eggs & tea

A collection of things i’ve recently found fascinating:

• International Biochar Initiative (IBI) projects, with cleaner char-producing stoves and gasifiers for all parts of the world.  Dozens of universities and thousands of farmers and researchers are busy with biochar, even though the “larger world” still hasn’t heard.  I’m dying to make or buy some char to test on our farm.
• Peter Schmidt on Terroir, Biodiversity, and Biochar Even though this expert is talking about wine grapes, it’s very easy to see how it pertains to tea as well.  As he says, Soil is an endless science.
• I’ve discovered mailing lists for Big Island Self-Sufficiency (chatty) and Hawaii Chickens (less so).
• Dmitri Orlov’s Social Collapse Best Practices talk given in San Francisco.  As he says, when any society collapses (as he observed in the Soviet Union), what matters is food, shelter, transportation, and security.  The time to think about how to secure those post-peak is now.
• I ordered a small rocket stove and a larger wood gas stove to experiment with.  Stoves are way more interesting than i ever knew.  It seems millions of us who live outside cities could be cooking this way – clean, no smoke, and carbon neutral.  Some stoves will even gasify, there are hundreds out there as research, but i still haven’t found a unit that cleanly produces char that you can just buy.  WorldStove looks promising – see video of their LuciaStove in Pyrolytic Gasification Mode.

Related posts:

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2. Tea and biochar! I’ve been studying biochar for a year now (see my...
3. Farm update, tea, biochar sweet potatoes Tea: We did our third tea harvest on November 30,...
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5. Farm Update What’s going on with the farm recently: Egg production is...

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