Michael Cox

Nina Surya wrote:With a clogged up sink I do this - it works but I'm not sure if it's "good" so feel free to comment:

Pour some baking soda in/on the drain.
Follow up with boiling water.

One time out of ten that doesn't work, then it's pulling out all of the stops by doing the upgraded version:

Pour some baking soda in/on the drain.
Follow up with vinegar.
Wait a bit.
Flush with boiling water.

Tried these multiple times. Didn't work sadly.

r ranson wrote:
A snake is awesome!  Especially if it's only a few feet down.

We are big on prevention in this house - all scraps go to the chickens, no grease down the sink, always have a mesh over the drain etc... but i think there is some kind of design fault/obstruction further down the pipes that is just prone to settling stuff out and building a clog.

The snake hasn't worked for me on this. I'm not sure why - it gets so far and then just stops. I can't pull anything back and can't make progress. I suspect there are some tight bends it gets jammed on.

This trick of blowing to clear the clog was brilliant though.

I've got a slightly temperamental drain from our kitchen sink. Every year or so the pipes clog but not in the u-bend, further down. I've dismantled the trap many times, messed around with a plunger, bought one of those flexible snake things - no joy.

Today I caved and had a "drain engineer" call by. £190 call out charge... steep but I was impatient and had no time to shop around for quotes. Came home from work early and waited for him. From the time he arrived at the door until he left was less than 5 minutes.

He unscrewed the u-bend, then screwed a flexible hose to the pipe fitting. Lay down on the floor and blew hard into the pipe - I heard the blockage *pop* free. 2 minutes to close the pipes back up again and confirm that the water was draining well, before he went on his way.

I'm simultaneously impressed, infuriated, and looking to buy a suitable flexible hose for next time.

Swales are sometimes described as a tree growing system. You plant trees on the down slope side of the swale and their roots benefit from the sunk water and accumulated fertile detritus in the pit.  They concentrate sparse water to benefit the trees.

What advantage are you hoping to see in a grass growing system? Are you seeing much surface flow that isn't already sinking into the soil? Grass is usually pretty good at sinking in rainwater - more so than bare soil at least.

Flipping this round... why do gradual?

Most of the major permaculture designers would be advocating for earth moving in the early stages of a project as part of improving water retention in the landscape, building fertility, and creating microclimates. Terracing, building swales and ponds are all excellent investments in the land.

How much could you get done if you hired a skilled bulldozer driver and machine for a day? I think it would be a lot.

Timothy Norton wrote:Personally, I love spending time with my chickens but a lot of that time is just being among them.

How much time do you spend, in a day, doing the things that need to be done for your chickens?

I will collect eggs daily as well as checking in on the water level/feed level.

I say five or less minutes. My setup is pretty hands off.

One day a week it might be fifteen minutes as I clean and fill food/water/supplement containers.

Very similar - although it's more like 10 minutes just because our coop is a little walk from the house.

I looked into this a while ago as I had a very similar question. Why can't we just use bits of old mushroom mycelium from a grow bag to inoculate another grow bag? My understanding is that the mycelium grows vigorously when fairly freshly developed from spawn, but after it has reached maturity and fruits, it loses vigour and is slower to colonise and develop, and more prone to being outcompeted. This is why commercial growers bother with maintaining cultures of spawn to rather than reuse their mature colonised grow bags.

Can you make this work in practice? Yeh, probably - your results are likely to be it and miss, but if you are tossing the used logs or grow bags anyway you have nothing to lose. I tried this a while ago by burying a spent grow bag of oyster muchrooms in a pile of fresh woodchips. Nothing developed.

A word of warning on your graphs - AI is still generally bad at things related to maths and numbers, including generating graphs. It will confidently lie to you and give you no clue that it has done so. If you want to use a graph like this I recommend that you find the original data source and either use their graphs or build your own.

My chickens have deep litter wood chips in their coop. When confined there they will actively scratch and turn it which keeps the top surface fresh and clear of poop. I add a few barrows of new chips every other month or so. When they have access to their larger run, or free range in the garden, they spend much less time working the litter in their coop and it can develop a bit of a crust of poop - especially under the roost bars. About once per week I go in with a fork and turn any crusty bits.

All this to say that I really like the deep litter - it's a much better solution for me than hard standing which would need to be human cleaned much more regularly. BUT it's not as low effort as some people advocating it indicate and you do need to pay attention to how much they are turning the top surface. In the context of quail and pigeon in this thread I imagine that the surface disturbance is less simply because they aren't as heavy, so the human management will need to be more attentive.

For those who may struggle to source local quality meat, there are facebook groups that connect hunters with excess meat to individuals who want it. In the UK we have "Giving Up the Game". I picked up a 40kg fallow deer this weekend for a good price and have stocked my freezer for the next few months. These are mostly hunters doing crop protection - pretty consistent supply of rabbits, wood pigeon, deer at a good price and all local.