Christopher Shimanski

Has anyone thought about building a RMH for doing maple syrup?  I had thought about some day getting into it at my place, but I've got no inclinations to make mountains of firewood to cook down my sap.  However, if i could adapt an RMH to host a basin at the top of the barrel, I'd have to imagine this would seriously cut down the amount of wood needed to produce a unit of syrup.  

Depends what you're trying to do.  A system will be forever more productive with a little bit of everything.  That was the whole point behind diverse homesteads long ago.  Every animal had a job.  Back when famine was a drought away and there were no chemicals, fuels, and fertilizers, people didn't have companion animals for fun, they all had to work.  

Cow - kept the grass down, provided milk, meat, and fertilizer
Pig - converted waste to meat, could graze on darn near anything, provided fertilizer
Chicken - eggs, meat, kept flies and other small pests in check, provided fertilizer
Goat - cleared the land, kept the brush down
Dog - protected the farm from larger predators
Cat - protected the farm from smaller pests
Horse - horsepower and conveyance

Be careful with hairy vetch though.  Once you plant it, you'll have it forever.  If you're not down for that, leave that one out.  

Mitchell Brouhard wrote:Hello everyone. I am looking to plant a garden for deer. I want to know what plants can handle deer browsing. Even if a plant needs some protection until it's established or tall enough to out compete the deer. All types of plants from annuals to perennials to trees and shrubs. I'd like to do at leat 50 percent natives. I live in the rouge valley of southern oregon.

You can double up and get a lot of bee benefits if you design it right, and it can be perennial and almost zero maintenance.  I've been searching for the very same blend for over 20 years.  Here's what I'd put in, and mix this all together.  

Yellow sweet clover
Balansa clover
Alfalfa
Red clover
Winter triticale
Chicory
Hairy vetch

Plant that 8 weeks before first frost, then the exact same time next year, broadcast the same blend in there, minus the alfalfa, hairy vetch, and chicory, and then just press it flat with whatever tool you have.  All those flowers will peter out at the same time, they are ready to flatten easily, and your next crop will pop right up through it again.  That will feed deer every month of the growing season.  It is also quite stunning in full bloom.  Here's a photo of my blend from last summer.  

Glenn Littman wrote:Christopher, my shop is 2,000 sq ft with 15' high ceiling with modest insulation. You're planning 6,000 sq ft. but you haven't given a ceiling height to determine the cu ft. Have you looked at Peter's website and the Building page with detailed specs for sizes up to a 10" system?. That same page provides some calculations for a given volume and temperature differential performance to provide guidance and help you to determine if a single system will be sufficient or if perhaps 2 will be needed. https://batchrocket.eu/en/building

If you happen to know a plumber that installs hydronic heating systems they should also be able to run a BTU requirement calculation for you. I would think that one 10" system my be sufficient based on the numbers published by Peter. You can see that a 10" system has more than 4 times the thermal energy output versus a 6" system like I am running. With that said, it would be good to have someone with the knowledge to run the BTU calcTulations confirm this for you.

It'll probably have 15' ceilings.  I'd like to use the vertical space too.  

Benjamin Dinkel wrote:Hi Christopher,
maybe check out this triple barrel batch box:
https://permies.com/t/193821/inch-batch-box-rocket-mass

That is an awesome share!  I appreciate it!

Glenn Littman wrote:Christopher, where are you located? How cold does it get in the winter? How well is the building insulated?

Hopefully, the science guys on the forum can chime in with their BTU calculations and thermal science but they'll need to know the ceiling height and insulation details.

I'm in the northern third of MN.  It can go into single digits and below zero for 2-3 months up there in a bad winter.  It can go to -30 or more in the worst of times.  I'd say the average performance temp I'd want to be able to best is -15 and above that.  This building doesn't exist yet, I'm just wondering if such a thing could be designed.  I'd have it well insulated if it meant I didn't have to ever pay to keep it heated.  

I've been watching reading on this for a long time.  I'm wondering if anyone has tried to custom build a RMH for a much larger building as opposed to expensive in-floor heat units?  I'd like to have a large heated shed, but I don't want to bite off the cost to heat it conventionally, or the hefty price tag in property taxes if it's viewed as such.  

It would be neat to be able to heat a 60x100' shed on just firewood if such a thing could be designed and scaled up.  

Is there a length consideration for the function of a rocket mass heater tubing?  My concerns are:  

1.  Will it fail to draft properly if the length is too long?  

2.  Is there a diminishing return on length, meaning there will simply be a lower amount of heat in a larger mass?  

And a bonus question:  

3.  How often does a RMH need to be tended (adding wood) while burning to keep it going?    

Kevin Olson wrote:

Christopher Shimanski wrote:You don't have to worry about moving nutrients around.  98% of organic material is made up of atmospheric gases.  The other 2% is minerals, and those minerals are unlimited.  There's enough P, K, Ca, Mg etc in the ground to grow for 10,000 years.  The key is having the biological activity to free it from rock particles and get it into plants.  And nature does that all on it's own, we just have to not intervene and screw it up.  

"...those minerals are unlimited."

True, generally speaking, but not necessarily bio-available.  I.e., they may (presently) be tied up in ways which plants (in particular) can't easily access.  At least, not without help from all manner of microbial soil life.  Whereas, whatever is in the chop-n-drop, leaf litter, pine straw, ramial wood chips, moldy hay or whatever has already been rendered bio-available.

Sometime in the past few months, I watched a video on using Johnson-Su compost extract to innoculate broad acre farm land in South Dakota to turn "dirt" into "soil".  I'm pretty sure it was on Jay Young's "Young Red Angus" YouTube channel, but I can't spot it right now (he has a lot of videos on Johnson-Su composting - he has a missionary zeal for the practice).  It also may have been on Dr. Johnson's channel, but I'm pretty darn certain the farmer was Jay.  He'd had some soil analyses done, and found that there was, just as you say, something like hundreds of years worth of phosphorus already in his soil, and that was the most limiting nutrient for his fields and crops.  I wish I could find the video and link to it here, so that I am not relying entirely on my (all too faulty) memory for the exact details.  I'll see if I can track it down, and add the link on edit.  But the point is, putting down more phosphorus when he plants corn or beans by the acre is not the solution to any lack of nutrients his crops might experience.  He has been applying a compost extract from a large-scale Johnson-Su (i.e. fungally dominant) composting operation, using the liquid fertilizer injection apparatus already on his seeders.  The extract has all sort of microbial and fungal life in it.  He is able to "seed" broad scale agricultural fields with these innoculants to re-establish a living soil in fields that had been "depleted" by being subjected to modern industrial ag practices, with great success, so far.  (He's also intercropping and other stuff - not exactly a permie operation in the strictest sense, but I am no paragon of permie virtue myself, and applaud steps in the right direction.)

So, exporting fertility from one place to another, and in this case, by the acre.

You don't even need to do that.  Grow diverse big biomass crops, and keep your soil alive with plants year round, and there will be no nutrient problems.  The reason plants turn purple after germination is because they're following a fallow period, and that fallow period causes that fallow syndrome.  When it comes to biological fertility, doing less is way more.  I haven't applied any fertilizer on my soils in 6 years, and they've only performed better the further I've gotten away from pellets and fallows.  

Last year i stumbled upon a biennial cover crop cocktail that terminates itself at the same time in early August, and I can broadcast anything into it and simply roll it flat and walk away.  Don't even need a fancy crimper, because almost all of it just seasonally terminated with the exception of chicory.