Brian White

Anne Miller wrote:Before we moved where we now live and before I found this wonderful forum I spent hours ridding our property of stinging nettles.

I now cherish their existence and wish I had more that is if I still have some. The ones I found here were not in an area good for gathering.

I hated burr clover though when I made peace with that plant it chose to go somewhere else and not bother me.

I used to love thistle because it has a pretty flower and always grew away from me though within eyesight.  Last summer it tormented me though this year we have none.

 How do you eat evening primrose?   I thought only the roots were edible?  

I grew up in Ireland on a farm.  My brother and I planted trees and left.  He mostly planted conifers on a hilly part. And I bought plums, greengages and damsons, for an unused part near a stream.  They all did very well after the initial years when sheep often damaged them if they got in.  I also planted trees along the river.  Sally and willow cuttings.  But the slugs slaughtered them and if a sheep broke through the fenced bit,  often they went for the tender tree leaves as well as the grass and weeds.  Eventually I changed the way I did it,  I had fenced part of the river, ran out of fence posts, and some willow trunks  that I beat into the ground as fence posts grew! They were high enough above the grass and weeds that slugs couldn't go up without being eaten by the birds.  So i went with planting willow fence post after that.  About 15 years later I went home for a visit and some were massive! 30 ft high or more and really thick.  I cut some of the trees down at the 3 ft high mark as firewood.   I was so impressed at how big they grew.  So, yeah, if you are growing willow or sally, I would go with cuttings from some of the bigger trees on your property.   Some old willows are massive trees, some of my cuttings came from near a massive one. They must have had its genes.

I do have a solution to the "greenwater problem"  But I never implemented it for my friend.   The solution is to make a "cage" with cheesecloth or very fine net in the pond. For her, the cage needs to be quite large because the pond is big.   In the cage, you can put some duckweed on the surface and  you put some water fleas, daphnia in too,   These swim in the water and "eat" the green water.   Their eggs hatch into tiny larvae, that also swim in the water,  and these little things also eat the green.  But they are so tiny that they pass through the mesh and eat the greenwater outside the mesh.  After a while they molt, and  get big enough for the fish to see and  eat.  So you end up with far clearer water, and you are making fishfood all through the pond!  Plus, duckweed grows quickly and you can toss it out as it fills the cage.  The goldfish love duckweed.   You could also grow azolla to absorb the phosphates.  (My fish don't like azolla).   You can use the azolla as mulch or "maybe" in hanging baskets.   I have done this idea with 2 ponds. A little one with waterfleas in it that  goes through a pipe and then drops into the big pond.   It works great.  The fish congregate at where the pipe water comes into the lower pond and eat the waterflea as they drop down. (actually they eat some pond weed that drops down too.   The water gets pumped around and  back into the little pond.  If the fish lay eggs, that can be a problem cos a fry can go through the pump,  get into the upper pond, grow up and eat every single adult waterflea.  This actually happened one spring.  Everything went green, and I emptyed the top pond and found a little fat fish in the muck at the bottom.  (I also had little isopods in mine, and that one fish had eliminated them too).   So, yeah, sometimes a pond needs a separate walled off "ecosystem" in it to provide food (and balance) to the fish eco-system.    What does anyone thing about growing watercress in a fish pond?          

Kevin Feinstein II wrote:

Brian White wrote:

Kevin Feinstein II wrote:Nearly every time I see an aquaponics set-up in a video, in person, or of my own design, I always come to the stark realization when I look at it from a food growing gardener's perspective. I always think I could WAAAY outgrow that in a raised or in-ground garden bed, or even containers of soil on my driveway.

I like aquaponics for the fish and the life-force that living water systems provide.

My friend has a goldfish pond.  It has 3 or 4 tons of water in it.  Its only 18 inches deep to keep within the bylaw regulations.  It goes green in Summer.  She often uses the goldfish water to water her greenhouse..   So is it  almost half way to aquaponics? If her plants had leaves that the fish ate, it might be about 80% there?  I have read so many horror stories about all the fishes dying, suddenly because the ph went whack a doodle that I'd be wary to attempt aquaponics. So her 80% setup, is about as far as I would go.

It is likely that the pond goes green from what in the aquarium world is known as "greenwater." Which is a single celled algae essentially and is the foundation of life in a way, LOL. This can be used to feed plankton like daphnia or moina and a host of other creatures that are great for small fish (and fry.) These creatures will clean up the greenwater and transform it. I actively cultivate greenwater currently.

Also, I think the more complicated the setup, the more things that can go wrong. Aquaponics is dominated by gear oriented people, but in my experience this gear doesn't lead to more sustainable, stable, or ecological food production. It can be fun if you are into gear. It's interesting that the aquaponics world tends to make things more complicated than even the aquarium world.  

Just on a random note.  Has anyone tried to grow lampreys?  They are a cold zone fish and many species don't parasitize other fish as adults!  The key thing about lamprey is that the young lamprey lives like a worm in the mud and filter feeds.  So they keep the water clean!   The other thing about lamprey is that they are royal food.  The kings and queens of England have lamprey pie on coronation day.  So,  if people were a tiny bit open minded about aquaculture, they could have lamprey in the mix (in the cold zones).   There might even be a thing where the eggs are harvested in the wild, the lamprey are hatched and sold to pond owners as "cleaning agents"  and when they metamorphose, the pond owners harvest them to eat. I grew up with brook lamprey in the river.  (These don't eat fish, and are about 6 inches long.  They are quite beautiful as adults). There are other species that are much bigger,  just choose one that isn't a parasite.   If we were doing anything in the river that created muck or stomped in the silt, sometimes the worm version would come swimming out and burrow into the sand further into the river.  So, yeah,  a cold water fish, a very important part of the ecosystem, that is just begging to be included in a permaculture pond, aquaculture, or garden water feature or river system  

Kevin Feinstein II wrote:Nearly every time I see an aquaponics set-up in a video, in person, or of my own design, I always come to the stark realization when I look at it from a food growing gardener's perspective. I always think I could WAAAY outgrow that in a raised or in-ground garden bed, or even containers of soil on my driveway.

I like aquaponics for the fish and the life-force that living water systems provide.

My friend has a goldfish pond.  It has 3 or 4 tons of water in it.  Its only 18 inches deep to keep within the bylaw regulations.  It goes green in Summer.  She often uses the goldfish water to water her greenhouse..   So is it  almost half way to aquaponics? If her plants had leaves that the fish ate, it might be about 80% there?  I have read so many horror stories about all the fishes dying, suddenly because the ph went whack a doodle that I'd be wary to attempt aquaponics. So her 80% setup, is about as far as I would go.

You can totally produce a lot of lightly compressed air from hydropower with a small trompe! Your "head" has to be half a meter or more,  and the trompe air collection need only be 1 meter below the water surface. The old ones are huge and might go 100 meters down into the ground with massive flows of water but in actual fact, you can do something very small.  Something like 5 liters per second will work fine with a 4 inch diameter down pipe.  I ran "nutrient film technique" for about 2 years  That worked well with low pressure air powering the air lift pump.  I didn't like buying chemicals so I stopped doing it.   There are "organic" chemicals too, so it can be done.   So, I have some diagrams of the actual thing I built. Remember that you will get way more air if you only go 1 meter deep or 1.5 meters deep.  And if you only need air to run an airlift pump for nutrient film technique, or for  bubbling in water that is 2.5 or 3 ft deep, that is just fine.   Video is from about 8 years ago when I did NFT over the summer in my greenhouse just to see if it could work.  I think I ran it from a marina 100 or 200 aquarium bubble pump,  but if you had a river or little steam, and pipe the lightly compressed air up to your greenhouse,  you could run 3 or 4 or 5 rows with no problems.    

Years ago, a guy from Norway, Magnar, living somewhere in Africa had a ning solar cookers group.  It was pretty good because he had a bunch of different ideas about how to make a parabolic dish.  Everyone makes a parabolic dish with "petals" but he showed how to make one from cones!  The cone method is cool.  You simply do the right length cuts and tape them together and you have your dish.  The idea with solar cooking is to make a parabolic dish with a small focal area, but not too small because it might burn your food. What I do is measure my cooking pot, and use a "beam of light" diameter that is a bit smaller than the size of the pot.  I actually forget the beam size I used this year! I'd have to check my drawings.  I think it was 6 or 8 inches.  Anyways, then you get your drawing board and start building your dish.  After that,  extend the lines of the mirrors to get the length of strip needed for each cone.    And after that I scale it up and cut the lengths out from an 8 ft by 4 ft piece of plastic.   Use tape to stick the pieces together, and then go to the drawing and scale up  ribs to hold the shape of the dish.   Stick reflective material to your dish and  put it in its frame and it is ready to track the sun. shows how to design your parabola.  The green at the end of the blue line represents the strip for the first mirror and the green at the end of the red line represents the strip for the 3rd mirror.  So it ended up that my partial dish was designed on a drawing board. It worked out nice, and it has just over 600 Watts heating power in Summer.

Inge Leonora-den Ouden wrote:

Jason Learned wrote:

Inge Leonora-den Ouden wrote:

Kaarina Kreus wrote:In the North: carrot, parsnip, black root, oatroot

Carrots and parsnips are not perennial, but bi-annual (first year they make the root, second year flowers and seeds).

What do you mean by 'black root'? Can you give the botanical (Latin) name?

I grow this as well, and its cousins, purple and meadow salsify. The latin name for Black Salsify is:  Pseudopodospermum hispanicum.
I've had some come back for 5 years and bloom every year. So it seems pretty perennial as far as eating the leaves go, but if you pick the root you'll have to plant some seeds. I'm not sure if you just leave a piece of root if it will work. If you try it let me know.

Hi Jason. I agree with you. Although officially the (black) Salsify is bi-annual, it comes back from the (forgotten) roots and acts as if it's a perennial. I have them in my allotment garden too. They are called 'schorseneren' in Dutch (like Scorzonera).

 Ok,  Scorzonera is perennial,  not biennial. I had some for a decade in one spot.  The german name for it means "Black Root" and it isn't a salsify at all, its scorzonera.   I saw the pictures, of "black salsify" and it is scorzonera! To cook it, you parboil it, and then rub or grate off the black outer part of  the root skin.  You have to parboil, because the white "milk" or scorzonera juice is like glue and it will turn your fingers yellow for a couple of days.  Boiling for a minute clots it and you avoid the mess. What I did to replant is sometimes grow from seeds but mostly, replant the top with 1 to 2 inches of root attached (if your top has several buds on it, you can even divide it like you would with rhubarb,  I usually divide in 2 when this is the case.  The roots by the way go down a foot and a half or so into the ground,  it is a real pain to dig them out of clay soil.  Scorzonera are loved in parts of Germany and Holland.  You buy them in glass jars.    

I made a solar oven to go at the focus of the solar reflector.  I haven't used it to cook food.  Instead, I left the door a bit ajar and dehydrated apples and herbs. As a dehydrator, it needs some work.  I have  metal fan blades and I just need a long shaft 12 volt motor and I can have that running to distribute the hot air better.  It was pretty amazing how quickly it dehydrated herbs, (faster and simpler than my kitchen dehydrator,  and of course far cheaper)  but I worry that the sun through the window did the dehydrating, and it would be better to just do it by hot air contact. I need a black surface to block the light inside the solar oven,  to absorb the light and transfer the heat to the air , but I don't want to paint stuff black because I don't think paint fumes are any good for food in an enclosed space.  I dehydrated nearly all my apples in it, but now we are in our rainy season and I will have to choose my moments, depending on the weather forecast and they will be few and far between. There are 2 very nice feature to my solar device.  1. Tracking.  The reflector is always pointed at where the sun is, from dawn to dusk.  and 2.    The solar oven is stationary because the focal area is stationary.  This permanence is something you can build on.  I have been looking at research papers about parabolic solar cookers and parabolics to drive steam engines and to drive sterling engines on academia.edu,  and they are all stuck in the full parabolic dish mindset.  But if you have a full dish,  you can't have a stationary focus!   And that means that they show stuff like sterling engines at the focus. Moving as the dish tracks the sun! This is ridiculous! Commercial sterling engines share a feature.  They are heavy.   Last year I made a tracking full dish.  My partial dish from this year has another feature that is very valuable, it has not blown around in the wind.   A parabolic dish is like an umbrella,  it seems to catch the wind.  Last years model blew off its hinges maybe 5 times.  This years has not yet blown off so it seems a lot more stable.  Having made my proof of concept, I hope people quickly see it's merits and start making their own versions.  

I have some tobacco for insecticide. It's the small rustica species. But I really don't know what I am doing.    Thanks for the info about boiling to kill the virus and I am interested in the stuff about soaking the stems too.  I was going to dehydrate it in my solar dehydrator because the thoughts of it hanging for 2 to 8 weeks in my house of non smokers,  just to make a pesticide does not appeal to me.   I hope to use it on spider mites.  I think spider mites are up there with tardigrades and cockroaches as the indestructible pests.  Has anyone experience with how concentrated you make it from dried leaves?  I tried to dry leaves slowly in the house a few years back, and some of them went moldy, so that was a fail for sure.  Anyone know the standard "withdrawal period" for tobacco?