Matthew Nistico

Lynne Cim wrote:Wait, people actually eat their scoby?  

My scoby is an absolute monster, looks very healthy and the larger it is, the less time it takes for my kombucha to ferment so I have not changed it out - is this bad?

Sure I eat my scobys.  Super nutritious.  I don't just chow down on them out of hand - though the scopy jerky concept mentioned above sounds intriguing - but I do keep excess scobys in the fridge and throw one into a fruit smoothie.

And there is nothing bad about not changing out your scoby.  That is the beauty of kombucha: you can keep the same culture alive for many, many batches.  But of course they do multiply.  Sometimes you can easily see a new scoby distinct from your original, and then remove one or the other for the next batch.  Other times the original scoby just adds layers until it is thick as a hockey puck.  In that case, I just cut it into smaller chunks to start the next batch.  Either way, you end up with a constant supply of excess scoby to give away, expand the volume of your combucha enterprise, or squirrel away for some other usage.

Lots of good suggestions here.  There is no definitive list for me; there are so many types of stews I like to make.  One thing is that I often try to replace white potatoes with something more interesting.  I might choose some combination of...

- Sweet potatoes
- Parsnips
- Rutabaga (I find they are milder and nicer in stews than turnips)
- Pumpkin chunks
- Mushrooms (when I have bunches coming out of my logs)

The quality of the stew broth is important.  For one, I usually start with a homemade bone broth instead of water, but I also choose good traditional stewing cuts of meat, something with bones and lots of connective tissue, which adds a silky smooth quality to the broth when it breaks down after long slow cooking.  Some more things that add to the broth...

- Throw in a boil bag with some bay leaves and lots of fresh rosemary and/or sage and/or oregano and/or parsley and/or whatever else might be in the garden.  Except mint.  Add also the carrot tops, celery tops, potato peelings, onion skins, mushroom stems, etc.
- I use homemade bone broth to boil pasta and beans and such.  I keep the leftover broth in the freezer for re-use in soups and stews where the starch is welcome as a thickener.
- Add just a touch of molasses or other natural sweetener.
- Replace some of the salt with something more flavorful like Worcestershire and/or Marmite.

Keralee Roberts wrote:Otherwise, one could take the view that the problem is the solution and eat the critters...  which are more nutritious than plants anyhow.  I suspect this is how the Native peoples managed the forest systems...plant or otherwise just encourage the stuff that feeds animals and people both, and you get to harvest a lot of animals.  Everyone wins.

An excellent and very accurate anthropological point.  Native peoples, at least here in the Americas, manipulated their environment extensively for the mutual benefit of themselves and many other species.  It is a myth that they lived without impacting the land.  It is just that European colonizers failed to recognize, or at least failed to appreciate, native styles of land management.  European farmers were focused on crop management.  But instead of managing crops, the natives managed ecosystems.  (At least for the most part; I am sure I must be forgiven for generalizing whole continents worth of cultures and practices into one model.)  

A principle land management tool they used was fire.  Burning back closed-canopy forests, they created more open savannah lands, or else they created intermixed patches of forest and cleared land.  By doing this, they made room for their own annual plantings.  But also, the forest regrowth brought in the animals they hunted.  Permies will recognize here the intentional harnessing of ecological succession stages.

When I think about it, this was also a benefit of the old European practice of coppice woodland management.  By intermixing patches of forest in various stages of growth and re-growth, coppice woodsmen maintained more productive woodlands compared to virgin old-growth forests.  The goal was to make the woodlands more economically productive, but in the process they were also made more ecologically productive, which fact I'm sure many a woodsman recognized through experience.  Strange that the Europeans did not see the parallel in the native systems they encountered here.

I find it curious that most people's "lessons learned" seem to involve rampaging mammals.  Deer, bears (?!), rabbits, gophers, mice, squirrels, etc.  That has not been my problem at all.  But then mine is a suburban homestead.  With a few exceptions, those types of animal pests have been a non-factor in establishing my food forest, so I can't comment much there.

I do have one tree (out of dozens!) that the squirrels hit hard and deprive me of fruit: they eat all of the flower buds on one European pear tree, but don't seem to touch anything else.  And just this year I am establishing a deer fence around my annual veggies and a few tree starts.  But this has only been a problem since recent nearby development flushed deer out and one has taken up permanent residence on my property.  Prior, they would only occasionally pass through.  Even my new resident deer (and her fawn, so cute!) only hit a very few of my plantings.  But what they do hit, they annihilate.

Here is what I have learnt:

Don't believe the happy horseshit some permies will sell you about living the easy life through permaculture.  ANY type of gardening or forestry is a lot of work!  A well established and well designed permaculture system should be less work, but it is still work.  Be prepared to put in the hours.

Don't believe the descriptions nurseries use to sell you plants and trees.  These are invariably optimistic about of what conditions plants will tolerate.  If it says "this plant grows in Zones 3-9," you should read "Zones 4-8."  It may survive in those most extreme ends of the zone range, but it won't thrive and it may well not fruit.  And if it says "this plant prefers shade or partial shade," you should read "may tolerate some shade, but will be happier in sun."  Excepting ferns, perhaps, all plants want sun!  Tolerating shade isn't the same thing as thriving in shade, and it is certainly not the same thing as fruiting prolifically in shade.

This part about shade is particularly relevant to us permies, who like to plant densely and to interplant things with trees and bushes.  Which segues into...

Don't believe the permaculture books and be tempted to plant too densely.  Remember, many of those books were written in the tropics.  If you live in the temperate latitudes of the world, including most of North America, there are simply not as many photons per cubic foot of vertical growing space here as in the tropics.  We aren't going to achieve a seven-layer food forest, so be satisfied with three or maybe four layers spread out over a larger area.

On a similar note, remember that many "bushes" will grow 15 feet tall, or more, if left to their own devices.  Trying to fit these into an idealized permaculture layer system is difficult.  They will need to be spaced out, as they won't realistically serve as "understory" to anything but full-sized trees, which many of our fruit tree cultivars are not.

Remember to afford plenty of time for your system to establish.  Be patient.  In my forest, many of the trees have taken much longer to grow and/or become productive than I had suspected based on nursery descriptions and the stories of other permies.  I believe this is because they had a hard start in life.  I have observed on my own and other properties that trees getting a hard start in life can sulk for years and years before fully recovering.

In my case, my beginning soil was very poor and the site very exposed.  Things have greatly improved, but in those early years I should have brought in even more soil supplementation/amendments/mulch than I did, and watered a whole lot more than I did.  Among the benefits of a mature food forest is that it makes a lot of its own mulch and requires little if any watering.  Most years I don't water anything but new transplants.  But this takes a long time to realize; don't think you can get away with such laissez-faire tactics from the start.

Or, another variation on the "be patient" theme... Geoff Lawton's Establishing a Food Forest the Permaculture Way (excellent 2008 video) recommends the first generation of plantings should be 90% (if I remember) support species: plants, trees, and bushes that make mulch, fix nitrogen, and grow fast to stabilize bare soil.  These are pioneer species, so they will better tolerate the poor conditions you may well be starting out with.  These are gradually chopped back and thinned out, and THEN you plant most of your productive species, which will themselves eventually comprise 90% of the mix.

I did not do this.  When I started out, I hadn't even heard the word "permaculture."  So I ended up doing a lot of things backwards: planting productive species and then later planting support species; putting trees in the ground and then later fitting them into a cohesive design, or rather fitting a cohesive design around the existing trees and features.  I don't recommend doing it my way; do it Geoff Lawton's way ; )

Kirsten Mouradian wrote:Favorite vinegar is persimmon!
Neighbors tree is prolific. I pull the tops, off soft ripe fruit, put them in a cloth covered bucket, stir daily for 2 weeks then leave it to make itself for a few months in the garage, then strain and bottle it.

That sounds good!  I will have to try that, as I also have a convenient source for more persimmons than I can usually eat.

Do you add any water to the bucket?  Or perhaps a little raw ACV as starter?

Tereza Okava wrote:I use a lot of black vinegar! a tiny bit can be transformative in a sauce. think about how complex a good balsamic vinegar is, it's similar.

Good description.  I love black vinegar, though I usually use it only for Chinese recipes.  I also keep white rice wine vinegar around for certain Asian cooking.  The flavor is much lighter but also less complex than black vinegar.

I am a big fan of the right vinegar for the right purpose...

I use distilled white vinegar only for cleaning things.  These days I buy high-octane 45% vinegar for that purpose.  Sometimes I spray it on straight, other times I dilute it.  It actually isn't much more expensive if you do the math, it takes up less space, and one jug lasts forever.  It also makes good contact herbicide.  But beware: the fumes will REALLY clean out your sinuses!

I use ACV - either purchased raw ACV or home brewed - for most generic cooking purposes.

I use ACV, balsamic, sherry vinegar, red wine vinegar, or white wine vinegar for salad dressings, depending on the mood I'm in.  For most salads I make - and I make a lot of salads! - the dressing is merely salt, pepper, olive oil, and vinegar (and/or citrus juice).

I don't bother to make flavored, i.e. herb-infused, vinegars.  I like lots of fresh herbs added to my salads and cooking, so I figure it is easier to keep a few straight vinegar options and pick the herbs fresh as opposed to keeping a dozen different bottles on my shelf.

r ranson wrote:I would really like something I could pop in the thermos and sip throughout the day like a delicious and nutritious tea.

How interesting.  It never occurred to me to do that.  If that is your interest, a number of good recipes have been provided herein.

I don't use broth/stock for drinking.  I only use it for cooking, so I'm not bothered if my broth tastes "meh."  It is always the basis of another recipe: a soup, a stew, a sauce, etc.  I also use my broth to cook grains, beans, pastas, etc.  I used to use it as the "water" in bread recipes, but now I bake my bread with beer.

Like many here, I keep a freezer bag for chicken and pork and turkey bones salvaged from foods I cook.  I keep beef and lamb bones segregated for their own batch.  To that I add veggie scraps: onion and garlic skins, root vegetable tops and skins, herb stems, mushroom stems... just about everything except for okra tops (slime!), stems from cruciferous vegetables (too strong), and the guts out of peppers (too bitter).  I tend to accumulate veggie scraps faster than bones, so when the bag is full I usually add anywhere from a pair to a whole package of purchased chicken feet.

One gallon-size Ziplok bag filled to bursting is all that my pressure cooker can hold.  I transfer the contents into a cotton mesh bag first, add a little ACV, and water up to the "max fill" line.  I use the broth/soup cycle on "high," which takes 1 hour to come to full pressure plus 4 hours cook time.  At the end, I strain the broth, return the bones/scraps to the Instant Pot - hence the cotton mesh bag; makes handling the bones easier - refill with more water and ACV, and run the cycle again!  I can get two full cycles out of one gallon bag of bones/scraps.  It takes 10 hours altogether, after which the bones are nearly soft enough to crush by hand.  But it is nearly hands-free and there is no scum to skim.

One double-cycle 10-hour day produces 5 quart bottles for my freezer plus a little extra.  I do run the combined batches of broth through a fine cloth to filter out debris and grit.  The result is dark, rich, slightly fatty broth that usually lasts me a month or three of cooking.  Perhaps I'd not drink it as tea, but it serves my purposes.

paul wheaton wrote:Never go to bed with the dampers open even a little.  Never run a fire at night.  To be warm at night, run a very hot fire before bed, surrounded by mass, and when the fire is down, close the dampers completely.  The mass around the stove will be warmed by extra heat and will release heat into the room as you sleep.

For most people living in anything but a very small cabin, the woodstove is likely to be in your kitchen or living room, not in your bedroom.  So make at least one portion of your mass portable.  Fill a metal hand-bucket with pea gravel and set atop your woodstove.  At night when the fire is put out, move the bucket full of now-blazing-hot stones into the middle of your bedroom floor to radiate its heat where you will want it overnight.

If your floor is stone or tile or concrete, you're good to go as is.  If your floor is wood or linoleum or carpeted, you'd want something low and heatproof onto which you can place the bucket so as not to burn a ring into your floor.  And probably best to keep toddlers from wandering into your bedroom at night when heating it this way.  Perhaps pets as well, though they are probably smart enough not to burn themselves.

Christopher Weeks wrote:Matthew, have you moved forward on your implementation? What obstacles have you encountered and lessons learned?

I have sort of halfway moved forward with implementation.  I have not yet put my system into daily practice, but I have used it to fulfill my, ahem... needs during several long-weekend van camping adventures over the past year.  During that cumulative time period, I have pretty much filled my first bucket.

I wasn't able to find an economical source of wide-mouth 6-gallon buckets, so I'm using 5-gallon models with non-gasket lids, which I can get for about $5.  I'm using a mix of shredded leaves and shredded paper/cardboard as my "sawdust."  But due to time constraints, I did NOT add any air holes or pipe vents or anything else I'd been planning on doing to scale Paul's Willow Feeder system down to my 5-gallon size.  It was just a straight bucket with sawdust and a lid.  Also, to clarify: I am depositing ZERO urine into my system.

What I learnt is that, without any air holes added to ventilate the bucket, the contents did create a little bit of a fuzzy mold cake over time.  But I decided, so what?!  I don't see why that should be a problem.  The end result wasn't particularly smelly.  After my third camping trip, I explored the accumulated contents with a stick to verify that there was nothing liquid or putrid collecting at the bottom of the bucket.

So I don't see why I shouldn't just keep things simple along the same pattern.  After 24 months, my plan is to feed my aged bucket contents into a vermicompost bin.  Which should do fine, slightly moldy as they may be.  The finished worm castings will go into my garden.

There is only one thing I might change going forward.  I am planning an experimental kiln built from a 55-gallon metal drum in order to make charcoal on site.  This is intended to recycle woody debris that I once chipped up for mulch, but decided that just takes too much time/effort/money - we will see if I can more easily make charcoal from it instead.

I am hoping to add the charcoal bits I produce to my "sawdust" mix.  I figure that they might aid in odor reduction.  Besides, after 24 months in a humanure bucket plus however many months in a worm bin, they should become very well charged biochar.  That biochar will join the flow of worm castings into my gardens.

Stephen B. Thomas wrote:GAMCOD Plot size: 8ft x 25ft (200sq ft)
Acre Size: 43,560 sq ft
One Acre / GAMCOD Plot = 217.8

GAMCOD Calories expanded to cover a full acre = 20,570.5 * 217.8 = 4,480,254.9

...That seems like a lot, to me. Can someone help correct my calculations?

This has probably been discussed somewhere already - I didn't read 200 pages! - but when you extrapolated your square footage up to a full acre, did you account for pathways?  I would figure 30-inch-wide pathways on all sides of your hugels to accommodate a wheelbarrow.  Expanded out to an acre, that adds up to a significant non-productive footprint, which will reduce your total yield.

Theoretically, you could minimize the negative impact of pathways by doubling the length of each hugel, so to require fewer pathways, or by rearranging your hugels and pathways into an interlocking keyhole pattern.  Anything to maximize the productive footprint.  But then again, you might wish to preserve your 8-foot-wide, 25-foot-long hugel bed dimension so as to keep your calculations true to your experimental test bed.  Besides, that seems like a convenient size for real-world gardening.

You should really map out on graph paper how many hugel beds and pathways you can fit into one (square? rectangular?) acre of land.  One pathway serves the hugels on both sides of it.  Once you have it on paper, you can play with dimensions and orientations as you wish to fit the most hugel beds into your space cleanly.  Then you would arrive at a thoroughly realistic factor to multiply the square footage of your test bed to fill out an acre.