Dave Bross

I'll second the prior mention of loquats.

Evergreen, fast growing, and very well adapted to the warmer climate here in FL.

Last year was the only year there was no fruit because we had a nasty and unusually early  freeze when they were flowering.

To get them to be hedge-like I pruned them ( topping them by pinching out the buds) a lot when young.

I tried a few different Elaegnus but not a lot of success there. The Ebbingei cultivar  may finally make it but now I know why it's not listed as invasive here like it is elsewhere.

A funny and unexpected outcome...I bought some giant thai ginger plants on ebay and interplanted them with the loquats on the back property line.  They've filled in around the trees to make a pretty dense "hedge." Probably not critter proof but dense enough that it's a nice privacy hedge.

Loquats need full sun to do fell. I tried planting along fence lines mostly in the shade and the trees are not much bigger many years later. The ones in the sun are huge.

One other note on the loquats. They only grow from seed, cuttings don't work but grafting does. There is a lot of grafting stock available out there for bigger, sweeter loquats.

I've noticed a lot of difference in the taste of the different ones I have and most of them came from seeds from the same tree.

One thing I always wondered...

When a grocery store is built on a slab, trenches are cast into the slab to run the refrigerant lines from the compressors in the back out to the coolers and freezers in the store.

When the refrigerant lines are laid in the trenches they're suspended in sand.

The whole thing is topped with a thin layer of concrete that's easily broken through if access is needed.

Seems a possible for residential if you weren't in a cost/time hurry like most contractors and had to go with a slab?


This little tidbit came from my days running my scrap metal businesses.

There was a guy who bought all the equipment from closed grocery stores who would give me all the scrap in exchange for pulling all the different units that he could resell off the roof with my crane.
This had to be done carefully because the roofs were rubber membranes and you don't want to rip or damage that.


His copper salvage trick was to cut the copper line at the compressor on one end and the cooler or freezer on the other.
He would then tie it off to his fork lift and pull it from the compressor side.

As long as you had a fairly straight pull you could easily pull all that copper tubing right out of it's little sand burrow.
There's a LOT of copper there.

Yeah, quality control has been going down the drain for a while.
Cutting the cement percentage in ready mix concrete is a cheat that usually won't be detected until decades later.

The old cracker houses here are up on stone pilings and built from first growth pine centuries ago .
Many survive today.
If that old pine catches fire it's all over quickly though. That stuff burns like gasoline.

I believe up on pilings is the way to go.

Here in Florida a majority of building has the supply and drain plumbing immortalized in the concrete slab.

This is a terrible idea because the pressurized supply side will often develop a leak that's very near impossible to locate and  would require breaking a lot of concrete to fix, if you could find it.
There was a lot of copper tubing in that era that was defective and one ex plumber friend told me that any dings or dents in copper water line will eventually cause a fail at that point.

Ii had a house where this happened and I ended up running the supply plumbing through the attic crawl space after wasting money on a service that claimed to be able to find the leak and couldn't.

My other thought was to put it in the ground next to the slab and tap into it through the exterior wall.

I was able to ask some plumbers about this and they all suggested overhead due to that being easier to hook up to by dropping lines down through the wall and cutting a "hatch" in the drywall to have room to make the connections.as opposed to breaking holes in the exterior walls, which were concrete block.

Better for frost issues too.

One of the more clever ways to leach out the tannins is to put them in a mesh bag hung in the water tank on a toilet.

Automatic water changes.

The one that worked for me was driving a school bus.

I liked it well enough I did it for 19 years.

There are many caveats and potential downsides if you choose to work for the wrong outfit so I wrote a short Amazon Kindle book about it.

How To Be A School Bus Driver

https://www.amazon.com/How-Be-School-Bus-Driver-ebook/dp/B007RRHW8M/ref=sr_1_1?

A friend had one of those high frequency boxes you're building on an old tombstone welder and it made it a very different and highly satisfactory beast.
Way easier striking and butter smooth welding.

I agree with your assessment of what a pain those tombstones are to weld with in stock configuration.
I've had one forever and have to employ workarounds like "stitching" on light stuff (spot welding every inch or so, then going back and spot welding between the original welds...rinse and repeat  ad nauseum)  and multiple passes with small diameter rods on heavy stuff.
I had to laugh watching a very talented hot rod/custom fabricator doing the same thing with a wire welder to avoid warping/burning through the thin auto body panels he was joining.

Certifiable it ain't, but what I do  works for what I need.

Randy...

Here are a few good vids:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j9V8DkXJVU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwkSTfNy1Nw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs1UhhJH0E8

My first job in the auto trade was working for a Mercedes shop. Back then (early 1970s) the exhaust systems on them had to first be fitted/mocked up in the car, tack welded, then pulled back off and welded completely.  We got a LOT of oxy acetylene welding practice. An odd thing we discovered was that the wire coat hangers the uniforms came on made the best gas welding rods.

Fast forward to the 1980s and owning junkyards and cutting things up with a propane/oxygen tip saved huge money using propane instead of acetylene. You can buy propane cutting tips for most torches.

All that to say I'm still quite fond of torch work.

One thing to be careful about on that old rig from your dad is that the diaphragms in the regulators may blow out from old age when you first put gas pressure to them. Just be ready to shut down the valve in case of unexpected excitement.

Looks like all the basics as I see them are covered here, but I can add one thing.

If you're going with a stick welder the 70 series rods are WAY easier to weld with, or to learn to weld with, 7018 and 7014 being the most popular.

Check this, or any of his other books:

Martin Crawford

https://permies.com/t/16041/Book-Review-Creating-Forest-Garden

more food forest than garden but plenty of useful crossover.