Mike Fullerton

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.

Casie Becker wrote:That article is from 2015... how did I not hear of this before.  We don't have enough Styrofoam coming into the house to do a large scale test of this, but it's just screaming to be a kids science fair project.

I know, right? It's almost like a kind of permie alchemy. Transform styrofoam into farm-fresh eggs just by passing it through mealworms and then chickens! And both of those stages also output garden fertilizer in the form of two different kinds of poo!

The wikipedia page notes that no attempt at commercialization has been made, which is kind of a shame, since this would be a perfect add-on to any local recycling depot. Maybe not commercialzed as much as run the way a lot of municipal compost programs are. Around here everyone drops off their garden waste at the compost facility and you can get bags of free compost every spring if you want. I'd picture the same thing with styrofoam and mealworms to feed backyard chickens or farmed fish.

There's also a larger, similar species, "superworms" that can reportedly do the same thing.

The suggestions above for re-use (especially for insulation) are probably the best option, but there's one kinda weird use-case - albeit one more suited to a situation where you have a continuous flow of material to get rid of - feed it to mealworms.

They have a combination of gut bacteria and digestive enzymes that can break down, digest and metabolize polystyrene. Their droppings can be used as fertilizer, much like worm castings, and the mealworms themselves are technically edible. Myself I don't think I could get past the "eww" factor of that, but they make a nice high-protein feed for chickens, ducks or fish.