Nathanael Szobody

It seems the issue is not the physics, but the scale. Aquaponics is intensive. Natural, passive energy is not. Natural waterways circulate passively, but they use enormous scales to do it. How many gallons of lake water support each of the fish therein? Your passive warm/cool circulation could work in your totes--if you're looking to support a couple goldfish and a basil plant. It seems that for adequate circulation for anything more serious (that is, intensive) you need mechanical help, like a windmill.

For oxygenation particularly, you could circulate the water through several other totes that are chock full of water plants. In other words, you sacrifice some of your nutrient in order to produce oxygen. It's all a question of scale. You can't grow lots of fish on a little bit of oxygen. Even if you find something that can survive on lower oxygen levels, how healthy will they be really?

You could have a windmill circulate your water.

Hi Jay, I use cotton for my tallow candle wicks. Either I twist the fibers from my own cotton plant or use cotton cloth. I was in a pinch once and needed an oil lamp immediately, so I punched a hole in the lid of a jar, filled it with old frying oil and ripped a strip off my turban for a wick. Months later I'm still using it. You just have to twist two strips together like a thin rope.

Hi Lee Ann, what a gorgeous bit of land! Sounds like quite an exciting project.

The answers to your questions are really a matter of preference and design. I think the best place to start is to walk your land over and over and visualize your various options in the landscape as it relates to your life and the relative position of your home. Maybe the answer to some of those questions is both! There are so many things to consider like prevailing winds, sun exposure, waterflow, and so much more. It seems you've done most of this already, so the next thing to do is come up with a matter plan where it all fits. Maybe you want a neatly arranged orchard guild out your back door that transitions to a food forest further out, it just depends on your design.

You mention water flowing just under the surface; do you want to put in some dealers, it a pond to harvest some of that water? This will dramatically repair your plans. I would say grab a whole stack of blank paper and start brainstorming! Permaculture is at the confluence of the flow of life and the flow of resources.

Mk Neal wrote:Much of North America was not home to earthworms before European settlement.  Particularly here in the Great Lakes region the forests evolved without such worms.

Thank you, I was just going to say this, but hesitated because I don't have a source. I recall being told that this may be the reason that sugar maples are dying off in the great lakes region: they are adapted to a very rich thin layer of topsoil, but that imported earthworms are mixing up the layers.

2 things:
Fresh ingredients
Sticky dough

I make mini spaetzle with a regular colander. It's almost like eating rice. Any flour at all (last time was sweet potato) a bunch of eggs, salt, and however much water is needed to press it through the holes with a rubber spatula. I used to live in Alsace, and they go heavy on the eggs there.

Lookin great Daniel! Good luck :-)

I should add: even though this space is no big deal, the sides of your sheets are no longer straight, so, like you said, it will create a similar space moving forward unless you take the one sheet down and reinstall. Again, just strike a chalk line and line the side of your sheets up with that.

By the way, your screw countersink is a beautiful thing. The stuff I've seen homeowners do...

Speaking as a drywall finisher, this gap is not a bit deal; one swipe of quickset mud and it's gone. The question is how to proceed: of you can find two adjacent walls that are square, follow those. If no walls are square, strike a chalk line square to the wall you want to work from, and that will give you a measure for how much to leave on one end of your board or the other. Remember: if you're going to drywall the walls as well, you can have up to a 1/2 inch gap on the edges that will be covered by the wall sheets.