Rachael Cart

I just stumbled across your thread Roy.

How's it all looking a year on?

Pearl Sutton wrote:I'm going to be an outlier here, wind. IF! I can do what I want.

My property has excellent constant wind, BUT I don't want a high tower turbine, due to the maintenance etc, I like savonius vertical axis wind turbines, easy to make out of scavenged stuff and can work on the ground. I have no running water, but hope to move ponded water with the wind turbines.

If I could have hydro, I'd be doing similar small scale stuff with it, so that would be ok, but I like how cheap I can do wind things. And the picture below shows how they can take advantage of things like windy corners or the space between building where the wind is always high.

small savonius vertical axis turbines

I'd love to know about these, do you have more details please?

Are these Shinshu beans still growing?They look incredible! Does anyone have any that they could send to the UK for me to experiment with here?

Thanks Beau,

I quite like the idea of my house sprouting mushrooms everywhere on the outside too. Would this cause problems? The Mycelium eating the cladding etc?

Thanks for the quick reply Beau. Yes, I had considered sheeps wool too, but wrong time of year again for finding any, but love the idea of testing out the mycelium in this application. I do like to tinker with stuff I did wonder if it might be too cold to grow in the winter, then it might get going itself in the spring?

Or I wonder if I was to wait until next year, whether I could still clad it for the winter, then I could take the top board off in spring and tip lots of loose substrate in the empty cavity and seal it back up again, whether that could work?

Hi Beau,

I just got caught up and watched the webinar. Thank you for that.

I live in the UK in an old static caravan (mobile home) that I'm renovating, but it has very little in the way of insulation, just an inch or so of polystyrene between the interior wall and external sheet metal skin. This will be our first winter, and I have a stack of larch boards ready to clad the whole structure with. I hate the idea of putting in 'standard' insulation from both an ecological point of view and for the cost. Could I fill the gap between the exterior metal wall of the caravan and the larch boards with this mycelium insulation? Could I fill it as I board with the loose substrate so it solidifies in place? Could this be done at this time of year with success? I'm in the North here, and it's wet most days and although still fairly warm, soon we'll be below freezing, so I don't have time to wait 6 weeks to grow panels.

Any ideas or suggestions that you may have?

Many thanks

I'm struggling to get this to play for more than a few minutes at a time without freezing, do you have a date for the smaller one please? But from what I've seen so far, it seems to be an overview of what was done at the jamboree rather than watching it actually happen. I thought it would be more instructional than reflective?

Hi Hazel,

Lovely to have you here at Permies, and I'd love to read your book. I'm in the UK and have around 3.5 acres of mainly old pasture, totally overgrown, and as well as being bordered by trees there is also about 1/2 acre of woodland which included old oaks and alder and younger birch, beech, hazel, willow and elder. I'd love to get into charcoal making, as well as creating a food forest around what's here. Do you have any tips you can suggest for someone starting out please?

I've taken over part of an old abandoned field earlier this year of my parents and moved here with my 2 daughters (7&. I came home to heal after some trauma, and to be here for my parents who are aging.

I'm concentrating on an acre of it for now, but there are another 3-4 if I have the time/energy.

My area has 4 concrete paths running north to south equally spaced, and another few overgrown gravel paths belong this. Most of the land is a mixture of nettle, thistle, ragwort, reeds, dock and buttercup. I have a static caravan across 2 of the paths. I've added in a natural clay lined pond with land drainage running in and out as overflow. I erected a poly tunnel and shed and have a cabin to rebuild.

I read somewhere on here that sometimes plants grow in a particular place as the land needs an element that plant brings. So what do I keep, what can I get rid of, is there a way to find out what the land needs? If there any use in harvesting these? They're all about 2' high at this point.

In the places where I have cleared and kill mulched, a few weeks later the 'weeds' are pushing through just the same regardless. It seems to be a never ending slog.

There is lots of wildlife, particularly frogs, toads, slugs, snails etc. I was hoping by coming here that I could help heal this bit of land that hadn't been taken care of and improve it. But it seems whatever I do, just either causes harm to the wildlife or it reclaims itself to it's overgrown spiky stingy mess asap.

I'm in North England and feeling really very disheartened by the whole thing.

I did this too!

My eldest was 16 months old when my youngest was born and already starting to be out of her cloth nappies. So when I sat her on the toilet, I hovered my newborn over the toilet too. It didn't take long for her to get the hint. Take her a short while after a feed, whenever her older sister went, just before I went to sleep while she was asleep etc. I think we only had less than 10 dirty nappies after she was 3 weeks old, ever, including night times! Incredible really when I look back, I don't know why more don't do it, who would want to be sat in all that shit. So easy if you're with your babies all the time anyway.

Cloth nappies were super easy too. Eldest out of nappies completely day and night by 18 months!

My youngest is 7 now and obviously doesn't remember a thing about it.