Jay Angler

I'd like to do a little reality checking here.

1. Both these designs are in danger of being wind tunnels. The both show the "tunnel", but in many ways that's the easy part to build. The amount of material, and the challenge of filling in the open ends of the tunnel, to actually create a warm, dry place to sleep, I suspect will be much harder than the roof, which as Nancy points out, simply needs a tarp to make it waterproof.

2. The Refugee tube is only made of two widths of pallets. To do so, took 12 identical pallets. Every extra layer - which would make the inside safer from driving rain, or make the effort of enclosing the ends more worthwhile - will take another 6 identical skids. In my neck of the woods, most of the "free pallets" are all slightly different sizes and designs.

Personally, the octagonal pallet shed that Nancy built and used flexible branches to form a domed roof would be more practical.  

Walter Byrd wrote: BTW: the term "invasive species" is not really fair. The species did not invade, humans brought them over.

Yes, sloppy word usage on my part - the Mountain Pine Beetle is a native of Canada. We provided it with a buffet, and it took advantage of that fact.

Most species which move to an area with or without human help, take advantage of whatever buffet humans have arranged. The Zebra Muscle took advantage of the polluted Great Lakes which had most of their top predator fish reduced or eliminated. The eco-systems are re-balancing, but it's taken 50 years or so?

There are several predators that have learned how to safely eat Boa Constrictors in Florida (or at least their eggs, which also helps reduce the problem.)

Humans tend to only identify something as "invasive" if they can't capitalize and make money off it. Which is raised up-thread as one part of identifying whether a piece of land is "marginal" or not. At some point, I hope that humans will choose something other than getting a lot of money, as their yardstick for the value of something.

The Orange trees were brought to Florida by humans and even though they've wrecked ecosystems, and have taken over huge tracts of land, we don't accuse them of being invasive! But we call the insect that spreads the bacteria, "invasive".

Tools I have concerns about, get the "nail polish" treatment. I use that convenient little brush in the jar to paint my initials on some part of the tool where it's not too likely to wear off. One jar lasts a long time. It also does a fair job of keeping a nut in place if you don't have a jam nut or nylock to use.  

I actually have one good pair of scissors which have my name engraved on them using a hand engraver - nothing fancy. At one point Hubby tried to insist they were his (he does have a near identical, but not quite so nice pair), until I suggested he look at the name on them.

However, in general I agree with the concept. Having at least one set of basic tools with the firm rule that all the bits stay together, and the box lives in a specific spot, is a very important method of keeping one's blood pressure at a healthy level!

Walter Byrd wrote: The primary driver of this agricultural disaster is citrus greening disease (also known as Huanglongbing or HLB), a fatal bacterial infection spread by an invasive insect vector called the Asian citrus psyllid.

This is another example of why current farming practices need to change. There are some great farmers who have been demonstrating better options, like Mark Shepard's Restoration Agriculture, with lines of a variety of trees and support plants on contour using swales for water management, and room for annual crops/animal grazing in between (including at times wheat if I'm not mistaken.)

Canada planted monoculture evergreen tree farms and the Pine Beetle invaded. 40 years later, I keep hearing about all the Doug Fir trees being planted in Europe as monocultures and thinking, we have better tools in our tool boxes, and lots of better traditions to draw on, such as coppicing on a human scale.

The best thing we can do as permies is to keep demonstrating and promoting those better ways!

That said, there are some very pointy mountains in BC, Canada, that are definitely *not* farmland! The Canadian Shield as a whole isn't a good candidate, but that doesn't mean there aren't pockets of it where soil has collected. I am on Glacial Till with lots of large and small rocks. A low area that gets soggy in the winter has far more green grass halfway through our drought period, with no water added, than it did 20 years ago. Big Paul at Wheaton Labs is using Hugels to build awesome soil out of dirt and rocks - it does take time, and access to some irrigation during the development stage is very helpful.

In my ecosystem, I just let my sunchoke tops die back to feed the underground portion of the plants. Once dry, they don't regenerate, but they're marginal on my land.

Also the deer eat them.

If I had dried stocks that weren't needed in the compost as extra browns, I'd biochar them as I'd much rather have biochar than ash.

G Freden wrote: ... My son pushed this heavy heavy wheelbarrow home, ten minutes away.  It was a sunny Sunday morning and I was expecting some admiring glances from passersby, but we didn't see anyone!  I'll show off here instead.

That's a great haul! Give your son a, "well done," from me. I'm narrowly built and light weight, so I have a lot of trouble keeping a heavy wheel barrow under control.

My "allotment" is a 4'x10' bed in a friend's sunny, sheltered backyard, where the ecosystem is much friendlier to tomato plants. My San Marzano tomatoes are doing wonderfully. I've mostly been bringing them home in a 4 litre bucket in my bike panier, but so far I've made 6 litres of tomato sauce and there is a bucket in the kitchen now, and likely more red ones in a few days. So much depends on the weather. The nights are getting cooler and the days shorter, so at some point the tomatoes simple won't develop the flavor we were getting 3 weeks ago.

Burra Maluca wrote: ... Apart from that pond thing between us, he's a lad of his times and I suspect that all his sockets are in mm, not archaic imperial, to match the materials and fittings he works with here. Austin has a good selection of both sorts though! ...

Canada is officially bilingual. Apparently that includes the need for complete sets of both metric and imperial - and the first case I looked in when I couldn't find my 11/32, was, of course, metric. 11/32 is a weird size to begin with, but we've got a lot of stainless steel hardware in that size and being in a soppy wet climate, stainless is worth the cost.  I'll go hunting today while there's better light in the tool area.  

Looking forward to more pictures and updates on your bum warmer!

bump!

Burra Maluca wrote: It seems to involve long, thin, weird, hollow brick things that He scavenged from somewhere and has been busy cutting to size so he can create ducts.

My son seems to have run off with the trowel though so sticking the bricks in place is going to have to wait until we either get it back or find another one.

Those hollow bricks sound intriguing. Scavenged anything has less embodied energy than having to buy new! I hope it works.

Tools, magical disappearing tools... I know that song! Good luck at retrieving your trowel! If he happens to have my 11/32 socket drive that fits my 1/4" ratchet driver, I'd like it back, however, I'm highly suspicious that he's not the one that relocated it. My driver handle itself was missing for over a year. I looked everywhere. "Someone" had left it in a bucket with other tools and had totally forgotten why it was even there.

Walter Byrd wrote:I have read this in a few places. But I am skeptical. I suspect that, when they say land is unsuitable for crops, what they really mean is: land is unsuitable for industrial scale agriculture.

I've heard the word "marginal land" bandied about, but a quick search turned up several quite different definitions:

1. "Generally, marginal land refers to that which is unsuited for sustained agricultural production. Approximately 10% of all agricultural land is classified as ‘marginal.’ It is the sustained technicality in that definition that separates marginal from unproductive: marginal lands can be improved to be productive but its limited productivity can also be worsened."
https://saifood.ca/amb5-marginal-land/#:~:text=Generally

2. "Marginal land is land that is of little agricultural or developmental value because crops produced from the area would be worth less than any rent paid for access to the area."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_land

3. "Land that is marginal for conventional row-crop production is often well-suited to perennial crops,[10] including low-input crops grown as bioenergy or bioproduct feedstocks such as switchgrass (Panicum virgatum), shrub willow (Salix spp.), and giant miscanthus (Miscanthus x giganteus), allowing production of these crops without inducing competition for prime farmlands."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_land

Some of what we consider "industrial agriculture" involves large tractors and combines etc, and there's plenty of land that is too steep or irregular for that, but which might still be perfectly fine for small scale, small plot farming. However, other land, the huge danger is that any farming that disturbs the soil will result in damage, erosion, and other risks such as land-slides.

I think a big part of the issue is that people used to produce a good chunk of their own food in a "kitchen garden" but that went out of style, and now with "densification" of cities, people are lucky to have a balcony, let alone a yard large enough to produce a meaningful amount of food. However, since Covid first, followed by inflation rising, the interest in city gardening has gone up in my region, even if it feels like a drop in the bucket.

To me the big issue is that we have plenty of historical evidence of "bad shit happening" causing starvation. Sometimes that is human caused, but many times it has been caused by large volcanic eruptions and humans cannot control those! As William Bronson wrote, "Few crops are as naturally storable compared to grains." However, several countries have been using up those reserves already, and seem to hope that they can rebuild them. Weather weirding and soil depletion is not helping there!