Thekla McDaniels

I know you don’t want a fan or such, but there have been several mentions of them.  I want to say beware, many cheap kitchen goods, vents etc do not exhaust the fumes outside!  (Crazy! right)

Also, I am pretty sure carbon monoxide is slightly lighter than air, so if it collects, it’s on the floor or in the basement.

I’m watching for the astonishingly simple solution here.  Been experimenting for years

You may have some luck with specialty bottle. com, or fillmore as suggested above.  There might be other companies to be found.  People who supply manufacturers.  You can buy lids separate from jars.  Hopefully the minimum purchase isn’t a pallet load of lids!

I have had good luck getting lids to fit various glass bottles and jars.

There are lots of sizes, and different kinds of threads.  Your jar looks like threaded, not lug closure.

Get your exact measurements ready millimeter s and inches, outside diameter of the jar top, and then try to talk to a real person, who will often send you a free sample, to be sure you have the right size.

Good luck!  Last time I needed to do this was about 10 years ago.  We all know how much has changed!

Fabulous harvest, Louise!  Are you drying them?

The easiest way I found to spread winecaps to friends and neighbors was just to give about a gallons worth of mycelium rich chips for them to put in their garden with lots of new chips for the mycelium to spread into.

In my case, I often had to encourage them to be patient. And place the mycelium impregnated chips in an area that was going to be easy to keep moist.  Alkaline and desert conditions are a challenge at the start.

Lid, interesting question, appropriate protection from the New Mexico sun.  I’ve spent years living on the Colorado plateau, and it can certainly be brutal.

I’m going to think what I would do!

I think soaking the wood would be a good idea. Living in an arid climate, I think it would take a long time to hydrate the dry wood if I didn’t soak it first. And if there was no other way to inoculate the soil, I would soak the wood in actively aerated compost tea to start a soil community in the container, or bury the wood in active compost, and leave it a couple weeks.

One year when I had a lot of starts that I wanted to put into gallon pots before I sold them, I made potting mix of my own. I included sticks and sunflower, stems, and so forth. My plants in those pots were extremely healthy and had very good color. One of the other things I did was include material to provide fungal inoculation. Just ground up pieces of rotten wood so that the fungal organism would have something to grow on. Another thing I did was add active compost to my potting mix. The rest of the potting mix was garden soil- pretty poor, alkaline, just typical yard dirt in that region.  Potting mix that I dumped out of old pots possibly, some wood chips. As I said, the plants in this mix were extremely robust. At the farmers market people wanted my plants as opposed to those plants grown in the commercial potting soil. But the other thing that gave my plants an advantage is mine were the only ones that were moved onto gallons. The other plants were , also for sale at the farmers market, were those poor spindly things in 2 inch pots and a foot of stem because they didn’t have enough bright light. So I can’t really say that it was my potting mix. Certainly the unconventional potting mix did not kill the plants.

Kate Downham wrote:The linen skirt that I made with an elastic waist got holes quite quickly where the elastic was, but a linen wrap skirt I have is still looking great after two years. The wrap skirt is made from a heavier weight linen, but I suspect that the elastic on the other skirt may have irritated the linen fibres somehow, which could also explain it.

Does mixing up different fibres this way cause the natural one to wear out more quickly?

Hi Kate,

I don’t know exactly, but I am imagining a piece of elastic running down a tube of fabric causing gathering.  A contributing factor on the elastic linen situation might have been that the elastic - once in place - concentrated the abrasion on specific spots…. once’s gathered, the little folds in the cloth that makes the gathers don’t seem to shift and reorganize.  Secondly, the elastic compresses the linen cloth against the body, increasing abrasion…

A wrap skirt is more likely to not put stress on the fibers, not compress some areas more than others against moving parts, and more easily slide over the body with movement.

Some of my guidelines on durable clothing:  tight is going to wear out faster, and to me, is less comfortable.

In knit sweaters larger loops are going to be more vulnerable to snagging.

I wear a lot of cotton, but wool is a much stronger fiber.  I think woven wool is stronger than knit wool.

Layers are good,

Thanks for starting the discussion

That’s a good one!

I suppose the originator thought free gravel for life would be on a par with the usefulness of the other choices!

You’re way ahead of me, Carla!

I’m waiting to see what Kate comes up with!  Insights for all of us!

Good for you John!  And thanks for giving us all a heads up!