Lina Joana

If you are looking to reach a larger audience then yes, this is too level 5. The fraction of people who would get past “and you store the poop in barrels for several years” is pretty small. Obviously just my personal opinion :)

Burra Maluca wrote:

Deane Adams wrote:
We also find the same ratio in nature: female to male in a honeybee hive,  

That doesn't sound right to me. As I understand it around 95% of a typical hive is female. Except in the winter, when it is 100%.

You are correct - the male to female ratio in honeybee hive, despite the claim in “the da vinci code”, is variable throughout the year and never approaches 1.6 unless the hive is collapsing.
I did a quick search to see if there was anything about bees that matches the golden ratio or the fibonacci series, and found an interesting true fact though - the number of ancestors a male bee has in each generation does follow the series - 1 in the drone’s generation, 1 in his parent’s generation, 2 in his grandparents, 3 in his great grandparents, and so on.

Jay Angler wrote:
Not sure if I said this up thread, but one of the problems many people I know have, is "making the decision". Years ago, a friend who had worked in supportive housing took their approach to her home. She had a 2-week schedule for breakfast or lunch, so if it was Tues on week two, it was grilled cheese sandwiches. Her dinner schedule was 6 weeks long for more variety. Her schedule was written up separately as "weekly shopping list". It worked for her. However, if you're trying for organic and local, one would have to create a list based on seasonal availability, and the big downside, would be building in sufficient flexibility to cope with windfalls

Yeah, that definitely doesn’t work for me! The amount of time planning, the detailed shopping lists, and most of all the need to use the specific ingredients no matter if I am tired or running late makes it more stressful rather than less.
I often do have a general plan in my head for the type of dish, which easily keeps things varied. Say I do tacos on Tuesdays. As long as I have the tortillas (or can make them), I can do bean, veggie, tofu, or cauliflower, with a variety of sauces and salsas. And maybe Wednesday is stirfry day. We can do broccoli with tempeh, mixed frozen veggies with egg, or tofu with carrots and kale. We can do peanut sauce or brown sauce, or just soy sauce and sesame. Or we can do spinach and chickpea, with a turkish seasoning blend. Or potatoes and cabbage with cumin and mustard and an Indian spice blend… what’s in the fridge?
Basically, if you have a well stocked spice shelf and a good supply of staples, you can use whatever is fresh in the fridge without thought or getting into a rut.
I get the decision paralysis thing. When I really can’t think of anything, we typically have pasta. No shame in that when it happens.
It also helps to have some tools. The ones I would consider musts are the instant pot and the food processor with shredder and mandolin attachment. Maybe also my toaster/air fryer, since it heats so much faster than the oven.
I think the key is to have staples on hand (flour, rice, noodles, your favorite beans, potatoes, onions, and garlic butter/oil, and spices) and a few basic cooking techniques (sautéing onions, making a cream sauce, preparing common cuts of meat) and then trying simple recipe free meals with whatever fresh food looks good at the store.
I once put wrote a “throw it together” recipe book for a friend. It had things line “stew: sauté whatever sized onions with a couple cloves of garlic in a splash of olive oil. Chop whatever veggies you have and add them along with a few handfuls of red lentils…”
You get the idea. It takes practice, but it doesn’t have to be hard or boring.

I think a lot of people did not grow up learning how to cook, and then learned to use cookbooks. Then they get excited about permaculture and start a garden or join a csa, only to become overwhelmed and then burned out.
To me, the foundation is learning to improvise in the kitchen. We have lots of cookbooks, which I rarely use. Most nights I have about 30 min to cook dinner.
If it has been a rough day, my fall backs will be pasta with frozen peas, olive oil, and cheese. Mostly available at a reasonable price organic from the store.
Next level up: Pasta with a cream sauce made with butter, milk, flour, and whatever veg is in the fridge.
Next up? A stir fry with tofu or tempeh and veggies, served over rice.
A stew of veg tossed in the instant pot.
Mexican style with quick homemade flour tortillas and instant pot cooked beans and veggies.
None of this needs detailed planning, or recipes. I’ve been known to get home totally dead, and cook instead of ordering takout because it is less work.

Once you have this foundation - cooking from staples without much planning- it becomes easier to add the bits which gets you local. After dinner, during cleanup, I can mix a batch of slow rise bread and shove it in the fridge. It will rise for a day and I will bake it the following evening. Or I will grab a couple of cups of dent corn I bought from the farmer down the road, and simmer it with pickling lime. The next day I will rinse it and toss it in the food processor to make masa. I can fry it up as tortillas with less than 15 min hands on time. Or I will roast a whole winter squash to blend and use in cream sauce or gnocchi.
The key is not to get all of this going at once. Make simple cooking second nature. Then if any part you add gets to be too much, you can always fall back on that.
It is also true that it helps to have community. My sister for Christmas give home canned beans and soups, and home made spice mixes. She knows they will be valued as the should be, and we absolutely do.

Cassie Thornhill wrote:
3. Upcycled crafts: We’ve started a “crafting with scraps” project, where we use leftover materials like cardboard, fabric, and glass jars for DIY projects. It’s been a fun way to make use of things that would otherwise be thrown out.

Possible downside: some kids start seeing the craft potential in EVERYTHING, and end up with piles of bottles, cardboard, twist ties, you name it. More than they could ever use. Down that path madness lies….

Ulla Bisgaard wrote:I think this is great, but I wish there were places where you could just order one installed. My husband and I do want one. Especially the stove and an oven, but non of us are very handy fixing and building things.

Unfortunately, this is the current weakness with rmh. It has not been standardized and engineered enough by people with the right letters after their names for it to be “not my liability if it fails” for contractors and government inspectors. So it remains the province is diyers who are confident enough to build something that, done wrong, could burn their house down… maybe someday it will get there.

Regarding the bundle: who is the target audience? This seems mostly like a rebundling of products that have been available before. So regulars on permies.com would either have some or most of it, or would have reasons why they haven’t bought - lack of interest for their context, etc. are you expecting to entice people
Who haven’t bought any of the products? Why would this configuration appeal to them?

I do, admittedly, get antsy watching videos. I bought one of the movie sets, and never could get through the whole thing, so maybe I am not the right person to be commenting. But two multi-film sets seems like a LOT of footage to sit through if someone just wants to know how to build one - or even if they are just curious and want to know more. How many hours is it all together, 4+? Would someone who likes movies want to watch it all? And if you approach it as having your choice of which style to build, so you only watch that - most of the styles do not have accompanying plans, correct?
I wonder if it would be better to curate the movies, so that the bundle has 3-4 full plans and the videos showing only those builds. From what I remember of the movies, it might take some editing- I think I tried to skip around, and felt disoriented, like I had missed important bits by not watching it all in sequence.

It is also worth noting that some staple crops have more than one yield if you know how to harvest.
For example, squash and gourd leaves are edible, and part of African cuisine. I have eaten both.
The leaves of African/southern/cow/blackeyed peas are also edible, and high in protein. I don’t know about other types of bean. If you grow 1/10 acre if black eyed peas, you would get around 150 lbs (or more, depending in spacing) of dried peas plus a summers worth of high protein greens.
Pumpkin and squash seeds are edible, and a good source of fats. Toasting them is probably the easiest preparation method, but you could probably shell and grind them too.
Sweet potato leaves are also a hood green. Amaranth can be grown for both grain and greens.
I am sure there are other examples…

The biointensive method was mentioned: here is a image of one persons vegan diet on 4000 sq feet growing space.
Unless you are following the method, I would take the square footage with a grain of salt, since the whole point is to grow in very little space. However, their percentages are useful, and they have thought about carbon biomass for composting, since the method is supposed to grow its own fertilizer.



http://growbiointensive.org/60%2030%2010%20circle.pdf

Pumpkin/squash cream sauce, using roasted pureed squash.
Start it like any cream sauce, by heating butter or oil and adding a few handfuls of flour to make a roux. After a few minutes, add milk or broth of choice, cook till thickened, then add roasted pureed squash. I don’t measure, but you can add quite a bit. Add salt, pepper, nutmeg, and sage or thyme to taste.
Serve on veggies, pasta, or potatoes. Add a bunch of cheese and pour over pasta, then bake for pumpkin mac and cheese.

Nina Surya wrote:
This thread is from some time ago already but still very important!

Ellendra, I'm trying to come up with some kind of practical solution to what you said "Run the plumbing in such a way that hot water going down the drain gives back at least part of its heat before it really leaves the house ". I think you're phrasing it right but can you give an example of what, how...?
We're currently renovating an old (OLD!) farmhouse in France and plumbing will be an action point very soon, so... open to all new ideas!

This might be hard to do in an existing house… I believe the idea is to have the sewage exit on the opposite side if the house from the main hot water usage, so that the warm water stays in the house. I suppose, theoretically, you could take a roundabout route with the pipes, but I don’t think it would be worth the clogged drains!!
Maybe others have additional thoughts. Maybe you could rig up some kind if heat exchange system, where the pipes are in contact with thermal mass - like, pack cob around the sewage pipes? Or have them run through a water basin? Not sure if it would be worth the trouble unless you are using a lot of hot water…