M Broussard

I've tried to grow ginger root for the last several years with no luck, so this is from the shops. I'm just a bit too far out of the subtropics to make it work without a hothouse.

Made a couple of very concentrated infusions, one with old root nodules (in the jar) and one with younger root (in the measuring cup).

They burn a bit but it's worth it!

After a couple years, I finally found enough mushrooms to harvest at once for this BB. Most of my mushroom locations yielded just a handful at a time, and unfortunately some of the nicest spots have been developed in the intervening time!

While cycling, I found a lovely flush of wood ear on a log that came down in Cyclone Gabrielle. I was able to harvest 1.526 + 1.271kg (6.16lbs) of wood ear.

The other two jars are the largest singles flushes of mushrooms from the previous years.

I bought this 100% cotton back in January of 2020, but with disruptions from COVID didn't make the skirt out of it until 2023. Here's the finished piece! Sewed on a 1940's singer with details done by hand, including installing twill tape around the pocket, the buttonholes, and the strip that fastens the top fabric button. The pocket has a suspension strap to distribute the weight of things in it onto the waistband.

All the thread is cotton, and the buttons are vintage shell and fabric.

I spun a large quantity of wool singles for a weaving project that I've finally finished!

Photos are the wool rolags from my wool prep BB, which I then spun on my upright wheel to a target of 14 ends per cm. The singles were then wound into skeins on my yarn swift; using the swift's diameter, I estimated each skein was around 500m (~1500m in total). The skeins were then boiled in 4L of water and 1tbsp of crushed flaxseed to act as sizing and hung to dry under tension using what I had to hand (a large spring we picked up at the scrap yard, and an F-clamp).

I realised partway through the weaving project that I hadn't taken a photo of the weight of the skeins of wool! To make up for this, I've included a photo of the finished singles being woven my warp-weighted loom and the weight of the finished textile (exactly 8 oz!) - as this necessarily doesn't include the thrums I've cut off the piece or extra wool yarn, it's obvious I spun in excess of this quantity. I hope these additional photos are acceptable evidence!

I find other peoples' responses to this question really interesting.

To add another data point, as a two-person household, we eat the equivalent of 2-4 chickens per year, or around 5-10% of the other people posting. It's a bit hard to estimate as it might be two whole geese or ducks one year, 1-2 1kg packs of drumsticks from the butcher the next year (cheaper than whole chickens, and with a slightly more favourable meat/bone ratio), or a 5kg box of frozen chicken feet the next, with a very small amount consumed at communal events 1-2 times per year.

Growing enough birds to accommodate 2-4 chickens per year would be possible even on a small section, except we are living in an area cockerels aren't permitted.

On the other hand, we go through a dozen eggs a week, which would require a larger number of birds.

Plastics - I'm not sure I'd include any plastic recycling that requires melting. The fumes from melting plastic are not particularly wholesome, and can lead to wide-scale contamination of the surrounding environment. Cutting plastic down into scoops, labels, washers etc, or making plastic yarn/plyarn seems better. Perhaps something about converting feed sacks into tarps to protect soil/gear?

Glass - the best thing to do with glass containers is to re-use them in their original form; the embodied energy of glass is high, and the energy breakeven is re-use of a bottle about 20 times. Preserving produce/beverages/etc in the original jars/bottles should be the first option. After that, using the bottles as underfloor insulation for earthen floors, or as lights in cob walls etc is a good option. Perhaps join several together to make a solar hot water heating system? Cutting down bottles into cups or funnels for watering plants is also good. Or cutting down jars and drilling a hole in the base for using as plastic-free seedling pots. I have melted bottle glass into beads using a basic plumbers torch, which is something relatively achievable in a home setting, but for making anything big you'd want a proper furnace.

Aluminium - in a home setting, you probably are going to be limited to smaller objects (maybe not a sign), but don't need to be limited to flat things as you can do sand casting.

Other types of waste:
Ashes - fertiliser, soap, lye (for cleaning or preserving food)
Bones - biochar and grind into fertiliser
Reculcant-to-compost organics - citrus peels, walnut shells, macadamia shells, hardwood offcuts from woodworking - mulch or biochar
Hazardous waste - smoke detectors (radioactive), batteries (heavy metals), fluorescent lights (heavy metals), old paint (lead, asbestos, microplastics), stained glass (lead), plant residue from phytoremediation projects, etc. Showing responsible disposal of these types of things is important for preventing soil contamination

Brody Ekberg wrote:Issai doesnt sound familiar, so I dont think I have that variety. Maybe our female is a Kens Red. The tag is long gone at this point and I don’t remember what I ordered. Our male is an Actinidia Arguta, or so the tag says.

Actinidia arguta is just the genus and species of hardy kiwifruit, not a specific variety name, so your male could be anything (including a seedling grown plant).

The vast, vast majority of hardy kiwifruit are not self-fertile. Your fruit set is pretty low -- flowers (and fruit) typically occur in clusters, but your  photos are of single fruits, indicating very poor pollination. It could be that somewhere within 500-1000m of your property there was a male plant which a bee visited before visiting your hardy kiwis, and had just enough pollen to pollinate a couple of flowers. Or perhaps your male produced one or two flowers -- he's pretty small, but I have seen some precocious males of A. arguta flower at that size.

Either way, it's nice to have some early fruit and hopefully your unnamed male does better next season and you get more fruit.

I am happy to finally submit my entry for this badge with several spoons I have made over the past couple years. I thought I'd finished, and sold the seal/dragon-headed spoon before realising it needed to be oiled! I've now carved a few more; I believe they are of a sufficiently fine workmanship to fit in the wood level badge.

Each spoon is oiled with a wood paste made in a traditional medieval French recipe involving grapeseed oil and beeswax.

You can make a small-scale chest with just hand tools if your students have good knife skills -- I made one a number of years ago, and I still use it to carry game pieces. It may look big in the picture, but it's only ~50mm (~2in)  tall. This is a viking-era sea chest, which is hard because it requires a tenon and has no 90-degree angles, but in your period, there are heaps of much more easily made square-sided chests and trunks. At this small scale, you can let wood glue (if you're really keen, the students can make their own hide glue for joinery) act in place of nails and dovetail joints.

Otherwise, if you purchase wide-width (250mm) timber, only a few saw-cuts are necessary to make a 6-board chest (achievable with a hand saw), and it can be put together with nails and a couple strap hinges.

Doing some hands-on food preservation common in the period (e.g. salting pork) might also be an interesting craft. When I was very young, my class did a trip to a 'pioneer school', and the candle-dipping and having each student do their math workings writing with chalk on a slate board were some of the most memorable experiences.

Rebekah Harmon wrote:My next series of questions are related to my own situation. I do not currently own any fiber animals. Nor do I have a setup to grow large amounts of fiber plants. I might grow a patch next year. But not one big enough for creating the listed garments. I've seen others make a belt or towel-sized swatch from garden-bed growing spaces. I think that, for a shirt or pants/skirt, I would have to grow a very large area, and I don't have the space on my acre.

One great thing about fibre plants, is that it's easy to save them up over time. I've been doing garden-bed-sized plantings of flax, and you could probably get enough fibre for a shirt from 40 square metres -- divided over however many seasons you need to. It's much less space than a grazing animal needs! Or, you could find some space in other peoples' gardens, a community garden, or a leased plot. Because it's such a fuss-free plant, once they've germinated and got to a hand's height or so, they're basically good to go, so not an imposition on your friends/family unlike other, fussier crops. There are a few of us in NZ growing a crop in friends' and family's gardens, and in this climate, it doesn't even require irrigation, so it's possible to do all the work yourself, even though you rarely visit the plot. Your climate is different, so your mileage may vary, though.

Growing it isn't the hard part, though! Extracting the fibre takes quite a lot of work compared to wool. That's the tradeoff -- space vs time.

Best of luck, Rebekah! Been very neat seeing you plough through the PEP programme!