Matthew Nistico

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.

Saana Jalimauchi wrote:Paul makes a good point in the video about the best option being having both of them, the heat pump and a Rocket Mass Heater.  Our mini split gets rarely used. In fact, we have not used it for the whole winter. At the moment the outer unit is basicly frozen and snowed in so even if we wanted to use it we would not be able to.. Oh well, we cannot leave the house empty anyways, we have a cat, so there's always someone around heating with wood. The electric radiators would end up costing a lot as the only source of heat.

I am actually surprised by your logic.  When I first designed my home, I had planned to install a mini split system plus a woodstove as a backup.  I later dropped the mini split entirely as redundant, for huge cost savings.  Perhaps if I were in a more seriously cold climate I might reconsider.  But the thing is, a wood stove is something one burns "when the mood strikes you," to paraphrase Paul in the video.  Not so with an RMH, which is most practical to run continuously during at least the coldest stretches of the heating season.

Understand that when I say "run continuously," I don't mean that you would burn a fire 24/7, but rather that you would burn a fire before the mass completely cools from the last fire.  However, while I once helped to build one, I've never actually lived with an RMH.  Is my presumption correct?

Saana Jalimauchi wrote:PS. Does anyone know where the word "mini split" comes from??

My understanding is this...  A regular air source heat pump has an outside compressor/fan unit that produces hot or cold refrigerant. That refrigerant is pumped inside to a central heat exchanger/air handler.  This inside unit distributes the heated or cooled air throughout the house via ducts.  Whereas, in a mini split heat pump, the function of the central heat exchanger/air handler is split throughout the house by pumping refrigerant to multiple miniature heat exchangers/air handlers, one for each room.

Cujo Liva wrote:Check into tromboncino squash.  It isn't for everyone, but I've stopped growing all other squashes.

Pluses:
-Resistant to vine borers.
-Very disease resistant.
-Can be eaten as a summer squash when young or allowed to fully mature, grow a thicker skin and used as a winter squash (including being excellent for storage).

Potential minuses:
-It grows as a large vine (up to 40' long).  I have a smaller garden, so I actually grow mine up a fruit tree in my mini-orchard.  It expands through the canopy and I end up getting two harvests each year from the trees- first fruit and later squash.

Absolutely, this is my solution as well.  I have similarly stopped growing anything but tromboncino (also called rampicante), though someday I also wish to experiment with Seminole pumpkin.  I have considered the whole growing-squash-up-a-tree concept.  Glad to hear that somebody has actually done this with some success.

I have seen these squash take over an entire garden before.  They are indeed that voracious.  Consider "centercut squash," a supposedly-improved variety of tromboncino sold by Row 7 Seed Co., probably among other seed outlets - https://www.row7seeds.com/products/centercut-squash-seeds

In addition to improved taste and texture, it is marketed as a slightly more compact plant than classic tromboncino, though still large.

Yes, I have absolutely observed pill bugs taking bites out of my plants, young and old.  Generally, though, I've not observed them to be so bad that I lose an entire plant, as some in this thread have bemoaned.  Maybe I am just lucky.  One year, however, I experimented with letting my tomato plants sprawl on the ground as opposed to staking them up.  The tomato plants were perfectly happy.  They thrived and grew wide just like sprawling squash vines do, and they put on tons of fruit.  And pill bugs ate 90% of the tomatoes before I could get to them.  Never again.

So, I absolutely believe that pill bugs can predate on your veggies.  But when following typical gardening practices, I've not found them to be an excessive pest.  Besides, in a permaculture setting - rich soils, lots of mulch - there are just sooo many pill bugs that I can't imagine trying to fight them with any hope of success.  Just learn to live with them, somehow.  Of course, I say that because, at the moment, they aren't eating me out of a harvest.  I am totally willing to believe that at different times in different places they could become in intolerable problem.

I hadn't realized until your recent pics of the roof covered in soil, but it doesn't look like you are berming up against any of the side walls.  Or is that simply yet to come?

Are you just building a home with a green roof, or an underground home?