Phil Stevens

Esteban Ademovski wrote:Yeah, I’ve been harvesting fresh material for the posts and support pieces with coppicing in mind, and reusing the older junkpoles as pickets to fill in the panels wherever I can.

And yeah, you’re right — I must’ve harvested hundreds of trees by now. 😂 It’s definitely made me look at the woodland a little differently. I’ve gotten more mindful of what I’m cutting and what I’m leaving behind, trying to work with the regrowth and keep things healthy for the next round instead of just taking whatever I can get.

It looks like what's being harvested are the local conifers: Doug fir and Ponderosa pine, correct? Neither of these species are coppice friendly, because when you cut them down that's pretty much the end of the tree. So if you want to plan for a supply of pole wood, then I would suggest planting fast-growing coppice-ready varieties like willow, poplar, hazelnut, and similar trees. This could become an output of the willows that are fed by the willow feeders, for starters.

We're having a wet start to spring (typical) after a dry winter (unusual). And now with the equinox upon us, we have a cold snap on the way and are expecting frost tomorrow night. Glad I haven't planted out anything tender yet. I've got the fire going and some corn and lime simmering for a pot of posole.

There's a company here in Aotearoa that turns soft plastics into fence posts. Thanks to them our local council has started collecting this material again. The quality is good, with close to zero leaching and excellent durability. No heavy metals leaching into the soil like the industry standard tanalised posts.

Future Post website

These engines go great in vans. I recently got an off-lease 2018 Caddy Maxi cargo van with the 2.0 L TDI and 6-speed dual wet clutch gearbox. It's got heaps of torque and is surprisingly quick off the line...not a lot of turbo lag. I towed a tandem axle lowboy trailer to collect a piece of equipment and it drove like there was nothing behind it on the highway. I can stack eight pallets in the back and have room for sacks of feed and tools. All this and if I keep to a top speed of 90 km/h I get 5.4 L / 100 km (43 mpg) lightly loaded. So it's about as good as I'm going to get for a 2.5 cube 3/4 ton payload van in the world of fossil fuels (which I am hoping to check out of again soon, but didn't have the budget to do it on this round).

However, given the amount of technology that is knitted into the drivetrain, I expect that if I want to keep it reliable and on the road I will have to shell out for the premium service and not even think about going the shade tree route like I used to do with vehicles back in the day.

I really like substituting halloumi in my saag paneer because it's got a more intense flavour. Salty and tangy with the extra umami from frying. Oh yeah.

One observation I'll add is that even dry wood gives off lots of water vapour when it burns. This is why the ideal RMH exhaust is mostly just steam. You can run into problems with wet fuel if your draft is marginal, especially in the shoulder seasons and when the mass hasn't heated up yet, because that water can condense out of the flue gas at the point where it cools enough, causing a plug effect. The other thing I have noted with my greenhouse J-tube is that if you're not running it all the time, those condensation episodes will rust out steel flue pipe and barrel surfaces.

Wool is flame retardant by nature. It's far less flammable than plastics. Adding borax also helps with fire safety and discourages pests.

Not sure about its effect in dogs, but we're seeing fecal egg counts of zero in cattle and sheep that are fed biochar as a supplement. I would give it a go and see how it works.

My experience trying to patch or mend cracked firebricks and refractory bodies is a 100% failure rate. I don't think it matters how good the adhesive is -- in fact, a really good high-temperature cement might exacerbate the problem. The issue is that these materials experience thermal shock, over and over. Any difference in the expansion of the mass from one area to another puts a lot of stress on any weak spot and pretty much guarantees that a joint will move. So even a carefully repaired defect becomes a focal point that magnifies and concentrates the force across a tight gradient that also has the disadvantage of containing a different substance with its own, and possibly very different, coefficient of expansion.

I think the best chance of success is to use something that flows and has some give to it, like sodium silicate. I have brushed a dilute waterglass solution over hairline cracks in firebrick and they seem to remain stable. It's the same principle as lime mortar in masonry: use a material that can conform to a bit of movement and the structure as a whole is more resilient than one built with hard, but brittle, cement.

In this case, I don't think there's much hope of fixing that break. I would go with the recommendations of Douglas and Cristobal and replace with something monolithic, either cast or cut from a slab.

We have a couple of species of thistle that always pop up in the paddocks, thanks to the profusion of seeds that they disperse in the wind. If I see "California" thistle (Cirsium arvense, also called Canadian, but it's neither...actually native to the Eurasian steppes) I destroy it with prejudice. This stuff is nasty, a perennial with a habit of sending roots up to ten metres long to shoot up new plants in clumps. Scotch thistle, or Cirsium vulgare, gets a reprieve and I allow these to grow until they flower and attract bumblebees, but chop and drop before they set seed. They have a nice deep taproot that hauls up lots of subsoil minerals, and I like their spiky, punk aesthetic. When I chop them and they wilt, the prickles lose their stiffness and the sheep will often eat them a couple of days later.