Eino Kenttä

Tried a bit just now, and it's not entirely dissimilar from curry! Of course it doesn't have the pungent/peppery taste, but that I suppose one could get from another ingredient.

I was just tidying a cabinet where I keep a lot of half-finished projects and materials for projects (I imagine some of you probably have a similar piece of furniture, where things just tend to end up?) Anyways, in there is a paper bag of nettle fibres. Not retted, but raw dried bark that I've pounded and combed to get rid of most of the non-fibre material. I think there are fibres in there collected both one and two years ago.

When I took this bag out of the cabinet, I caught a whiff of curry smell, so of course I shoved my nose in the bag. It did smell more or less exactly like curry powder. Since I was wondering if my nose had bugged (it does happen) I asked my brother to smell it. He confirmed that it does indeed smell like curry.

Now, this has me wondering. I don't want to eat nettle fibres obviously, but maybe you can do something similar with the leaves? Grind them into a paste, dry it in cakes, and let them sit in a paper bag for a couple of years maybe? And then grind it into a powder, add salt and something spicy like peppers? Or maybe you could use the non-fibre stuff in the bark, to get a bonus product out of your nettle processing? I find this interesting anyways, I like curry spice. Did anyone else notice this?

We do get a bit colder than you, down to -15 C occasionally I believe (although we still haven't spent winter on our land, so only know what the neighbours told us.) That said, at least one winter we had potatoes survive in the ground, just below the surface, so maybe dahlias will be fine if we mulch heavily?

Ah. I think I might have an answer for you. I assume you girdled the branches for air layering? When girdling, you stop the flow of cytokinin from the roots, thereby reducing the cytokinin/auxin ratio (auxins are produced in buds, cytokinins in root tips). The reduced c/a ratio is actually what induces rooting. By contrast, an increased c/a ratio promotes growth of lateral buds. The point is that cytokinin and auxin have roughly opposite effects, and the relative abundance of the two determines what happens. Now, Wikipedia says this:

Auxin inhibits abscission prior to the formation of the abscission layer, and thus inhibits senescence of leaves.

As far as I can tell, that means that a low c/a ratio (a lot of auxin compared to cytokinin) will inhibit leaf drop, and that's exactly the kind of situation that girdling creates. Hormones are funny.

Okay, now that's interesting! Mix of ginger and carrot sounds lovely. I had sort of automatically assumed that the taste would be similar to sunroots since they're in the same family. Silly me, dandelions are also in the same family, and dandelion roots taste nothing like sunroots...

I might have to try growing dahlias even though our climate probably isn't the best for them. What varieties did you start with? Are there any that are even a bit frost resistant?

I've thrown some random post-composting bones in with the wood when making char trench-style once or twice. Since this wasn't at my own place, I don't really have any experience with actually using the char. It chars okay, though. The surface of each piece turns white, so I suppose anything non-mineral burns off there, but when you break the pieces apart they're nice and black inside. When we did it, it was mainly in order to make the bones easier to crush and incorporate into the soil, but if some of the carbon sticks around, that's a nice bonus.

As for how it helps the biochar, I suppose one thing is that it adds nutrients, mainly calcium and phosphorus but probably some nitrogen as well. Other than that, I don't know.

Where my mother's from (the border between Sweden and Finland), they say that mare's tails are a sign that the wind will pick up in the next 12 hours... I guess a lot of these weather signs depend on where you are.

I'll start. I think English is lacking an elegant way to say a day and a night or 24 hours. You just say "a day", and let people figure out from context whether you mean the whole 24, or the part of them when the sun's up, or 12 hours, or...

In Swedish, we have separate words for this. Dygn refers to a full 24 hours, while dag covers the rest of the meaning of English "day".

All languages are different. There are things I can say in my native Swedish that I can't in English, and vice versa, despite English and Swedish actually being quite closely related (relatively speaking). Have you spotted any useful words or expressions that exist in another language but are absent from English, or words that are used in English but lack an equivalent in another language you speak? Let's hear them!

In cases where the seeds are heavier than the residue, I've found that shaking the seeds in a round-bottomed bowl helps. Shake with "round" motions, so that the seeds slowly move around the rim of the bowl as you go. The chaff will tend to gather on top of the seeds, mainly in the middle of the bowl, and you can remove it, with a spoon if the pieces are too small for your fingers to be practical. Think gold panning, only without water (and what you're after is arguably more valuable than gold!) For this to work optimally, you need to have enough material. It won't work very well if the seeds and chaff only just cover the bottom of the bowl.

One advantage of this method is that it also works well on tiny seeds that would be tricky to winnow. I've successfully cleaned broadleaf plantain seeds, which are extremely small, like this.

Oh, and welcome to Permies!