Life goes on - Summer 2022

I love that tar tank! Great use of a old gas can

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Well, I only answered some general questions back in March but he admitted some lurking and espinonage on DOW :smile:

For some reason - yes, but Iā€™ve noticed lately there are several Facebook guys in the area between the big lakes, and down in SmĆ„land as well. Also up north around the Vilhelmina meetup area.

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Yup it shows by the look of the gasifier. Beautiful build by lurking and espinonage on the DOW site.
Let him know he is welcome any time to look around and ask questions.
But he does have you to talk to any time.
I like all the new people from across the pond that are checking the DOW site out.
Bob

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Finally got the Cavalier. Bye-bye Buick!

He gave me a TH350 transmission, some propane tanks, and some money to buy new wiring for the car as well for the trade.

Itā€™ll need new battery cable ends, new spark plug wires, and some exhaust repair as well as a new fuel pump, I already have the fuel pump thatā€™s no big deal.

He paid me to compensate for the wiring damage and said if I have any problems to let him know, heā€™s really excited about the gasifier Iā€™ll end up putting on it.

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Good morning all.

LOT OF READING !

The DOW site keeps up with the number of post we read . It is showing I have read well over a Hundred Thousand with many , many others nipping at my heels . Now if I could only remember half of what I read I would be much smarter :blush:

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I tell you what, guys. Spreading mulch is for the birds. Isnā€™t worth wasting diesel to have the tractor scoop it up and spread, so Iā€™m using a hay fork and walking all over the plot to pile up before raking it even. The stuff I have to do to build topsoil.

Tiller only penetrated 3 inches into the clay, so Iā€™m banking on the mulch to rot and build topsoil.

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How thin are you spreading it? I usually use the skid steer when mulching new ground but I usually stack about a foot to 18 inches of mulch on it. Usually wood chips. If you do that make sure you donā€™t forget the lime and the chicken litter.

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Make it easy on yourself Cody. A tomato only needs a hole a foot deep and about six inches around, every two foot. You just have to amend soil to fill that hole. All that space between the tomatoes is fine like it is. a trench ten foot long and a foot wide of amended soil will grow all the cucumbers you can stand. Itā€™s all like that. Traditional row corn? a trench every three feet. The clay inbetween is fine for walking on. I grow corn in four foot square blocks now.

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I canā€™t dig trenches with my tractor, clay is rock hard. It would take me a week with a pickaxe to even scratch it.

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Iā€™m spreading about 6 inches deep for now. Itā€™s the first layer and it already has leaf mold growing in it so itā€™s ready to self compost.

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You donā€™t want to go deeper then what you need for the seedbed anyway. doing so, destroys what little bit of ecosystem you have in the clay. You need the radishes, but worms and fungus are part of the solution as well, and you donā€™t want to destroy those. You need organic matter and a help working it down.

Wood doesnā€™t break down that fast, but grass clipping, shredded leafs, road apples(horse people give that it away), straw/hay, etc all break down fairly fast. Honestly a big round bale of straw that has been sitting for too long in a field. then just unroll it in the garden. might be the easiestā€¦ I havenā€™t tried it though.

Ideally you want a mix of brown and green. Pay attention to pH in the soil, and you really want it aerated to promote the aerobic bacteria, which wood chips can matt and block moisture and air from getting in. If you have some compost or compost juice, sprinkle it on top and water it in to get the bacteria started.

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Iā€™m making some Daveā€™s Fetid Swamp Water right now to use for my watering regimen. Weeds and grass clippings go into the water and compost anaerobically. Mix that 8:1 water and nasty juice and itā€™s packed with nitrogen. The leftover solids you can throw into the compost to supercharge that.

Since itā€™s on a downhill grade Iā€™m going to attempt a drip hose watering system. Itā€™s pretty far from the water taps so Iā€™ll use a clean 55 gallon plastic drum with a drain fitting in the bottom. Iā€™ll have to measure how much I tilled. Some spots didnā€™t even get cultivated because of the uneven ground.

I have plenty more mulch to just keep layering more and more each year lasagna style, and Iā€™ll probably alternate between leaves grass clippings and mulch.

People assume I have good soil but all I have is a thin but hard sod layer on top of clay. We at least donā€™t spray chemicals or use seed grass so itā€™s natural.

I want this patch to be my grain and legume field so I did a whole even tilling and covered with mulch. Iā€™ll use one of those fancy push powered plow/seeder combination gizmos for straighter row crops.
The rest of my stuff will just be raised beds.

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You actually want the aerobic bacteria. The nasty bacteria are typically the ones that eat your crops and lock nitrogen. The aerobic ones are typically the ones that eat the anaerobic ones. Very similar issues happen in compacted soil, and/or poorly drained soil. Which you may have both.

Donā€™t underestimate the value of a bag or two of lime pellets and monitoring the pH. It has a significant effect on how strong the clay molecules bond together and promotes the aerobic bacteria.

You could also opt to do it the other way, and just add weights to the tiller, then criss cross to get deeper, and you can also sharpen the tines a little with an angle grinder. Then you start from scratch biologically, so till in the organic matter, add the nematodes and fungus, and aerobic bacteria and worms back or you can wait a year or two for them to recover.

It sounds very similar to the soil we started with. It is a depleted compacted clay soil where the topsoil washed out from decades of moldboard plowing on a hill. The stuff was rock hard. You need to find a good source of a tons of organic matter, and you want cover crops, and keep as many roots in the soil at all times to keep the organic matter from washing down the hill.

You are definitely have the right idea. I donā€™t want to sound discouraging, but it will take a couple of years. But it will be 100% worth it.

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The anaerobic is done in water and takes a few months. Dave The Good on YouTube has shown great results with it. Koreans have used this method for a long time before things like air pumps existed.

Also Iā€™m not sure if anyone has planted where my front yard sits. A sharecropper used to live on this property about 100 years ago, it went wild and then my grandpa bought it from his mother in law(my great grandmother).

My neighbor uses the front 12 acres for hay for his cattle, thank God he doesnā€™t do anything other than broadcast alfalfa, no tilling or plowing and no Graze-On which if you used straw or manure from hay that was treated with Graze-On all of your broad leaf plants would be killed for years until the herbicide finally would break down. Very nasty chemical.

What I did today was till that patch of grass, and spread chip mulch that has been breaking down in a pile for a little over a year. As soon as I saw the white leaf mold I knew it was ready. So I have a little bit of green and lots of brown with its own biome to kickstart. I know itā€™ll be a few years before I see any soil. Iā€™m hoping I can maintain a yearly or every two years addition of more mulch and do no-till by hand in that plot.

If I had money Iā€™d buy a seed drill for the tractor and do multi plant no-till in my other spots and use the pond water for irrigation.

I might try to make my own one row seed drill discer, Iā€™m not giving people 600 dollars for something with two pizza cutters on the front thatā€™s just silly.

Upteenth Edit: I forgot to mention my chip mulch is telephone service chips so it has a mix of leaves and such in there, it isnā€™t entirely wood.

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We have the Trimountain Series hereā€¦
https://soilseries.sc.egov.usda.gov/OSD_Docs/T/TRIMOUNTAIN.html
It has taken ten years, two excavators, the H pulling a quack digger, and a cultivator, and countless rock parties, to get enough soil to plant in. Then I started bringing in loads of swamp muck, 5 yards at a time, along with twelve year old piles of wood chips. We hand screened all of it. I mow with a bagger and lay down the clippings by the wheel barrow load.

We did good last yearā€¦canned dilly beans for the entire month of August.
I think I should set up a sprinkler. We are still doing hand watering.
We are having a dry spring, so I may have to buy a chipper to make mulch from the tag elders. Or maybe irrigate the grass.

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It is June 12th 2022 09:00 pm right now Lights just came back on the power is restored. We just had over 2 hour extended power outage in the East Wenatchee area. Raining hard and the wind blowing. Cause unknown.
I was in the bathtube taking a hot soaker. Wow lights out. They will come on in a few seconds I thought. Hum 10 minutes later. Maybe not. Still day light by the light coming though the bottom crack of the door.
I am thinking getting out of the tube in the dark. I have never done this before drying off in the dark. Walk out of the bath room still dripping with the towel wrapped around me. Dana sitting there and asked. Did you have a nice bath? Well yes I did and in the dark.
I am not going to start up the generator the lights will be back on in a few more minutes. And they were about 7,200 seconds later. That was the longest outage in maybe 10 years? It is dark now. Time for some hot tea.
Bob

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We belong to a power co-op and they sent a notice that we can expect periods of black outs this summer because for some reason they are short on supply from their distributor. Never had anything like this before. So far it has been unusually cool weather wise so no big air conditioning loads to deal with. No food, no gas, no power. Pretty soon weā€™ll be Bangladesh.

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Yes. Grid-Down power outages. That has been my 99.5% focus for my own personal Wood-for-Power works these last 15 years.

Here is a new scenario book I am just started reading,
ā€œBlackout - Tomorrow it will be too lateā€ by Marc Elsberg and Austrian writer.
Setting current day Europe. Now going system by system; country by country installing ā€œmade in Americaā€ Smart Meters onto all consumers.
Some single individual had parsed out the meters code commands and then ordered nearly a whole countryā€™s worth individuals disconnects simultaneously. The Grid supplier Plants going sudden loss of demand into destructive overproduce and cascading-effects, shutting down. Then . . . 12-36 hours later as individual supplier plants trying to start back up and Grid resynchronize the nefarious individual would command a whole areas worth of Smart Meters simultaneously back on. The sudden overdemand forcing auto-shutting down cascading ripples again.
None of you European guys whoā€™ve read this book in itā€™s original German . . do not spoil the ending for me, please.

Anyhow. There will always be more reasons for Grid system to not to work than can be kept ahead of. You should not care about the Whyā€™s. But just the What-Is.
NOW; with automatic islanding save-the-system block/cell rapid isolating, you; Rural-living most likely the first to be disconnected isolated!
Take that books sub-title as the caution to take heed for.
ā€œTomorrow it will be too lateā€ . . . to do anything but the powers-out scramble.
My response was to dig out a couple of more tri-knob compliant 20 pound propane bottles and fill them up with now 30% cheaper now propane versus storing gasoline for the two generators. Propane now here Washinton State it half the price of road grade diesel.

Being an extended cold wet, wet Spring here. Iā€™ve seen not a single field of hay even being attempted to be harvested yet. In ground seed planted gardens and the seeds are rotting. Pot started food plants sitting, waiting for the sun. Not growing.

Had a visitor, snow-birding Solar guy come up, and stop by for the weekend. Heā€™s a former dedicated wood gaser. Ha! Wife put him to work for his supper, digging mudding in new plants for her. Then he jumped onto the Stihl weed eater perimeter grasses, thistles, black berry slaying while I sweated lawn mowing in an 8 hour not drizzle raining short window period.

Later in front on the wood stove glow he was drawn in like a moth. We nearly sweating just to have a ventilating de-humidifying woodstove fire. Him trying cuddling up to the red wood charcoal glow to replace his left behind S.W. daily sun soakings.

You are at least set up too BobMac for transitional electricity.
Others . . . . others here . . . others in our Families and circle of Friends . . . ???
Remember. They laughed at Noah too. Lottery tickets, concert and sports tickets will not burn long enough, hot enough to be of any worth in a Grid-Down. Time frittered away will come back and ass bite hard.
Your in pocket and purse plastic cards will become instant worthless. Not worth the toxic smoke to burn. All of the multiple hundreds of hours on-line ā€œInfluencingā€ will be time lost blowing away in the winds of change.
Wood, wood, wood, wood is the real, Real; because it can Provide.
Steve Unruh

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thanks gƶran and tone for ticks remedysā€¦two days ago we tried diesel application with a little brush and 85 % approx of the ticks fall off with a whileā€¦the problem seems resolved, but is followed immediately with other problems, the fox has found that in our is to find a lot to eatā€¦he diggs every night the young plants out and a lot of them are destroyedā€¦remedies? self made poisons?
ciao giorgo
with the stupid fox remains no time for gasifiersā€¦

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Hi Steve, the electricity generator? After testing your diesel / wood generator, you can do the following:
-diesel engine turns out well, low consumption of diesel fuel and small wood - 1kg per 1kWh

  • works well and stably, it is not bothered by changing the quality of gas too much, but it is not 100% on wood
    -It is easy to set the diesel pump regulator so that it can overcome sudden heavy loads with the help of diesel fuel
  • An inverter generator with accumulators would probably be the optimal solution for independent operation
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