Gennifer Reed

Beautiful work and delicious experiment! I will try this in the future. Previously I had cooked whole oat groats in a pan/stovetop to a boil (with fruits & enough water) for breakfast. Then left on the stovetop and added silicon on all sides and top, surrounded by dish towels to insulate in the heat. If it’s a flat stovetop, it continues to heat and needs the silicon to keep the towels from burning. If it was wool, that would be best! In the morning, my groats were soft and still warm. I like this new idea very much. Thank you!

Joe Black wrote:We just finished building our kitchen garden and decided to build raised beds using cheap local pine timber (pallet boards) treated with shou sugi ban. It was our first attempt at this so there was a good bit of trial and error. It also took a lot of time to treat the boards with the blow torch and then assemble them, but I think it's worked out nicely and once I got into it, the shou sugi ban process becomes very meditative and creates beautiful patterns as you burn the wood. In the past we have built raised beds with no sides and they worked perfectly but the owner of the property shares the view of the kitchen garden with us and we didn't want to give the wrong impression of permaculture

Hi Joe,

May I ask for an update on your shou sugi ban garden beds a few years after please? Thank you.

Wow, Cath I am just looking at your cabin. Mind sharing how it is a few years down the road? And when you say "the deeper the burn...", may I ask approximately how deep? Thanks so much.

Beautiful, thank you for this! As a possible thought for why bruising the stems helps them bend without breaking... the bruising likely crushes the cell walls within the stem making them more flexible and less turgid.
The ribbon is lovely and I'm wondering if you or anyone have ideas for some plant leaf to easily weave in, instead of ribbon?

I put a heater (bought at an Ace hardware store) that had a black "U" shaped heating element on top of a red rectangle box (sorry, no pictures) on a plugged in additional temperature gauge (on below 33 Fahrenheit or so, and turned off above that). It also had a dial for high to low power. The heater was held by some flexible sheet metal under another piece of sheet metal, where the metal waterer sat. All of it was held up by a wooden frame that also had chicken wire around the sheet metal so that they could get up onto the platform above the shavings, with all dirt falling off of their feet, and keeping their feet cool at the same time (not touching the heated metal area under the waterer). It worked like a charm and was the only thing I found after extensive looking (for Northern Wisconsin deep freeze winters). I hope that helps or inspires some.