Lina Joana

Ulla Bisgaard wrote:I think this is great, but I wish there were places where you could just order one installed. My husband and I do want one. Especially the stove and an oven, but non of us are very handy fixing and building things.

Unfortunately, this is the current weakness with rmh. It has not been standardized and engineered enough by people with the right letters after their names for it to be “not my liability if it fails” for contractors and government inspectors. So it remains the province is diyers who are confident enough to build something that, done wrong, could burn their house down… maybe someday it will get there.

Regarding the bundle: who is the target audience? This seems mostly like a rebundling of products that have been available before. So regulars on permies.com would either have some or most of it, or would have reasons why they haven’t bought - lack of interest for their context, etc. are you expecting to entice people
Who haven’t bought any of the products? Why would this configuration appeal to them?

I do, admittedly, get antsy watching videos. I bought one of the movie sets, and never could get through the whole thing, so maybe I am not the right person to be commenting. But two multi-film sets seems like a LOT of footage to sit through if someone just wants to know how to build one - or even if they are just curious and want to know more. How many hours is it all together, 4+? Would someone who likes movies want to watch it all? And if you approach it as having your choice of which style to build, so you only watch that - most of the styles do not have accompanying plans, correct?
I wonder if it would be better to curate the movies, so that the bundle has 3-4 full plans and the videos showing only those builds. From what I remember of the movies, it might take some editing- I think I tried to skip around, and felt disoriented, like I had missed important bits by not watching it all in sequence.

It is also worth noting that some staple crops have more than one yield if you know how to harvest.
For example, squash and gourd leaves are edible, and part of African cuisine. I have eaten both.
The leaves of African/southern/cow/blackeyed peas are also edible, and high in protein. I don’t know about other types of bean. If you grow 1/10 acre if black eyed peas, you would get around 150 lbs (or more, depending in spacing) of dried peas plus a summers worth of high protein greens.
Pumpkin and squash seeds are edible, and a good source of fats. Toasting them is probably the easiest preparation method, but you could probably shell and grind them too.
Sweet potato leaves are also a hood green. Amaranth can be grown for both grain and greens.
I am sure there are other examples…

The biointensive method was mentioned: here is a image of one persons vegan diet on 4000 sq feet growing space.
Unless you are following the method, I would take the square footage with a grain of salt, since the whole point is to grow in very little space. However, their percentages are useful, and they have thought about carbon biomass for composting, since the method is supposed to grow its own fertilizer.



http://growbiointensive.org/60%2030%2010%20circle.pdf

Pumpkin/squash cream sauce, using roasted pureed squash.
Start it like any cream sauce, by heating butter or oil and adding a few handfuls of flour to make a roux. After a few minutes, add milk or broth of choice, cook till thickened, then add roasted pureed squash. I don’t measure, but you can add quite a bit. Add salt, pepper, nutmeg, and sage or thyme to taste.
Serve on veggies, pasta, or potatoes. Add a bunch of cheese and pour over pasta, then bake for pumpkin mac and cheese.

Nina Surya wrote:
This thread is from some time ago already but still very important!

Ellendra, I'm trying to come up with some kind of practical solution to what you said "Run the plumbing in such a way that hot water going down the drain gives back at least part of its heat before it really leaves the house ". I think you're phrasing it right but can you give an example of what, how...?
We're currently renovating an old (OLD!) farmhouse in France and plumbing will be an action point very soon, so... open to all new ideas!

This might be hard to do in an existing house… I believe the idea is to have the sewage exit on the opposite side if the house from the main hot water usage, so that the warm water stays in the house. I suppose, theoretically, you could take a roundabout route with the pipes, but I don’t think it would be worth the clogged drains!!
Maybe others have additional thoughts. Maybe you could rig up some kind if heat exchange system, where the pipes are in contact with thermal mass - like, pack cob around the sewage pipes? Or have them run through a water basin? Not sure if it would be worth the trouble unless you are using a lot of hot water…

So here is the decision making process I would use for food growing:
1) look at your itemized grocery receipts. What do you eat the most of/spend the most on? What would you eat a lot more of if it cost less? Berries are one example for me.
2) of those things, what could you produce more cheaply? Some things are are expensive at the store because they take a lot to produce (like dairy, cheese in particular) and some things because they are perishable and harder to ship (like greens and berries). Focusing on easy to produce but hard to ship and store first will give the most bang for the buck- assuming you eat a lot of it.
3) what items on your essential list have the most fragile supply chains? Eggs are a good example- unless you can feed hens free, it may be hard to beat budget grocery store prices. Farmers market eggs around here are $6-8 per dozen, which is a better reflection of production costs. However, when store eggs briefly spiked to $12/dozen, the farmers market prices stayed steady, because feed costs didn’t spike. So - what can’t you do without that is likely to see massive spikes and/or shortages?
4) what are you willing to do? Not everyone can kill a rabbit they have raised and loved, when you get right down to it. And thats ok! Ditto milking a dairy animal every. Single. Day.

The answers are going to be different for everyone, obviously. There are a lot of great ideas on this thread as well for buying in bulk, etc. for the things that aren’t worth growing.

I have a cattle panel staked into an arch shape, covered with a tarp. I store hay on pallets under that. The tarp drapes over the arch and is pinned down on the back side, with the front open. I can store about 15, though that is pushing it. You could put two panels together to get more space.

Barbara Simoes wrote:I, too, don't spend beyond what I have--no debt. I own the house and property outright, have a healthy retirement fund, which I started back in my 20's or 30's, and yet, my credit is considered barely "fair" because I don't use credit.  That whole system is crazy.  I really resent that someone who is responsible with money is penalized because of it!

But you are only penalized if you need to take on debt, right? Otherwise, your credit score doesn’t matter. If you don’t need to borrow, you are ahead of the game.
I agree with you that it is a crazy system… but when it comes to borrowing money from strangers, I can’t think of a better one. If a borrower has no history of borrowing, how do I asses trustworthiness?
Personally, I dislike debt, it makes me feel insecure. But, I have to admit to the logic of things like a mortgage. I have one, with an interest rate of 3%. There are money markets right now with 4% returns. If I put anything I can save into the market, instead if paying down the loan faster, I will come out ahead. If I has waited another 5-10 years to buy land, my fruit trees would be that much farther behind, and I would be spending more on good food. In that situation, it seems like a mortgage is worth the feelings of insecurity it engenders.
Getting back to the original thread - I wonder if we could have something like the permies gear review grid, but primarily for longevity? As it stands, I could review a chainsaw after only using it for a year, which is useful in some regards but not for longevity. I would love to have a resource for all kinds of goods that were reviewed only by folks who had owned the item for an extended period of time.

Rachel Dee wrote:
Another thing that we do - cloth diapers. $500-600 for a full set for a kid for 2 years. Disposable is $2000 through those same years, but at $25 per pack at a time. One diaper is $25 when using cloth. We got lucky and were given 3 sets, so I didn't have to buy anything new for my first kid. With this new baby, I'm starting to buy one at a time, even though I'm just 4 months pregnant.

Just curious - were the first child’s diapers not usable after 2 years?

My family used the cotton trifold and flat diapers. They kept them, and gave them to my sister, then to me. I have finally had a number of them wear out, but they certainly survive multiple kids.
However, we also have the new all in one style diapers for daycare. The hemp/cotton and bamboo ones got horribly stained, and used some bleach in desperation that degraded the fabric. Much as I dislike it, the synthetic pocked diapers do not stain so badly, and have held up better. But still not nearly as well as tje old fashioned cotton.

paul wheaton wrote:At this time, I like the appeal of building community with people that have been through four years of the bootcamp more than the people jumping straight into ant village or deep roots.  I think it is possible that it is time to bump up the price on those two programs so that they remain available, but less attractive.

I don’t know how hard this info is to find, but if you want a good comparison- what is the cost to join and buy a house in an ecovillage in a comparable (rural montana type) area? It is still not a perfect comparison, since I think most ecovillages allow the sale of individual homes, but I suspect the buy in cost is more than most folks could save in 4 years. Framing it like that - 4 years of skill building labor in exchange for a lifetime spot in an ecovillage - I think gets closer to what you want to give away than a house and 4 acres, especially if ownership is not actually transferred. You could of course talk about what else they can do with it as an exit strategy (rent it out, sell the spot to an approved person? Whatever you are comfortable with), but it sounds like you want to attract people who will stay and create a community, so that should definitely be front and center.