m louka

easy ways to reduce the toxins of natural dyes:
1. choose dyestuff that doesn't need a mordant (cochineal, black walnut husks, etc)
2. play with the ph of your dye bath. raise with vinegar (not a mordant), lower with hardwood ash.
3. make your own soy mordant (not the same as soy milk from the store)
4. ferment your dye bath (like the walnut husk mentioned by another contributor)

http://www.allnaturaldyeing.com/

things i'm using for mulch:
paper bags (sometimes my coop gets too many donated paper bags),
mail (plastic windows removed from envelopes),
cardboard boxes (a builder drops off long boxes for siding that are perfect width for between rows),
coffee chaff (i fill my Honda Fit with 8 large bags when i go an hour north to a coffee roaster),
burlap bags (same coffee roaster),
wood shavings (furniture makers),
weeds that quickly put on huge masses of carbon/nitrogen (i let dock, burdock, mullein and other weeds get huge if they're not in the way of foods - realizing that i do use some of these for food/medicinals, too - and then pull them before they go to seed),
hay (i have a hay field when the previous owner abandoned bales on the edge of the field so they're no longer filled with seed)
leaves (even though i'm in the country, the village folks bag their leaves and haul and drop them at my place. they take back the bags to reuse)
huge paper bags from bulk grains from the coop
wood chips (as above from grounds crews and power line cleanups)
raw wool because farmers can't get a decent price to be bothered to clean and sell it

all of these are good for the compost pile, but i've used them between beds and rows with great success.

---> but please don't use carpet any where near your food; petrochemicals and flame retardants make it toxic in our homes and more so out in the field in our food

Tyler Ludens wrote:

Micky Ewing wrote:

For the cook, the downside of pulses is how long they can take to cook. For the environmentally conscious, this is also a concern.

Can they be slow-cooked in a haybox?

not unless you boil them for ten minutes first
"a toxin called phytohaemagglutinin, also known as kidney bean lectin, that is found in many types of beans. Kidney beans contain especially large amounts of this toxin, and amazingly, eating just four or five raw or improperly cooked kidney beans can make a person extremely ill. Ingesting larger amounts can actually cause death. Other beans, including white kidney beans, broad beans and lima beans, contain the same toxin in smaller but still dangerous amounts." http://www.choosingvoluntarysimplicity.com/crockpots-slow-cooking-dried-beans-phytohaemagglutinin/

every time i plant, i have to remove rocks. i pile them in the tire tracks then - when the fray of seeding is over and the fray of weeding has started - i load them into the tractor bucket. i'm no longer plowing so i'm hoping it will be fewer each year.
i put them in the field road and they smash down into the mud with each drive. i dump them around the barn foundation so the sand isn't carried away from the rain. i have them as my stoops and along footpaths on top of gravel so the gravel doesn't disperse as easily.
i put 10 tractor buckets in my barn foundation before the concrete was poured.
i dumped a tractor bucket of large stones over the river bank so that i could create a stairway on the steep bank and prevent erosion.
a neighbor takes round ones for a sweat lodge.
i build cairns to keep drug dealers and pee-ers from using my pullout.
i stonehenge massive ones that i can only push with the tractor bucket on top of rock outcroppings in my hay field so i don't run over the outcroppings that hide in the tall grass.
i will find a use for a gabion and make one soon

I had slugs in my wine cap mushroom bed and used wood ash from my wood stove to kill them. It was much faster than picking them off. I just kept a bucket of ash near the bed and used a scoop to both surround new mushrooms and to dust the slugs. It kept them off new mushrooms and drove them from mushrooms (and, I assumed, towards death) they'd found/I'd missed. Not a long-term solution, but may take less time than picking.

it does sound like most folks are using sunscreen as a last resort - something EWG recommends - but some are using the cheap stuff - something they do not.

https://www.ewg.org/sunscreen/

i wear hat, old men's business shirt, jeans, gloves, shades and hate how dark i still get as i know it's still damaging to my skin.

Harper Stone wrote:
Now, to go find my spot…

did you find it?

This is something I want to build this year. Anyone know if it works - volume, seed size/type?
it's open source and there are some good videos.

http://www.realseeds.co.uk/seedcleaner.html

This is more what I had in mind - no tubes.
http://pages.uoregon.edu/hof/S01havestingrain/conclusion.html

this place has an active setup and is right near the airport http://swes.cals.arizona.edu/erl/about.htm
civano also has one in their main office, i think.