Burra Maluca

out to pasture
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since Apr 03, 2010
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Biography
Burra is a hermit and a dreamer. Also autistic, and terribly burned out. I live near the bottom of a mountain in Portugal with my partner, my welsh sheepdog, and with my son living close by. I spend my days trying to find the best way to spend my spoons and wishing I had more energy to spend in the garden.
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Recent posts by Burra Maluca

Oh for goodness sake. He's going round the kitchen now.

Red lentils glow.
Yellow split chick peas glow just a teeny bit on the split side only.
Whole chick peas glow purple!
Black eyed peas glow a bit.
Turmeric glows lots.
The enamel pan glows purple.
Peanut butter glows, but not purple.
The melamine bowls that were here when we bought the place glow like crazy.

So it's not really surprising that the enamel pan I cooked red lentils and turmeric in glowed so much!

I've vetoed any more experiments because the lights going on and off so much are doing my head in now...


15 hours ago
Oh wow. Austin, for reasons best known to himself, shone his little UV light that he uses for setting UV sensitive resin at the inside of the empty rice-and-lentils pot. Which is cooked with turmeric, because turmeric contains curcumin which is good for dodgy knee joints.

It turns out that curcumin has other properties besides fixing knees - it also glows under UV light!



Apparently he'd been using the light for setting the resin to fix up a broken mounting on the headlamp that the wild boar smashed.  But that's another story...
16 hours ago
A wise man once said something like "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good!"

There's a danger that if someone insists on everything being 100% sustainable, then they'll never begin to make improvements.

Maybe the metal needed could be sourced used somewhere? Maybe start a thread here on permies to brainstorm alternative ways to solve a problem or alternative materials to use.

Most of the rural houses where I live are made from stone cut from the mountain that the house is built on, mostly whilst the terraces on the mountain were being made. My son's house is like that. It had been abandoned for years and years and he's renovating it as best he can so those stone walls can provide his housing for the rest of his life, and probably for a few generations beyond that. That seems pretty sustainable to me!

Some of the materials we are using for our rocket mass heater were purchased new. But the finished product should allow us to heat ourselves with waste wood for the rest of our lives. It's a balance. Some of the materials in the build were salvaged, people seem to be inspired by what we are doing, and hopefully the overall impact will be for greater sustainability.

Do something. Have fun. Learn what you can along the way. Don't punish yourself for not being perfect. Keep learning. And keep sharing.
23 hours ago
A few more bricks are down!



And he seems to have figured out the junction to the exit...

23 hours ago
The first layer of bricks is down for the bench!

Well, most of them anyway...



Nobly helped by my favourite bostik bucket.

I'm rather hoping that things will pick up speed a bit now, before either of us feel the need to light it up. And I'm starting to dream of having a nice warm place to air damp clothes off if we have six solid weeks of rain. Or a cozy place to rest and put my feet up without having to haul my butt upstairs.
2 days ago
Put a batch of bone broth to cook in the crockpot or instant pot!
3 days ago

Billions of glossy brown nuts lie crushed on city sidewalks. The nuts you see are actually toxic horse chestnuts, not the sweet American chestnuts that once fed a continent.

Before 1904, American chestnuts made up a quarter of eastern hardwood forests, dropping tons of sweet, edible nuts every autumn. Native peoples and settlers harvested them as a staple food and fed pigs on the forest floor. But a fungal blight introduced on imported Asian trees wiped out four billion trees in forty years, collapsing entire ecosystems.

City planners replaced the lost food trees with fast-growing, fungus-immune horse chestnuts, whose seeds contain aesculin—a toxin that ruptures human red blood cells. Meanwhile, efforts to breed blight-resistant American chestnuts continue, alongside secret groves of survivors guarded deep in the Appalachians

.



CHAPTERS
00:00 Browns Everywhere
00:09 City Carpets
00:26 Shopper Leaving
00:41 Free Pile Ignored
01:07 Famine and Forest
01:38 Horse Chestnuts
02:34 Toxic Twins Everywhere
03:22 Vast Appalachian Forest
05:04 Appalachian Economy
08:01 Chestnut Civilization
10:46 Invading Fungus
13:19 New Sprouts
15:00 Backcross Breeding
16:44 Secret Trees Alive
17:06 Poison Cells Burst
18:24 Bread on Tree
19:26 Orange Cankers
20:12 Horse Chestnuts
20:51 Edible vs Asphalt
21:40 Extinction Begins
4 days ago
On my own land, I'm as organic as possible, with the exception that I will use my own composted humanure on the land, which most organic certifications do not allow. The certification is of no interest to me on my own land, but the principles very much are.

If a neighbour who follows similar principles has produce available, I will gladly accept or purchase that produce. I've had fruit, milk, cheese and goat meat that is absolutely top quality, fully 'organic' in principle but not certified.

Beyond that, when it comes to choosing what to support with cold hard cash, first of all I would choose waste streams. Too-Good-To-Go bags of bread aren't organic, but I'm happy to eat the bread and it saves me money that I can then invest in making my property more productive. I will buy a kilo of chicken liver which is not organic and which then entitles me to ask for a big bag of free meat scraps which get rendered down into lard and supply meaty bits for adding to meals and skinny bits that get chopped up and added to rice as a collagen supplement. There's usually bones for making bone broth in the bag too. The price of liver has dropped by over 50% over the last twenty years because so few people want to buy it, so whilst it's not quite a waste product I'm pretty sure my money doesn't support the system very much. And again, I save money that can be invested into my own land.

I eat a fair amount of rice. Organic rice is very expensive here but there is a new variety that is being sold for very little more than the cheapest rice available that is grown here in Portugal and has been bred to need far fewer inputs and be naturally resistant to local pests and diseases. I do pay the little extra for this. When it first came out the price was right down at the cheapest level to get everyone to try it. Then it gradually rose to the point that I said -NO MORE! and stopped buying it, reverting to the cheapest available rice. Apparently enough other people did the same and the price dropped to exactly my cut off point so I'm now buying it again. From I can deduce that either someone is watching my every purchase and I have far more power to control such things than seems reasonable, or my cut off point was the same as plenty of other people's. The rice is packaged in paper, not plastic, which is another bonus. The used bags get used as kindling for the rocket mass heater. In my mind, if it's bred to need fewer inputs then they don't need to be charging more for it!

I buy in bulk bags of split red lentils. Not organic because the price difference is too extreme - literally over four times the price for organic! I figure that the lentils I buy are part of a rotation that will then reduce the nitrate needed for the next crop. If I was a bit younger with a bit more energy I'd grow my own. I'm very tempted to try a patch anyway this year but my common sense (which knows exactly how many projects aren't getting done, not to mention the essential stuff that's also being neglected) has stepped in and told me to invest in a blight resistant chestnut tree instead because my attempts to grow my own haven't worked yet. I'm also running an experiment with perennial beans, though I don't think they'll be able to take the place of lentils, at least, not they way I use the lentils. I could learn different ways though!

In short - I focus on my own land first, well grown stuff second, waste stream a close third, least impact fourth. Certification of itself is of no interest to me.
4 days ago
I don't do many 'traditional' walks with Rock.

He comes outside with me every time I go out to the garden, whereupon he zooms around like a lunatic incessantly. If I do a 'real' walk, he comes with me. And then my neighbour, who has decided she's too old to have a dog of her own, takes him out every day. He's learned what time of day she turns up, and if I go outside with him at around that time he hangs around just long enough to be polite and then runs like crazy up the hill to find her, then helps her in the garden until she brings him home again.

Tonight was a little different as she was down working on the land next to mine so Rock shot off the moment I let him out (she has a biscuit supply in her pocket and food is very important), then after a minute he ran back to me, and kept running backwards and forwards until he'd succeeding in worrying me enough to go and check that everything was OK: Whereupon we chatted for ten minutes and Rock sits around looking smug because he's got us together, like he firmly believes we are supposed to be.

He's quite good at entertaining and exercising himself...



I think I might select 'other' because none of the others feel quite right...
5 days ago
I've always considered it to be black water if it's stored for more than 24 hours.

Mine is a very simple system - just a wide hose-pipe collecting it from the shower, wash basin and washing machine that carries it to whichever fruit tree seems to need it most at the time. No storage involved. But I am very fussy about what soaps are used!
5 days ago