Thekla McDaniels

Kate said
“Clearing some of this to grow food is more of a matter of choosing where to get our firewood and mulch from, not industrial-scale clearing.“

Well said!  To me this represents the very heart of permaculture!

I am going to be quoting and paraphrasing this in days and years to come.

Thank you, Kate.

Su Ba wrote:Folks in my town know that I love dill pickles, so as a result, I get gifted jars of store bought pickles. After consuming the pickles, I’ll soak parboiled veggies in the leftover brine to create new refrigerator pickles. Green beans, carrots, asparagus, bell peppers, chayote, daikon/radishes, etc. It takes a couple of weeks in the frig for the veggies to take on the full flavor. When this batch of veggies are all consumed, then I’ll use the leftover brine to cook diced potatoes in, and make a hot potato salad.  ….  And rather than drinking any leftover juice if there is any , I’ll use it to dip squares of bread and eat them as my evening snack.  Waste not, want not.

You really DO like dill pickles!😁

I have been considering what trees to plant in the next season.  Right now a front runner is a few mulberry trees.  Not the fruitless, which are pollen producing.

What I like:  fast growing shade tree with high protein leaves (silk worms are able to produce silk from an all mulberry leaf diet).  If the leaves aren’t palatable to humans, then animals can eat them and make them in to milk cheese eggs and meat.

Once full size, mulberry trees can be coppiced or pollarded.  A good many street trees in the western USA are pollarded mulberries.

A source of rods and poles, firewood, fence building materials.  There’s a great thread here on permies where the community compiled a list of more than a hundred uses just for sticks)

They fruit for an extended period of time, so you don’t have to pick and preserve.  If you let the chickens free range, they will discover the berries under the tree.

And I don’t think I made this up, but check first before counting on it, a female tree will bear fruit without being pollinated, but either they are seedless, or the seeds are sterile.

And if one of your youngsters gets interested in coming years, they could try out silk production.  Hardest part, so I have been told is killing the pupating caterpillars… 😢 hard sad, not difficult to accomplish.  

That’s great news, Kees.  Congratulations!  Enjoy

Wow, George, that was fast!

I might be ready to abandon this project.  If I expose the material to sunlight, will that make it unavailable to the anaerobic process?  Too hard to read all the variables.

Weeding and dreaming, or chopping wood or observing the animal behavior of my mixed species barn yard community is so much more supportive of my health than confronting these processes. 🙏

Ach!  You think the nitrile doesn’t do anything but break into smaller bits of nitrile?  I thought it was going to separate into component molecules or compounds ready to be re-utilized by some other organism.  I thought that’s what biodegradable means!?

Where can I find out more about that?

I see “mr google” was consulted, but isn’t that “AI”?  AI has been shown to “hallucinate”, or fabricate erroneous information, and as a search engine, google has deteriorated significantly in the last 10 years.  IMO.

All it takes is for some bloggers or influencers to utilize “biodegradable” to mean this new thing, and AI will quote or utilize it as such, and the word  becomes the new version of itself.  

I would be very discouraged if “biodegradable” has come to mean just turning in to microscopic particles of the same substance.

And, if that is so, what’s the new word we can use to communicate the meaning “biodegradable” used to carry:   Restoring carbon compounds to molecular components utilizable by other living organisms in their life processes?  Or have we reached the point we no longer need or want to communicate about that specific idea?

Wow, it’s going to take some time for me to assimilate this new (to me) further degradation of our language, and restore my optimism and positive attitude!  Disillusionment can be so painful.

Maybe I need to head over to the aging homesteader thread…. commiserate with fellow seniors who also are experiencing the mounting losses of this life stage.

Thanks, Tim.  A whole new set of things to think about.  That process sounds more like industrial processing than composting.  Now I am wondering if that is how those “compostable” plastic cutlery and cups are broken down.  I would have preferred a new word for a process like that


I have been wondering if it would speed the start of the decomposition if I devised a way to expose the used gloves to sunlight.  It’s pretty intense in these high elevation arid conditions.

I wear nitrile gloves mostly to keep the skin on my hands intact.  I make an effective barrier cream type lotion but still sometimes need the gloves, which I wear and re-wear until they tear or are contaminated.  I wear them under my leather work gloves as well as on their own.

I needed to replace my box, and there in the hardware store, I found a box marked “biodegradable”.  

Say what?!!

I read every word on the box and decided they would be worth a try.  They’re not going to be worse than the regular nitrile gloves.

“Accelerated biodegradation in biologically active landfill”.

Doesn’t that sound like composting?

I wore the first ones today, and they feel good, seem to be the same glove….

So for now I’m looking for where to create my biologically active environment.

I think I will try to encourage a fungal rich pile of sticks and leaves, and inoculate with various rotting branches, soil, leaves, samples collected from all around, including compost… I need one any way.  We seem to be having an open winter, so although it’s scary to think about the coming summer, it won’t be too hard to gather organism rich substances.

And I will be collecting my  used glove fragments.

I wonder, does anyone feel inclined to join this experiment, or care to venture any theories or guesses how to enhance and accelerate the decomposition of my nitrile gloves?

Good for you, Pearl.

I’m sitting next to my fire, listening to Catch 22 .

I’m wearing my jeans and work clothes not yet rags.  I am covered in chain saw “dust”.

Maybe I am looking snazzy too, but definitely a different kind of snazzy 😁

Happy new year

John Weiland wrote:

In an inverted corollary to this observation, I find that the best way to find a lost item on the property is to go buy a new one....the old one will magically appear just as soon as you've used the new one past the point of being able to return it!  ...  

Yup!  Me too!  The people at the hardware store, wherever I live know this about me and are kind