E Nordlie

A traditional solution is to have the beams on top of the posts, with diagonal braces - either between the sides of the posts and the undersides of the beams (inside the frames), or from the outsides of the posts to the outsides of the beams. This both ties the beams securely to the posts, and stabilizes the frames - keeps them from moving sideways. "Knees" work the same way, but require curved or bent materials, and if the frames are going to be filled with insulation I assume knees would make it a bit more fiddly.

I don't have any serious building experience myself, but have seen a lot of different wooden structures. Sideways stability is important - knees or diagonal braces of some sort are necessary, unless sheets of stiff material like plywood are attached more or less directly to the posts.

We may be misunderstanding each other here - what do you mean by making clay, and how could clay be toxic? I am not a native english speaker, but isn't clay a very fine grained mostly mineral soil? I have never heard of anyone creating clay (what would they make it from?), or heard of toxic clay. I guess clay could be contaminated by different pollutants, or marine clay could contain more salt than most plants appreciate - but in this context the amount of potentially salty clay deposited in each place seems too small to be a problem.

Depending on your local geology and land use, it may be very easy to find clay, or impossible, or anything in between. How accessible a pottery supply store is will vary too, but surely both buying and finding clay must be easier than creating it yourself. Clay that is sold is also natural. I guess making clay would entail breaking down specific minerals in one or more ways that mimic natural chemical and mechanical weathering, and possibly sorting the result very finely somehow.

For what it's worth, I have had another season of beetle free beans May be partly or completely due to random variations in weather, temperature etc., but considering the bean plants seemed very similar to earlier years, conditions can't have been totally different.

I haven't got anything useful to add, but I thought it might be worth mentioning that pickled rutabagas are a major part of the plot of a great Donald Duck story by Carl Barks. The villain is called McBrine, and wants to sabotage cucumber production - to enable him to sell a lot of pickled rutabaga. It does not end well for him.

Tommy Bolin wrote:Finns clean the glass of their woodstoves with ash. According to my Finnish mother.

I think this is pretty common in Norway, the easiest way to do it is to dip newspaper (or paper towel) in water briefly, dip the damp paper in the ashes in the stove, and rub it on the glass. Most of the soot/tar carbon mix will come off immediately, but repeat if necessary with new damp ash paper. At the end wipe any residue off with just damp paper, no ash. I've seen this method recommended in other ash use discussions, but using a rag instead of paper. As far as I know everybody uses paper here - presumably rags would work just as well, but it seems more economical to use a couple of pages of newspaper. You can throw it in the compost afterwards, or leave it to dry out and burn it the next time you light the stove.

Fredy Perlman wrote:

echo minarosa wrote:I also spread a fair bit of crushed oyster shells for the birds.

Interesting, for the birds? What do oyster shells do for them?

Birds need the minerals to produce new egg shells - wild birds obviously need less than laying hens, since they do not lay as many eggs, but they still need the same minerals. I've seen at least tits, tree sparrows, magpies and crows picking bits of egg shell out of soil where I spread compost, and hens sometimes seem to scratch for old shell fragments as eagerly as for worms and bugs. I've also seen both hens and wild birds eating old snail shells, seems likely they would get at least some of the same minerals from those - which again might indicate that snails, and possibly other invertebrates, could acquire some of the minerals they need either directly or indirectly from egg shells that end up in the garden.

I doubt egg- or sea shell fragments really work as grit (to grind food), they are much more fragile than most stones. I've always heard that actual grit needs to be provided in addition to shell fragments for hens that have no access to natural soil with small stones.

I wouldn't worry about "breeding them" or them continuing to multiply indefinitely - in my experience wasp populations vary *a lot* from year to year, presumably naturally. I haven't noticed a real pattern to it, sometimes there is a boom every other year, sometimes there are several years of low populations. Which appear to result in more aphids.

Bearing in mind that I don't know the exact species, your climate, or the size of the cut pieces - I don't think it matters. Nearly all the moisture loss will be from the cut ends rather than the split sides.

I know the original question was about bush beans, but since there was at least one post proposing that there may be some sort of antagonism between Old World and New World crops I want to add my observation that broad beans and potatoes grow happily together. I have read/heard about this combination, and tried it myself. In my case, at least, both potatoes and broad beans seemed to produce similar harvests per plant compared to separate plantings - it is important to mention that the potatoes in my case were spaced as if they were planted alone, while the broad beans were only about 1/4 of the density they would normally be sown. This means the potato harvest was "normal" for the size of the bed, but with "bonus" beans. I usually sow broad beans a little before planting potatoes, but in this case they went in at the same time - the broad beans may have been very slightly held back by this, so it is possible sowing them a couple of weeks before planting the potatoes would allow them to produce slightly more. Or just earlier. I may have to try.

Interesting combination of potatoes and corn, I would have thought the potatoes would be ready to harvest some time before the corn? And the distance between the corn and the potatoes too small to avoid disturbing the corn roots while harvesting potatoes? 1 m is seems a good distance, but two feet I would be nervous. How do you get this to work?