Bounty

[greenstorm]

Most of a 5 gallon bucket of soap lard trimmings rendering in the oven, plus two crockpots' worth on the table. Instant pot full of dog scraps. Dehydrator on with bay leaves. Supergiant stock pot with bones on the stove overnight. Dishwasher on. Freezers all stuffed full, with more work to be done tomorrow.

Gonna be a big electricity bill for today, and small grocery bills for awhile.

Can one cook doughnuts in lard?

I'm incredibly tired, and I've been super sad and anxious all day except when I can get completely caught up in deboning a picnic shoulder or something. I don't want to be sad the whole time Josh is here. I want to be present and enjoy his company. He's a wonderful person to project with though.

There's not even any point in discussing my communications with Tucker right now. They go terribly, then really well for a bit, then terribly. Why am I doing them? What do I want to get out of them?

Lots of rain last night and today. Everything is muddy and chilly. Summer is over. Next dry day I'll take in grain and tomatoes I think. A dry day might be a bit if it stays this cool, since I don't think it'll dry quickly.

Demoncat hates the rearrangement of the kitchen for butchering and meowls piteously.

This is going to be my first full week's vacation where I don't have to manage a trip somewhere.

My mind doesn't exist. More tomorrow.

Comments

[yarrowkat]

oh, i would trade you a warm sunny dry week for a wet one! if only it worked like that.

[greenstorm]

Oh gosh, one more warm sunny week would ripen so many of my tomatoes. It would be great!

This is why we shouldn't be put in charge of the environment. We'd wreck every carefully-evolved ecosystem within six weeks. It would be the same thing as the Americanization of foodways -- all moderate reasonable climates everywhere.

/laugh

I still want that week of sun.

[yarrowkat]

your point stands. and i would love a week of rain and coolth! it's in the high 90s out there again all week. i do not always love my air-conditioned office building, but on really hot days i do.

[greenstorm]

FROST FORECAST LAST NIGHT I'M NOT READY.

t didn't actually frost, but still. This trade just sounds real good. Maybe I'll take two weeks of slightly cooler rather than one week of really hot though. You can have the rain from both of them.

[yarrowkat]

O.O

frost! i just. omg. it's August!

it's a deal! two weeks of autumnal desert sunshine (rather than "summer ends later every year" summer sunshine - anyway then you get the *gorgeous* almost-unreal-it's-so-blue deep cerulean skies that go with it) in exchange for enough rain to keep death-by-drought at bay another year here. no frost for either of us yet.

(on a more serious note, if you have an indoor space that's suitable for it, you can pull tomato plants up by the roots, hang them upside-down, and all the fruit will ripen over the next week or so, as the various nutrients in the plants' stems move into the fruits.)

[greenstorm]

Potential frost in August is the hardest thing about the north. It's such a short season. I clearly need enormous greenhouses. If you want to see something amazing, Dong Jianyi has a passive greenhouse setup in Alberta/-40C that is incredibly impressive but also has a bunch of moving parts.

I did that with a couple of my tomatoes last year; I should consider at least some of them this year. I probably have more hanging space than shelf space for the green ones too.

[yarrowkat]

enourmous greenhouses are so lovely everywhere. folks with high-tunnels here do year-round gardening, and they can grow things like *celery*, which just blows my mind and i really really want to grow fresh celery. i didn't know what i was missing until I ate some from a friend's farm once.

[greenstorm]

I was literally looking at 42' geodesic domes this morning and thinking, if I move to the coast which bottoms out at 0 to -5C on average/-15C at the absolute coldest ever, would it make sense to build a home or instead to build a giant greenhouse and put a little doesn't-have-to-be-weatherproof shed in it for sleeping and put in an outhouse somewhere? Maybe a little heated shower in the greenhouse with greywater going into the beds, all the waste heat going right into the greenhouse.

I suspect it's deeply impractical but I keep circling back to the idea.

If there was enough waste heat I could grow citrus...

[yarrowkat]

ooooh. you could have a compost toilet system, run copper tubing coils through it, and use the excess heat from that to heat some of your grow beds.

though there are the animals to consider. they'd live outside the dome?

[greenstorm]

One of my favourite youtuber garden folks (RED gardens) just did a video about heating a shower with compost, I should watch it. How would a compost toilet system work with copper coils? I guess you'd empty it into the compost, or compost-in-place and move the hole every so often? Would the offgassing from the compost be a problem in the dome though? Hm.

The animals don't go in my bedroom right now, but they have access to the rest of the home as a shared cuddle space (mostly). I'd anticipate having a heated workshop/social area outside the dome, so probably that would have a dog/cat door.

I already think about giving the pigs a high tunnel of their own for winter (and then growing in it in spring). It would need to be atop those big concrete 3' high blocks or something for them.

[yarrowkat]

mmm, good point. i think i'd put the bins just outside the dome, probably on the opposite side from where you sleep (because compost attracts rats, bugs, etc), and run the tubing under the wall & into a grow bed that runs alongside that wall. you can't disturb humanure compost, just gotta let it rot, and it needs both high heat (which it generates by itself if you balance it) and time - we let ours cure for a year after we close a bin. we have a three-bin system made of pallets. we bust up a strawbale into the base of one, then put humanure buckets & any kitchen scraps that aren't going to the animals in. our animal manure compost is separate, because it's too high-volume to do together, and we mostly have poultry, and poultry manure rots safer/faster than human. over every bucket of manure, we add the same volume of leaves/dry straw/grass clippings/sawdust/other carboniferous material (always cottonwood leaves for us, because we live under 9 large cottonwoods and have an endless supply, but whatever's local to you will work; sawdust is very odor-absorbent, which is nice). once the bin is full, we throw a pallet over it to mark it closed, and move to the next bin while the first one rots. when it's been a year (i make a calendar note also), then we open it and rake out the black gold. anything uncomposted goes in the bottom of an empty bin for later. primary culprits: "compostable" silverware, which requires very high heat, coconut shells, sometimes chicken bones. it eats everything else. whole dead hens who die of age, meat, cheese, citrus, whatever. everything people say "that can't go in compost," our compost eats. :) (what they mean is "that will attract rats in your compost." i think the clarification matters, because in a suburban setting, not attracting rats is important. in my setting, it just determines where i put the bins.)

[greenstorm]

This makes a lot of sense. I've never stewarded a humanure setup -- here you can't get organic certification if there's one on the property, so I think they may be less common as a trickle-down effect. In the case you describe the outhouse has buckets, and the buckets are emptied into the pit, instead of the outhouse being moved over a sequential series of pits?

I love love love high-nitrogen composts hot enough to break down animals quickly. Here I have no way of doing it: I'd have to exclude, not just domestic animals but also all the bears and big cats and foxes etc it would lure who might snag an animal on the way out even if they couldn't access the compost. A pit with a cover and its own electric fence might be enough of a disincentive though.

[yarrowkat]

i am not sure if organic certification would exclude it in the US; certification is prohibitively expensive, so most small farmers with organic practices never get certified. it's something like $5k/year.

ours is above-ground, not in a pit. but yes, bucket in the outhouse and another in the houses, emptied into the bin. we do not have bears, big cats, or foxes, however. :) just raccoons, whom we can effectively fence out, and coyotes, who are smart and canny and don't mess with fenced enclosures when there are free-range birds to prey on. and stray cats; Furdre used to eat out of the compost all the time and that is how i eventually tamed her, luring her over to the yurt (which is not far from that compost) with food.

i've seen it done with a tall outhouse built up about person-height above ground - this was at EarthHaven ecovillage in North Carolina - you climbed stairs to get in, and then pooped into a barrel that's kind of way down there, and if you have the capacity to separate it, you pee into a tube that goes to a different barrel; this they dilute with water and put directly on the soil as high-nitrogen fertilizer. below the high floor, the enclosure with the barrels is fully fenced with a secure gate, so a person can enter to remove/add barrels but animals cannot.

[greenstorm]

Is it the crunch of celery or the flavour? Do you grow lovage?

[yarrowkat]

both! the flavor was much richer in the locally-grown celery. i have not grown lovage. is it similar?

[greenstorm]

Lovage is a 6'+ perennial herb. You use the leaves as a flavouring, so it's not entirely like celery where you get the crunch. But. The leaves taste like concentrated celery so you need a very small amount, and do very well in a "celery salt" or any soups/egg salads/etc where you want the flavour.

I love things that you plant once and then forget about (or irrigate, in your case, I suppose).

If it grows in your area (it needs winter dormancy but you get that) someone local will be able to hack you off a piece of root for a start.

[yarrowkat]

it sounds delicious. i will look into how well it survives here, and see if i can find some.  thank you!

[greenstorm]

I'm so curious!

[yarrowkat]

looks like it is hardy here (we're in zone 7, it's good zones 3-9) as a perennial, but it prefers mildly acidic soil, which might be something i have to specially provide for it since our soil is alkaline, and cooler summers, so it would need good shade here.   i am going to get some seeds and give it a try!