Roy Ramey wrote:

Dave de Basque wrote:Congrats on another great Kickstarter!! I'm glad for the moment I'm in with the earlybirds! I have my confirmation from Kickstarter and everything. I'm just hoping I don't have a problem later like last time... My EU credit card tends to reject things that don't go through the "3D Strong Customer Authentication" gateway, which normally opens when I hit "pay" on websites here, but on Kickstarter it failed to do so once again, and I'm worried I'll be getting a "payment failed" message soon.

Any Euro-permies here that are experienced tricking out Kickstarter to cooperate and open up the verification gateway? I'm on a Mac and use Safari and Firefox. Thanks if any tips.

BTW for stretch goals, I'm interested in footage of any courses at Wheaton Labs or elsewhere, especially of the Low-tech variety.

Could you just use PayPal instead?

Thanks for the suggestion Roy! I am not a fan of PayPal for reasons and don't have an account, but if push comes to shove and I get the dreaded message that the payment didn't go through, I will look into it, they at least used to make one-off payments possible with no account. I really appreciate your help!

Congrats on another great Kickstarter!! I'm glad for the moment I'm in with the earlybirds! I have my confirmation from Kickstarter and everything. I'm just hoping I don't have a problem later like last time... My EU credit card tends to reject things that don't go through the "3D Strong Customer Authentication" gateway, which normally opens when I hit "pay" on websites here, but on Kickstarter it failed to do so once again, and I'm worried I'll be getting a "payment failed" message soon.

Any Euro-permies here that are experienced tricking out Kickstarter to cooperate and open up the verification gateway? I'm on a Mac and use Safari and Firefox. Thanks if any tips.

BTW for stretch goals, I'm interested in footage of any courses at Wheaton Labs or elsewhere, especially of the Low-tech variety.

On the subject of soles, you might have a look at espadrilles or "alpargatas." This is traditional Catalonian Spring & Summer footwear made of esparto rope soles (now commonly Bangladeshi jute). They spread to the Basque Country in the 14th century and became the most common footwear there also. They are still sold and worn quite a bit as light summer footwear and have occasionally crept into high fashion circles:

Espadrille - The English Wikipedia article (with links to other interesting rustic shoes from around the world)

Since espadrilles are still being produced, worn and sold, you can even buy ready-made rope soles (website in Spanish):

Ready-made rope soles (Spain)

There are other versions with heels, and with vulcanized rubber frames, more or less, protecting the rope sole. Since vulcanized rubber can refer to the natural product or the synthetic one though, and I'm not sure whether that implies petroleum products, the link above is to the plain rope soles, though you can find everything if you poke around the site.

I wonder if you got a double rope sole and just made the lower one very easy to replace, if that might not be quite a nice permie piece of footwear, especially with the wool uppers and insoles and such you're talking about.

Oh, and breaking news, in poking around a little bit I found some artisan Basque espadrille makers still in production, websites in French as the traditional center of production of espadrilles was in the Basque town of Maule (Mauléon in French), on the French side of the Basque Country:

Prodiso, a site with a lot of variety/design possibilities (in French)

Armaité - another artisan maker - this page with rope soles and wool uppers! (French)

You can also find espadrilles on Etsy in English it seems...

John Venn wrote:Hey guys, very late to the party, but I have collected a whole range of cast iron cookware made by Le Creuset by checking second hand shops and second hand websites. They often go for a fraction of the price of a new one, which can be very substantial for Le Creuset.
You have to sift through some that are chipped or have some pitting in the bottom but these do not affect your health as the anti-stick coating is made of glass/ceramic so it is only an esthetic issue (I do prefer mine in good condition and with some patience and regularly checking the shops you can find them.)
Le Creuset also has an awesome custumor support. I bought a second hand skillet with a loose wooden handle that I tried to tighten at home and broke the screw running through the handle, securing the skillet to the handle. Got a new handle, for free (!), through customer support, even though it is a version they do not make anymore, as a Le Creuset pan comes with a life time garantee. Speaking about permaculture...

Hi John, great idea on second-hand Le Creuset. I have a couple of items myself. They're really pricey new and it's a great idea to look for them in second-hand shops/sites.

As far as I know, all Le Creuset pieces are coated cast iron. On the outside coated with painted stuff, on the inside with either black stuff or white stuff. I used to be really confident that the inside stuff was "good" stuff, inert like glass. I thought that basically enamel = ceramic = glass as far as toxic gick goes. But then someone warned me of a number of toxic elements that could potentially be in enamel, and since then I am not as confident in these surfaces. The Le Creuset inside surfaces are really, really long lasting, gotta give them credit for that, but I haven't seen where they actually say what it's composed of. I suppose that's what they call a "trade secret" these days, but call me over-curious, I actually want to know.

And color me skeptical, but I'm not much comforted by affirmations of "no PFOA" or freedom from whatever toxic compound they choose to name. I'm concerned about the toxic compounds it DOES contain but no one is mentioning because they don't have to because trade secrets yada yada. /rant

So I'm kinda confident about my Le Creuset cookware but not totally.

Just so people know, in recent years, I have found Le Creuset knockoffs in European Ikea stores (Lord, please don't let word get out to my permie friends that I occasionally go to Ikea!). "Made in France" say these knockoffs, so I imagine they are actually made in the Le Creuset factory but wholesaled out for other brands like Ikea to sell as their own. I've also seen (and bought) Pyrex cookware in Europe that I'd swear was made by Le Creuset, but it didn't have a "Made in France" imprint, so that one is a bit more sketchy. Same deal with the coatings though, I really want to know what's in them. Not what they don't have, what they do have. Pretty please Mr. Manufacturer.

Plain old uncoated cast iron, I have a skillet of those too, I also worry about a little bit. Most people, I think, have too much iron in their blood, and I think that if you're not pretty careful about what you actually cook in cast iron (no acidic stuff like tomato sauce for starters), you might be at risk of overdoing the iron in your blood, which is not good for your health. The solution to which I believe is donating blood regularly, that drops your iron levels. But anyway, lately I'm liking the alternative of uncoated stainless steel rather than cast iron.

I am not a doctor nor a lawyer nor a metallurgist, but as far as I know food-grade stainless is more inert and less porous than cast iron, so you don't have to be concerned about making acidic foods in it, and also, whatever unhealthy anything might be in the metal is much less likely to slag off into your food.

I've got a good number of uncoated steel pots and pans now. You can see an example of an uncoated stainless steel omelette pan if you scroll up to the first picture above this post, in a post by David Livingston. Hanging there in the middle of the bottom row is a steel omelette pan like French chefs think everyone in the world should have. I have one just like it. If you treat plain stainless steel pans like you would cast iron, they behave just the same. Season them, don't use soap, etc. Another advantage is you don't have to worry about rust, so I just air dry them, whereas I heat my cast iron skillet to dry it. They're perfectly non-stick if you treat them right and last forever, just like cast iron, and unlike the consumerist non-stick coated crap you see so much of.

I'm having problems paying Kickstarter! I'm in Europe. My bank says their default payment gateway doesn't support EU safe transactions... it just asks for your card details and that's it, no verification, etc. Does anyone know if there is some Kickstarter backdoor or some way for EU folks to give them money? Strange, I would have thought Kickstarter was big enough to handle this!

I know opinions differ on this, but I usually think of a swale as a tree-planting system, and it is dead level on contour. So what you're planning I would just call a ditch or a channel or a stream.

To avoid erosion completely (always a good idea), I would generally keep the fall of your channel to 2% max, and preferably closer to 1%. If it's heavily planted with water-loving plants with good root systems, you could maybe get away with a bit more, but only once those plants are established, so you'd have to devise a way to keep the flow gentle in the initial stages. Do you know what the maximum possible flow is out of that spring? Combined with a 100-year rain event for the area? (Like hurricane leftovers  blowing through after 3 weeks of solid rain, or some such thing.) That's what you want to plan for.

Meandering around the property gently like that it can do a lot of good. I'm sure there's a limit to how much digging you want to do though, so if you want to drop it down a few feet at a time, you might want to create some infrastructure. Maybe vetiver grass or something if you want to go all-natural.

Interesting about the cake soaks. My carrot cake recipe is pretty moist so I will probably use that in another recipe... thanks for the tip.

My burning questions though are:

1) how was the texture of your frosting?
2) how did you mix the frosting and how did that go?
3) If you kept it outside the fridge, how did it keep?

Thanks Jenn!

Hi Rachel, lovely to find another Donella Meadows fan here on Permies... actually, I would think perhaps there are quite a few.

It's funny within the context of the OP about reductionist vs. holistic thinking, to think about Thinking in Systems (both the book, and the subject in general). I'll come back to that at the end.

I share the concern over the often disastrous dominance of reductionist thinking in our decadent late-capitalist world, and certainly do agree that reductionist thinking can become dangerous when it chronically fails to finish its own analysis by seeking out its place again in the conext it came from, in the whole.

Spending too much time analyzing a small, analyzable thing can make you forget everything else. You forget that the small thing you're analyzing actually is related to everything. In fact, the scientific method, which has given us so much progress, just begs at every turn for us to isolate variables and such, and leads us to find a key factor or two to manipulate situations in some particular way. And we believe its conclusions and act on them as the "truth." As if those one or two little factors we found existed in isolation in the real world. So acting with this mistaken belief that you can manipulate your variables in the real world having only the effects observed in your carefully isolated, sterilized little lab often has us running off the rails in the modern world.

This is made worse by what economists call "externalities," a huge problem in conventional economic theory that everyone acknowledges and then essentially brushes off and looks the other way because its implications are too big. Externalities mean, if I dump toxic gick in your river, neener neener neener, too bad, not my problem, no one owns the river, do they? Same with the air, soil loss, plastic in the oceans, none of it is my (little individual reductionist) problem. But all of us get that sinking feeling when we look at the whole again and see it going to H-E-double-toothpicks due to all of us acting like isolated little reductionists. And there's "nothing to be done" because no one actually has the brain power to think about The Whole. At least not in this analytical way.

That makes your "poetic knowledge" idea all the more interesting. A way to look at wholes as wholes and deal with them that way without dissecting them. I'm really interested in this subject if you want to share more. It seems this is hard core epistemology, meaning the philosophy of how do we know, that we know what we know? Not an irrelevant subject because every few hundred years, our whole way of looking at the world changes, and suddenly society "knows" or "sees" or is interested in radically different things than it was before.

Anyway, it seems to me at the moment that poetic knowledge does not have any big system, or organization, or ideology, or cultural trend, pulling for it at the moment. Science, education, capitalism, the organization of work, our way of looking at problems, all of them seem to be pulling for reductionism. I wonder what forces could/do pull for holism?

Aside: For the moment, this poetic knowledge concept reminds me of all forms of art, first of all, and then also of language learning, a subject I've always loved. A lot of language students study in that reductionist way -- analyzing the grammar, looking for the logic of the other language's system, learning lists of clearly defined vocabulary. All stuff that feeds into the very weak, slow and limited frontal cortex of our brains, but hey, it's all we've got to analyze with. Other students, though, just mess around, pick up catchy phrases and tones of voice they've heard here and there, and repeat and innovate with them, not very accurately at first, but they keep going and gradually get better at them. Without every actually "knowing" (in that reductionist way we're used to calling 'knowing') what they're doing. Actually everyone learns their own native language this way. And some days you can just see a foreign language student lost in analysis, and other days the same student's neurons line up in a particular way, and they just go with the flow, stop thinking, dive in, and do really well. Speech is more about training the instincts to deliver your thoughts as words -- speech happens way too fast for the analytical frontal cortex to keep up with it. And art, who can analyze that? Though goodness knows we all try. I suppose it's because both rely so heavily on this poetic aspect... dissecting them may turn up some interesting stuff, but it's nowhere near as interesting as the phenomenon (like listening to music) itself.

So circling back to systems thinking... Maybe that is the bridge we need between discrete analysis and holistic mushiness. It seems to have a foot in both worlds. Kind of like Burra's tarot card above. Maybe that's what I always found attractive about it. Anyway, thanks for the post! It sounds like your daughter is lucky with the education you're giving her!

Hans Quistorff wrote:
My primary use of the leaves is to complement things that are too bitter or bland so I don't worry about the slight bitterness.  For coffee I put a 5 finger pinch of the leaves in the mill and put the beans on top and whiz it up fine. Works the same with cacao and I often use both cacao and coffee together.  

Ohhh now that's an idea. I generally drink my coffee black and unsweetened now but occasionally I like something a bit sweeter. I could just drop a few stevia leaves in the grinder when I grind up my coffee beans and then make it in the French press. Worth a try! I have never like the taste of commercial stevia extract in coffee (I love it in tea though), so maybe this is a way for me to like it in coffee.

OK, I tried it today, and it was... OK.

Cream cheese, softened butter, vanilla, and stevia was the initial idea.

I decided to double down on the green of the stevia and add pistachio nuts for a bit of crunchy texture. So I tried chopping them up a bit in the blender, which produced, even at low speed, a dismaying variety of chunk sizes ranging from still-whole nut meats to some powdery shmootz approaching nut butter. I ended up creaming it all, and I can't say anyone noticed a pistachio taste in the final product, so that particular sub-experiment is now off the list for future batches.

Next surprise was the texture... So thick the (high-powered) blender couldn't blend. I really need to get an old electric beater or a fancy countertop mixer gizmo, but for now I've got enough expensive appliances and I'm using what I've got. I use the blender for the frosting in the original recipe with powdered sugar. Anyway, I added some creme fraiche (like sour cream) to start thinning it out and it was getting a bit sour, so I switched to fresh whipping cream. I kept adding that carefully bit by bit and it took quite a lot to make the mix manageable.

Then I had a flashback and remembered observing in the regular recipe how the mixture thinned out and smoothed out when the icing sugar was added, it really surprised me how it changed the texture and made it more manageable.

Anyway, back to now: Color. I was expecting bright green like my homemade toothpaste with stevia and it was a milky yellowish green instead. Makes sense with all that cream cheese and cream I suppose. Didn't know what to do about that, couldn't think of anything appropriate to add to green it up -- any ideas?

Next: Taste test told me this is too stevia-y. So I broke down and added 1/3 cup of evaporated cane juice (I won't use the 'S' word), which we in our house call "rat poison." That took the edge off a bit. It could have used more but I didn't want to add more. Coconut sugar would have totally ruined the color. In retrospect, maybe Xylitol would have been the ticket. Xylitol makes things sticky and runny in my experience, so not sure how that will pan out.

I noticed the mass was getting grainy and the grains were surrounded by a tiny bit of watery stuff. So I decided to add something like the cornstarch that's in icing sugar. I reached for agar agar and then arrowroot, as I kept adding more whipping cream. Finally I got it to an acceptable texture that would blend.

The result was just passable. Color was weird. Texture was more light and whipped-cream like than I wanted. It was not quite sweet enough. And it lacked that sparkle and compactness that the icing sugar gives it.

So next time I'll make some adjustments. Probably will add more stevia and use xylitol too. Maybe I'll look for especially green stevia leaves to make powder of. And maybe I'll look for some neutral-tasting, acceptable oil that's high in Omega 3's and low in Omega 6's to thin it out instead of whipping cream -- anyone know of anything that fits the bill? I'm trying to avoid the typical seed oils (sunflower etc.) that are high in Omega 6.

Hope my meh experiment can serve to inform others' efforts for a healthy cream cheese frosting, anyway. And if anyone wants to report on their experiments at healthy cake frosting, please do!

Speaking of baking, I just used it in a carrot cake, both in the cake part and in the frosting.

The result of the cake part, I'd have to say, is a pass. I also changed to gluten-free flours and also changed leavening (bicarbonate + lemon juice), so it wasn't a scientific comparison, but the cake part is pretty good and I'm satisfied.

The cream cheese frosting, which originally called for 500g of powdered sugar (the kind with cornstarch added) is a pale, green shadow of its former self though. It lacks that "sparkle" and sharpness the sugar gives it, and also the texture is meh. So I will either have to keep experimenting a lot, or ditch the idea, and for instance, just have some of our great, local sheep's milk cheese for dessert (mmm.... ) instead of baking a carrot cake. It's tempting but if I get the knack of stevia-leaf-sweetened frosting I will try to remember to report back here.

Just made carrot cake using bicarbonate of soda and lemon juice as leavening, and it's great! Thanks Leigh, I don't know if I would have had the confidence to experiment without your advice here.

Using stevia leaves

For what it's worth, I understand that the "good" properties of stevia leaves that are helpful against diabetes, are also associated with the off/bitter taste some stevia plants have.  These parts are removed in refining to make the white commercial stevia powders and commercial extracts. So with a commercial product you get a calorie-free natural sweetener but no other health benefits. The natural leaf and the commercial products I think are quite different health-wise, so we should be clear when we're talking about "stevia" whether we're talking about the natural leaf or the refined commercial products. I prefer to get the health benefits of the leaf too, so I am oriented towards finding grow-your-own/DIY ways to minimize any bitterness in natural stevia leaves. And just generally use stevia leaves successfully in various ways.

Drying the leaves. I didn't know this, but now that I've read it I'd have to agree with other people above who've said that any bitterness is removed or greatly reduced by drying. I almost always use the leaves dried and the last few years I haven't had any bitterness problems. I keep whole leaves for teas and such, and grind them up really fine and sieve them for use in recipes.

Combining with other sweeteners. OK, this is not a purist thing and my other ingredients are not DIY, but I have often used stevia leaves for about half the sweetening power in a recipe, and then some combination of coconut sugar, xylitol, honey, brown sugar, or evaporated cane juice for the other half of the sweeting power. I almost never notice any difference in taste this way from the original recipe. And from there I experiment as time permits with pushing the stevia envelope and pushing the proportion of stevia higher without anyone noticing a difference in taste.

DIY extracts. This is an area I haven't tried but am interested in. Alcohol extracts, glycerines, water-based... I'd love to hear people's experiences, what extraction method to use, hot or cold, fresh or dried, how long to macerate... etc. ¿?

Improving the plant product. For best flavor. Selecting out bitterness in the plants themselves when planting from seed as described above. Experimenting with soil quality, watering regime, sun exposure, etc. Also when to harvest the leaves for best flavor. I read an article years ago about when to harvest and now have forgotten and can't find it anymore. Personal experiences, anyone?

How much to use. When swapping out for sugar in a recipe. The commercial products sometimes tell you. But no one seems to say anything about how much ground-up stevia leaf to use. At least as a guideline, because I believe different plants can have fairly different sweetness levels, they're not a "normalized" commercial product. I would love to hear what people say in this regard, and to start, I'll just throw out there a starting-off point I often use to experiment: a somewhat heaping tablespoon of powdered leaves to substitute for 1 cup of sugar.

Ways to compensate other properties of sugar. So sugar dissolves fairly easily, caramelizes when heated, can make a crusty surface when heated in another way, can add a crunchy texture sometimes, etc. Some recipes need these properties and it's interesting to hear what people do to get the characteristics they want in another way.

So there, I've got a few ideas to contribute and I wanted to revive this thread and get ideas from other stevia leaf experimenters out there. And if any of the old hands on the thread above want to pipe in with the results of their previous experiments, I'd be interested! Thanks, hopefully this can be a contribution to our health and our self-sufficiency!

Wow, thanks for all the good ideas everyone! I think the ones that keep moisture in the frosting to a minimum will be the most successful, and are probably the ones I'll try first. And they will also keep better, I'd like the cake to last 4 days or so at least. I have made a few runny frostings in my day and I'm wary of stepping on that particular rake again. I like the idea about adding whipped cream to lighten if necessary, that's a great one, thanks Ellendra.

I like the strong stevia tea idea, Terry, but I usually get good enough results with super-ground-up leaves that I later put through a fine sieve to get out the little bits of stem and leaf vein that seem to always remain. This is one of the things I use in my homemade toothpaste and it's pretty darn acceptable. So at least on the first try I'll try that. But I reserve the right to steal your strong stevia tea idea for other dishes in the future, actually, I may try that on the cake part.

Just a quick question about "baking soda." Where I live, nothing by this name is available. But we do have bicarbonate of soda. I have been assuming this is the same thing, but is this correct?

Edit: Never mind, I forgot to do an internet search before asking, so I've now answered my own question: Yes, they are the same thing!

Someone who knows passed on to me the best carrot cake recipe in the world, and so I made some for my birthday. Special occasions are the only times we'll have white sugar in the house. So I went ahead and made the original recipe. 500g of icing sugar (or powdered or whatever they call it in your country) in the recipe. Yikes, that's over a pound of bleepity-bleeping white sugar going into our bodies, I keep thinking as I'm rolling around a scrumptious morsel of it in my mouth.  

I actually doctored up the cake part a little bit to make it healthier because I can't stop myself from doing those things, but I really couldn't think of a way to make the a workable, delicious cake frosting without icing/powdered sugar.

But I want to "health up" the recipe so I might think about having this more than once a year. If I could really get it ketoed or paleoed up, I would be really thrilled.

So this frosting will have cream cheese, butter, powdered vanilla bean and ... ???
I will probably sweeten mostly with ground, dried stevia leaves. This will turn it very green, which is not my goal, but stevia in leaf form is much healthier and cheaper than the white powdered processed stuff you buy in supermarkets. The frosting probably needs something added for texture, as the icing sugar seems to add volume, and smooth and thin the mixure out. And sugar is also a preservative that I suppose helps keep the frosting and the cake fresh and edible for a few days. I may throw in some coconut sugar to take the stevia-y edge off the taste, I can live with a bit of that. That will turn it brown, so who knows how the color will turn out! Probably still quite green though. I might take advantage of this and add some turmeric to the cake mix to make it bright orange for contrast.

And then for the cake part, I suppose I could try a combo of almond, coconut, quinoa and buckwheat flours to substitute for the whole-wheat flour in the recipe too. That would be the keto version, not sure how paleo folks address the idea of a cake or how you might paleo it up. I know maybe making a cake runs contrary to the actual spirit of paleo in the first place, but orthodoxy aside, I'm wondering if I could make something that scratches my cake itch in a somewhat paleo-friendly way. I do like going back to the most basic or ancient ingredients possible without stopping having fun in life, ha, ha...

Anyway, has anyone ever attempted anything like this? Any advice or secret ingredients? Any failed or successful experiments that might inform my efforts?

Wow! I never knew about "The Woodwright's Shop"! I am fascinated by low tech and hand tools.

The PBS link to the episodes has changed over time... the current link to browse episodes by topic is:

https://www.pbs.org/woodwrightsshop/watch-on-line/watch-episodes-topics/

Luckily I don't have a place yet to do woodworking, otherwise I might fall clean down the rabbit hole for good!

In our community garden, we are forever on the verge of starting up a bokashi-to-vermicompost system.

One of the things that makes us hesitate is that we don't know what bokashi does to diseased plant material. We have endemic late blight affecting tomatoes (phytophthora infestans), which is the big problem we don't want to add to, and then there is the powdery mildew that usually takes down our curcubits towards the end of the season.

If we throw a lot of mixed, leftover plant material from our gardens into the bokashi fermenters along with people's kitchen waste, will the pathogens be killed during the fermentation?

Just wondering as this process bypasses hot composting, so that process to kill off the nasties will not be happening.

Blake Lenoir wrote: I'm looking for the ones the French took to Canada and into the American Great Lakes. Which types of kale have been used by the French in the 1680s to the 1760s?

There seem to be some people around called food ethnologists or food anthropologists or something like that, who study such things. Our local Slow Food convivium many years ago had a couple of talks with one of these people and it was very interesting apparently, I wasn't able to attend.

But that makes me think, maybe you could find an active Slow Food group somewhere in French-speaking Canada/the Great Lakes area that could give you a lead? Or maybe they've even studied the subject already.

One difficulty might be that as easily as the brassicas cross, and as much as gardeners like to experiment and "improve" their varieties, maybe we really can't have the "same" variety today that the people of that time had, even if we have a direct descendant that people have made an effort to keep pure. 300 years is a lot of generations for even a long-lived brassica.

Could I ask what is the aim you have with wanting this information?

Inge Leonora-den Ouden wrote:... But I noticed they had clubroot. So I pulled them out again.

What is clubroot?

Inge Leonora-den Ouden wrote:

Dave de Basque wrote:I was just looking and found a couple more resources for Europeans...

...

And the other resource is something I should have discovered a long time ago, the amazing folks at Kokopelli in France. (Website in French.) ...

Interesting! I had a look at their website. When I go to the FAQ (in French that has a different name of course) I can read the answer to where they ship, but they do write there that it's different for countries outside the EU (not all countries the same, it depends ...). You can find too where they are located, even their address. But what I wanted to find was if I can pay with my Dutch bank account (no credit card).

It seems you can. On their "Foire aux questions" (I'm impressed that they managed to reverse-engineer the abbreviation FAQ) they say (I won't bother translating since you're Dutch and you folks have a reputation for speaking everything fluently):

"Quels modes de paiement proposez-vous ?

Vous pouvez choisir le mode de paiement qui vous convient le mieux : par carte bancaire, par chèque (la commande sera expédiée à réception du chèque) ou par virement bancaire (la commande sera expédiée à réception du virement), mais ATTENTION : Dans le libellé de votre virement, le N° de la commande doit IMPÉRATIVEMENT apparaitre. Sans cela, nous ne pouvons garantir la livraison de celle-ci en temps et en heure. Merci pour votre coopération.

Les virements bancaires mettent approximativement 2 jours ouvrés à arriver sur notre compte. Nous vous remercions donc pour votre patience."

So I suppose you take the order to the end, indicate you're paying by bank transfer, and they assign you an order number. If things work properly, which I imagine they do, it seems like they really have their act together. And then they send your order once the transfer hits their account.

Good bot.

Yea! Gir bot says I finished my pioneer scavenger hunt!! Gir bot is so sweet. I'm now a pollinator, but I think maybe my label already said I was a pollinator? Or maybe I'm dreaming. Anyway, what's in a name? It's always a pleasure to participate here. Hugs to everyone, it's 2022 and we all need them!

Hi,

You might want to check out this post of mine and the whole thread it's in about gluten-free bread baking. There's a lot of info there that might help you. Spoiler: I suggest psyllium husks, prepared as in that thread. And if you're OK with starch, starch (tapioca starch, potato starch, etc.) apparently improves the texture a lot though I've always wanted to avoid it.

You probably already know this, but an effective sourdough really has to be "trained" to eat the flour you are going to end up using. If you get a sourdough sponge going successfully (which often takes a couple of weeks, and maybe a few false starts for "weird" flours as you need to use in gluten-free baking), and then you switch flours on it to make the bread, it might not take to the new flour at all.

Another thing is an ingredient that will stand up to high-temperature oven baking and will allow air bubbles to form. Gluten performs this function in regular breads, it's very stretchy, doesn't poop out at oven temps, and will surround a little bubble of sourdough-fermented air, keeping the air in and allowing the bread to rise. If you can't make the air stay put inside the bubbles, it will escape and you get a brick. So that's why some people use the gums if they're not allergic (xanthan, guar, and locust bean) and also some starch or starches.  Lots of the things you'd think would work for this don't, they stop holding things together at high temps (not sure but I suspect arrowroot is one of these). So I say try the psyllium husks as an addition to your flour mix. All this takes patience and lots of experimentation to get right.

Go ahead and experiement with bread making like this if you like, but I have a simpler suggestion too that may or may not meet your goals. Just make quick breads. They're more like a cake or crumbly cornbread in texture, but they hit the spot. They use chemical leavening (something like baking powder) instead of sourdough or bread yeast. I think you can make a perfectly good aluminum-free baking powder from good old bicarbonate of soda and cream of tartar or any other acid ingredient, better if it's dry which is why cream of tartar works well. (C of T is a leftover of winemaking.) There's a chemical reaction between the two, the batter rises and presto, it's very reliable. It's not the texture of sourdough bread, but it can be really delicious. Any recipe that calls for baking powder will do, just change out the flours to something you can use. Some psyllium husks can help even in these recipes if you want more rise, and it will help it be less crumbly, but then you're back in experimentation terrirtory again. Just my two cents, I hope you get some delicious baking going!

I posted a random message a couple of hours ago, and I came back to a rare PM from "staff." Letting me know I had seemingly gotten one of the links wrong in my post and letting me know to fix it if appropriate, and even making the effort to take a guess at what the right link might be! I mean, how on the ball is that? Whoever that was, yoo-hoo, thank you, you're absolutely awesome!! And thanks to all the rest of you and the Duke who make it all possible, I'm impressed what a tight ship we're running here. This really is one of the most useful sites on the internet, so go ahead and be proud of whatever role you play! Yay, team!!

I was just looking and found a couple more resources for Europeans...

I have no experience with this seed company, but they have a heck of a lot of variety from all over the world, including giant (Jersey walking stick) kale:

Seeds Gallery shop: Jesrsey walking stick kale

I can't find where they're located but they seem to ship all over, and have varieties specifically from a lot of European countries. All they claim is that they don't buy seeds from China. No permie creds, a standard seed company.

And the other resource is something I should have discovered a long time ago, the amazing folks at Kokopelli in France. (Website in French.) The French government is a very heavy-handed "seed dictatorship" following everything the multinationals ask them to do. There is an official list of approved seeds and there are approved suppliers for them, as all over the EU, seed suppliers need to be absolutely huge and have a very big volume to be "approved" to sell seeds legally. There is some exception for "amateurs" but a professional farmer cannot use "amateur" seeds and no one can sell the products of these semi-illegal plantings. The folks at Kokopelli tell the French government to take a hike and have somehow been finding a way (including spending a lot of time in court and paying a lot of fines) to distribute open pollinated, traditional local varieties for more than 20 years, and they have a huge collection. They have an enormous collection of kales (choux-frisées in French), but it seems it doesn't include giant kale. But I thought I would add this resource to the thread. They have plenty of permie-like cred.

N Thomas wrote:

Thanks for your detailed response, here is some additional background:
I'm looking to make sandwich bread.
I'm trying to avoid using seeds (i.e. Chia) because I'm a Paleo eater and seeds are considered inflammatory.

Well then probably the paleo submarine recipe above is probably a good starting point. Are you looking to make something like a normal, tall loaf of bread for slicing? I mean, not a submarine style. That might take a lot of experimenting! Good luck, and let us know how it goes!

R Sumner wrote:

My ClO2 + H2O prep failed yesterday due to reasons. If it suns I will try again today.

At the risk of going off-topic, what do you use to make, store and apply it? Aquarium pump and tubing or a more professional rig? Do you use metal fittings? I've noted plastic spray bottles degenerate, etc...

Hi R, glad to oblige, my setup is pretty simple and dependable, I didn't even know there was more than one way to make it, but of course there is! The person I've found who is most serious and scientific about chlorine dioxide, its preparation and all its uses is a German/Spanish/Swiss biomedical researcher by the name of Andreas Kalcker and you can see his fairly easy preparation method here (he keeps his videos separate from his website).

Basically his recommendation is to always use all-glass containers with an airtight seal. Glass is non-reactive and doesn't deteriorate or contaminate the solution. You generate ClO2 gas from a shot glass you put inside the larger container, and it's gradually absorbed by the water in the larger container. Dissolved in water it's quite stable. The resulting solution of ClO2 in water is totally pure if you use distilled water, no contaminants and no residues. It takes 48-72 hours in my experience, you have to do the process twice. It makes about 400 ml of standardized CDS at 3000ppm, which is diluted in certain ratios for different uses -- got to read up on each protocol, which he also has on his website.

Once done, I keep the solution in the fridge. One time I tried to make it in the sun to speed up reaction time. It must have blown the seal a bit because the liquid went back to clear instead of more or less sunflower oil-colored like it is supposed to be, so I intuited the gas had all escaped due to too much pressure. I looked up the boiling point of ClO2 and it's about 11ºC or 52ºF, so that made sense. So I now do everything out of the sun and at room temperature, like he shows you to, and just wait, and once finished it goes in an airtight brown glass dropper bottle in the fridge.

Since I'm a bit of a nerd I also bought some test strips to test the final concentration of the solution. He shows that in the video too.

Another thing is that the dilute solutions you make for whatever purpose last anywhere from 3 days to a week. So best to make small batches. The undiluted solution you make above probably loses concentration over time too, but I haven't tested it to verify.

All this makes me sound like a chem nerd which is not true. I'm much more a fan of finding solutions for things based on living systems which you can grow yourself. So the other things in this thread based on plants and poultices, etc. are my usual preference. And they work! Chemical things, like colloidal silver which I discovered years ago and now chlorine dioxide which I discovered recently, which require importing some gear and raw materials, really have to prove their worth in my book. But CDS is the best stuff I've ever used for everything I've tried it for, so much so I think it's really important, so it has earned it's place in my pantry!

Karen and Kathleen, re the colloidal silver... I used that years ago and found it pretty effective at the time. I got a good brand recommended to me by someone who knew, and later closed her shop. I've heard that the shelf life can be variable depending on how it's made, and that there are a lot of low-quality products out there. I wonder if you could tell us about your setups or your way to ensure you're getting a quality product? It seems like the active principle might be pretty similar to CDS, and I love to have more things in my arsenal!

I will get to wound care at the end but I want to second R Summer above's recommendation of chlorine dioxide, ClO2 as a real excellent, cheap and super-useful multi-purpose thing to have around the house or homestead. I have only started having it around for the last six months and already I am really impressed with all the things I've used it for. I swear I will never be without it again.

Note fwiw there are some name-calling non-scientists and meme-makers out there on the internet who say "it's bleach" and it's dangerous. You know the types. Honestly these people are so boring. So, some basic principles:

1) Not everything with "Cl" (chlorine) in the molecular formula is bleach. Standard bleach is sodium hypochlorite, NaClO, and might have some legitimate uses but it is not very good for the environment or for any living creature and is best avoided if possible. It almost always has a substitute. Table salt is NaCl. In the chemical formula the only difference between salt and bleach is the addition of an O (Oxygen) atom. Salt is not bleach either and we're not afraid of it.  Ask any chemist -- an atom here or there in a molecule really does change its properties completely, so you have to evaluate every chemical molecule on its own merits.

2) Absolutely everything -- mother's milk, distilled water (ask me how I know), granola, fresh organic celery, pine sap, everything -- can kill you in the wrong concentration and quantity. This is why we don't drink 5 gallons of milk a day or eat a kilo block of table salt. You would die. But we don't call milk and salt deadly poisons and we're not afraid of them. Becasue we use our noodles. That's what they're for. We and all other biological creatures need everything in a "moderate" and reasonable quantity, and if you are dealing with a new substance you don't have any experience with, you need to learn what that is. So just be reasonably safe and learn about anything new you're trying, whether it's indigenous knowledge about a local plant you don't know, or a chemist's knowledge about a chemical. How much, how concentrated, how often is good?

That said, one of the things that chlorine dioxide is useful for is sterilizing surfaces. Apparently it is so biocompatible because it oxidizes and kills really small things like bacteria and viruses, but it leaves larger things, like complete cells (skin cells, blood cells, whatever) alone. So it seems that it can actually replace some sterilization uses of chlorine and of bleach and be much better for everyone's health. Restaurants and food preparation businesses (here, at least) can opt to use it to sterilize their surfaces instead of bleach. Some biolabs apparently use it to clean the air of pathogens. It is also often used to purify drinking water, so water companies can switch from using standard bleach at low concentrations for tap water delivery to chlorine dioxide, to pretty much everyone's benefit as far as I can tell. These systems are up and running in many locations throughout the world and companies that sell the necessary equipement and supplies exist and are thriving. US Patents have were granted in the 1980s for loads of uses, including even cleaning blood plasma of bacteria and viruses. Talk about bio-compatible.

So back to wound care, I prepare a batch every once in a while and keep it in the fridge. I put a drop on a wound. It sterilizes and seems to calm and promote skin healing quickly. I have found some protocols and also used it for eczema, toenail fungus (with coconut oil), jock itch and even the sniffles with great success so far. I wouldn't say miraculous, but it seems to work quickly and is working better than anything else I've ever tried for each of these things. And I've tried a lot of things. So I don't know about poultices and ointments, but I definitely keep a full dropper bottle of CDS (chlorine dioxide solution) around for wound care all the time now.

Not to knock the herbal poultices etc. at all, they work. There used to be someone in this area that made a thick, waxy poultice from a secret family formula that you could put on any infection and it would suck the infection right out. Kind of like the infected toe pics above. Worked fast and worked every time. Then it disappeared, and I heard the old lady that made it got too old and her kids were not interested in carrying on. Have been trying to find out who it was and get the recipe for years. No dice so far. In the meantime, I may have to experiement with a lot of the great ideas in this thread. Thanks everyone!

Lif Strand wrote:  It ends up a dried brown prickly jungle (see photo) that every fall I vow will not recur the coming year (as it has for so many years in spite of my vows) but on the other hand, I've got lots of over-wintering birds that are so very happy.

Well, that's no so bad, is it? Happy overwintering birds are great and a joy to watch (mainly because it's not cherry season and they're not eating all your cherries!). If anyone asks, you can say you're "rewilding" your garden for the benefit of the biosphere in general. If the ghost of Bill Mollison visits you, you can tell him you're giving it over to Zone 5 now, where you can just observe and learn from nature.

Maybe it's a question of reducing your expectations on yourself to what you're actually going to do -- and what really inspires you. I mean, what's the point of worrying about stuff you're not actually going to do? I tend to get overwhelmed with big projects, so from others I gradually have learned what I call the "little corner" method, which I apply to lots of things. It's a great strategy when you're moving into a new house with all the chaos on moving day. I just choose a little corner to have just the way I want it, and forget about the rest for now. And gradually expand from there, putting things the way I want them. I lay off the expansion if I start to get overwhelmed and focus on just maintaining the nice bit I have. If you have just a little corner of the yard that does the garden basics for you, looks nice and keeps you entertained, you can leave the rest to the birds and be very satisfied, you've done a favor to yourself and them. Just a thought.

What a nice an honest old blog post Edward! Thank you.

fwiw, one rule I've established in my head since I've started on the "growies" path, regarding my personal time: Biology comes first. So whatever is on my plate, if it's biological, I need to tend to that before the non-biological things, because, well, biological things live and die, thrive and fade away -- their condition really depends on me and my attitude towards them. No wrong-making for anyone that doesn't want to have houseplants, pets, a vegetable garden or orchard, farm animals, or children!! It's just that a live, biological being, well, there it is, and it needs what it needs, NOW, and it wants what it wants. You get to choose whether and how to deal with that, and your results, always passed through an exciting randomness of the universe filter, are what they are, but generally you can see that the active love you put into it, indirectly and in the long term, is generally reflected in thriving, what you could think of as love back. No single individual needs to play that game, but it can be very rich and fulfilling if you get into it.

On the down-and-dirty subject of bindweed, I can only sympathize. One strategy I've used to some success is shading out by laying down big sheets of cardboard from the local box-making plant, and or worthless sheep's wool (of a scratchy variety) from the local farmers, two really cheap inputs I have locally to totally shade it out. 5x a year visiting is not enough, but when it creeps in from the edges of whatever I've put down to suppress it, I find that visiting every 2 weeks generally averts disaster. Tear up the vines that creep in from the edges and keep your plants from being mobbed. It takes many, many years of doing this to weaken the damn underground roots to the point it dies... I find for me that it's good practice in getting myself out of the consumer-culture-induced "put in a little effort and see an instant result" mindset that our "modern" society instills in us, and back into the rhythms of how the real, physical, biological world actually works. It feels really real and good on some level.

This ground cover also helps with droughts, as well as mulching thickly with straw, cardboard, sheep's wool, pine needles or whatever I have around. And of course, plants with huge leaves like your butternut squash are classics to shade out weeds and keep the ground protected and moist.

Anyway, I'm not sure what you're up to now in New Jersey, but I hope you're liking it! I think there must be some green space left in your heart if you keep coming back here to permies. I think we can all choose to take care of the biosphere in our own way and in ways that give something back to us (we are biological creatures too, with our likes and dislikes, and ways we thrive) as well as in some small way taking care of the big kahuna of "all of it."

Rex Reeves wrote:Have you looked into Sepp Holzers method of growing citrus? Paul Wheaton has talked about it recently in one of his podcasts. I understand it has a solar reflector pond in front and a heat retaining berm behind. Might be right up your alley.

Another thought is a large high tunnel that can utilized during the cold nights and then left open the rest of the year. A RMH inside would do a lot more than one outside. I don't know about your location but where I live wind chill would be a huge factor in heat loss.

I'm not sure one RMH outside would be enough. You might need a series of them in a ring around the trees. I think having some data from an out door RMH and the temperature differences at various distances throughout a typical night would be great information.

One question I try to ask myself before starting a project is "do the gains justify the means?" Will the profit of selling the fruit or the benefit of having it grown on your property be worth the amount of work that goes into keeping the plants alive?

Best of luck on your adventure.

Hey Rex, thanks for chiming in! I really appreciate your input.

Yes, I'm a big fan of Sepp's. In the design I'm working on, there is a substantial slope going down to the west (WxSW), so a reflecting pond to the south is not going to work. Citrus trees would be in a northish-southish line up against a WxSW-facing gabion wall, and behind the wall may be a rocket forge among other things, so between the west and slightly south orientation and what's behind I'm hoping the rocks will provide some warmth.

The high tunnel structure is a great idea. I could leave a hoop structure set up (maybe a half-hoop given the gabion wall on the uphill side) and cover it as needed. I've wanted some kind of tenting strategy but if there is some way to kind of accordion-fold the high-tunnel cover that might be great. Does anyone know of a video showing some sort of an idea for something like a retractable high tunnel cover? Or any other kind of retractable cover outdoors for trees?

You're right that it would be nice to have data about temperatures at various distances from an outside RMH. The effect of the "smudge pots" with oil in them used in citrus orchards of my youth must have been substantial, even though they were dotted around pretty sparsely, because people actually used them and it can't be cheap to light a pot of oil on fire. If memory serves me correctly, maybe there was one smudge pot every 5 or so trees in a row, maybe every 10, I don't remember too well as I was a kid. I think an RMH bench running by each tree would have to work way better.

I'm thinking of a long series of RMH benches covering about 40 meters (130' or so). This would go between a line of the most sensitive trees like, say, lemons, which would be against the gabion wall, and the second line of less sensitive trees (satsumas or whatever). And have some system rigged up to cover the whole deal when freezing temps threaten.

There are big greenhouses already in this design, and I don't want the place to become a plastic jungle. That's just my hesitancy to having the trees under permanent cover, there will be other more tropical trees under permanent cover in the greenhouses. I basically need to provide potentially +7°C (12-13°F) temperature support maybe 30 nights a year.

The "justification" for all of this is basically self-sufficiency. For one, resiliency, so if supply chains deteriorate at some point people still have what they need locally, and second, because there are some things that are marginal or impossible to grow locally, that realistically no one is going to give up: lemons, bananas, mangoes, pineapples... Maybe people would cut back, but I for one am not going to say I'll never have a pineapple again because I don't live in the tropics. So rather than setting myself up to import these things over tens of thousands of kilometers for the rest of my life and exploit the whole third world export agriculture chain, it seems reasonable to develop a really eco-smart way to grow what people are actually going to consume, locally. Which is what this is all about.

Don't want to create an ethical firestorm about this. Part of the reason I'm inclined to go for it is that my area does not have a severe climate, but there are a few freezing nights every year. Providing some support over those few freezing nights, you really open up the window of what it's possible to grow locally.

I am a RMH newbie looking for some sage advice from the old hands.

I grew up around orchards that used "smudge pots" (pots of oil) on freezing nights to keep from losing citrus trees. The environmental aspects horrified me even as a kid, now of course even worse. But I still have a dream of using an outdoor heat source to keep out-of-zone trees alive on freezing nights in an environmentally friendly way.

Farms in the area where I live now might get ~10-30 freezing nights a year, and any colder than -6°C / 21F would be super-unusual. So the cold is not usually severe or prolonged and I've been thinking in the name of self-sufficiency it might be a worthwhile effort to rig up a system for frost-tender trees. I was thinking that some kind of outdoor RMH could do the trick, maybe in combination with some kind of tenting with thermal blankets/row covers.

A major goal would be getting a whole night's worth of heat out of one fire as spending your life getting up in the middle of the night to tend to freezing trees is a bummer.

Would like to hear people's ideas about the feasibility of the concept in general, finishing materials that might work outdoors, air flow and draw, insulation underneath yes/no/how, etc., etc. I'll just leave it there and let the experts speak.

The Basques are also fanatical about their beans. Small beans are generally favored over large ones as having a finer taste.

I have recently had a chance to put the "new beans vs. old beans" controversy to the test.

I have always been a pretty spontaneous cook so the whole soaking-the-night-before routine used to throw me off. So I would buy nice beans from local producers and accumulate them in the pantry for years. I recently got tired of this old song and dance and have really gotten into cooking beans with the advice of my local chef friends.

Some tbh probably 5-year-old navy beans took damn near an hour in the pressure cooker, after being soaked overnight. Then bought some of this year's crop from a new local producer at the farmer's market. She told me, "you don't need to soak them, and they cook in 15 minutes!" OK, then she said, at least check them after 15 minutes to see how they're going. I ended up cooking them another 8 minutes for a total of 23. Best beans ever. No soaking. Wow. So it does really make a difference how old the beans are. If you can find a local producer and know you're getting this year's crop, your cooking times will be greatly reduced, and maybe even no soaking!

Back to the original question, here we always cook beans (but never lentils) in a pressure cooker. (Lentils sometimes foam up and clog the steam vent, causing the pressure cooker to explode, ask me how I know.) Also, except the lady at the farmer's market selling this year's beans, everyone tells you to pre-soak everything but lentils. I have loads of cookbooks in various languages, some 100 years old and some new, so I've been reading up on bean cooking and experimenting and here are the pointers I've come up with. (I've never tried sprouting/fermenting or a haybox, those will be future experiments)

The best way to soak beans, especially old ones, is to pour over them the night before 4x the volume of BOILING water. The temperature shock really does something.

The next day, dump the water (unless they're black beans, then we save the water to preserve the color) and cover the beans and all your fixins but salt in the pressure cooker with 2 or 3 fingers of COLD water. Start to boil with the top off, and skim off any scum that rises to the surface before you close the top.

Cook on the highest heat you can without burning stuff (I have an induction stove that goes up to 10 and I use 8 or 9) until it comes up to pressure, which is the second line. This takes maybe 5 minutes. Then I start timing, 20 minutes to an hour, depending on the age of the beans and the type, and I start reducing the heat gradually to medium-low, whatever keeps it between the first and second lines but closer to the second.

Once the time is up, I put the pressure cooker in the sink and run a thin stream of cold water over the top, and the pressure goes down right away. This is a really useful trick when you don't know how long your beans are going to take to cook. I can get the top off, test, put it on again in and get back up to pressure in less than 5 minutes

Test the beans for tenderness, if not completely done, put them back on under pressure for a few more minutes.

Once they're nice and tender, put the pot back on the stove, add your salt and anything delicate, and simmer with the top off for maybe15-30 minutes. This changes them from watery like they come out of the pressure cooker to nice and creamy, makes a huge difference. Slosh the pot around to mix occasionally, only if you have to, stir gently with a wooden spoon to keep the beans from breaking.

Good additions at the beginning are kombu (for flavor, minerals and to de-fartify them), onion or leek, garlic, celery (not traditional Basque but good for flavor), carrot, and for the meat eaters, Spanish-style chorizo (a cured pork sausage made with paprika, doesn't fall apart like Mexican chorizo), salt pork, fat, baby ribs...

We view baking soda as a desperation measure to soften really tough old beans, and there is always the danger they'll disintegrate and turn to mush. Ask me how I know. For what it's worth of course, your mileage may differ. Salting at the beginning of cooking similarly causes the beans to break apart, say my chef friends.  

We like to eat our beans with crusty bread and pickled peppers (not too spicy)... mmm

I'm curious, you haybox and thermos method folks, how watery vs. creamy do they come out? Do you have to pop them back on the stove for a bit to make them less watery?

Skandi Rogers wrote:I cannot think of any "sexy" gardening or food production/marketing other than top end champagne.

Oooh, there I think a good food photographer can do wonders... Food can be very sexy and appeals to several of our primal, animal instincts and senses!

Skandi Rogers wrote:Ways to get a similar effect;
To have a restaurant that used only permaculture products and won 3 stars. But it would have to be a ground up thing or it would just be the chefs name that got the recognition rather than the produce.

A great local chef here (food is the religion of the Basques and the chefs are their equivalent of a royal family) who can charge anything he wants opened his new flagship restaurant that happened to have a small dining room. People started reserving to try it out, and presto, they couldn't book a table for months. People started really talking it up -- "Have you been to ChefX's restaurant yet? I couldn't get a table for 6 months!" "No kidding! Wow, it must be fantastic!" Besides the great food, the added scarcity effect really worked. He is dripping in Michelin stars and lives very well. I would too if I could charge people $400/person for dinner. But he has the talent, the name, the local economy, and he worked it that way.

Skandi Rogers wrote:Produce some random super luxuary product and MARKET the hell out of it. Something like chocolate or coffee it would have to be something with mass market appeal but also something that does well at the top end. Air dried ham? Cheese?

For example.

Also a yes to John's ideas, and a question for Mike -- What is the super-attractive thing that makes Lady Gaga want to drop coin to enter, and everyone else to line up? It's gotta be another layer on top of just truly good food.

Anyway, I think one thing that people are gagging for these days that we've got, is something real, something honest, something with some integrity, in the sea of glitzy lies and smarminess that we all live in. Something that is good for you from the inside out. There's definitely something to tap into there. But realistically, you always need to work on the esthetics and hire a really good photographer to make anything look appealing.

And then there's that great challenge, that spectacular test drive of permaculture, that wows everyone and gives you the Tesla Roadster effect. Which is...

paul wheaton wrote:Did the tesla roadster have any marketing?

Hmmm... that was an interesting rabbit hole. I spent a few minutes looking and the most serious account of Tesla's marketing strategy was behind a paywall after a teaser, and the rest were kind of breathless Tesla-prop, but a tolerable one was this one. All of them seem to indicate that Tesla specializes in being spectacular and sexy, and works all the ways in existence to appear in the media constantly for free. Free is a really nice price. Plus Elon Musk is a marketing machine 24/7. Color me cynical though, I think being a multi-billionaire helps *a lot* in getting starry-eyed followers that think you're sexy, and in getting media to cover you. But there are also lots of lessons for permies to learn in his strategy, and with some creative adaptation, no doubt...

paul wheaton wrote:Rather than having a bunch of people bickering over what permaculture is, wouldn't the better approach be to kinda do what sepp does?  Just one guy doing his thing.  And he refuses to sell his food anymore.   So if you want it, you have to send somebody over to sepp's place, harvest a bit that can be fit into a single backpack and pack it out.  Suppose 50 pounds of food is packed out.  And that person had to pay 100 euros.  And that person had to be paid to go there and get it.  Suppose you are in europe - so maybe there was a thousand euros spent for the person to go get it?  $20 per pound.  

Oh, yeah... 100% one person doing their thing a la Sepp. We have to listen to each other a lot, but design by committee makes things lose their punch usually. Just a person or a small, close group with a good feel for things defining something and setting something up. But I think you've gotta set up something big and or really notable and sexy that all these folks can latch onto to get the Tesla Roadster effect. Are we that sexy?

paul wheaton wrote:

Dave de Basque wrote:Hmmm.... And what is the Tesla Roadster of permaculture?

What if the super rich only wanted permaculture food?

Yes. And I'm also thinking a highly visible "performance" comparison test as happened with the Tesla Roadster where all the car mags took it out for a spin, compared it with a Porsche, etc. And it did really well. So maybe something like Gabe Brown tries to emphasize in his talks to farmers: "signing checks on the back instead of the front". Speaking to farmers right where they know performance counts, in the wallet. This covers supply-side performance, producing the stuff.

On the demand side is this idea of the super-rich (or NBA players, or famous actors/musicians...) only wanting permaculture food. Tons of people could be influenced to demand permaculture standards, wouldn't that be nice?

Either one needs to come with a high-visibility marketing campaign like the Tesla Roadster did to actually create some waves.

Elon Musk was helped by having a few billion to throw at whatever he wanted... What's our way of creating waves really visibly, so people see the message? Pondering.

Also final thought. What is "permaculture food"? Yes, we here kinda "know" but two challenges

1) If you sat us in a room we wouldn't all agree, and bickering would be used for #2...`

2) As soon as permaculture food hits "big time" the usual suspects will be out degrading the standards so within a few years it just means GMO stuff raised in toxic sluge on a megafarm run by drones, like everything else. Back to system default.

So maybe it needs a few of those super-rich people to endow a foundation to set up and defend some standards. I've seen more than one good, potentially big project lose all its impact becase nothing was defined, trademarked, copyrighted, registered, and as soon as it started to make waves, the copycats came along and corrupted the whole idea, so it became only its Disneyland version instead of the real thing.

Feel free to delete if this is not welcome, hey it's your pseudoblog on your site, so... Just my two cents.

Jeremy Baker wrote:I’ll ask the same question. Why do some names get blacked out?

This is always (I think) for not following one of the permie.com policies (real-sounding name, be nice, etc.). In some cases, I think it's reversible, by ... starting to follow the policies.

Hmmm.... And what is the Tesla Roadster of permaculture?