Brian White

Alder Burns wrote:I need to grow some next year for sure!  My stash of old chewing tobacco has finally run out.  A tea of tobacco is the only thing I know of that will drop large numbers of aphids dead, and quick!  Nothing else works for me...not soapy water, not D.E.  My rutabagas have them bad right now and I'm out there rubbing and smushing every week.  I've been around some kids that grew it years ago....it's pretty easy once you get the very fine seeds to come up.

  What is your tea recipe? How strong?    I got a cauli that is being murdered by aphids right now.  It needs a cuppa!   I have dehydrated tobacco rustica.  Thanks.

It's October ,  and usually the rainy season starts in the first week and it is  usually rain and clouds for the whole month after that.  This year, October had a few cloudy days but lots of sun too!   So, finally, I popped down to the gorge with a 4 liter milk container and filled it with sea water,  came back and started evaporating off the water on a frying pan on the sun scoop.  (Not a clue what the technique is because I never did it before.).  First day, I started late and the sun just peeped through the clouds,  not much got evaporated,  maybe 200 ml,  next day,  I wasn't paying much attention and it boiled off a few times,  then I had to leave, so poured the last liter and a half on,  and hoped for the best.   It didn't get finished,  and I covered it and let it boil off the next day.    So, what did I learn.   Well,  don't fully dry it on the pan,  I ended up with a white rock that is harder than some sandstone on the islands here.  I can only imagine how much faster it will go in summer!   The artesian sea salt from 4 liters of of sea water on vancouver island sells for $8.40  and I have a feeling you could make 4 or more liters worth a day in Summer.   Anyway see the video.   In a prepper group, I was told that the right way to do it is to filter your sea water first,   boil off 3/4 of the water,  then filter out the lime and gypsum that is deposited (I think with coffee filter paper) then boil it down again until there is salt in brine.  Then wash off the brine (with saturated clean brine).  The brine you wash off contains magnesium chloride, and potassium chloride (which are very bitter tasting) and then dry your salt gently to finish it off!      So, that brine that you have washed off,  I guess you can experiment with it separately.  See if you can do struvite magic,  by adding pee to it and extracting the magnesium phosphate to be used as fertilizer.   The nice thing about the sun scoop is that it has solar tracking, so you don't have to be there all the time watching it.    I would love it if someone else tried to make a sun scoop. I thought there were hundreds of thousands of DIY enthusiasts across the world,  where are they?  

I grow rustica, and dehydrate it as insecticide.  I don't know if it is any good, to be honest.

Commercial greenhouses typically remove all the plants in the winter,  and maybe all the soil too, and then fumigate with really strong chemicals to reduce mites and aphids to an annoying memory.  I have plants in the greenhouse year round so I can't destroy the bugs like that. This year,  my greenhouse was too dry because I was doing an experiment that sent all the irrigation water under the soil and spider mites proliferated. I tried organic insecticidal soap and a 3 in one  thing that was supposed to reduce fungal infections, insects and mites,  and it did nothing.   Recently I tried fumigating by burning dried nettle leaves.  (I read somewhere that nettle leaves are insecticidal and kill mites too).   I think it worked a bit.  but I was pure guessing how dry to have the leaves and how hot to burn them.  I have drawn up  a list of home grown  plants and substances to try,  So,  burn rosemary?  or atomize rosemary oil?   Burn mint or atomize the oil?  Same with fennel,  and rose.   How about burning ivy or holly?  or if the infestation is really bad,  how about burning daphne in the greenhouse?  (Daphne Laurel when I cut it, it makes me feel a bit sick,  and I looked it up,  it contains things that are being researched as insecticides,  miticides, and cancer killers.  So,  maybe use it in the greenhouse.  I forgot the tobacco.   Could I soak dehydrated tobacco in water and vaporize it in the atomizer in the rafters too?     I can do the essential oil things now because I have a solar distiller and it does 5 or 6 ml of hydrosol per hour.   Then I can put the atomizer up in the rafters of the greenhouse and let it work all day.   Anyway,   have any of you used natural fumigants with success?   I can't grow neem so please don't suggest it,  lets keep it to home grown solutions please.   So, please let me know what you tried and if you had success with it.  Here is the video of me smoking up the greenhouse.  

If you like nettles, or new Zealand spinach,  you will probably like good king henry.  It is clear from the comments that people don't know how to cook it.  Its leaves feel "sandy" because they are covered in kind of soapy granules to keep insects away.   So you pick the leaves and young shoots and put them in a pot and boil them for about 20 minutes.  And then you discard the water, because the soapy stuff is in the water.  So, that is the trick,  throw the water away, and never use it in soup.   You do not drink the water and yes, chickens won't drink the water either, because all the horrible is in the water.  Then chop up the leaves and shoots and have it with butter and potatoes and it is lovely.  You can also use the young seed and flower shoots.  When the seed stem gets a bit woody, you can rub the seeds off the woody bits and cook them with the leaves.  It ends up a bit "mealy" and tastes like quinoa but the seeds are black not white.  So that is the key to using GKH,  boil it in plenty of water and get rid of the water, cos the soapy stuff is in the water.  I tried spray the water as insecticide or miticide a few times, but I don't know if it worked or not.  Spider mites have spidey senses and seem largely unkillable in my world.   I far prefer good king henry to spinach.

Just wondering,  if you added a lot of sauerkraut juice to cabbage and kneaded it in, would it start up sour enough and ferment safely like sauerkraut?    Just asking because I am supposed to not eat much salt.   Thanks

I have a tracking solar heat concentrator, the sun scoop since April 2025.   Most people use these types of things as a solar cooker. But I did a water boil test and it delivers over 600 watts for about 8 hours a day in Summer.  Perhaps enough heat to cook a months worth of food.   BUT it is unreliable.  If it is cloudy for a few hours,  scary bacteria might grow.  So,  I have been thinking of and trying dump loads all this time. My go to dump load is about 10 liters or soil and chopped up weeds in a steaming pot. 2 inches of water in the bottom, and after 2 hours it is nicely steamed, and there are no weed seeds left alive.  In theory it should be much quicker but heat travels really slow through soil, and most of it gets radiated from the sides of the pot as water bubbles up,  and the middle takes a long time to get hot.  I use it as a 3.5 inch mulch when I transplant or grow seeds. (3.5 inches because I can level things off with a 2 by 4.   A lot of permies don't like this because "It kills the life" but as I see it,  there is plenty of life 3.5 inches below and it colonizes it really quick. (a lot of bacteria, protozoa and fungi are necrophiliacs and they breed faster than rabbits and they love my "dead" soil.  Plus, the plant roots have a great opportunity to encourage the life that they prefer as co-contributors.  I solar steam 10 liter batches,  in pots but if you are using pv,  you can do the same thing with an insulated metal barrel as a giant steaming pot, and get it up to about 80 or 90 C and have a thermostat to shut it off.  200 liters of soil at a time and you might get it done in a day.     That's almost commercial scale.     I take about a week to fill a 200 liter barrel with the 10 liters per batch thing.   AND I steam up lawnmowed weeds, and clippings,  that can go in the barrel too, and it steams much quicker than soil because the heat zips through it. (Soil is a good insulator).   Steamed weeds rot really quickly, and I just use them straight away as mulch. I skip the composting stage totally. And I also skip the weeding stage. It is pretty cool.  I also use the heat to dehydrate fruit herbs, vegetables, herbs and tobacco (for insecticide).  And I adapted a vevor 3 gallon distiller for the heat concentrator,  (just barbecue black painted the bottom black) and it delivers about 6 ml per minute of distilled water,  or hydrosol if you are distilling essential oil.  Of course you can distill alcohol too if you are allowed. It would be good for cleaning, and if you know how to distill of the meths first,  might be ok for drinking.   I found fennel to be the best but I only started very late in the year when everything, including the mint was woody.  When doing essential oils,  you make it like a steamer with maybe 4 inches of water and then wire mesh and then your herbs.  I read up.   When they steam rose petals for its essential oil as  perfume, the water left in the bottom of the still is "rose water" and that is valuable stuff!  But what is in the water after distilling fennel, or mint or weeds or grass from your lawn?    Probably sugars and proteins.   And I bet that if you added some yeast to it,  or pour it slowly on mushroom straw,  stuff will grow!  And if it is yeast, you might be able to get very useful cleaning alcohol from your waste grass, etc.   And maybe some yeast to feed to animals or fish.      So yeah,  what I do with solar heat,  anyone else could do with solar PV as a dump load and they could actually control it better.   My reflector is a bit under 1.5 sq meters in area, and I plugged the heating numbers into google.  It told me that on a sunny day,  it gives me the same heat amount as you could get from three to five grid connected 400 watt  roof mounted solar panels.    (of course on a cloudy day,  mine gives you nothing).     I hope to work on the soil steaming some more,  and either get the big  insulated barrel thing going,  or get a smaller system going, that is continuous flow. (As the soil gets to a good temperature, a thermostat turns on an auger, and soil gets moved) because that would be really neat. So yeah, distilling, dehydrating and soil steaming  can use up some of that spare energy to do very useful stuff.      sun scoop playlist

        Hi, Remy,  I am specifically growing Azolla to fix nitrogen. Duckweed cannot fix nitrogen, so if there is no nitrate in the water, it cannot grow,  and it is just recycling nitrate that is already there.      Permaculture cannot replace commercial farming and the food produced commercially with artificial nitrates,  without fixing a whole lot more nitrogen.  A bit over half the nitrogen fixation on earth is done with natural gas in giant chemical plants.  Anyway,   I now have azolla growing in a greenhouse in high phosphate water and it is producing extra biomass in the greenhouse, out of inorganic material and nitrogen gas from the air.   I also am growing azolla in low nitrate/high phosphate water and it is growing great and producing new biomass using nitrogen from the air to produce the new biomass.  Supposedly, Azolla fixes nitrate twice as fast as legumes, so that is why I chose it.  It is fine to recycle your urine,  but new nitrate must be produced every yeah too. Or the people of the world cannot be fed.  
 

Remy Urbaniak wrote:Hi,
interesting experiment.

If your goal is to use Azolla specifically, than fair enough, however if your goal is to produce biomass for composting and mulching then duckweed is far better option on less than a hectare pond. On such small scale you do not need nitrogen fixing plants as you already have a ton of nitrogen you are disposing off every day - urine ! Urine is perfect fertilizer, rich in N, P, K, contains all the trace elements and has very low to zero percentage of undesirable elements.
.

 

I got a lee valley scythe as  a present for a friend and I think it is great. Probably ok for pencil sized brush.  Definitely works well on Himalayan blackberries.   But if you want to do something cheaper and more tough, you might try to search old  heavy scythes on the online markets, craigslist, etc.   Get one in half decent condition and cut 1/3 to 1/2 of the blade off , make a point on it like usual, and  it should be fine for rough cutting.   I had a very heavy scythe in Ireland, and I did that to it,  and the same in Canada,  I had a heavy old scythe,  cut it down to more manageable and it was way easier to use.  This was like the shorter scythes that I used in Norway.  And both of them were easier to use for rough work than when they were long.  I just used the angle grinder to sharpen at the start of the season and a scythe stone the rest of the time.  I tried piening once but didn't get the hang of it.  

Where I live, there is an agricultural supply  place called Borden Merchentile  that also has scythes,   probably more heavy duty than Lee Valley.  There might be still the "Austrian Scythe guy" who made custom scythes.   I used scythes for a summer in Norway as actual work, and in Ireland,  a lot to keep the weeds on the side of the road clean.  There are a lot of different types.  Even a one handed "lady's scythe"  that was very lightweight in Norway. I just tried it for a few minutes.   When I was working in the orchard in the Fjord,  the scythe was a little bit heavy with a short blade.  We had the scythe stones and we would sharpen them every 10 to 15 minutes.  My co-worker was a city boy from Holland and he couldn't keep up. But he sure tried!  So yeah,  scything is an acquired skill, and some people will never get it.  And there are lots of types, perhaps you need to go to an agricultural fair and try some to see what works.