Trace Oswald

This is by no means definitive (about anything), but I found it interesting.  I had a partial bag of charcoal I made sitting outside for months.  It hasn't been inoculated, just charcoal straight from the retort.  Anyway, it's been rained on, snowed on, frozen,...you get the picture.  I needed to use some of it for my bucket toilet, but it was frozen into big, unwieldy clumps.  I brought it into the house to thaw and dry out.  The thawing worked fine.  The drying out?  Just over three weeks, it's still damp.  Considering the very, very dry, heated winter air, I found it pretty amazing that the charcoal stayed damp for this long, with no real signs of drying out any time soon.  I can imagine in soil a couple inches down, it could easily hold moisture the entire summer.

JoAnn Peterson wrote:Have you tried digging your spring out? The info I have read suggests that the surrounding clay contains the “confined aquifer” your spring is coming up from. I have similar, when I dug directly at the spring emergence it was loose rock and pea gravel. 2 feet off to the side was very thick clay and silt. My digging expanded it from a trickle into a 30 gallon a minute pure spring flow. See if you can increase your flow rate!

Hey JoAnn.  I'm really looking forward to spring when I can start digging again.  I plan to work on it this year a lot more.  I would love it if I could increase the flow a little, but I also don't want to cause a situation where the water leaves my land any faster.  

Robert Ray wrote:This question arose from a thread where the other party more or less told me that Permaculture was not viable north of Colorado and that even Colorado was not a good area to implement Permaculture in.  My reply that any effort to improve my impact was worthy. So just wondering what others thoughts were.

I think whoever said that has a different view of permaculture than I have...  quite simply, I view permaculture as doing my best to work with nature, rather than against.  Emphasis on the "doing my best" part.

I find Greta far too angry to listen to.  She seems so miserable all the time.  What a terrible way to go through your young life.

I've always been told that the layer around the drain pipe should be sand, and you should make the extra effort to ensure that the sand is down tightly around the pipe.  The sand supports it from being crushed or punctured, whereas rock applies uneven pressures and can puncture or crush the pipe as it is filled in.

John Weiland wrote:

Kathleen Sanderson wrote: Our concern here with the furnace in the basement and the woodstove on the main floor is that no amount of warmth on the main floor would keep the basement pipes from freezing if the furnace was out.  

I don't think you would have to worry.  It may be worth the experiment just to see.  At my lady's former house, we turned off all heat the the basement for four days just to see how cold it would get.  It was well below zero outside.  The basement never got below 50 degrees.

Tereza Okava wrote:In my experience it's a lot easier to adapt to a hot climate than to a cold one  

I wonder if that is a genetic thing, or personality based, or ?  For me it is exactly the opposite.  I moved to a very hot climate and it took me years to acclimate.  I moved to Wisconsin where it is bitter cold, and the first year I dressed like I was in the arctic  After that first winter, I was fine.  Now I wear a long sleeve t-shirt and a sweatshirt in any temperature down to 30 degrees or so unless it is damp or windy.  We have temperatures below -20F nearly every winter and sometimes much colder than that.  The cold never bothers me until it hits those extremes.

For me, if you are cold, you can always just dress warmer.  If you are hot, you can only take off so many clothes.  

As William said, builditsolar.com has a lot of info on this.  This page Earth temperatures gives the earth temperatures for the US.  It also explains seasonal temperature changes for depths less than 30 feet, where the temperature remains nearly constant.

My lady told me "I'm getting rid of you as soon as you can't pick up heavy things."