Larisa Walk

Corn cobs, including those with modly kernels, make great kindling if you heat with wood. This year we're going to experiment with using the clean cobs to grind up and turn into mushroom substrate.

It looks like some of the colored cobs have some dent genetics but the white corn maybe flour? Orange cobs look like our polenta flint.

I've gotten too lazy to make tortillas from our flint polenta corn. I just cook it into hominy and use it whole with beans and salsa and chopped greens to make a deconstructed bean tortilla. It tastes the same flavor-wise with lots less effort. BTW, I've also nixtamalized popcorn and sorghum as well as flour and dent corns and made decent tortillas from all of them. They're just different flavors and textures, but all quite tasty.

If birds are showing interest in the amaranth (and not just bugs that may be on the heads), the grain may be mature and ready to harvest, long before the seed heads have dried down. If you can rub seed out into your palm the heads can be cut, placed into a tub or onto a sheet, and carried into a protected space free of birds and rodents to finish drying down. It helps to pull off any leaves and really big heads can be trimmed down to individual branches. You'll need to dry the heads on sheets or cardboard as screens will let seed sift through. Having several screens hanging above a sheet is the best option as that way you'll maximize airflow while having the sheet to catch seeds. We've been growing and eating grain amaranth for nearly 40 years using this method.

The Grolsch type bottles can be used to preserve any high acid fruit juices from apple to tomato, etc. Set the bottle in a bowl, fill the bottle with boiling hot juice all the way to the top until it starts to overflow (this is why you want a bowl underneath), then put the top on and seal by pressing the wire bail into place. You're all done - no further canning required. We don't sterilize the bottles but they are clean inside and out. We've been using this method for over 35 years.

I think you should isolate Choo-choo, preferably in a dark place with limited hours of daylight so she will stop laying eggs.  If the tissue protrudes again, place Choo-choo on her back on your lap, head down between your knees and vent facing you. This helps the vent to retract back into position. If it comes back out once she is upright, you can do a support with vet tape, around her bum and forward, around her wings, and connect the 2 ends together on her back (a diaper pin will help keep the vet tape ends together).  You'll need to check/replace this support a couple of times a day to keep the area clean. Make sure she's getting plenty of calcium. It takes about a week of this treatment for the prolapse to resolve. I had this happen to a hen a few years ago and she recovered and went back to egg laying later in the summer. The next year she had it happen again but the second time she died from an infection (you could see that the tissue was turning black). Good luck with your hen.

We do the wood mallet in a cast iron pan method. We use a "bumper" made from the gaskets on the end of water filter cartridges. We glued 2 of these together to get the thickness we wanted. If you have bigger hazelnuts, you could try a stack of 3 of these gaskets. Here's a link to an old video I did using this method. We have switched to using a cast iron skillet to contain the nuts, and only use 1 "bumper" at a time as it's faster. The nuts come out mostly whole or halved, with a few getting broken into smaller pieces.

Purple Loosestrife gave me a medium gray many years ago. My favorite memory of that experience was taking a feed bag to the local park/lake and cutting big bunches of the flowering tops and stuffing them into the sack. I sure did get a LOT of looks from people wondering what in the world I was doing ;>).

In our experience the best method for eliminating window condensation in the winter is exterior shutters. The next best method is bubblewrap installed on the glass on the interior surface. The glass only needs to be misted with water for the bubble wrap to adhere. We use the bubble wrap on windows that have exterior shutters so that during the day when the shutters are open to allow sunlight in we still have some extra insulation on the glass. If you can get it the bubblewrap that has extra large bubbles (1") works best. In the spring you can peel them off the glass very easily and roll them up to store until next winter.

Mike Haasl wrote:Congratulations on your retirement Larisa!  Since I presume you aren't selling screen any more, might I ask...  Where did you source your stainless steel screen and what size mesh did you use?

Not fully retired - yet. Just scaling back a bit. We still have screen for sale until we run out. Then we may or may not restock. We've been getting 4'x100' rolls of the screen from Edward J. Darby & Son. It's 12x12 mesh and .018 dia. T304 wire. I have contact info for them if you're interested.

Laura Kelly wrote:

Larisa Walk wrote:Our dryer design has worked in the humid midwest for over 35 years. You can read all about it at http://geopathfinder.com/Solar-Food-Drying.html

Larisa, do you still have a URL with your design? I have constructed a version based on your description, but would love to view a web page, and this geopathfinder.com link is coming up as a "page not found"

We've "retired" somewhat and are no longer keeping our website up and running. But you can get to the archive from this link https://web.archive.org/web/20220330013825/http://geopathfinder.com/Solar-Food-Drying.html.