Matthew Nistico

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm unfamiliar with your "drainage mat" product.  Could you give a nutshell description of how it works?

I too have some of these garleek seeds from Row 7.  I can imagine well how to handle them - like any other leek - as part of my annual plantings.  But for integration into a perennial garden...

If a few were left undisturbed all season, how well would they self seed?

Ryan Burkitt wrote:For anyone that has built or owned a natural building. Is there a way to cool a natural building without electricity?

I have built a natural building. To summarize the many prior posts, yes, there are multiple ways to cool a natural building without electricity.

Some excellent methods discussed include using the thermal inertia of the earth.  First, earth tubes: buried ventilation pipes that draw into the structure air cooled and dehumidified by ambient subterranean temperatures.  Second, building an earth-integrated structure, such as an underground building or an earth-berm building, to tap into those ambient temperatures through direct contact rather than convection.

A less extreme but still effective version of the same concept is to build a non-earth-integrated building with enormous mass in the walls, so that they possess their own thermal inertia.  Examples would include a monolithic cob structure, or possibly earth bag or adobe brick structures if the walls are exceptionally thick.

The problem is that all these techniques could potentially work for new construction, but if you are talking about an existing, conventional, above-ground structure - the OP didn't specify - then they are out of the question.  None can be retrofit.

Actually, it might be possible to add earth tubes after the fact, but it wouldn't be easy, and I don't immediately see how it would work without incorporating electric fans.

My own experience is with a non-earth-integrated natural building: a fairly conventional, above-ground structure integrating some natural/alternative materials into a passive-solar design.  You will find a subtle bias in the literature to discuss passive-solar architecture in terms of heating a building.  But it can be just as effective at cooling a building.

In a very brief nutshell, passive-solar architecture works like this: design your structure around a large thermal mass exposed to the interior space; wrap around that mass a building envelope as highly insulated as is practical to construct; orient the whole structure according to (or very close to) the cardinal directions; and then carefully position and size the windows, doors, and roof overhangs so to control the ingress of direct sunlight into the building.  There can be additional subtleties to it - optimizing indirect daylighting, accounting for local conditions like prevailing winds, incorporating exterior plantings and landscaping, choosing appropriate types of window glass - but I've just summarize the core principals in one paragraph.  And depending on one's design choices, it is possible to achieve good passive-solar results without adding $1 to your design.  Except for the cost of "extra" insulation and roof overhangs, but the general architectural advantages of these features should be self-evident to a smart designer in any case.

During the winter, your interior thermal mass is flooded with direct sunlight and naturally warmed, in turn warming your rooms and occupants.  During the summer, it is kept (nearly) completely shaded and absorbs no additional heat except for ambient room temperature.  In the evening, as soon as the temperature outside drops below the temperature inside, you open up windows to let the cooler air in.  This can be improved using exhaust fans, but they are not necessary (since we are aiming for "without electricity").  A good design includes high and low windows - possibly including a clerestory or a steeple - to create a passive thermosyphon that draws in cooler air all night.  In the morning the windows are closed again, and the thermal mass retains the cooler nighttime temperature into the day, in turn cooling rooms and occupants.  An unused rocket mass heater can be well integrated into this summertime system.

According to the books, a thoroughly designed passive-solar building has 1/3 less need for climate control.  Will this keep you cool in the Sahara?  By itself, it would keep you cooler, but probably not cool enough.  It would be a good start, but there are other traditional architectural techniques designed for cooling in a desert climate.  I find it is very adequate (together with minimal electricity invested in ceiling fans) in South Carolina.

But can you retrofit any passive-solar benefits into an existing structure?  Not easily, but it could be done.

To start, you need interior thermal mass.  This could be achieved by adding a trombe wall in a good spot, if you can make the room for it and if the existing floor can support the weight.  This is a massive interior wall, often a half-height wall, typically made of compressed earth or masonry +/- 1 foot thick.  Water is also an excellent thermal mass.  Adding an interior pool would work, but is probably impractical for anything but the most extreme retrofit.  A "trombe wall" made by permanently lining up very large water vessels is a possibility.  If your structure is built atop a monolithic concrete slab foundation, this will be the easiest way to gain your thermal mass, because it is already there.  Tear up any carpet and foam and subfloor - think of these as insulation separating your thermal mass from the interior space - then refinish the slab by staining and sealing it as a finished floor, or by covering it directly with non-insulating material like ceramic tile.  And remember what I said above about a rocket mass heater.

Now that you have some mass, you need to control its exposure to direct sunlight.  This is why passive-solar design orients the building North/South/East/West, because then it is very easy to choose on which walls to locate and how to size your windows and doors.  The goal is to have minimal openings facing East and West, or none at all, where it is impossible to control sun exposure during sunrise and sunset; modest openings to the North, which are essentially holes in your insulated building envelope, but also can provide desirable indirect lighting (and sometimes code-mandated emergency egress); and large openings to the South, to let direct winter light flood your interior mass.  Your roof overhangs and possibly additional plantings will keep summer light out.  Note that South-facing windows can be too large, also.  There is a science to optimizing these openings relative to your thermal mass and climate, which I won't go into here.

Existing conventional construction would have been oriented to face the street, which means for our purposes that the building orientation will be totally random, and no thought will have been put into location or size of windows and doors.  Do your best to add exterior awnings and/or perhaps plantings to come as close as possible to the ideals outlined above.  If you can't do that, interior blackout curtains would be the next best thing for some windows, if you can live with them.  Because any of these solutions will be jerry-rigged onto a less-than-ideal building plan, it may be necessary to manually raise, lower, open, close, install, or remove some of these throughout the day or the year in order serve our passive-solar goals without completely shutting out light or views.

Finally, you are ready to consider ventilation.  If you don't have high-level windows or vents to open to create a thermosyphon, or you can't install some, you must rely on cross ventilation from ground-level windows and screen doors.  With double-hung windows, this can sometimes be less effective than the books would have you believe.  Casement windows are better.  If you find that natural cross ventilation isn't sufficient at night, you might have to bite the bullet and burn a little electricity to run some fans.  Adding a whole-house exhaust fan is still a cost-effective investment compared to air conditioning.

To address the OP's original question - are weeds good or bad; to pull or not to pull? - I have an alternate point of view that I don't believe anyone has expressed yet.  I propose that the OP's dilemma actually begs a different question: is your garden designed according to good permaculture principals if you have so many weeds in the first place?

To be sure, a few weeds here and there are inevitable, regardless of your design.  Who cares?  Pull them, or not, as you like.  But if you have weeds that are engulfing, overtopping, overcrowding, or otherwise posing an existential threat to your crop, seems to me that something is fundamentally wrong.  Perhaps your crop is just weak?  If so, why?  Maybe your transplants or seedlings got off to a rough start?  Could you be planting the wrong things in the wrong place?  Does your garden have good soil and appropriate light exposure?

Any of these questions could reveal circumstances that might favor weeds over your crop.  But the weeds in this scenario are the symptom.  I am suggesting that we address the underlying problem rather than worry overly much about the symptom.

First off, some disclaimers...  I totally acknowledge that, as with everything, it all depends because there are many styles of gardening we could be talking about and many different objectives the gardener could be aiming for.  We could be talking about a patio garden, a kitchen garden, a food forest, or a field of row crops.  One garden might be optimized for minimal time commitment, another optimized for minimal inputs, yet another optimized for profit.  Then again, one might argue that good permaculture principals can be applied to all cases, just in different ways to different degrees.  For now, let's not wade into that argument.

Further, I of course admit that the best design can be hindered, if not outright undone, by poor implementation.  In fact, I more than acknowledge this; I personify it.  I fancy myself a half-way talented permaculture designer, and I am in fact PDC certified.  Yet some of my results in practice have been pathetic, usually because I make dumb mistakes, often born out of a lack of time and labor to dedicate to my projects.  Transplanting trees that die or languish because I failed to water them sufficiently during establishment; letting valued plantings languish and die because everything else grows too tall and thick and I'm years overdue in chopping it back; etc.  I have 20'-tall weed trees in my food forest.  Need I say more?

Sometimes, I have also seen poor results for reasons that I cannot easily explain.  Fruit trees that grow strong and healthy, yet have not born a crop after 10 years.  Why not?  Whatever, I soldier on, keep trying, keep replanting.

But having given my disclaimers, here is my point: a good permaculture design should account for weeds in the first place, and not just through endless hours of weeding or hoeing.  This could be in one of four ways (probably more, but four that I can think of right now).  Or, perhaps in several of these four ways at once.

1) This is the simplest, which I can express in one word: mulch!  As some have pointed out above, weeds are born of bare soil.  That is where the seed bank lies.  Nature abhors bare soil.  We permies emulate nature.  So, let your mulch be thick and rich!  This will not eliminate weeds, but it should give you a good head start against them.  This will be more difficult if you are direct-seeding annuals, but it can still be done with a little patience and care.

2) Not all mulches are brown.  Design your polyculture with multiple layers.  One of these should be a groundcover, which some also call a living mulch.  This makes just as much sense in your kitchen garden as in your food forest: let those squash and sweet potato vines loose underneath your okra and tomatoes!  Take the space your weeds would otherwise occupy and fill that space with an appropriate and desired planting.  Several posters above argued that weeds are good because they add diversity and biomass to your soil food web.  Excellent and very true.  I currently let weeds occupy several of the layers in my food forest.  But if you can do the same thing with a variety of different crop species at different levels, then you can enjoy the same results without using the dreaded word "weed."

If your garden design involves large scale row crops and a tractor, will you be able to implement this same technique, or will you crush your groundcover crops under your tires?  Perhaps you can, with a little creativity and likely a little compromise.  But it won't be nearly as easy as if you were gardening on foot.  I face this same difficulty even in a small scale kitchen garden.  Gardening from a wheelchair, I am become the vehicle.  It makes many common permaculture techniques difficult.

3) Fight weeds with weeds.  I love my spinach and lettuce and tomatoes and such, but studying permaculture has also opened my eyes to the value of atypical crops.  Select among your crop species ones that are vigorous and thick growing and self-seeding - i.e. ones that "grow like a weed"; some above have mentioned lambs quarters - and use your "weed crop" to suppress other weeds.

At least in parts of the garden.  Got to have at least a few tomatoes!

4) Okay, this one's a little bit of a cheat, but...  Make peace with your spontaneous weeds by mentally redefining them as another form of crop.  Now we are circling back to the ideas that others above have already discussed, which don't reduce weeding so much as put the weeds you remove to productive use.  This could be more laborious, depending on your setup and your preferred approach.  If you count on repurposing your volunteer biomass to productive use in your garden design from the get go, then it is a now harvest.  And if you're harvesting it, is it really still a "weed"?  You could do this by composting your weeds, making weed tea for fertilizer, or feeding your animals with them.  If you can find a way to let your animals graze your weeds in place without excessive damage to your main crops, then it is really a win-win!

A part of this thread has diverged from the original question - are weeds good or bad? - to address instead what is the best way to recycle weeds once you have pulled them or cut off their tops: Chop & Drop vs Compost.

Several have argued that a compost pile is a more efficient way to recycle your vegetative nutrients, since mulching with your weeds - i.e. chop & drop - allows much more of the nutrients to off gas than occurs inside a compost pile, particularly nitrogen.  My understanding is that this is accurate.

However, I don't necessarily conclude that composting is therefore the preferred method.  I would say, it depends on your circumstances and preferences.  Composting is more efficient in terms of nutrients, but chop & drop is more efficient in terms of time and effort.

I would also point out that there is a middle path.  Ruth Stout-style gardening seems to me to combine the attributes of both composting and chop & drop.

So, I would tentatively propose that this is then actually the optimal process.  And sometimes, I do so.  But most of the time I am lazy and hurried, so I revert to chop & drop.

Denise Cares wrote:

Joseph Lofthouse wrote:In one of my fields, purslane is a tremendous problem. In every other field, if I see a purslane plant, I pull it up, and hike to the nearest paved roadway, and deposit the plant onto the hot asphalt: To be scorched, and squished. I don't care about the lost nutrients. Seems like a good trade-off.

Too sad Joseph. Purslane is very nutritious. It can be dried and used in powdered form many ways. It will not grow back as readily once pulled - in my experience at least - but I don't know why. I've tried spreading the seeds but they didn't grow either. I've read it's a bi-annual plant. It is frost sensitive. Maybe nature is offering you the opportunity to harvest it and use it or to share it with those who might gain health benefit from it.  I'm thinking of  our fine brother Paul W. here...
https://www.webmd.com/diet/health-benefits-purslane
https://www.earth.com/earthpedia-articles/10-surprising-purslane-benefits/
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/purslane

I second Denise's motion.  If I found my field overwhelmed with purslane, I might start by pulling the purslane as Joseph does. But noting that this field is a evidently an excellent location for purslane, I would then go back and replace the "weeds" I had pulled with a cultivated variety of purslane - there are several - and let it grow along with whatever other crop I had originally desired there.  Then I would harvest and eat the purslane!  I love the stuff and frequently plant it in my own garden (where, unfortunately, it is usually destroyed by deer, who love it even more than I do).  I make a couple types of fresh salad with it.  Very tasty.  I understand that it shows up cooked in some Mexican dishes, but I've not yet tried cooking it.

BTW, people write that purslane will aggressively self-seed.  Unfortunately, I've not experienced that with my cultivated varieties.  And the one time I tried direct seeding it, I got zero germination.  I usually make seed starts in potting mix - good germination in that setting - or else I buy transplants.  If you can't find purslane to transplant in a nursery's vegetable area, sometimes you can find it in the ornamental area.