Brian White

The situation is bleak,  forget oil,  because nitrates are the biggest  problem,  I believe Canada and USA can be OK because there is lots of oil and gas here, and they make nitrates and urea from natural gas and it isn't that difficult.  But we all import a hell of a lot of food that we could grow ourselves. This food supply will stop.   By the fall, there could easily be mass starvation across South America,  Europe,  Africa and Asia, because of the Nitrate problem.   Think about it,  natural nitrate is produced across the land and oceans by mostly blue green algae, beans, peas, legumes in general, alders, azolla, and  lightning   and that is it!    Scientists have measured natural nitrate production across the globe and manufactured nitrates from humans and it is neck and neck, with the humans producing slightly more.   So 50 50,  and the human produced stuff all goes on agricultural land, meaning that it has an enormous impact on yields and we cannot simply replace it with natural nitrate because it can never be produced in such a huge  quantity.  So what to do?  I  actually have a bit of a plan for this.   I have a Tracking solar reflector (about 600 watts) that runs when the sun is in the sky.  I steam sterilize soil layered with chopped up weeds in a 14 liter pot.  (chopped by running the lawn mower over them).  Roughly 2.5 hours for 10 liters of soil.   That skips the composting step, the composting is done in the soil.  Chopped weeds rot quicker than unchopped weeds,  and you what rots quicker than chopped weeds?   Cooked chopped weeds!  So there will be a period when the soil bacteria and fungi come back and go into overdrive, and plants might struggle a bit, but once that is past, it should be good times for the plants.  I'm going to try to automate the soil steaming, so there will be a hopper, that I fill with soil in the morning, and an auger that will be switched on and off by a thermostat, to bring soil through the hot zone as soon as it is fully steamed,  kind of like pasteurization.  So, end product lots of steamed soil (hopefully). If you are worried about the soil biome, there is a solution,  just use the steamed soil as a 4 inch layer as a heavy mulch.  The bacteria and fungi will come up from below.   I also use it to run a solar dehydrator.  BUT, it needs a fan, to stop stuff from burning.  Even so, I dehydrated a lot of stuff last year and solar dehydration beats the freezer on running costs big time.      Another thing is Azolla.   I was reading up research findings over the last couple of days,   Azolla fixes nitrogen roughly twice as fast as beans!   You cannot beat that.  But azolla has something in it that makes animals  and chickens not thrive so well.   Drying or cooking the azolla seems to reduce this anti-thriving factor but doesn't seem to eliminate it.   Pretty amazing to me that they have not exactly figured out what the problem is in all these years!  My goldfish love duckweed, they mildly dislike azolla. Azolla grows in shallow water and it  can double its biomass in 4 to 10 days,  so I plan  to grow it with wood ash as fertilizer,  have it pull nitrogen from the air,  layer it with the soil and steam it in the solar cooker, as a complete organic fertilizer.    If I have too much azolla,  I will steam it separately and  both try to feed it to my fish and use it as steamed mulch.    I'm also pushing an idea called the "well trompe",  Trompes in "wells" at low head hydro sites along rivers,  to collect and remove sediment, to strongly oxygenate the water, and provide areas where river shellfish and baby fish can shelter.  The trompe produces low pressure air,  which is not useful for electricity, so I am talking to the Lego air engine guys, to try to get them to make tesla turbines,  and di Pietro engines that will run on 3.5 psi air.  And then we CAN use the well trompes to produce electricity!   (Currently governments are getting rid of river hydroelectricity to allow fish to migrate.   This includes small hydropower because the turbine blades slice up fish and that isn't great when they migrate).   But a trompe doesn't have a turbine!  And hopefully that makes a difference to officialdom.  Here is one of the best Azolla videos that I found yesterday.  Lets all try growing and processing azolla!  They grow  a lot of azolla on a shallow lake and they pellet it for chickens!      

I'd like to grow a pomato or a totato,   A potato where you can eat the berries like tomatoes or a tomato with stem tubers.  Back in Ireland tomatoes struggle outdoors while some years the potatoes have enough potato berries to stink up the ground at harvest time!  Apparently the potato is the result of a cross between tomato and one of its relatives millions of years ago.  The stem tuber was a huge advantage as it climbed the Andes  mountains.  So if this cross happened once in the wild,  it might be possible again.  By the way, my Neighbour in Ireland, Harry Kehoe,  was a potato breeder.   In Ireland his most successful potato is the Rooster variety.   We used to grow "scarlet pimpernel" (a Dutch variety, and golden wonder, and 3867-7 (an early trial variety that got scrapped because it produced potatoes too close to the surface and so would never be commercial ).  3867-7 was awesome! It was extremely early, and you could just find the potatoes with your finger, and pluck them there and then while letting the plant continue to produce. I was working for Harry the day he scrapped the trial and he gave me a bag of them.   I kept them going for 4 or 5 years.  Can't remember how we lost the variety, but it was definitely a shame.  Harry had other successes too.  His greatest was Cara.   This is a dry climate variety.   It had good in dry east England and great in Cyprus, and the horn of Africa.  Harry got awards in Kenya or Ethiopian or both because Cara saved lives.   I grew it 2 years in Ireland,  a dry year and a wet year.  It did not taste good in a wet year, but in a dry year, it yielded more than double of the other varieties and they were big and tasted great. Cara would be perfect as one of the varieties you grow,  anywhere the summers are very dry, like on southern Vancouver island.  

It looks like it could make a great solar cooker or hot solar drier.   Direct the light in through the screen from the bottom and insulate the sides.    What is the screen made of?  Just fine wire mesh?   Thanks,   Brian

In the last couple of years, people have speculated that, at the Alhambra in Granada in Spain,  they were using a trompe to power an airlift pump to pump water to the soldiers in a castle keep 6 meters higher. 600 YEARS AGO!  The pump had no moving parts!   This month a guy went further and suggested in video that it was a pulser pump, and he made a model and it is at 1.5 million views and rising after 2 weeks!      
I introduced the pulser pump to the modern world in the 1990's.  It's a low pressure trompe that powers a low pressure airlift pump with pipes optimized for slug and plug flow. The key is that it is optimized for these types of flows, because these are the most energy efficient way to move water with air.   Other airlift pumps work because bubbly water is less dense than water without bubbles, and therefore a column of bubbly water is higher.   I put the pulser pump on the internet in the 2000's.  It went on youtube and other video services in 2006.  But even with video evidence that it worked, people still called me a liar.  Here is one of my pulser pump videos.  

And here is the guys video, with a pulser pump model,  that got 1.5 million views so far.  


My problem is that even though he didn't credit me, he took a screenshot from one of my videos, and he made a bad model of a pulser pump.  If he had looked properly at my videos he would have made a much better model.  Also, it is as if my useful info was censored, it never made it to the 1.5 million new people.   Youtube demonetized me nearly a decade ago, so my videos will never get viewers again.  If you read comments on his video, nobody has learned anything from my real pulser pumps from as far back as 1990.   None of my real info got past the BS of people trying to guess how it works and how "inefficient"  it is.   The other video about the Alhambra pump was even worse,  it had an animation to show how the guy thought a trompe worked and how he thought an airlift pump worked.   The animation has very little in common with reality.   My pulser pump had 4 inch pipes, had power water that had a head of 0.5 meters  and was 250 to 350 liters per minute, went 2.5 meters deep and pumped water to 3.5 or 4 meters to the cattle and to 5.5 meters to the sheep.   The thing is, it could pump much higher,  at least to 8 meters high.   I also had a pulser pump with 6 inch pipes (to test if that would be better)  but it only ran when the stream was in flood, so I never got to test it properly.  So, anyone out there in the Permies world who is monetized and who wants to prove that an Alhambra pulser pump worked?  Here is what you need to do.  Make a pulser pump with 6 inch pipes in a swimming pool or something like that.  it needs to go 2.5 meters below the surface, and its airlift pipes need to go 6 meters above the surface of the pool water.  Airlift pipes would be probably 1 inch pipe.    I am putting in an image for guidance.  You don't have to be exactly like the image,  but close to how it is, is best.  

I found a very interesting wikipedia entry about soil steam sterilizing.  In my case, I got 20% faster growth in a month.  Does that mean that we could use 20% less land to grow crops is we just steamed the soil?   And if we used the same equipment to do both the soil steaming AND make bioChar,  it could be a really great new thing!    Soil steaming on a big scale

Margaux Knox wrote:Reading through some stuff about the Garden Master Course, and Helen's holistic approach to "weeds" has me thinking...

I'm sure some weeds are more or less helpful or harmful depending on location and what they're growing near, among other factors.


I also was excited to see a few evening primrose plants pop up, and am thinking I'm going to grow them as a food crop next year. Beautiful, and never seemed to bother any other plants, so I kept them. Pretty much anything I notice the bees love, I try to keep.

How do you eat evening primrose?

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