Waldo Schafli

Hi Permies,

2 questions is it better to process plastic out of compost before or after making it?

What are the latest techniques or machinery available for this process?

Looking at process about 6000m³ initially and then hopefully minimum plastic content 3000m³ annually.

Will be using the ASP composting method.

Fanks!

Did you get an answer R Scott?

Hi RS.

This website is a great source. You can Ctrl+F for avocado and you'll find their guild. https://treeyopermacultureedu.wordpress.com/chapter-2-3-or-the-11-design-principles-from-the-intro-book/small-scale-intensive/

Have fun with your experiments & planning for a warmer climate is not a bad idea.

Hello Permieverse.

As some of you know, my wife and I started this https://permies.com/t/56205/projects/South-African-Permaculture-Nursery

The agreement with the landowner did not work out and we are moving ever forward.

Here is where the design comes in. We want to stack functions with our business entities ie Having a nursery that supplies your landscaping business needs & the landscaping providing needs for the nursery.

We are starting a Company (Empire) with various entities that cover the vast disciplines of Permaculture/Sustainable Development.

Permaculture Nursery, Primarily - Edible, Secondary - Food, Fuel, Fiber
Landscape Design - Either small solutions like food forests, veggie terraces, water use etc or full design & implementation
Educational entity - A stall at the farmers market, an hour at the Farmers Union, various talks & workshops across the province.
Social Entity - Implementation of various permaculture techniques for the benefit of our rural community - Foodscapes, RMHs, Grey water solutions etc
Natural Building/Crafts - Workshops & contracts covering earth building, to making your own tools.
Joel Salatin type livestock businesses.

How would you structure such a company with regards to
Priority of implementation,
Infrastructure Sharing
Marketing & Shelf space sharing

Please add to our list of entities & show us how you would go by structuring such an entity.

South-Africa
Warm Temperate
750mm annual average rain

Thank you!

This project is no more. I'll post a link to a new thread as soon as we have all of our ducks in a edged-row.

Sometimes life gets a little strange & humans have a tendency to get entertainment out of it.

Tonight we took ""How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood" and played around with it a little bit.

Worst - "How many books can a bookseller sell if a bookseller could sell books

Best - "How much stones could a stoner stone if a stoner could stone stones."

What can you come up with?

Have fun!

A good question for a growing concern & one that designers could be facing more often in the coming years. Many of our friends who are willing & 'have the time to garden' are 50+ retirees. Many of them with ailments that hinder gardening. We are friends with a few sprightly 70-90 year old characters. Their enthusiasm to learn & cultivate is wonderfully inspiring.

The main culprit we have encountered is bending over to garden. Long handle, light head cultivation tools. Keeps the back straight & doesn't tire you out as fast.

Raised/Hugel beds & the tightest Zone 1 imaginable. We've seen apple crates & landscapers fabric used to raise 1.2mx1.2m beds to hip height. Stacking logs or adding any biomass underneath the frames should help with soil temps & evaporation. Mounting old gutters against walls is the tight Zone 1. Make plants accessible, looks pretty nifty, has nifty runoff control options. If managed well you can grow creepers from the bottom to the top rooting them every step. Adding worms to this design is, to me personally, essential. Building the soil in such small quarters calls for small builders.

I am not going to expand on Hugels as there are numerous threads that explain their use as an Appropriate technology. (note the capital)

A rather far off thought might be to cultivate shade tolernant veggies etc for an indoor area.

If your site allows it, I think the best solution would be the attached greenhouse ala David Holmgren.

An observation - staying active both mentally & physically as you age keeps you healthier for longer. Stagnating as you age makes you old before your time.

Last solution for now.

Become engrained in your community.

Another good thread Travis

On a technical note, you can bend 32mm/40mm pvc pipe over a 6m stretch without it collaspsing on itself. Using 4-way connectors for the ribs & roof makes it quite sturdy if slipped over rebar or smaller pvc

What a great trade-off your friend has. Having local processors for raw materials that are hard or laborious to do in small batches is a great way of value-adding. One of our friends, www.lowerland.co.za, grows his wheat for a specific bakery which makes doing business a whole lot easier. His farm is a great example of large-scale ag transforming through Permaculture.

If you are looking for 2nd grade pulp & fruit-tree seeds to sow wild, ask your local Distillery.
You'll be amazed at the amount of "waste" these big processors get rid of.

Another value-added activity is mixing herbs with dried fruits & vegetables.

Sun dried Tomato & Basil
Sun dried Apricots & Rosemary
Dehydrated Onions & chives
Etc
Etc
Etc

Hello, I would like to get this thread going again.

I'm assuming that Cortland has left the permieverse, if not yay!

An angle I've been looking at is the 'homesteaders survival' techniques & how we can profit from it. When you're homesteading, you use everything you produce to its fullest extent, adding massive amounts of bio-diversity is a key to any great homestead. I have seen it succinctly as such - Make what you use, whether it be honey, shoes, RMHs, books, jams etc that will sell.

Making edgy & unknown products that you yourself don't use is a waste of time.
Making edgy & unknown products that you do use is an almost sure profit.

Creating sauces, jams, shoes etc takes many different components - closing the loop on your production-needs is key to Value-adding and knowing when you can't is also super important. If you have access to land it becomes easier to close the loops.

For instance

1. My mother-in-law makes a salad sauce from

Onions - We can grow these ourselves but buying them in bulk makes more financial sense, we would like to subsidise these bulk transactions with our own crop.
Poppy seeds - Same as above.
Sunflower Oil - This can easily be replaced with numerous other oils we can self process.
Vinegar - Apple country is 40km away so we can again make our own through sourcing from them.
Sugar - Stevia is a possibility but for now we buy in Bulk.

2. Grow salad greens, which are super easy to grow & sell them alongside the sauce.

She has great relationships with retailers in the area who call her every time stock is running low & then she delivers to them when she is heading in that direction. Adding the fresh greens ups the delivery time but also the income.

3. As she has grown in popularity, numerous offers have rolled in to expand the business. She can now essentially hand over her recipe and cash in on the royalties or make more product for the demanding consumers. People who are fanatic about your products are your best sellers & marketers.

Three actions, semi-closed loop. Closing each loop should either lower your overheads or increase your income. Sometimes these two are linked and sometimes you just get one, either way you increased your profit margin.

A last little gem we saw one of our Homesteading friends make. Blueberry & Granadilla jam. What a winner. If you're into making jellies, check out Carissa macrocarpa, Natal Plum. A great defense hedge, pollinator attraction, amazing flower smell & the fruit which makes a very unique jelly. Also suited to coasts. Salt & frost hardy.

Thank you to all the contributors, keep 'em coming.