Mike Fullerton

Neven Curlin wrote:I'd like to report back and post an update on my attempts to improve my processing process of Miscanthus x giganteus.

Great info. Thanks! Sounds like the cutting blade type is the way to go instead of the crushing gear type.

In perusing the board for more shredder stuff, I did come across the does paul hate wood chippers thread, which is an interesting alternate take. Any machinery ultimately creates dependencies on maintenance, spare parts and energy. I guess in the end the most natural, permie-style way to break down woody biomass like this is to take a cue from nature and use fungi, at least as a backup for if the day ever comes where the shredder kicks the bucket.

It wouldn't be all that suitable for animal bedding or paths, but it would at least process it without machinery, generate an edible yield and get the carbon into the soil as spent mushroom substrate. Yet every source of information about cultivating mushrooms on miscanthus uses pre-shredded material. Makes me wonder... Could something like winecaps - which can be grown outdoors on non-pasteurized substrate - be set up to grow on whole miscanthus canes?

I tried scarlet runners last year even though I'd read that they don't set well in heat. Not wanting to just believe any old thing I find on the internet, I decided to try it out directly for myself. Unfortunately... on this one the internet was correct.

The summers here scorch hard - high 30s celsius (that's around 100 F) every day. The vines grew well and flowered profusely. They're quite pretty and the bees were all over them, but there was no pod set at all. As of aug 1 there wasn't a single bean on a teepee of 16 vines, even though they were 10 or so feet tall by then. But then the weather suddenly cooled off, with the daytime highs being low 30s C (85-90ish F) instead. Immediately they began to set pods. Heavily. Got enough off the last couple feet of vine growth for a couple pots of chili, but if they had set like that from the start of flowering then the harvest would have been massive.

So they're already a marginal crop here, and with things heating up their future prospects aren't good. A heat-tolerant runner bean that doesn't quit setting above 30c/85f would be the holy grail of legumes!

I tried it last year the simple way - just weeds in a 5 gal bucket, stirred with a stick. It seemed to be working at first, but then stick stirring just wasn't cutting it anymore and the water went anoxic. The anaerobes took over and it began to emit this horribly objectionable funk somewhere between pond scum and concentrated ass. That was enough to end the experiment. It lingered too, even in a breeze. Yuck.

This year I've got an aquarium pump and air stone in there, bubbling away 24/7. Soooo much better! It's been going for a couple months now and it just smells like healthy pond/lake water. Without actively trying to sniff at it there's no smell at all.

I'm keeping it going as a kind of "perpetual stew" type of thing. Every few days I'll use about a third to half the bucket, top it back up with fresh water and add more weeds. So it's always changing depending on what's around, there's always a mix of new and old material in there and since it never empties out completely the bacterial population doesn't have to start over from scratch each time.

Been on a bit of a Matt Mahaffey kick lately. A fascinating musical rabbit hole to fall down...

If anyone has any tips on how to shred Miscanthus faster, I'm all ears.

Interesting insights on the shredding. I had assumed that it would shred really easily due to the small diameter and the fact that it's a large grass rather than a tree branch. Less dense and presumably easier to shred than a branch of the same diameter? But I guess it depends on the cutting type. I can see how the kind with the gears could have trouble, since it's more of a crush than a slice.

From a quick search, most of the info out there about shredding miscanthus seems to be aimed at commercial operators and enormous industrial units. Maybe since it's so similar to bamboo, figuring out which home unit is best for that would lead to better results? Then again, a lot of that info is about shredding *green* bamboo, which is not really a great analogue.

Pretty cool concept!
The regenerative jacket-cooling/intake air pre-heating is very reminiscent of the sort of cooling loop you see in actual rocket engines. In fact, if the turbine you mentioned were used to spin a blower that forced more air into the system, you'd have the basic ingredients of the expander cycle - like some sort of wood-fueled steampunk RL10.

"It's 40 degrees and I feel like I'm dyin'..."

Duckweed seems like seriously awesome stuff, especially if you're going with ducks instead of chickens as your poultry of choice. You can also dig it straight into garden beds as a soil amendment or add it to compost piles.

Lemna Minor - Wikipedia
It grows extremely rapidly - they say it can double in mass in 24 hours. 73 tonnes/ha/year dry mass is cited in the article above in ideal conditions. There's even mention of a trial growing it in north carolina on diluted swine lagoon fluid at over 100 tonnes/ha/year which is downright astounding. As far as I know the best you can do on land is giant miscanthus at 40ish tonnes/ha/year, so duckweed is over twice as productive per unit area.

Duckweed Aquaculture Tutorial - Vegetronix
It's also quite high in protein. 20-40%, comparable to soy. Can apparently replace soy in duck diets, which I guess isn't surprising considering it's their biggest plant food source in the wild. You can dry it down and store it for winter feed too. Poopy duck water (which ducks produce in seemingly limitless abundance) would seem like an ideal medium on which to grow it too.

Jen Fulkerson wrote:Ok I admit it, I'm a crazy person.

You're not alone there! This lady here seems like an ultra-enthusiast about duckweed, complete with trips all over the world to study it and find unique strains. She's even got a post a bit down the page about feeding duckweed to black solider flies. Seems like a winning biomass combo - you'd have the ridiculous plant productivity of duckweed helping feed the ridiculous animal productivity of BSF and ducks will happily munch both of them like they're candy!

T Melville wrote:Just found this the other day. I don't think it's spread so much as it's grown into a full sized plant, but it was planted beside a railroad tie and now has two stems on the other side of it.

Good to know! I was worried it would be like raspberries, which I've seen shoot up new canes 15-20 feet from an established patch. Those railroad ties are usually pretty chunky aren't they? 6-7in deep? Seems a subsurface barrier would need to be deeper than that to be effective, but I guess if it spreads that slowly it's not exactly threatening to get out of control and take the whole place over or anything!

I looked a bit further into using it in strawbale construction, and I came across this article about it:
Miscanthus: the game-changer in building construction
It's written by a group that markets and promotes miscanthus in the UK, so they're tooting their own horn a bit here, but they seem quite chuffed about the compression strength and thermal/acoustic insulation properties. Seems like it would work pretty well, and since you can grow it yourself in quantity on marginal land it may turn out much cheaper than paying to truck in bales of grain straw.