Syd Smith

I'm a geology prof! I'm what you might call mid-career, but I just relocated and started over at a different university. I research the geochemistry of natural systems to better understand how Earth's deep chemical processes really work, but I spend most of my time teaching undergraduates and the occasional graduate student about rocks and minerals. I love teaching and thinking about geologic puzzles, so it's been the perfect career path for me. I think I will do it until I don't want to anymore, which might work out to be around retirement age.

I honestly don't really think of myself as a homesteader, but I love doing things with my hands and figuring out how things work, and I love eating fresh fruits and vegetables, so I suppose I am essentially becoming one! I've gradually worked my way up from my first house, with a tiny yard where I put in my first little keyhole garden of mixed vegetable beds and an alternative wildflower lawn; to a third of an acre with a few fruit trees and vegetable beds and my first hand-built wood frame greenhouse; to the new property. We now have 3 acres of mostly compacted former horse pasture, but about half an acre of it is wooded. We're planting and planning our vineyard, the forest garden orchard, the veggie beds, wildflower meadows, the woodland understory additions, and a windbreak hedge. Putting the solar on the barn, and planning the house renovation so we can work from home and give our menagerie of animals a happy place to live (and add an attached greenhouse for my plants!). Gradually turning this property over to the kind of home that can feed us and keep us happily living with nature.

There are mine dumps, and then there are mine dumps.

All of this depends on the commodities (elements) mined, the types of ore (actual minerals), and how the ore and non-ore waste were treated, used, and disposed. Some modern mines treat their waste on-site and it is okay. Others... have not done this. Some were mining building materials and basically all the waste and tailings are inert. Others... far less so. Some are would qualify as Superfund sites in the United States, but have never been remediated in any way.

This really runs the gamut, and may go beyond what a person can do alone without professional input. It's really important to look into the questions above, and then do follow-up testing, and research those particular element contaminants (knowing that the contaminants are not necessarily the same elements as the commodities that were mined), including their oxidation and mineral status and leachability.

Linen is pretty great! It's not the best defense against a really determined mosquito (like the dreaded tiger mosquitoes that can bite through thick jeans), but it's at least a first layer defense, and it's really good for sun protection without overheating. Lightweight wool can be wicking and cooling in hot weather, too.

I also have a mix of old assorted outdoor hiking clothes and athletic wear, mostly from thrift stores, and I just rotate through them and wash them every week. If you don't care what hideous colors you wear outside in the yard, you can find a LOT of good quality outdoor clothing at thrift stores, much of it never worn! You just might wind up pairing fluorescent yellow wool socks with bright green pants and a coral orange shirt. I consider it a fashion statement!

Bought a piece of property a year ago, read about 10 permaculture books while observing and planning the property's future, and then started the nitty-gritty, nuts-and-bolts planning stage for my future forest garden... which involves a whole lot of online research. Deep research about each specific plant and fruit variety and root type and compatibility. Deep research for every step of the process and how to do it in the most effective but affordable and approachable and eco-friendly way. Making my maps and layers on paper and digitally, taking notes, building spreadsheets. Research, research, research!

And as I did all of that, posts from the permies forums kept coming up in my search hits, over and over. After a while, I finally took a closer look, and I decided that maybe it would be helpful to join and have a place to actually ask some of my questions and keep up with discussions, instead of going it alone at every step. Et voilà.

I think if you have healthy soil, worms will come, and you won't need to add any. Wood chips and leaf matter and mulch should all help attract them!

It's my favorite vermicompost bedding. I always keep a bucket of it next to the worm bin, so I can just throw in enough carbon to balance the kitchen scraps with every feeding!

Julie Gentry wrote:I have too many hot peppers this year. Ideas for preserving them or other ideas for what I can do with them? Besides giving them away which I already do.

I have already fermented as many as my husband will eat in a year.

Thank you!

I've had success freezing large quantities, then boiling them down to make salsa and hot sauce later!

Just be aware that the freezing damage can possibly increase the heat... and the boiling process is kind of chemical warfare in your own kitchen. Ventilation is good!!

I love our cast iron, but there are some really, really nice, not-too-expensive carbon steel pans that you can get now that are easy to maintain and heat really evenly. You do have to season them, and I strongly recommend metal handles so they can go from the stove to the oven (and for easier seasoning). But cleaning is just as easy as cast iron, easier since they are a bit lighter weight, and we use them nearly every day.

Yeardly Arthur wrote:

Sarah Joubert wrote: I have long been debating whether this would make a suitable ammendment to lighten my clay soil by adding sand and if it would add minerals left in the dehydrated grasses.

Seaweed, yes! Sand, not so much. We have notoriously heavy clay soil here in central Alabama, and I have been fooled more than once by the idea that expanding the soil with sand will fix the hard, sticky clay. It will not. In fact, sand will turn clay into concrete. I can be a very slow learner, and after multiple attempts can attest to the futility of trying to sand my way out of clay issues.

Three things will improve clay soil. 1. Organic material. 2. Gypsum. 3. More organic material. If you use seaweed in steps 1 and/or 3, you will certainly get the a minerals you're hoping for (many times more than land plants), and the added benefits of water-retaining mucilage and amino acids. The more you can add to your clay soil, the better.

I'll leave it to the geologists in the thread to comment on specifics, but my understanding is that clay has an abundance of clingy electrons, and the calcium in gypsum provides more positive charges to keep the electrons company. In practice, a good dose of powdered gypsum turns my sticky red clay into crumbly brown soil in a single season - especially when I add plenty of leaf mold, grass clippings, rotted wood and composted sawdust.

My very quick and dirty answer on a busy Saturday (while trying to make a new tractor attachment speak to our tractor!) is that clay minerals, which make up a pretty big family, are on the whole pretty weird! They have a lot of sites in their atomic structures where ions can attach, including spots that you might effectively consider "defects" because they aren't the routine locations for elements to sit in there. heck, you can jam water into their structure with hydrogen bonds and cause the mineral volume to expand dramatically, and then drive off that water if the mineral dries out.

To be honest, I think of a lot of mineral families as "garbage cans" (because they have some repeating locations in their atomic structure where you can swap in a bunch of different elements without changing that overall structure), but clays are pretty high on that list! Their extreme expansion and contraction qualities can also cause some interesting outcomes in soils... though if you are working in super clay rich material, it can also cause serious structural problems (like slope creep and imploding basements).

Greg Martin wrote:I have 7 selections that I'm growing in zone 5 Maine.  This past winter we got to -20F and they all survived.  Mine are planted under fruit and nut trees and seem quite happy.  A few of them are in what I would consider near full shade (little to no direct sun, but not forest dark) and seem happy.  A few are in partial shade and they are quite happy too.

Do you mean 7 different varieties? I'm not familiar with varieties of it! Are they performing differently? Different flavors? Very interesting!