Michael Cox

Eucalyptus brash would also be excellent material for making biochar with - you would need suitable equipment to do it safely in fire prone country

Perhaps our disagreement is about what you consider to be knowledge?

I share some of my son's obsessively inquisitive traits. I can't recall a topic in recent years where I haven't been able to go down the rabbit hole a scratch that itch to investigate and learn.

I think this graphic is helpful.



I would suggest that the vast majority of the area of that diagram is readily accessible on the internet. Of course, you might need years of study to recognise it and understand it, but it is likely there. The central core area is very well represented.

So if we are talking about what is not accessible via the internet, I'd ask more explicitly - what knowledge do you mean?

I'm going to hard disagree here...

Accessible knowledge is unfathomably vast now - bewilderingly so. Sure, accessing deep knowledge requires some skills and dedication to break through the surface noise. But once you do you can learn more, more quickly, than at any time in prior human history.

Thinking back to my own life - I learned beekeeping as a teenager back in 1995. At that point in time learning was very much dusty old tomes, or master-student relationships. There were beginning to be more accessible "backyard beekeeping" type books but you were utterly dependent on someone standing alongside you and showing you the way. The internet has transformed that utterly - every single possible facet of beekeeping, from the most basic to the most detailed and arcane is now out there. You have the full richness of conflicting opinions being discussed and evaluated, and many of the old myths that were passed down orally can be debunked. And those dusty old tomes are available on there as well... The learning process has been completely disrupted.

This is just one field that I am personally intimately familiar with - it seems to be repeated all over.

As a parent, I'm currently watching - in some position between awe and mild apprehension - my 13-year-old's progress in learning computer coding. He has been able to self-teach in the space of a handful of months enough code that he is writing his own games, messing around with the basics of AI, has a functional understanding of computer graphics, including using and applying ray tracing, made a key logger for his laptop... I'm clinging on for dear life and trying to keep up. I grew up at a time when home computers were just becoming established, and would have killed for the access to knowledge that he has now. My biggest challenge is to make sure he stays on the ethical side of life!

Anne Miller wrote:I cant help with you question other than they less particular about nesting sites.

I have always heard African bees are very aggressive so I would stay away from them as much as possible.

"African" bees (as in bees living in Africa) are very different from "Africanised" bees living in the Americas.

Africanised bees are the result of the hybridisation of two strains of bee leading to the expression of hyper-territorial behaviours beyond those seen by any of the lines they were bred from. There is no reason to believe that African bees will necessarily be more aggressive and indeed many people throughout Africa do keep bees successfully.

I'm still to come to a method of seed storing that I'm completely happy with, but this thread sparked a memory of discussions about how early peoples saved seeds from season to season.

Drain blocked itself again a couple of weeks ago at the same spot. After snaking failed (as it did last time) i went on amazon and ordered a flexible hose with a screw thread to fit the pipes. It took a bit of lung power and a few attempts but did the trick. It helped to have some water in the pipe - it seemed to give the air something to push against, rather than just leaking gradually past the blockage.

Where you have known cold spots that are getting damp issues you need to guarantee good air circulation. Pull back furniture away from walls, remove fabric like curtains etc...

The problem is that the cold spots are at a lower temperature (at least some of the time) than the air in the room. The warm air in your living space holds lots of moisture, as that circulates through the house it cools and becomes saturated, then condenses out in the cold spots.

You can address the cold spots directly by insulating as you have already suggested.

Otherwise you need to address the humidity in the air itself. In our case we installed a powerful dehumidifier upstairs on the landing, in the cooler part of the house. It runs through the damp UK autumn when the relative humidity is high. We were emptying about 4 litres a day from it to start with. The fabric of the building holds a lot of moisture in the timber, plaster work etc... This has the advantage of making the house both feel warmer and then be easier to heat as well.

Salt cured and cold smoked egg yolks.

Mix about 500g salt and 500g sugar. Put half into a wide container about 1” deep. Use an egg shell to make divots for the yolks, so they can be placed without touching each other. Carefully separate the yolks (preserve the whites for meringue!), gently placing each one in its divot. Try to get them as clean as you can without risking breaking the yolk.

Spread the rest of the salt/sugar mixture over the tops ensuring they are well covered.

Leave covered in the fridge for 5 days.

The salt draws the moisture out of the yolks, making firm pucks, that look a bit like dried apricots.

Take them out after 5 days (they can go longer), and throughly rinse the eggs in cold water, this is your chance to remove any extra egg white that is still hanging on.

Spread them out on fine wire rack, and return the  to the fridge uncovered for 48 hours. This allows the surface moisture to thoroughly dry out.

Now they go in the cold smoker for 24 hours. They will keep in the fridge for a couple of months if covered, and you can resist eating them.

I use them grated on dishes, in a similar way to a hard cheese like Parmesan. It gives a delicate and smoky umami hit, without overpowering anything. They are not overly salty.

Have you considered planting vetiver grass hedges on contour? They form a dense barrier that drastically slows surface water flows and erosion, while stabilising slopes. You would probably place them 20ft apart, allowing you to mow strips across the slope as you do now. They have very deep root systems so bring soil moisture up to the surface which other plants can then access. Over time the trapped material collects up slope of each hedge making terraces of fertile soil on a more shallow incline.

The grasses grow tall, but recover well after fire and can be cut low with a hedge trimmer to reduce fuel load. The cut leaves make excellent mulch for building soil carbon and increasing water retention. It's generally considered a low fire risk, and is used extensively in places like Australia. The above-ground biomass remains green and moist, provided there is some maintenance to periodically cut back growth.

PDF showing examples of vetiver

Anne Miller wrote:I cant help with you question other than they less particular about nesting sites.

I have always heard African bees are very aggressive so I would stay away from them as much as possible.

Minor correction.

There is a big difference between African bees (that is, bees from Africa) and Africanised bees. Africanised bees are a hybrid sub-species that originated from mixing bees of European lineage with those from Africa. The hybridization led to very different traits than either parent line.