2.