Jim Small

I'm thinking a grill over the chimney of the RMH. 16 inch square or so. No coals. Or someething like that.

I use a nice Propane Grill currently and it works, but I'm curious about trying a rocket design for grilling. I'm thinking portable enough so I could move it under cover, enough of a grill cover to do say 4 ribeyes at a time. We're in a semi-suburban area with lots of trees, so lots of wood falls from the skies periodically.

I have some DIY skills but have never done any welding. Poking around Amazon I find some inexpensive rocket heaters with grills but I'm reluctant to just go with the reviews. Mostly the inexpensive ones seem to be designed for camping trips which is of course totally reasonable but I could do a step up from camping!

Any thoughts, experiences?

We are in the Denver area. Climate zone? Funny. Climate Change means "every few days" in the high desert!

We're thinking of trying harder for rhubarb. We have a plant that has sort of produced for us but it's getting old (like me.) So I bought some rhubarb seeds which I'll try sprouting, and also probably get some starter plants at our local nursery since I hear it take a couple of years to get a crop from seed.

We'll repeat our "wild forest" garden. I just let whatever grew last year, grow again but also put in some cherry tomatoes (The Incredible Wife loves the little yellow pear tomatoes.) I get a kick out of starting tomatoes from seed. Then lots of tomatillos, seed and volunteers. Peppers especially Jalapenos, cukes, etc. For some reason I'm the only gardener in the world who does not get buried in zucchini or yellow squash! Don't know what I'm doing wrong.

We noticed that we really didn't have a lot of pests with multiple mixed flowers, cosmos, marigolds, borage, etc. Maybe it worked--the plants brought in the predators? That would be cool...

My daughter and her family live near Seattle so slug central. They have five ducks, don't know the breed, but they have cleaned the slugs out. My son in law lives out.

It's probably not possible to totally and accurately account for all the "carbon emissions" that occur from ANY activity. Reminds me of the old joke about hiring an accountant, where the CEO set up a mock set of data and asked the three finalists what the cost per unit was.
The first confidently laid out a spreadsheet and said, "It costs $6.32 per unit."
The second confidently laid out HIS spreadsheet and said, "It costs $38.71 per unit."
The third came in and said, "How much would you LIKE it to cost?" and got the job.
I fear that most "carbon accountants" are the third type.

The absolute worst I am aware of is the highly emotional discussion about agriculture and especially cows. Ridiculous statements like "cows emit more greenhouse gas than transportation."

My take is that we need to separate NEW carbon emissions (mainly fossil fuels) from RECYCLED emissions. Our gardens and livestock make NO new carbon, they just recycle. Every carbon atom that a cow emits, or that builds a stalk or leaf in our Permie forests, came from CO2 that was already in the air, taken up by the grass, and turned into cow or human food. So, NO net increase in greenhouse gas.  Cows are not alchemists! (by the way they ALSO don't destroy water, another weird myth.)  And the methane that they emit, supposedly a worse greenhouse gas, would ALSO be emitted from the grass that ferments and breaks down in the field if the cows don't eat it, AND methane breaks down in the atmosphere anyway with a half life of about 10 years. Now our agricultural "system" does use a lot of fossil fuels to make nitrogen fertilizer and to transport things from California to Montana but industrial plant AND animal agriculture are equally culpable here.

I'm proud of what I do with my larval Permaculture efforts despite the fact that my compost heaps certainly emit CO2 and methane, but no "neocarbon".

I'm a Pathologist and I took countless pictures through the eyepiece of my microscope with a Nikon Coolpix that had a small lens, about the same size as the eyepiece. You could hold the lens against the eyepiece and it was steady.

I've taken a few pretty decent shots using the cell phone but it's a lot trickier to get it all lined up. But the Cell camera seems to focus just fine through the eyepiece.

As pictures got more common, our hospital got us an adapter that fits in the top tube and we wired in an inexpensive camera so I could take pictures from the computer screen.

One thing you could do that is fairly cool is to stain the organisms on the slide. Methylene blue is easy, Iodine sort of works. If you can find a Gram Stain kit some of the bacteria will stain blue-black (gram positive) and some will stain red (gram negative.) Fungi stain dark with Gram.

But it's also cool as heck to just do a "wet prep" with a coverslip and take a look at all the little protozoa and arthropods jerking around!

Not sure why I did not think of doing this YEARS ago...

Here's my "ghetto" setup. Fencing around a couple of compost piles. The 3 foot tall one on the left has worked well, the cheapo fencing on the right...not so much. But the bacteria still work. (I hope the picture comes through, one of my first posts.)

You may note a big black pipe sticking out at the bottom. It's black drainage pipe with a bunch of slits in it and I looped it into the bottom before filling it. The theory is that it lets air in from the bottom without me having to build a nicer structured platform because I'm...lazy.

It's about 6 feet in diameter. In Denver, the winters get cold and I'm a geek so I figure the middle has a chance to get warm if I surround it by a lot of insulation. My math tells me that if I double the linear dimension, the surface area goes up 4x but the volume goes up 8x. The surface area is what radiates away the heat and evaporates the water, while the volume determines how much heat it makes. I've had the same experience with the rolly black plastic composters, that they freeze all winter and just don't have the volume to heat up most of the year. (They are on the West side of the house and get nice and warm in the summer.)

I also find the plastic drums tend to go anaerobic and smell funny (strong, fecal odor) if I'm not VERY careful to put "browns" in. Amusing that one of my Browns is shredded paper from my office which is in no way brown.

One of my favorite "greens" is coffee grounds from the local Starbucks. You may see the three silver bags stacked up on the left compost bin. More irony: my green is brown!

The theory is that I would move the compost from the left to the right bin (or vice versa) but with illnesses, surgeries, family tragedies it's fortunate I get anything done at all and the pits just keep on eating the kitchen scraps, leaves, coffee grounds, etc.

So I can't say I'm "speeding it up." My compost tea goes right on into the ground and I never see it. I don't turn it nearly often enough. But when I get around to it next spring there will be lots of brown gold in there and I haven't had to do much other than trudge out in the snow and throw the kitchen compost on the pile.

As a Pathologist I spent my career looking at slides made with various stains. There are a lot of factors that can alter the staining even with the same material.

Waters can have different pH (acidity) and many dyes change color with different pH's.
Waters also can have a variety of different mineral contents which can also change the color of some dyes, or how it binds to the cloth.
Then theres a whole other bunch of things: chlorine, organic material, I don't even know what else.

This is a cool "thread" and I love the "colorful" posts!