Paul Tipper

Hi Stephen

My initial though is that you haven't allowed any space around the hugels for access.  If you allowed say 4' alongside each hugel (enough to run a smallish cart up between them to aid with a more effortless harvest), that would change your width to 12', so 300sqft, reducing your full acre output to 2,986,836.6 Cals. Not sure if this sounds more realistic...

Edit - it appears my thoughts have already been raised by others in a different time zone (pathetic excuse for not reading other comments first!)

Interesting, lard AND butter...  Entertaining but I think using a recipe at least for the general method might lead to better results!  I'd better get planning my pies... sadly I'll have to skip the fennel as I appear to be the only one in my household who is a fan of fennel with pork, so to include it would not be in the seasonal spirit of generosity!  Probably stick with sage, salt and pepper (but maybe I'll make a dinky one with fennel and cider jelly for the sake of science...)

I also know this as hot water crust pastry and it is about the only kind of pastry I have made successfully, and I'm hopeless at almost all other kinds of dough based cookery (my baked WMD's - weapons of mandibular debilitation - would be better known had I not got the good sense to know when I'm beaten and give up)!  That said, my success with hot water crust might be motivated by thoughts of the minced spiced pork and jelly on the inside which makes the delightful cold pork pies that are a speciality of the Melton Mowbray area of Leicestershire in England.  I have also experienced it used for many other game type pies around the UK, mostly served cold.

A tip though.  Whatever you do, do not attempt to warm up a hot water crust pastry pork pie in order to eat it.  It is not designed for this and will not be a pleasant experience, or at least not nearly as pleasant as eating it cold.

I also have only made this pastry with lard as the fat.  I may have to experiment with using butter for sweet pies... perhaps a creamy chicken an vegetable pie...mmmmm.

Anyway, thank you for this thread which has served to remind me that it has become my duty to produce a couple of large pork pies for Christmas.  Better get to it!

Not sure if there are any native or available relatives of this in your area.  It is certainly pretty hardy here.

https://www.sgaonline.org.au/pigface-carpobrotus-glaucescens/

Do you know what kind of rock you have?  With soil that colour over here it would be sandstone or mudstone.  There are usually plenty of fault lines in it that tree roots have a habit of finding and making bigger.  Again, here the suggestion would be acacia species.

There is an Australian youtube channel called Polyculture Farms Dryland Permaculture https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEkuV0v62-S77iczDrCLtzQ that might give some useful ideas.  One idea which they used early on was to use logs on the ground to catch eroding soil.  

There are plenty of mainstream erosion control measures which might help otherwise.  How about strawbales arranged in crescents across a slope to create mini leaky dams.  I'm pretty sure this is used in other hot dry climates (like Portugal and Spain?) planting trees in the crescent.  Kind of look like an eye on a potato!

Good luck!

I just had a thought about getting around the 10m rule... What if you put it on wheels? I don't know how flat your garden is so may not be practical but this is often used to circumvent regulations for permanent buildings. 10m would be a fairly small caravan these days!  This might allow you to change the orientation to best suit the wind.

We're in the Hunter Valley, so we're the opposite of you - cool dryish winters and warm/hot wettish summers.  Outside drying works well in Spring and Autumn but generally touch and go in Winter and Summer.  I have had similar ideas for a covered "drying room" so that we can reliably dry clothes all year round.  To partly solve the wet wind problem, I thought of using louvered windows.  You may be able to get some secondhand if you're lucky...I imagine they would be unpopular now as they don't seal the outside out and the inside in as seems to be the craze with energy efficient homes these days.

Another alternative might be to use shade cloth.  It would cut down the wind though, but it would stop the worst of the rain blowing in.

Love to see what you end up creating :)

I'm loving these smackdowns!  

I just wanted to add a thought on the profit debate.  I recently listened to an Oliver Goshe podcast (Regenerative Skills - The history and future of agroforestry) with Patrick Worms, and he raised that one of the big problems with getting conventional ag to switch to regen ag was getting them to start thinking in terms of profit and to stop thinking in terms of yield.  When considering purely the yield per acre of a crop, regen ag does not look good next to conventional ag.  However, when you consider the far lower inputs to achieve that yield per acre, the yield per input dollar is much greater.  

Speaking as someone exposed to current "Australian permaculture", there is an increasing emphasis on "fair share" with the inevitable 'debate' on land ownership elitism, white privilege within permaculture and the 'outrageous cost' of permaculture education when it should be free... blah blah.  It seems that those less financially fortunate feel that the financially fortunate can only have become fortunate through nefarious and oppressive means and thus must be severely criticised at the least, or have their excessive stuff redistributed to the more worthy...  I'm pretty sure this is not the way to encourage people to engage in permaculture.  

Anyway, I think the reluctance to use the 'profit' word is related to the negative reactions of this sector of the audience, as they associate it with evil capitalism (or more correctly "corporate capitalism") rather than the very thing which is required to make it sustainable without subsidy.  So, perhaps yield is being used as a euphemism for profit to avoid triggering this demographic.

I think most waxes just get thicker till they are eventually solid like butter.

This would be because waxes are a mixture of many different length hydrocarbons typically, all with different melting points.  So whilst there is no distinct freezing/melting point, it is actually happening over a wider temperature range.  I'm sure the rate of change of temperature would slow at the point where melting begins until it finishes, and because it happens over a wider temperature range might actually be more useful in a real life situation.

However, compared to filling bottles with water, it does seem like a painful and expensive exercise (and somewhat typical of the industrial system's over complicated and needlessly expensive solutions to a simple problem)

It would be interesting to see how water behaves against wax or indeed any mixture of oils (olive oil? coconut oil?), given that it would be both unlikely and undesirable to take advantage of the latent heat between solid and liquid states, given the change in volume that goes with it.  At least with coconut oil, if the bottle broke it would smell really good (in my opinion)!