Larisa Walk

I would concur on the need for a binder with the roasted pea flour. But the raw pea flour makes fine crepes or wraps with just water and a long soak time. Some change occurs to the starch in the roasting process that makes for a crumbly result. I think I should try the technique that I use for buckwheat wraps. I use 1.75 cups of water, bring it to a boil and sprinkle 1 cup of buckwheat flour on the surface of the boiling water, cover the pan, and let it boil for 2 minutes. Then I stir the flour into the water and let it sit until it's cool enough to knead by hand. The dough rests for a bit after kneading, then gets divided, pressed into tortilla rounds, and dry-fried on a cast iron griddle. As long as the process is followed exactly, the wraps come out flexible without the need for any other ingredients. More experimentation is in order.

I see that this thread has been revived. I wanted to report that we did try pan roasting whole yellow peas, then ground them into flour. Very easy to do. However, when we tried to make a flat bread with the flour as we have done in the past with raw flour (1.5 parts water to 1 part pea flour), it didn't work at all. They crumbled into small bits. Tasted good but the starch didn't behave predictably as usual. Maybe adding boiling hot water and allowing it to soak longer than an hour would make a difference?

Zoe Mays wrote:We do dishes by hand and have been using Sal Suds, obviously not ok for greywater. We are considering using Dr Bronner's castile liquid soap and/or a pure emulsified orange oil degreaser. Our overall purpose is water conservation. Has anyone used these products for greywater? is there any reason not to use them? I want to be able to water my fig, apple, pear and citrus trees, but I don't expect to water my annual veggies with the greywater.

We use Sal Suds, very sparingly, on oily pans only. We have a household graywater system. We also use the Sal Suds for laundry - about 1 Tablespoon per load (our water source is rainwater).

We washed clothes for many years with the plunger and hand wringer method (wringer was the same as the kind that Lehman's Hardware sell). I also grew up using a wringer washer with my mom. An important note is that wringers are hard on textiles and buttons, particularly if you aren't careful in how you feed stuff through it. And the clothes don't get as dry as with a centrifugal spin. We still use a plunger to augment our very small Haier washing machine. Its main contribution to laundry processing is the spin cycles. The Haier was $180 new a few years ago and was small enough to fit in our Geo Metro at the time. BTW, we are off grid and have a rainwater cistern so energy and water conservation are very important to us in setting up our systems.

This dryer (see website below) is soooo much simpler and has worked since 1985. It will dry herbs in a few hours and most everything else in 1-2 sunny days.
http://geopathfinder.com/Solar-Food-Drying.html

I've been trying to figure out how to turn textile waste into paper (to be used in collage art projects) without a Hollander beater. The blender by itself doesn't do enough. I'm thinking of using a disposal but wondering if it's worth the bother?

I think the main issue with Carol's seeds, or lack thereof, is lack of communication. Most growers can understand crop failures, health problems that interfere with the physical demands of farming, etc., etc. If Carol, or someone that is helping her out, would update her website "News" it would be immensely helpful, both for those who are awaiting seed from previous orders and for smoothing the reentry into seed sales, if that is what Carol plans to do eventually. Then everyone can patiently wait rather than fretting, knowing what the plan is. This may help with getting the word out rather than trying to catch up on a backlog of missed communication one by one.

We mill whole buckwheat with our Diamant flour mill with metal plates. The hulls mostly flake off and our sifted out with an ordinary flour sifter. Small particles of hull add fiber to the flour and are not a problem for us. We use buckwheat flour in many recipes as we don't eat gluten grains. Did you know that you can make wraps with buckwheat flour?The only way we've been successful with home grown sunflower seeds is to use them for sprouting in shallow trays of soil. They don't need to be hulled for that.

We use a 12V electric heater element in a standard 10 gallon tank. It can either run as a divert load on the PV system or be manually switched on to get hot water when the system isn't diverting. The water gets heated to about 155*F, at which point we shut it off to avoid boiling it off (we have a digital thermometer placed against the mid point on the side of the tank under the insulation to monitor it). When diluted with cold water, that 10 gallon tank yields more hot water than its small size would when run normally, but you have to know that straight hot water from the tap is too intense. Normally we heat water by PV for at least 8-9 months of the year. In the winter months we have a 1/2" copper coil around our masonry stove's flue pipe that connects to the same tank. We don't have hot water 24/7 but work around weather and stove use and have plenty for our modest means. You can see more about our systems at http://geopathfinder.com/Solar-Electricity.html

I don't wear anything that is knitted as it's too clingy to the skin when damp with sweat. Same goes for synthetics which I wouldn't buy even if they outperformed natural fibers. It's very humid here in Minnesota. I like an open-weave or seer-sucker weave shirt of cotton or linen/hemp. Long sleeves for sun protection until it's too hot. Prefer skirts all year, especially in the summer where they shade my legs, let air circulate, and swish the bugs away. When really hot I like a dress as then there's no tight spot around my waist. For hats, woven straw or cotton with a wide brim keeps the sun off my head and face. If it's really hot, a hat can be worn wet. I feel naked without a hat. Summer clothing criteria: shade from sun, light in color, breathable, insect barrier, loose-fitting. Big pockets are handy but an apron with pockets can always be added when harvesting or planting.