William Bronson

Turn them into Biochar?

I bought these off of eBay.
The roots are tiny, so I expect to eat them whole.
I'm starting some of them in containers, other in raised beds.

I was improving a bed at the community garden, when I got an idea.
Lay a plastic barrel down on its side and stake it in place so it doesn't roll.
Build a raised bed with the barrel forming one end.
Set up drip irrigation with a valve at the barrel and 1/2 gallon emitters as the end points.
Each emitter is pinned under a small flower pot, and the pots are buried in sawdust .
The sawdust I stopped with compost.
We cut a hole at the apex of the barrel, big enough to hold a bucket.
We cut the bottom off a bucket, and slide it in place.
This gives us access to the interior, but we can close the hole with a bucket lid, or a second bucket with a plant in it.

Could you use steel springs as the cushion in an all steel tire?
I googled that and the results were not promising,but there is a company making memory metal mesh tires for bicycles.
These tires is use less rubber and can be retreaded.
That would open the door to rubber coatings that are not based on petroleum.

https://smarttirecompany.com/


A different way of using bikes that might escaped the need for rubber tires is a  rail road riding bike.

T R Stream wrote:

William Bronson wrote:
Or use the oven itself as a firebox.
While not a rocket stove, it is a highly insulated fire"proof" box

I like making use of its existing qualities --
would that mean burning inside the oven, adding an exhaust pipe/chimney, and using it as heating? or maybe cut an opening in the top as a burner for cooking?

I was thinking a hole in the top, with a "plunger" tube, a piece of 4" flue pipe that extends down into the oven/firebox, stopping 4" off the bottom.
Pipe that into the bottom of an inverted  half barrel, sitting on top of the oven, which itself has a plunger pipe leading to a proper chimney.
Seal between the barrel and firebox with cob.
The barrel radiates heat, not unlike the barrel on a rocket stove.
Cook on flat surface of the barrel,or heat firebricks on the upper oven rack for baking.

That's one idea, but you could also just punch a hole in the bottom and direct the exhaust from a tlud or rocket stove onto  the bottom of a chunk of steel/stone/ refractory inside the oven.
You probably wouldn't even need a chimney, just prop the oven door open a bit.


I have much crappier oven  that I hope to use as the firebox for a boiler,  with a tlud inside and a couple of retorts alongside it , or with a tlud below the stove heating the retorts through a hole.

A fire worthy box with a nicely fit hinged door has a lot of possibilities for your average mad tinkerer .

I would probably build a rocket powered ,"black" oven out of it.
Or use the oven itself as a firebox.
While not a rocket stove, it is a highly insulated fire"proof" box, so it should support efficient combustion.
But bring far away from home, scrapping it for money is not a waste.
Money is to cool scrap as whiskey is to corn, but less work/profitable.

I use them for shelf supports.
I use a drill with an extra long driver bit, screws and washers.
The can itself is a little bit of storage, and a properly sized jar will fit nicely.
A wall of these could be a great hardware,seed or spice storage.
Two close set close together could make a good  place to store long handled tools, with work gloves stored inside the cans themselves.
Wall mounted cans could be packed with bamboo tubes to make houses for mason bees, the ends covered with aluminum mesh gutter guard.
Cans could be the containers for the plants in a living wall.

They could be sacrificial molds for the voids in a cast concrete block.
They might be used as sacrificial molds for  casting cylindrical  concrete legs or shelf supports.

Flattened or whole, they can be used in the corners of a raised bed.


With the right cross section, a tapered  piece of lumber could be forced through a can that has no top or bottom, changing the cans cross section in the process.



I also use tin cans to make TLUD  (Top-Lit Up Draft)gasifier stoves.
They can also be parts for larger stoves, like sections of chimney flue, or legs.

I've made candles in tin cans.
The lids, can be used a snuffer.
I keep the lids off of some cans to use as giant washers.

Four out of the six people in my family of origen have had life threatening cancers that have required extreme interventions to survive.
The two of us that have not, probably have the "worst" diets out of the six of us.

My father has always been very keen on knowing how the food he ate affected his health.
At 88, he's still doing rather well, but he has Alzheimer's, like his father did.
This is the very thing he feared the most.
Ironically, his extremely low fat diet might have contributed to his mental state, even though it was supposed to do the opposite.

I've noticed once the body suffers from an unbalanced diet, just balancing the diet might not be enough to set things right.

I'm insulin resistant, probably started  from my teenage habit of drinking lots of highly sugared herbal tea!
It wasn't soda, which I had ni access to, but I always got sleepy after drinking it.
When I got a job, I would eat a handful of candy bars for lunch...
I'm not going to be able to eat "normal" amounts of sugar of simple carbs and be ok, that ship has sailed.

But, I recently gave up caffeine, to avoid prostate cancer and incidentally greatly reduced my artificial sugar intake, and now my body is less reactive to eating simple carbs and sugars.

At the same time I started experiencing pain and weakness in my thigh muscles.
It turned out each serving of the energy drink I used to imbibe was fortified with 100% of several important vitamins, and I had been megadosing by drinking multiple servings every day.
You can buy drinks that have the vitamins but not the caffeine and taurine, but they cost a lot more than the ones with the stimulants!
I'm back to supplementing vitamins B, C, and D, now in pill form, and at more moderate levels.

Like my father before me, I find myself creating odd drinks and unusual meals to try to bring my body back into balance.

All of which to say, once you start messing with the body by feeding it extremes of anything, you will likely trigger cascading effects, and your "fixes" will as well

I definitely think whole foods, as a rule, will keep you from going to extremes.
I don't see artificial colors and flavors as very threatening to my family's health, because the cheapest and best meals are made from items that don't have any of those things.
Yesterday at my mom's house I ate a microwaved potato with butter and salt.
Dirt cheap, delicious and no worries about additives.
Flaming hot Cheetos, mountain dew code red and Kraft macaroni dinner  might have crazy stuff in them but no one needs to eat those, just like no one needs to drink whiskey, but we are allowed to do so if we want.
I see white flour and bread as similarly suspect, but also no one is forcing them on me.

I wonder if j chokes in buckets might work well.
Grow them in the bucket, feed the greens fresh, leave them outside overwinter, pull them inside to thaw, feed most of the roots to the bunnies, plant a few roots back into the soil along with fresh rabbit bedding.

Or maybe, bring them inside and grow them out?
Sunchokes can grow in low light, producing blanched sprouts.

If bunnies can eat beets, swish chard/beets are incredibly resilient.
The roots might have too much sugar, but I keep pet rabbits so my criteria for feeding is different.

I use a wine bottle, just like mom always used .
Should be green glass, because that's what mom always used!