Klaus Wolfgang

I'm years late to the party, but if anyone knows where to get Mark's (or some other landrace/grex variety of sweet potato) in the continental US let me know.

Thanks for humoring me Mart.

That makes a lot of sense, I guess in addition to diversifying your cooking methods one thing I hadn't thought of was the ability to make it yourself, or fix it if it breaks. Assuming you have some tinfoil or other reflective material on hand as a backup.

A solar lunch box is only as good as long as the dog doesn't knock it off the counter and the solar panels/batteries haven't degraded/died.

By the way, you mentioned a "Chinese parabolic cooker," would that effectively be the same thing, just a manufactured version from China?

When  I get back to the states I'll try making one, I'm not a prepper but it seems like a fun project even if I won't get a ton of use out of it.

Although, maybe I become one, preparing for a rainy day is always smart. Even if it's not the end of the world, you can always lose your job...

Not trying to derail the thread but can anyone enlighten me as to what a solar cooker is?

It looks like it uses mirrors to focus sunlight on a specific spot to raise temperatures enough to cook, is it effectively an oven then?

What are the tradeoffs with other alternatives, such as a rocket mass oven which is also powerless, or a solar powered induction stove?

Is there any benefit to these over traditional ovens other than being electricity free and low tech? Does it cook slower and work better for certain meals for example?

Sounds cool, I'm in the same boat as John Shelton.

Totally off grid, having to build a house from scratch, and making a living off a communal farm is a big investment (time and financially) so make sure whoever you pick you click with, you don't want to be stuck with a neighbor you hate with no way out haha.

I can't personally make a major commitment like that, I'd like to eventually wean off my job but right now the financial security is hard to just drop altogether. I'll be doing something kind of similar with some of my childhood friends, but our will be on grid with the goal to be mostly grid-independent, but we all have different jobs, the permaculture and homesteading part will just be for fun so there are no commitments. We'll be more like neighbors on a big shared piece of property. We've known each other since childhood, so there's no risk of personality clashes.

You're going all the way though, if you get some bites I'd be curious how it turns out for you. Keep us up to date if it becomes a reality! I'm exceptionally curious about the employee owned farm, it sounds a bit like communism and I don't mean that in a bad way (Some people, especially many Americans view the word as an insult), it just reminds me of the old Karl Marx quote "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". Some people may contribute more or less to a communal farm, and you'll have to figure out how to fairly split that or to split it evenly regardless of input. Sometimes a lot of extra work doesn't equate to a lot of extra yield and that could lead to disputes. I'm sure with amiable enough people, this won't be an issue. I think it can be a very cool model with the right group of people.

> I know I have spent, and continue to spend, a lot of money on raised beds, soil, seeds, pots and fertilizer.

Well we can look at these individually, depending on your soil you might not need pots, beds, or to buy any soil. I think you can eliminate pots & beds everywhere if you really tried.

The advantage of raised beds is really in soil quality, you get better drainage and dirt because you're just using store bought soil instead of whats on the ground. My goal in gardening is to improve the soil I have instead, and by increasing soil health drainage and water absorption will be by products.

I also plant everything outdoors, so I've never really used pots for much. You can start seeds inside if you need to in about anything that will hold soil lying around.

So this leaves main costs. Seeds, and Fertilizer.

Seeds are always going to be subjective. You can find a lot of seeds for free via forums, neighbors, seed exchanges, and even out foraging. On the flip side you might want to buy something niche where you're going to end up paying to find a variety you want. I don't think seeds alone are very expensive most of the time though, and if you use varieties that aren't seedless (especially landrace or heirloom varieties) you should be able to just keep the seeds and replant annuals again the next year.

As for fertilizer, this is where I struggle a bit too. There are maybe 3 easy methods for fertilizer

1) Compost
2) Living compost
3) Humanure compost

The last one can be a sizable amount of fertilizer, especially with a family of 3 or more. You do need to get hay/sawdust though so it's not entirely free unless you're chipping trees yourself, have a chip drop available to you, or have neighbors with extra hay or something you can use. It is still significantly cheaper than buying fertilizer though.

You can certainly find solutions that will work, however nothing will work at any reasonable scale to power a home.

If you're just looking to retain a small amount of electricity to power something minor for a few hours that might be doable, but without modern batteries you won't be able to power a whole house when the electricity goes out for any reasonable amount of time.

Gravity batteries work but the amount of water you need to store is insane when you do the actual math. Any type of thermal battery won't work any better than the gravity fed ones as far as I know.

You can try to store it chemically but it's just going to be a much worse version of a typical battery.

As the poster above noted, you could also create alcohol do something like silviculture to make charcoal / wood. Those are good options because theoretically you can store a large amount of power in a (relatively) small area. The problem with these two is producing enough of it, but at least they store nearly indefinitely and over time you can continue to stockpile alcohol or charcoal for an emergency.

You could also theoretically split water into oxygen and hydrogen with electrolysis and try to store the hydrogen, but finding containers that won't leak is very difficult and it can be dangerous, because to store it at a reasonable density it needs to be under tremendous pressure.

Hmm, i'm certainly no expert on this topic so take my advice with a heap of salt.

In my observation, I've seen trees totally covered in aphids next to trees of the same species without a single afid on them. Likewise i've seen branches covered in aphids with all other branches untouched.

I do know that plants are able to make a metabolite that can kill off aphids by stopping their digestion, aphids are unable to attack plants that are sufficiently healthy and can afford to create these chemicals. There's a reason aphids don't just wipe out every crop, other than predators. Plants have many biological mechanisms of self defense, some include attracting predators but most include complex biological defenses.

I read about the digestion metabolite long ago but can't find the source anymore.


https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-34821-w
https://www.mdpi.com/2223-7747/13/16/2332

You can read the abstracts above for some other mechanisms, the point is plants have defenses against aphids. Typically the plants that are covered in aphids are the ones that are the least healthy because they either can't spend the energy to create these expensive metabolites or can't get the correct nutrition.

If all of your plants are unhealthy, then you may have to worry about aphids spreading. If only a couple are unhealthy or only these smartweeds are, then the aphids aren't a big deal and attracting some of their predators might actually be beneficial.

Oh and it's also a great neck workout with heavy enough weights, if you're a guy who wants a thick neck lol.

Out in southeast asia you'll see people carrying stuff on their head all the time, and not light stuff either.

I've done some carrying on my head to my home, but nothing in excess of maybe 20 kilos or so. My wife's brother hauls stuff around using a tump line as someone else has depicted, and it looks pretty useful. You can definitely carry more weight overall with a tump line.

Shoulder carrying or on the small of your back (where you'd place a barbell) is also good and can usually be used for heavier loads if they're shaped right. On the head is by far the least exerting method though in my experience, even if I can put more weight on my back, I have to bend over and it's more exhausting to carry the same weight the same distance in my opinion.

Anyway, point being this is alive and well in many parts of the world still. I would also say that if you're a younger fit person you can start with a lot more than 5lbs off the bat, at least I did and I've had no issues or pains. I found that walking up awkard and steep terrain i had more difficulty in my arms and in the muscles used to keep balance in my neck (If things tip a little to the side, back, or forth it can be a real neck workout) than with actual compression issues. I'm personally more worried about the load on the spine as far as safety goes, but I also think it's pretty hard to get enough weight do that unless you've got a neck like a bull.

In my opinion, head carrying is awesome when it meets a few criteria:

1) The item is heavy enough, or awkward enough to grip that your forearms would burn out if you carried by hand. Or if both of your hands are just full (I can't balance stuff without at least 1 hand free personally to help steady the item, but some people probably can)
2) The item isn't so heavy that you feel any real strain just standing still with it
3) The item is well-balanced, some things just don't balance well on your head if they're an awkward shape. Usually those awkward shapes are easier to carry by hand or on your shoulder.

If it meets these, it's almost always easier to carry on your head than on your shoulder or back, because you don't shift your center of gravity.

Hi all,

I have a vacation home in the tropics where some of my wife's family stays (nieces who are going to school, relative who had a stroke and can't support himself anymore). They're doing some gardening with the plots of good soil and on the rice field so they can have some extra food and cut costs while i'm not around.

I would however like to make my own little garden, problem is the land leftover and unused I would like to use is barren heavily compacted clay where the previous owner was going to do some construction but abandoned. It still has the base of 4 concrete pillars, and gets a decent amount of shade from a hill and the house. There aren't even hardly any weeds growing in it. The other issue is that I can't really bring anything in to mulch. The house is a long walk from the nearest road, so anything I bring in has to be hand carried for roughly a third of a mile by hand over a rickety bridge (or alternatively across the river which is say thigh deep most of the year and 30 feet wide or so), and up and down slopes. While this is totally doable and I routinely end up being the family pack animal, it would be tough to bring in large quantities of anything to use as a mulch, other than what I can make here on the property.

I'm hoping to potentially plant some cover crops during my visit this year to help improve the soil, along with whatever crops might be able to survive such conditions. I'm not too worried about an actual harvest as long as I can start moving the soil in the right direction. I'll only be here 3 months, and then I likely won't be back for at least another year, so I can leave whatever is there for a good while on its own.

I'm not at all familiar with tropical plants or gardening in the tropics, so I have no clue what I should be planting here. Seeds are light and I think I can get a pretty good variety delivered to the road online.

What would you suggest I plant?

Thanks,
Klaus.