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Ahh the Chestnut, you can sit in a chestnut home roasting chestnuts on an an open fire burning on Chestnut wood. It reminds me of the old saying, the axe with
by 1-6 3y ago
Ahh the Chestnut, you can sit in a chestnut home roasting chestnuts on an an open fire burning on Chestnut wood.
It reminds me of the old saying, the axe with the wooden handle was welcomed in the forest because it convinced all the trees that it was one of them.
- 29athrowaway 3y agoOr leave it alone, put on a sweater, and build using superadobe.
- stephenr 3y agoThat's nothing. You could sit in a bamboo hut wearing clothes made from bamboo, sitting on bamboo furniture, using bamboo chopsticks to eat bamboo out of bamboo bowls.
- blamestross 3y agoAnd still have a problem with having too much bamboo growing outside...
- stephenr 3y agoI guess it depends on the specific type. I'd rather have to remove a bamboo clump than a Thai banana clump (I've done both).
- tmoertel 3y agoPlease share this story :-)
- stephenr 3y agoIt's not much of a story - banana plants are ridiculously resilient; so long as it hasn't flowered yet, you can cut off the entire "trunk" and it will have started shooting the new leaves from the stump within a day. This resilience applies to the part below ground too, and they're full of water, so it's a bit like trying to dig watermelons out of the ground, but if inevitably split one while digging, and you miss a bit it's just going to grow again, and if you take too long between bouts vs the plant (as with bamboo it's unlikely to be a 1-day affair for a reasonable size clump), some of the bits you cut will have broken down and started to rot, so the ground will be soggy and smell horrible.
- rch 3y agoTree of Heaven is worse still. I tried to clear a small property of it for a couple of seasons, and failed, so I unconsciously take note whenever I see it growing: it's seemingly everywhere.
- SAI_Peregrinus 3y agoIt's more accurately called Tree of Hell that Will Not Die. Toxic sap, spreads wildly, re-sprouts from any root fragments more than about 1cm long.
- qup 3y agoI have a few that are over a year old now that I noticed and plan to take care of soon. Can you summarize what you've learned?
- TheCleric 3y agoNever dealt with those, but the worst for me was Brazilian peppertree. I had just one in my backyard and the best I could do over a decade was managing to keep it from spreading.
- aifooh7Keew6xoo 3y agoAnd then you'd still probably die of starvation or some variation of malnutrition, for lack of the physical capacity to consume the 17 lbs of bamboo a day necessary to sustain 2000 kcal intake. I'm not even entirely sure that the act of consuming it yields more calories from consumption than consumed in exertion for humans. Most species that subsist on bamboo are sedentary and spend significant fractions of their time and energy simply masticating.
- stephenr 3y agoI guess I should have been clearer; I didn't exactly intend eating it alone. There's more than enough calories to sustain life in a Thai green curry with bamboo in it ;-)
- jimmaswell 3y agoCouldn't you condense the calories somehow, like making a broth and straining?
- aifooh7Keew6xoo 3y agoI imagine it's going to involve a pulverization or grinding step to increase surface area and availability of whatever has caloric value in the plant matter (the equivalent biological processes all seem to), but I'm sure with the appropriate process you could make a soylent bamboo paste or something yeah.
- eesmith 3y agoIt's pretty similar. The American Chestnut was a "cradle to grave" tree - from a baby rocked in a chestnut crib, living in a chestnut house with chestnut furniture and shingled with chestnut bark, warmed by a chestnut fire, entertained by a chestnut fiddle, until finally ending as a body buried in a chestnut casket. Plus, chestnut nuts were food for you, for your pigs, and for the wild game you hunted.
- hinkley 3y agoMark Shepard is trying to make hazelnut finished pork into a “thing”. I think it was always niche to one tiny demographic but most of us have never heard of it. It’s a lot easier to deal with hazelnut harvesting if the ones you miss turn into ham. So what if you were supposed to harvest yesterday and it’s raining today?
- hinkley 3y agoHow long have bamboo clothes been a thing? That’s the rayon process isn’t it? Has that been around more than twenty years? Patagonia will sell you work clothes that are almost half wood fiber cloth now, with a mix of cotton and hemp to finish it out. You could definitely eat chestnut porridge from a chestnut bowl with a chestnut spoon, so the clothing is the main differentiator and if chestnut were here today, I’m sure they’d be using it for clothing.
- stephenr 3y agoI'm not sure how long they've been making them. Mostly I've seen bamboo socks, rather than outerwear, but for the sake of comparison I can't see why it can't be used for non-sock uses.
- hinkley 3y agoI’ve seen shirts. Rayon is a process, not a material. It’s somewhere in the range of satin or silk. This wood fiber I haven’t seen unblended so I don’t know what its consistency is like, but I would guess in the neighborhood of flax. Softer than hemp, rougher than cotton. Whether it’s softer or rougher than linen I could not tell you.
- NoImmatureAdHom 3y agoI don't think that's quite right. Rayon / viscose is basically: you take some cellulosic material (wood pulp, could be bamboo pulp, whatever) and dissolve it in a strong basic solution. You now have cellulose in solution. Then, you shoot it out of tiny holes to make almost 100% cellulose fibers of whatever diameter (the hole size). Then you make this into yarns and weave it into something. You can make it seem like silk, cotton, wool, whatever. I don't think the feedstock has much to do with it (though lignin-containing vs. not is an issue).
- hinkley 3y agoWhat's 'new' is that someone started making a big deal about bamboo as the feedstock about 15, 20 years ago, as a renewable material. Apparently the rayon process was patented in 1892.
- AlbertCory 3y agoAnd you can make coffee with bamboo coffee filters. As I said in here, Jerry and I actually could taste the difference between them and paper filters, in a Triangle Test. https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/google-busts-a-coffee-myth https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/google-busts-a-coffee-my...
- rootusrootus 3y agoAfter finding out that bamboo fabric is just rayon, and seeing some videos of how bamboo lumber is created ... I'm not feeling all that positive about bamboo as some kind of green/renewable material. The processing it requires uses a bunch of really nasty chemicals.
- 10u152 3y agoYeah the “Bamboo” fabric was fantastic marketing. I’ll still take cotton, thanks.
- dr_kiszonka 3y agoA lot of people got seriously bamboozled!
- scythe 3y agoThere's been some pretty interesting developments in the space of wood fiber clothing without such nasty chemicals: http://ioncell.fi/ http://ioncell.fi/ https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2015/ra/c5ra12386k https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2015/ra/c5ra1238... Probably a decade before it makes its way to a price point I can afford.
- jimbobthrowawy 3y agoAfter seeing the effort it takes to remove bamboo from where you don't want it, I'm pretty prejudiced against it outside where it's native. Granted, it's no knotweed.
- hamandcheese 3y agoAnd wipe your ass with bamboo toilet paper.
- mlrtime 3y agoAlso bamboo is not a tree and not protected under any tree laws (that I know of). IANATL (I am not a tree lawyer) but do browse /r/treelaw for fun