Phil Stevens

Timothy Norton wrote:Taking a look at them, I have to be honest I thought they were alfalfa pellets!

I'd be curious to see what the pellet does when exposed to water. It doesn't look like wool, but I wonder if it plumps up? Maybe they shred the wool somehow and bind it together?

I have loads of questions, I hope some others chime in with their observations.

We have around 30 million sheep in this country (5M humans, for perspective). Since the market for wool is so miserable these days, but the sheep still need to be shorn, farmers are always looking for more outlets for the product. For many years we've been able to get bags of dags (the dangly dingelberries on the east end of a westbound sheep that has digestive issues) at the garden centres. Usually it's just powdered dry dags, but some enterprising merchants started putting the stuff through extruders. The binder is the sheep shit.

Makes a much more user-friendly product, as you can see above. They hold together as long as they're dry, but as soon as you water them they turn to damp fluff. Superb nutrient profile, not too heavy on the N for flowering and fruiting plants, and easy to use.

If you're ok with dystopian, Octavia Butler's Parables novels have a major theme of survival in troubled times. The main character has a wide range of abilities to forage, scrounge, hunt, grow food, and build community while a series of disasters is playing out.

That's a beauty, Sue. I've given up on the entire cabbage family during the warm part of the year because the white butterflies here are so pervasive, thanks to the number of farmers that grow expanses of fodder brassica for winter grazing. A lot of self-sown mustard greens and kale still come up if we get a good summer rain, and then they get annihilated :-( Good on you for being diligent and finding a method that works.

I was briefly in the S AZ permie loop before I moved across the Pacific, but that was over twenty years ago. Sonoran Permaculture doesn't appear to have updated their website in a long time but it looks like Barbara Rose is still active and her Bean Tree Farm is super inspiring. Then of course there is Brad Lancaster.

Jay Angler wrote:Do your plants have any small branches coming out fairly close to the ground? I've had some success by cutting a flap in the side of a #10 pot, feeding a branch through the hole and upward and filling all around it with dirt. I put a reservoir under the pot, as keeping the soil moist has been key in my climate for getting rooting.

They do have a profusion of branches, and there are some lower down that are likely candidates for this technique. I've done a similar thing (with bags instead of pots) with pomegranates and macadamias and suspect that it will be the simplest way for me to get some known-sex propagation happening. I think I'll go in first with my fruit-thinning snips and cut off all the thorns, because I dislike the stabby part.

I've tried cuttings a few times now and still batting zero. Starting them from seed isn't all that appealing to me because I'd like to be able to give people sexed plants. I am starting to see root suckers pop up, but I saw somewhere on the interwebs that it's the males that tend to spread this way (I could draw some metaphor to human behaviour here but I won't because I'm well past the days of sowing wild oats). Maybe I'll try layering next. Welding gloves or chain mail will be required.

Some of the carbon in coal seams is pyrogenic. In other words, the peat deposits and swamp vegetation that eventually became the coal formations of the Carboniferous period had fires go through them from time to time, and the charcoal produced in those fires didn't go anywhere. So there is biochar embedded in coal that is hundreds of millions of years old, and that biochar may have sat in the swamps for millions before the coal formed.

Now, whether biochar in a more aerobic environment would hang around that long is probably pushing the extremes, but at those timescales the environment itself changes to the point that it might no longer be anything like how it started out. So the "old" pyrogenic carbon in dark prairie soils, which has been accurately dated to well over 10,000 years, might still be there in a few million but it won't be prairie anymore...it might be a scrubland or a forest atop a rising set of mountains, or a layer of sediment under a new sea.

The general consensus is that as long as the treatment temperature is high enough to form aromatic ring structures (over 400 C), most of the carbon in biochar will resist breakdown for hundreds to thousands of years. The trick has been figuring out what "most" means...I think that the 30% loss assumption over 100 years was introduced more as a hedge against uncertainty and a strategy so the emerging industry wouldn't get attacked for overpromising. There are protocols for doing accelerated weathering tests on biochar to simulate longer timescales, and there's even a standard that assigns a 100-year expectation based on the ratio of carbon to hydrogen in the material.

It's an example of how humans like to turn everything into financial models and one benefit I see from the cautious framing is that it ultimately helps the argument for making biochar production a normal part of business as usual that we just need to do for the long term.

Duckduckgo is mostly just a more useful and privacy-respecting front end to Bing. The problem we're seeing is probably emanating from the source, which is a shame but also predictable. I've started using Mojeek a lot, but it's quirky and does not seem to have either the aggregate index size built up to compete with the dominant players, nor a robust query logic. They are improving all the time but nothing like the Google of a decade or so ago.

S Tonin wrote:
-Someone's grilling/ someone's grilling and not paying attention

Oh, this one is a classic!

In addition to this list, I can reliably ID paper, cardboard, and plastic fires. Also pretty good at detecting hydrocarbon accelerants, and differentiating between petrol, diesel, and motor oil. Unfortunately for me, all of these seem to go into my neighbour's brazier from time to time, and another house nearby has a penchant for stuffing their wood fire full of paper and plastic (never mind the fact that recycling pickup here is free).

Then there are the different types of wood: Pine has an obvious and distinct aroma. So do the cedars and junipers, and fir and spruce to a lesser extent. Lots of hardwood smokes have unique smells and I can pick out willow, poplar (plus cottonwood and aspen), oak, and fruit woods easily. Then there's mesquite...nothing quite like it (although Tasmanian blackwood has some similarity if it's good and dry).