Here is the test of the moment

When not logged in, go to https://permies.com/wiki/279979/garden-master-affiliate-info

In step 1, it will say something about logging in.  Click on the link within step 1 (do not click on the login button at the top of the page - outside of "step 1").  The link within step 1 has magic sauce that should bring you back to the affiliate thread.

The test right now is:  if you click on the link within step 1, and then follow the log in stuff, does it automatically take you back to the affiliate thread, or to the main forum page?

Took me back to the main forum page, not the aff page.

Dave de Basque wrote:

paul wheaton wrote:Gurk.  I can't make it do that.  Any hints how i might be able to reproduce this?

Try installing add-ons EFF Privacy Badger and Ghostery and see what happens.

I disabled these add-ons and still got redirected to the home page after login. No idea what might be causing that.

Anyway, I went back to the process in the other tab and got an f-code. It was easy (despite the hiccup of the redirect to the home page after login, I thought that was default behavior because it happens to me every time). So no worries from my end.

The first post says I'm logged in and shows my new f-code, yea!

paul wheaton wrote:Gurk.  I can't make it do that.  Any hints how i might be able to reproduce this?

Try installing add-ons EFF Privacy Badger and Ghostery and see what happens.

paul wheaton wrote:

That sounds like our system failed.  The "step 1" login should bring you back to that page.  

....   found the problem and i think i fixed it ...

OK, trying again to see if it’s fixed.
- Not logged in, no f-code.
- Pressed Second Test link
- Logged in
- Got redirected to Forum main page again

Second test

Here’s the scoop on my end

Mac OS 13, Firefox 138 with some privacy add-ons

Started as not logged in.

Clicked on link above, went to GMC affiliate info wiki page

Step 1: Clicked link, took me to login page

Logged in, got redirected to Forums home page in a new tab (Special wish upon a star: That after logging in, I would always be magically redirected to the page I was on before logging in.)

Try my usual trick of using the back button to navigate back to the page I was on before. Doesn’t work because it’s a new tab. Go to previous tab where the GMCAI page is and continue from there.

I do not refresh my page bacause I need another cup of coffee and I’m confused what to do next because I see (image below) -- same as before logging in. It seems I didn’t complete Step 1 when clicking on the link as I did before because it seems I should have an f-code now and I don’t, I only got logged in. So I continue in my non-coffee brain haze and click the same Step 1 link again. It opens another tab and invites me to log in again even though I am already logged in with my name at upper right.

I think some users might abandon here.

I go back to the GMCAI tab, refresh the page and Step 1 changes, asking me how I’d like to be paid.

I go back to the tab for this thread (t/279835) and refresh it too. It now says
- you do not have an f-code (no change)
- you are currently logged in (changed)

Back to GMCAI, I enter fake payment details as I don’t like the available options*. This takes me to my Ledger page. Lots of things to do there as I’m not set up as an affiliate, but I’m not sure if this is of any value. If anyone wants me to continue to see if I eventually get an f-code, let me know and I will.
(*Second wish upon a star: I would love Permies to have a Wise account and I’d take affiliate money there via easy-peasy super-fast transfer.)

Questions:
Did it work? I would say not yet. Maybe if I filled in the affiliate details it would eventually give me an f-code.
Was it super easy? No. (It was until it wasn’t, but I was making things complicated a bit on purpose to kick the tires.)

Looks like we’re very close to victory but I would say there are some loose ends to tie up maybe.

There are many choices for windbreaks, but I personally like Eastern Red Cedar, see the pic below. It grows really dense almost ground to top and is of course evergreen. The pic is from a site I hadn't come across before, Windbreak Trees. It seems like a really useful site regarding how to design and plant etc., and of course, they're glad to sell you the trees. White pine is on their species list too!

Anyway, back to the cedar, I might plant a double or triple row with an eye to progressively logging as they grow for the lovely rot-resistant wood, very handy for all kinds of things on the farm. Windbreaks are more effective if they're not just a vertical wall, I might plant some dense, low bush or shrub at the base of the windward side and also the leeward side of your cedars.

If your prevailing wind is from the southwest, then, I'd plant maybe some berries on the sun-facing side, and a shade-loving bush if you can find something appropriate, on the NE side. Planting something at the base of the windward side is more important to sculpt your windbreak than  the leeward side, but both are helpful.

In addition to the Windbreak Trees website I just came across, the Plants for a Future website is really great to search for plants with specific characteristics you might need on a permie property, it's great for stacking functions and idea generation.

Good luck to you and your chooks!

Hey I'm here to talk about the "new 54 page PDF about hugelkultur" offer from yesterday's dailyish.

I already have access to the 133 hr. PDC and maybe I'm a dufus but I can't seem to find where the hugelkultur PDF was hung for a few days so I can go nab it. Can anyone help?

Edit: OK, so I am the test dufus for this and will leave this post up in case it helps anyone else. It is right where you would expect it to be (and where I looked but did not see), in the "133 hours..." thread, where those who are logged in will see the links to the content right in the first post, scroll down and there is an option to Upgrade/Buy as a gift, keep scrolling to the very end of the post and you will see the familiar light-blue box with the ginormous "click here to download" text, and the name of the file in small print is, tada, hugelkultur.pdf. I have worked in IT and UX and we users really are stupid, ha ha.

I was reading up on alternatives to the big guys the other day, also partly in response to the increasing irrelevance of DDG results.

After tossing out a lot of alternatives, I settled on Qwant, which I'm pretty happy with.

Different results than others, and relevant. Privacy focused. Based in France and open source I believe.

The French seem to start up a lot of cool alternative software projects, and most of them seem to be unknown outside of France. Worth a look if you want other "alternative" software too.

https://www.qwant.com/

Just saw a post out there on the internet that illustrates one solution to this problem that already exists:

(oops, image link didn't work, see photo below)

source

OK, everything on that website does need to be taken with a grain of salt, but still, the photo shows a beaver dam's ability to hold back silt. Beavers are great topsoil builders and you can see why. I keep getting more and more convinced that nature already solved all our problems ages ago, it's just waiting for us to notice.

In any case, my mind always goes to de-silting ponds on the infeed to avoid silting, so it's nice to have another alternative to explore to help keep your pond water clear.

I think we need to adopt a different frame of mind about these problems.

We've spent a century or two building up a whole society based on short-term thinking (booting the problem to the next generation, i.e. now), enormous scale (sexy and powerful at the beginning but bringing equally enormous problems over time), and concentration -- of wealth, of water, of topsoil, of information systems, of human population, etc.

We are collectively driven to these unsustainable solutions, and because someone finds them economically "efficient" at a given moment we keep on taking this course. Even though the time of reckoning has already arrived, and we are trying to solve the problems created over the last 50 or 100 years with dwindling natural resources, grandiose decaying infrastructure, and decreased knowledge of natural systems as humans are now mostly urbanites who get our information via TikTok rather than our own eyes and hands.

I sometimes think of the mentality of many (or all?) groups of North American Indians by way of contrast. The "seven generations" principle of the Iroquois, the plains Indians carefully managing how many buffalo they harvested at a time in order to keep the herds bountiful, and many more examples. Perhaps because they didn't have a boss worried about quarterly profits telling them what to do and they didn't keep GDP statistics, they made normal, sane decisions that seemed to reflect a deep knowledge of how nature actually works, and complete respect and care for future generations.  They were investing in nature rather than mining it for short-term personal gain or grand visions of empire.

Permaculture, for me, is a way of looking at whole systems and infusing a bit of the spirit of wisdom and sanity of many indigenous cultures into our Western tech-centered mentality. "How does nature solve this problem?" is a great question.

Phil makes a very good point. With people on the land, and being sensitive to it, they can restore water cycles, recharge springs and aquifers, green the desert, restore clear-cut rainforest, etc.

I think in the end we'll have to change our way of thinking and our way of life. Eventually we will need loads of people all over the land taking responsibility for managing their little bit of nature with a view to restoring working natural systems rather than trying to tweak the problematic infrastructure that our old way of thinking created. That's what permaculture thinking has brought me to think, anyway.

For small-scale systems, where possible it's good to design in a de-silting pond or two on the way into a water storage pond. They can be relatively small and dredged frequently, using the fertile topsoil they contain on your farmland. A big dam I wouldn't know what to do with, there are so many big-industrial problems rolled into that dilemma.

I watch the top video and think, what to do with all the glyphosate and other toxic gick in that silt, even if you dredge it? I don't know and personally I'd rather work on creating practical alternatives to that whole dysfuctional system.

I'm going to be experimenting with living mulch this year in my "balcony food forest" and would appreciate feedback.

I want this thread to be useful for lots of people, not just for me, so if you have comments that don't apply to my situation but might apply to other people, please go ahead.

I was inspired a few years ago by a video from the UK of someone who planted a food forest with loads of different berries among other things, and used strawberries as a living mulch throughout. That accidentally led them to set up a side business with organic jams. Can't find that video now, but here is a similar one.



My main goal with living mulch is to retain moisture in the soil and protect from the blazing sun. Also, obviously, be nice to the main crop. Strawberries have the advantage of being perennial too, so no need to replant annually. And then there's the "stacking fuctions" bonus too... strawberries! The main crop I care about is tomatoes, and the main problem with tomatoes here is late blight (phytophthora infestans), so air circulation as fungus prevention is key.

My situation: I'm growing in grow bags and small planters on a long, narrow southish-facing urban balcony that gets blazing hot in the summer. I have zero problem with snails and slugs, which is a new situation for me! The soil is bagged stuff I mixed myself. A big problem for me is evaporation. The smallish planters sit directly in the sun and can overheat very quicly if the soil is dry. The big (40L / 10 gal) grow bags are made to allow air permeation which is good to keep the plants from getting root-bound but also allows more evaporation.

One fear: The sun might be too much for the strawberry plants. Though I had some in planters last year and they mostly survived (a few died from rot in rainy periods but it doesn't seem like the sun killed any). We will disappear for a couple of weeks in the summer and someone will come every few days to water plants, but not daily and not thoroughly, just what they're willing to do. Last year it wasn't a disaster.

Any notes from experience on strawberries as living mulch, or any better ideas folks might have, are great. Thank you!

One of the things I love about grape vines is that if I string up a wire in any direction, the vine (sometimes with a little help) will grow reliably along it and will leaf out and produce shade about 20cm/8" either side of the wire. Would passionflowers or hops do some equivalent of that? I've never had either.

Another question I have is about minimal pruning. I'm wondering if I can get away with doing absolutely none. We're now heading into late winter, and there are still some sickly looking green leaves in protected spots, lots of ratty little branchlets... So far I've just been letting nature take its course. The growth tips look pretty fried all around. I don't know if cutting back a bit would actually stimulate growth or if I am just creating busy work for myself. If my objective is leaf coverage and not fruit.

Thanks everyone for your contributions.

Does anyone have pruning or other advice for grape vines being used for shade, rather than for actual grape production? I mean, I don't mind grapes but my key objective is getting dense branching and lots of leaf cover where they grow. I have a couple of vines I planted last year to prune, and maybe 4 more new ones to add for this coming summer.

Background is that I have a long south-facing balcony that gets blazing hot in the summer. Some areas are protected with awnings and some really can't be due to things protruding from the house. I grow loads of things in planters and grow bags on the balcony.

Last year I started my project to get some shade on the walls of the house that are not protected by awnings. My go-to for this purpose is grapes, as they leaf out during the hot weather and lose their leaves, opening up your views again, in the winter.

I had uneven luck with my plants last year. My new Muscatel vines did fine planted in grow bags by themselves. Three others, two local varieties and a supermarket special, which I planted each in a grow bag with a tomato plant, all died. I think that grapes and tomatoes are bad companions.

Any pruning fertilizing etc. advice from folks to maximize leafing and branching rather than the usual goal of maximizing grape production? Any advice on new varieties or types of varieties to get for the new plants?

I got a load of kiwis in the late fall, and prospects to get more, so I decided to ferment some. I read the same thing -- add a grape leaf to keep them "crispier" (maybe not the right adjective for kiwis but I was hoping for them at least to not turn to mush). They were great and you have to eat them fairly quickly.

For future batches, I harvested a bunch of the last nice grape leaves on my vines, stuffed them into a jar, filled the jar to the brim with spring water + 3.5% unrefined sea salt solution, put a little round of "oven paper" (like wax paper without the wax) on top of them, closed the jar, and let them do their thing. They bubbled a little bit for a while and have been just chilling on the shelf ever since, now I'm going on 3 months. I'm happy with the result so far. No blanching necessary. They seem pretty shelf stable for a ferment.

As far as my location, I'm in a windy, dense, small urban location but close to a river, 100m from managed forest, and more forested mountains all around - I probably don't have as many spores in the air as a homesteader in the middle of a natural forest, but I will have a decent number I would imagine.

When unititated guests come over and I want them to try my fermented treasures, I try to skim the mold off the top of everything before they arrive. Gotta be strategic you know.

There are a lot of reasons that reducing or eliminating plastic interests me: health/avoiding ingesting microplastics, environmental/avoiding spreading toxic gick around, history/didn't people manage without this 100 years ago?, and maximizing self-sufficiency just so we don't all become incapable, helpless consumer blobs, like, can't I make some really nice stuff with the natural materials around me?

But the real reason I posted this now is I'm reading a book (Ecology of Fear by Mike Davis) in light of the latest round of fires that swept through Southern California last month. He pointed out (in 1998) how the skyrocketing use of plastic in construction of everthing from houses to apartment buildings to skyscrapers makes them go up in flames much quicker and billow out loads of very toxic smoke. So it was really the fire aspect of toxic gick that motivated my original post.

Which I mention just in case anyone has anything to say about that.

S. Marshall wrote:

Dave de Basque wrote:…

I love these suggestions!  
I didn’t intend to cover those windows but to cut the cattle panels around them. I did assume that wall may be too high for the dry and tough conditions in my climate, but thought VA creeper may work. I love the idea of trying these other plants and did not know about this database!  I will certainly check this out.

An awning would be great for these windows but we get 80+mph gusts and would hate them to rip off. I use exterior sun shades on those which considerably made a difference keeping our home cooler— with the interior cellular shades up it’s even cooler than before we have the exterior shades). The only problem was the wind, so I secured wires to keep it in place.

I love the idea of simply training vines up wires!

Hey S, glad you like the ideas and definitely do check out the PFAF database — it's a gold mine! Those folks put in a lot of work to help people like us with plant varieties.

I think I need to try to explain myself better as far as what I'm envisioning. So first of all, no it's not a "real" awning, it's just leafy vines trained to work like a real awning. I have started to do that on the south-facing wall of my flat which also gets real toasty in the summertime. And where we also get some pretty brutal windstorms a few times a year that send anything that is not weighed down flying and rip any real awnings that anyone left open to shreds. The grape vines last year suffered in the windstorms but survived, so they seem a lot stronger than a "real" awning.

What I would do to build what I'm thinking of is set a series of metal posts in concrete in three rows. One parallel to the SE side of your house and continuing that side towards where you took the second photo from. The height would be the height of the bottom of your roof at that side or a bit lower. The second row of posts would go in the middle of your SW wall, starting from the peak of your roof, and up to the height (or almost) of the peak. The third row would sit on your deck and go up to the height (or almost) of the edge of the roof there, and parallel to the other two rows. Anchored in maybe a concrete block or something and braced maybe against the railing.

So I would run sturdy wires through the tops of the posts, following your roofline, maybe a bit lower than your actual roof. I think you'll need wires about 30cm/1ft max. apart to get good leaf coverage. If you can find a way to get a few cross wires going, especially on the diagonal 45-degree-ish, the way the vine's shoots will be growing, that will enhance coverage.

This will make kind of a "tunnel" of green that will be as if your roof and the sides of your house extended further. How far is up to you. In Denver at the very end of summer (~Sept 20) and at 4pm, the sun will be at 22°, so that is possibly the lowest sun angle you'll want to protect against. Run a line from the lowest place on your building you need shaded, out at 22°, and that should be the end of your "tunnel." To simplify a bit. I don't know if I'm explaining myself so that you can see what I'm seeing, but hopefully.

Run grapes (or whatever vine you settle on) up those wires and sit back and relax. It might take 2 years for them to grow long enough to get full coverage up at the peak. Make sure you get a sturdy vine like a grape that won't collapse back on itself as it grows uphill at the angle of your roof.

This is just my theory by the way, I have not trained grapes to crawl up a bare wire at a steep angle like the angle of your roof, but my instincts say this will work fine, especially if you can get a few crosswires going somehow. I don't want to be on that ladder personally with the terrain you've got, but maybe there's something a bit hillbilly style that you can rig up throwing a spool of thinner wire over the main wires once they're set up... those kind of things are above my pay grade though, it's just an idea.

Emmett Ray wrote:
I lived in a few different places in Europe and absolutely loved it.  The natural beauty and the people were always my favorite things about everywhere I've ever lived.  But, the laws in Europe?  So many of them seem to be ridiculous for the sake of being ridiculous and restricting.  Centuries of structures still stand today that weren't built with a single piece of plastic in them.  How in tarnation did the world survive for thousands of years without current building scams, I mean regulations?!

I hope you'll update us on what you find out.  I'd be interested to know.

Hey Emmett, I wish you the best in your natural building quest! Yes Europe is great on a lot of levels. I even appreciate some of the laws. For instance, I live in a pretty densely populated, mountainous rural area. You look at the surrounding mountains and you see forest. And old stone farmhouses dot the landscape in areas where there was some minimal sunny, arable land. If you want to build a new house in the mountains, the answer is no. Renovate an old farmhouse, OK, clear a new area and build, no. It really keeps urban sprawl down and makes the towns compact and lively.

However, OTOH, yes, Euro bureaucracy on a lot of levels has a very high frustration factor. A lot of what they want to regulate is a good idea on some level, as humans left to our own devices often go wild and rain on everybody else's parade without a second thought, but it's often done in a way that's loaded with Catch-22's, unclear and roundabout procedures, slowwww decisionmaking, and of course the first answer to everything is normally "no." Definitely hostile to innovation and heavily favoring doing the same-old, same-old and going through established channels for everything. Personally, I'll take it though, if it's my tradeoff for a beautiful landscape, towns that are nice, prosperous and interesting, and a cohesive society where people know how to get along with each other.

Matt McSpadden wrote:Maybe, but it would be very hard and very expensive to do.

There are vintage electrical companies that still sell cloth covered wire. You could use metal boxes. I suspect there may be some ceramic outlets available somewhere... though I have not found any for US plugs. Most outlets use plastic now.

I think it would be nearly impossible to create a system of running water in a house that does not use plastic. It is still ok to use copper pipes for the interior. Steel pipes for drains. But you are going to have a very limited selection for faucets and fixtures... almost all use plastic. The biggest issue is in the well. It would be nearly impossible to get a non-plastic pipe down a deep well. And most well pumps probably contain plastic as well. (and I'm not sure cloth covered wires would stand up to sitting in water to run the pump). If you had a shallow hand pump well... perhaps. But the pressure tank uses plastic... and without it, you would need to setup some sort of gravity feed system for running water. And most of those tanks are plastic. Maybe with the right shallow water hand pump, metal tank, with gravity feed through copper pipes and industrial faucets... maybe?

I don't like plastic, and I seek to reduce the usage where I can. But it often means I have to do things differently than I am used to.

Thanks Matt for the thoughtful reply. So, in minimizing plastic but working in the real world, not getting too wildly impractical, in what areas do you really think that eliminating plastic altogether is impossible or super-impractical? I'm just wondering what you yourself would advise to a friend or client.

Just wondering, in places that have the usual "modern" building codes, if it's possible to build to code plastic free, for all the reasons a person might want to do that.

I'm mainly thinking of electrical wiring and pipes. Is there any such thing anymore as electrical wires coated in anything but plastic?

And as far as pipes, I have heard locally (though I don't follow these things closely) that for a lot of uses here, in the code, copper and other metal piping is no longer acceptable and plastic is mandatory.

Can anyone educate me? I realize building codes vary hugely from location to location, but anywhere in the highly regulated consumerist world will do. I just want to hear what's possible in this respect.

I look at the picture of your SW wall and my inner idealist immediately envisions really wide awnings rather than a "wall" of green that would block your view. I'm thinking of kind of a peaked trellis on stilts essentially. Supported from your deck on the one side (and a planter or grow bags there) and anchored in the ground on the high side. Separate from the house but braced to it at a few points. As wide as you can afford, but damn, if I could just run sturdy steel wires or cables over/through a few posts, I would do that. A strong leafy climber might be able to just work its way along and maybe make crosswise lines unnecessary, or maybe it would be successful with very few.

As far as the plants to go on it, I would definitely consult the Plants for a Future database, where you can search by the characteristics you need, (Zone 4, climber, dry soil, etc.). For shade, I'm always looking to grapes or grape-like vines. They grow fast, make great shade, and shed their leaves in the winter. The vines are vigorous and sturdy and will grow along a single wire. Some are quite hardy, and they love dry conditions. I'm not interested at all for this application in them producing actual grapes, I just want them for their big shady leaves.

I searched on PFAF for fun. In the "Search by use and properties" section, I went down to "Habit" (=growth habit) and checked Perennial, Climber, and Perennial Climber; then in "Hardiness USDA" I clicked zones 1, 2, 3, 4; in "Growth rate" I chose Fast; in "Shade" I chose None (meaning it grows in full sun); in "Moisture" I chose Dry Soil — and then I clicked Search. This netted a list of maybe 50 plants, including 5 grape varieties, so I bet you can find something that works for you and is not invasive, won't root into your house, etc.

Just a thought... might turn out cheaper too...

Despite what I said above about our local sheep breed's seemingly indestructible hair, Geoff Lawton on the other hand used to say that a well made hot compost pile takes care of everything. In fact, he recommended putting some kind of a dead animal (roadkill, a rat you caught, butchering waste...) right in the center of your compost pile in order to jump start the composting process. He said that you will find no sign of it at all (no hair, no bones, no nothing) once the composting is finished. And that there's nothing better to accelerate the composting process.

In the absence of a carcass, I suppose you could use a pile of comfrey leaves or some other notorious composting accelerator there in the middle of the pile.

Anyway, if you want the hair visibly gone but want to use its minerals as garden input, maybe it's worth a try to put it there in the middle of a hot compost pile on top of an animal carcass and see what happens. I haven't had occasion to try this yet, "your mileage may differ."

Funny aside, Bill Mollison famously asked to be composted when he died (semi-jokingly). I don't know how serious he was or whether that's what actually happened, but it was a humorous and interesting suggestion at least... RIP Bill.

Hmmm... 3 inches... I keep thinking what with being raised it must be a cooling rack for something baked, I just can't think of anything so long and skinny... Maybe mini baguettes? Ha, ha, this looks like it's from an era when French bread was not a thing.

How about crackers, baked in sheets and stacked vertically to cool?

Ooh, and off on another tangent, just thinking of stacking vertically, how about a dish drying rack? Or maybe not even drying, maybe a vertical plate organizer or display gizmo?

Edit: should have looked at the picture again before I said this, bars are running in the wrong direction... so I'm back to cooling crackers!

To me, especially with its little feet to raise it off the counter, it looks obviously like a bread cooling rack for someone who habitually baked four loaves at a time in smallish equal-sized molds. What are the dimensions of one "slot"? Does that make any sense? That's what I thought of instantly.

Hi Thelka, I really liked your post. On most occasions, I've stored tomatoes just like you said and had similar results. I stored less, so I used them up before we got to February but I do remember a year when a good number lasted through January. Like you, several varieties involved and they all stored OK. And the disappointing taste like a grocery store tomato, but heck, in winter you can't complain. One year I was desperate to make green tomato relish as I have many years and they kept ripening too fast for me to get a decent sized batch in... I guess worse things could happen to you!

Jack Edmondson wrote:
Here is some information on using a simple bunyip.  These home made devices can find level from one room to another around corners and up and down stairs, as water seeks its own level.  One just has to take a minute or two to calibrate them.

Thanks, Jack, for your post and for digging up this video. It's "Bunyip," not "Bunyan" as I said from my scratchy memory above. And marking it in the way shown in your video is great and makes your Bunyip level useful in multiple projects over time.

I think contour maps and staking things out on the ground serve different purposes and it's best to let each do its work independently.

Contour maps are good for laying things out, making a design (at your desk) of a property you may not know very well, or understanding more clearly what's going on at and around a property you are familiar with. And you can pencil out some ideas that later inform how you look at the property when you visit. Being super-precise is not usually what you're after, though I absolutely love 0.25m contour lines, I find it gives me an almost spiritual connection with the land.

Of course, garbage in, garbage out, you need really good survey/LIDAR data to generate 1-foot contours. You don't say where in Spain you are, but you may have really good aerial survey data done by your Autonomous Community. Here in the Basque Country we have 1-meter-resolution LIDAR surveys of the whole country, every inch. That's great to work with and you can generate fairly accurate 0.25m contour lines from that. Or very accurate 1m contours. I don't know if you use map-making software at all, QGIS for instance is free but the learning curve can be steep.

Google Maps and Google Earth generally suck for planning anything at the level of an individual property. Sometimes you get contour lines running perpindicular to actual contour in spots if you zoom in at a particular place. I would look for LIDAR data or do a drone survey.

Staking things out on the ground I would only do in the spots where I intend to build something dead level -- a swale, a house pad, a body of water, a section of path or road... I would not waste time trying to get any of this to line up with a line on the map unless there was a good reason to. The map is much less accurate than what you do on the ground.

A nice low-tech tool for running out contours on the ground is the water level, I think the Australians call it a Bunyan level. You need a couple of identical 1.5- or 2-m sticks, a few meters of transparent tubing, water or tea, some zip ties, a ruler, a permanent marker, and a companion. Run each end of the tubing along a stick and zip tie it in place firmly but without blocking off flow inside the tube, don't put a zip tie right at the bottom. You want a length of tubing between the sticks that corresponds to how you are going to flag out the contour line - 1m, 2m, 3m, 5m..., your choice depending on the complexity of the terrain and your needs. Stand the sticks-with-tube up next to each other on a level surface. Fill the tube with water (or tea for visibility) up to about eye level on the sticks. Mark the water level (which will of course be identical) with the marker on each end of the tube. So now you can run out a contour line on the land. Set a stick on the ground and put a flag (thin metal stick with a colo(u)red flag on the end) in right there. Your companion goes out with the other stick (without spilling any water of course), and finds the place where the water goes exactly up to the marked line when she sets the stick on the ground like you. That is level. She puts a flag in the ground to mark the spot, and then you take your stick ahead of her to mark the next spot. And so on until you're done.

The water level also works to stake out something you're going to build with a certain fall, say a drainage ditch that you want to lose -1.5m evelation over 100m run. So every 2 meters it will lose 3 cm. In that case you make three marks on each side of the tube, one where the water is level, and the other two 1.5 cm higher and lower than that on the tube (so exactly 3 cm between the top and bottom marks). So you set the first stick and flag it, companion moves with the other stick out 2m and slightly down to the place where the water reaches the top mark. And for the first person the water level will have descended to the bottom mark. That's the 3cm-difference you want. Flag and then repeat as in the other example.

I love stuff like that, but of course you can be "modern" and get a laser level or a transit level or whatever you want, ha, ha...

Does any of this help?

If you've built raised beds and put soil in there that's been moved, and even mixed in some peat, then the soil should be loose enough for a carrot to get through. Carrots don't like root disturbance, so avoid working right near the roots. Don't fertilize your carrots, that makes them grow more greens than carrot. If the tops aren't growing for a bit but the roots are (the carrots) that could actually be a great success, you might be doing just fine. I gauge root diameter occasionally by sticking a pinkie in the soil on either side and seeing how thick it is. If that's moving forward, you're doing great. Also don't forget to thin them out, make sure there's only one carrot root growing at each location.

UPDATE: I made my kefir and my yogurt in the dehydrator set to a bit above body temperature, 10 hours. I used the lid on both jars but I kept the kefir jar lid very loose to permit off-gassing. The starters were in each case, about 1/6 of and old Lambert's probiotic capsule plus: a big heaping tablespoon of the last batch of yogurt, in the case of the yogurt, and a big heaping tablespoon of store-bought semi-hippy plain kefir in the case of the kefir. And the UHT cow's milk close to its expiration date.

RESULT: The kefir was perfect for what I wanted, solid like yogurt. The actual yogurt was actually a bit more liquidy at the top until I refrigerated it, and later the top 1cm or so was kind of curds-and-whey-y -- this has happened on previous batches, and it seems like a minor flaw, it's fine. In both cases creamy and absolutely delicious.

ANALYSIS: I may have just made yogurt out of the kefir culture, who knows. That tiny bit of a very old probiotic capsule may have been so peppy that it took over and outcompeted the kefir cultures present in the store-bought kefir. Or maybe, as S Bengi wrote above, my store-bought kefir was over-pasteurized and didn't have very strong, live cultures. (On the label, ingredients are pasteurized milk + fermenting cultures, leading me to think the cultures themselves weren't ever pasteurized though, so maybe this is not the explanation.) Or maybe I just discovered the perfect recipe, at least for me, because the result (at least in flavor and texture, microorganisms present are more of a mystery) was exactly what I was looking for -- solid yet creamy, and not too sour.

PROBIOTIC CAPSULE: I'm attributing my good results (better than what I read about on blogs) to the only thing I'm doing differently, adding a tiny bit of the powder from inside these old capsules I keep in the fridge. Just for science, I'll say what species it says it provides: Bifidobacterium bifidus, Lactobacillus acidophilus, Streptococcus thermophilus, Lactobacillus delbrueckii. Seems to solidify and makes creamier than I expected in every case.

CONCLUSION: I'm pleased as punch with the results and will do this again. I have two brands of goat's milk kefir I may try as a starter in the future, one of them definitely has active cultures because the lids start to bulge out and gas escapes when I open them. Too bad I can't locate fresh goat's milk at the moment. Season for fresh sheep's milk has just ended, so will try that next year. I may try proper kefir grains if I can find them in Europe. If I find raw cow's milk in the end, I will try with that too. Maybe I will remember to report back here, I hope so!

Cristobal Cristo wrote:With pasteurized milk yogurt or kefir I use the previous batch no more than 2 times, because some unwanted bacteria gets to the culture. Sour milk has this advantage that you just need one ingredient, no heat and nothing good gets destroyed by cooking. The good bacteria will quickly suppress any bad one - like in pickles or sauerkraut.

Hi Cristobal, I don't have any experience with sour milk at all. Could you tell me about the flavor and texture compared to yogurt and kefir? And how the beneficial microorganisms compare? (if you know). Why do you like having sour milk instead of other things?

Abraham Palma wrote:Hello, Dave.

I can talk about my kefir culture. I've tried several things. Since I don't want the kefir fatigue syndrome (that's when your body tells you have drink too much kefir this month!), I tried to make it always in the fridge. However, the taste wasn't great.

Apparently, the microbes need room temperatures for doing their work properly. We can preserve it in the fridge, and if the fridge is not too cold, it will continue the fermentation process, just not the best lactic process you would expect, but the one that leads to cheese smells.
Whenever I've ruined a batch by letting it sit in the counter for too long, I've made labneh instead. That's the same as making cream cheese, but using kefir. The cream cheese is good for toasts, and it can be used in cheese cake recipes. You can let it mature if you like strong flavours.

But for now, I'm doing this:
- Leave the jar with the grains and fresh milk in the counter. I check it at every meal. If it is still liquid, I let it be. If it has solidified, I whiskle it with a spoon and taste it. Normally, the first time the flavour is still bland, if you like it this way, skip to the next step. The second time it solidifies, the taste is good, acidic like a real yoghurt without any animal smells. The speed of the process depends very much on the room temperature. These days it's ready in about 24 hours.
- Once the kéfir is good for drinking, I add some sugar, and with the help of a colander, I pour the creamy kéfir in cups. The cups have a lid. I store them in the fridge, they are good to drink for at least a couple of days.
- While the grains are still in the colander, I clean the bottle only with water, and also the grains. This prevents any cheese ferment to be passed to the next batch, though it is not required.
- I put the grains again in the jar and fill it with whole milk. The jar can be stored up to 5 days in the fridge. Once we have eaten the kéfir in the cups, I take the bottle to the counter to let it develop its flavour.


It looks like too much work, but it isn't. Checking the kéfir is just a few seconds. Pouring the kefir into cups and readying a new jar is just 6 minutes.
My family is enjoying the homemade kefir, and they are actually asking when we can have the next one! Twice a week seems to be golden for us.

Oh, and I believe that the culture we keep at home has evolved to fit our tastes too. After a few years it has changed its flavour to something we like more. Could it be using microbes from our bodies?

Hi Abraham. Nice to hear from you since you're in Spain. Where do you get kefir grains? Thanks for all this information on your process!

S Bengi wrote:If your store bought kefir has active cultures that haven't been killed due to pasteurization then what you are making in the kefir jar will be as good as the store bought one. So keep on doing what you are doing. It's possible that your store bought kefir only has 6 different species of microbes vs the official 36+ that kefir grains have. But that's okay its still a step in the right direction. Just keep on doing what you are doing.

Great! Thanks for the advice. Any suggestions for making it less tangy and on the thicker side? I guess less tangy comes from less time fermenting, but what controls how thick or thin it is? I'm really looking for yogurt with more beneficial microorganisms, I want something to spoon rather than to drink.

Cristobal Cristo wrote:Hi Dave,

Too bad it is not a normal milk - raw. You would leave it in the room temperature and make sour milk - my favorite.
If it was already cooked, I would turn into yogurt.

I am working on getting a "secret" local source of raw milk. If I do, do you think I can make kefir from a previous batch of kefir, without ever purchasing kefir grains? (Not that I have anything against them and they won't break the bank, it just seems unnecessary, and they're hard to track down around here.) Also, do you use your sour milk to make kefir? Or do you consider it your version of kefir?

A friend of mine here is a big fan of a fairly local dairy for their sustainability practices among many other things. He spoke so glowingly that I went and bought a case (6 liters) of UHT cow's milk. Even though we very rarely use cow's milk products. And there it sat, because we couldn't think of anything to do with it. The "best by" date was coming up.

Meanwhile, we have been spending a lot of money on hippie goat's and sheep's milk yogurt and kefir and I am looking to economize. And another friend makes her own yogurt at home (from cow's milk, in a yogurt maker) and occasionally gives me some, and it's pretty darn good. So I thought I've gotta figure something out here, and no way am I buying another consumer appliance to make yogurt. But we do have an electric dehydrator and I thought I'd give that a whirl. I had some ooooold probiotic capsules in the fridge which I keep for tummy emergencies, and I opened up a capsule and mixed in a tiny amount, as well as a big spoonful of plain store-bought yogurt as the starter. And presto, it worked great, even with UHT milk, which a few bloggers told me it shouldn't.

So I thought I would try my hand at kefir and see if that works too. I followed the same procedure as above, substituting store-bought plain kefir for yogurt, also with a little shot of probiotics. I've got one jar of kefir and one of yogurt both sitting in the dehydrator at body temperature for 10 hours.

Any idea what's going to come out? It seems like I'm violating all the modern consumer kefir rules by not buying any special kefir grains or anything. And I don't really know if this time and temperature are right either. Just looking for advice from any old kefir hands out there as I've never made it before.

Wow, Anne, thank you! Just watching the first of the above videos, I got intrigued with what they're doing and hopped onto their YouTube channel. They followed up this short with a long report, bokashi section starts at 3:47:



The long and short of it is that pretty much exactly what Angelika was originally proposing above worked really well for them! I'm excited and am already thinking about our version of this project! Thanks everyone!!

Angelika Maier wrote:We have a piece of land which is heavy, poor, no drainage clay soil with some sand. We are weighing various plans to improve the soil. We already do plant nurse trees, mulch and the usual things.
How about a bigger bokashi? I watched some videos were people do bokashi in silage plastic.
We could pick up restaurant waste to feed it.
Does anyone have experience in what's happening if bokashi is dug into clay soil?
Some people say it's good in a worm farm others say it isn't.
I understand that bokashi is not compost and not a finished product.
Any input?

Our community garden is about to test the bokashi + worm farm system, stay tuned. I think about 15 families will participate.

From what I understand, worms don't like fresh bokashi too much, it's too acidic for them. Some say just wait three days and they'll move on in. We are going to experiment with mixing in various things to make it easier for them: slaked lime to raise the pH and provide calcium, biochar, maybe sawdust, grass clippings and fallen leaves when we can get them, and as much garden waste from undiseased plants as we can.

We are curious to find out if diseased plants (tomatoes with late blight, curcubits with powdery mildew) and troublesome weeds (we have problems with bindweed/morning glory and oxalis/wood sorrell) will become totally inocuous if passed through our bokashi system. That would be awfully nice. And in that case, we might be daring and try to imitate your large-scale system and process all the garden waste for the community garden, which is probably on the order of 6m3 or so annually.

I'm afraid I don't know a thing about silage plastic. Yet. I too have had a hard time finding information on large-scale bokashi systems. Maybe it's down to you and us to innovate the system! But honestly, anything that can exclude air decently should work just fine. The only confounding factor might be allowing the liquid to escape. Poking holes in the bottom would turn it into single-use plastic, so yecch. Maybe long-term some sort of airtight tarp with a row of grommets down the middle or some such thing would be the ticket, maybe a camping tarp or two tied together with plastic over the top once finished would work.  

I've read a lot about bokashi, and I haven't ever read of anyone reporting a negative experience about digging it into any particular type of soil. Might need a good muck layer underneath on very sandy soil, but I think in clay it should be ideal. I'd almost swear I've read about various positive experiences of digging bokashi into clay.

One last thing: if your soil drains poorly, is there any chance you've got a hardpan layer underneath that needs breaking up?

Don't forget supermarkets when scavenging for waste, they probably throw out more than restaurants. In our area, they're pretty thoroughly scavenged already, but just in case...

Same deal, I'm hoping for a (low-effort, free?) recording since this is in the wee hours of the morning for me. I love Elaine but I'm not in a position to kick in additional coin at the moment...

Hey Ludie, my memory was you planted more than one variety of lemon... Did your other ones besides the Meyer survive? I had heard that Meyers were particularly sensitive to cold. Just wondering if your great water wall did any good, what do you think?

Well, just to update... SUCCESS!! It looks like the "visualizing success" worked... Kickstarter has confirmed they got my money, so, hopeful message to fellow Euro types... it might just work, go for it!

klara stinders 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.

Hi Dave!
I am a fellow Euro-permie and I remembered reading your message a few weeks ago.
Did your payment go through this time?

With this Kickstarter, I am in trouble too (the previous 2 I backed went smoothly).
Yesterday, I got an e-mail from Kickstarter saying 'Oh no! Your pledge was declined by the card provider.'
Reason: Your card does not support this type of purchase.
Tried to fix on the Kickstarter website itself. Alas, it didn't help.
Reason: The card has been declined for an unknown reason.

I contacted my bank peoples, hopefully they have some grey matter to figure it out within 6 days!

Hopefully you had no problems this time!

I'm hopeful because I haven't had any strange messages from Kickstarter or the bank yet, I'll cross my fingers.

Last time I called the online bank, went into my branch, contacted Kickstarter, everything... but no dice. Kickstarter knows about the Euro payment gateway and supposedly their card-charging service (Stripe?) supports it, but for some reason, the required payment gateway never kicks in for me from the Kickstarter site. This time, no weird messages yet -- what is it I'm supposed to be doing, oh yeah, I'm visualizing success.

I wish I could tell you I did anything differently this time, but I didn't that I know of -- seems down to luck. Or maybe all the crying I did last time got through and someone flipped the appropriate switch. Who knows? Good luck next time!

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!