Hi Kent, I honestly don’t know yet how much mulch it can slice through yet but the blade is sharp and the operator’s weight is on it and it penetrates the soil well. The BCS tractor we have is a smaller one and when we had the opener bar for seed depth at 2" it would spin the wheels so weights and chains would help. I’ll report back good or bad when I sow the peas.
I like the link
must be “warned” from christians…???
ciao giorgio
Plese report on the seeder, l need to build a similar thing as well.
He is saying that he is openly Christian.
Giorgio, thanks for your reply. I thought that the Terms of Service for the forum included a restriction on religious discussion. I wanted to give fair warning to anyone who would want to avoid religious material. Your comment encouraged me to check. I can’t find anything there now. I am happy to talk about religion, though religion seems to be people searching for God, while Christianity is God giving grace to people who don’t deserve it. Not the same thing.
Chris Saenz
If I am missing the spirit or the letter of the terms, please correct me.
The Instant Pot Max gets up to 15 psi for pressure canning. It is only 6 quarts though. Nesco and Presto both make larger ones. And for some things you can just use a water bath, which doesn’t require a pressure cooker canner. It depends on what you are canning.
I would look at the tattler reusable canning lids. They also make single use lids now. I don’t know offhand whether they are good for pressure canning. Tattler is located in Reed City. I got mine on sale around christmas, and I think it was 20 bucks for 3 dozen, which means the breakeven point is 1 reuse vs what I just paid for the single use lids.
Apparently people have converted instant pot pressure cookers into distillation devices. Not sure if home distillation is legal in Michigan without the federal permit, which is 100 bucks, but you have to fill out a bunch of paperwork and have a secure place… but it allows the distiller to brew like 5000 gallons of booze…
Buckwheat doesn’t fix nitrogen. Legumes like clovers, beans, etc do. Buckwheat can be used as a grain flour (and it is used for gluten-free). It grows quickly, it scavenges nutrients especially calcium and phosphorous and brings them back to the top of the soil, and the stalks/residue breaks down very quickly. I “plant” it as a cover crop (usually just scatter it. on top before a rain).
There is also a nitrogen fixing bacteria you can apply to certain crops, the most popular comes from brazil sugarcane for nitrogen fixation, but it ‘infects’ other plants like corn as well.
i use the 5 gallon bucket method and bought a container of fishing worms. 
I glued screen on the inside and outside of the vent holes to try and alleviate any potential fruit fly issue. If I made it up to TC, I was going to ask for some of yours, but I haven’t been up there is a few years.
Do you have pictures or videos? That sounds awesome.
I would never suggest to anyone that they reuse ordinary canning lids. I will report, however, that we have Amish/Mennonite friends who reuse the lids until they show rust, or fail to seal. I can also report (off the record ) that unnamed experienced persons, who happen to live at our address, find that lids can be reused several times, with perhaps one in fifty failing to seal. We do check for rust, scratches, dents, and bends. Some jam needs to be eaten right away anyway, right?
Reuse lids with low-acid foods in a pressure canner? No way! Should you check the seal before you eat something? Absolutely. We are all responsible. I have no formal training or certification. Your mileage may very. Edit: mileage varies, sorry.
Kent
I have found canning with used lids is more or less a waste of time and food. I lost too many by being cheap. Specialy the more complicated things, and more “expensive”. It takes hours to pit wild cherrys for a few glasses full and to risk it all on a 5c lid…
We do reuse them for things like sauerkraut or pickles thugh…
Can’t disagree Kristijan and just for reference a U.S. dollar is 100 cents. Before the lock downs Ball brand lids were for a long time $1.80 cents a dozen, where I buy them. About 15 cents each. Immediately they went over 5 dollars a dozen and completely unavailable for nearly two years. Now I finally see them in stock but the price is almost double to $3.39 a dozen or over 28 cents a lid. Wide mouth lids are even more. Makes one rethink canning in less than quart jars. There was no reason for any of this other than gouging people when they were down. Still, considering the cost of food now, I’m not going to argue about 28 cents for a quart of non-polluted food.
I keep meat rabbits, Chickens and a small Aquaponics system in a urban back yard about 200 square mtrs. We also keep about 20 quail. My pool is converted into a pond and has about 150 tilapia and the aquaponics helps keep it clean and airrated. We don’t grow the normal food crops but instead grow edible “weeds”, pawpaws, banana, amaranth, cassava and sweet potato. Anything that will grow like a weed with minimal water and work and that I can eat the leaves. Our biggest source of nutrients is moringa and we have eight trees.
Being completely food self sufficient is difficult but the above ensures a constant source of fresh food
Hi Sean, there is a pic in reply 32. I copied the design from a seeder on a video and tried to contact the company but they are no more
@paul Your planters made from rubber excavator tracks made me think about making planters from a rubber conveyorbelt cut to length and bolted together, I’ll make one in spring to see how it holds up and if I should make more.
It should make for a warmer microclimate there and combined with a thick layer of mulch or woodchips it should retain a lot of water so not a lot of watering needs to be done (hopefully once or twice in a season but we’ll see)
I have not seen anyone write anything about drying meats on DOW, I have no doubt that many of you guys know about this, but perhaps it helps someone.
I made something like this one like six-seven years ago.
https://hankstruebbq.com/biltong-box/
It works excellent, last christmas I salted and cold smoked some one pound chunks of moosemeat and dried it until it weighed 67% of the weight after smoking and then very thinly sliced like chips, it was gone in notime by the whole family.
American jerky is more like strips of meat if I’m not mistaken that is dried but there is perhaps thin slices too, I don’t know.
It has to be dried to a minimum so it weighs 72% of the original weight to be safe and not get molds growing, this is why it is nice to have a fan in the box, I have a timer on mine too and run the fan every other hour and I don’t have a lamp in there for warmth either.
You can of course flavor and rub the meat any way you want like south african biltong, american jerky or any other way you want.
Now, it does require electricity so if you are offgrid I would choose to dry in an oldfashioned manner like close to above a stove of some kind to get as much air as possible moving around it.
Just thought this was worth mentioning as it is very nice to have as a snack
Thank you. I am an unobservant moron sometimes.
Is that front coulter good enough to move the trash out of the way? What soil type do you have?
I spent too much time trying to figure out a good design for an air seeder module to get plant spacing correct.
a good method we use for conserving smoked meat, espescially if one not has a chest or box with fly net …we give a layer of ash in a barrel, than a layer of the smoked meat on, filling up every cavity with ash, than another layer of smoked meat …and so on.
the meat dries not out so much and conserves very well, protected from flyes and other insects-ants- by the last thick upper ash layer…before using is washed with water, never seen molds on it…but we make this system only for two years…a old man told us this conserving method from his youth time
we live since 40 years without freezer (and television), less electricity consume as possible…
our elecricity needed we make with photovoltaic since `89 and later also with wind generators…the weak point in the system are the batteries…but now with chargas and electricity generator we have the possibility to be independent of batteries in emergency situations…
the sourdough though needs cooling, so it is stored in a 3meter deep well…vegetables always fresh from the garden…
the future will constrict more people to this methods, but have they possibility and knowledge??
Giorgio, l too got the ash method from my grandfather. I put salami in for the first time this year. Looks good so far
and not to forget meat in jars -sterilized in water-bath…but this is well known i think?
Interesting method of preserving smoked meat in ash, this is something I have never heard of and it makes me want to try it, does it dry more and more with time or does it reach a level and then no more moist lost?
Does it have to be hot smoked(cooked) or cold smoked? Or perhaps borh works?
Sorry, lots of questions…
I have always thought that it is very interesting and there is much to learn from southern, southeast and eastern europe, especially in traditional foods and old ways and this confirms it as both you Giorgio and Kristijan has learned it from older generations.
I totally agree, too much old time knowledge has already been lost here and it seems as the big mass doesn’t care much, as I get older I just wish that I understood those things when my grandparents were around to ask and learn but no, I had to be a moron and go with the flow and not learn any of these unvaluable things. So now I kind of have to reinvent the wheel to learn, learn, learn.
I don’t see where modern technology has been very good for mankind, Johan, but I have to admit that the internet has certainly made it easier to get information that would not have been easily available thirty years ago. I can never figure out how it all got on here.
I filled small sized casings this year so the salamis are thin. It seems the ash does dry them over time. But bigger, fattyer parts will probably not dry much.