I've harvested 25lbs of wheat berries from a boulevard in my city. I then threshed, winnowed it myself. I still have some of the flour and berries left and use it to make bread.
I did my threshing using a lawn mower on a big tarp. This actually worked fairly well. Were I to do it again I would probably want a more repeatable setup. Ive seen some good strategies on youtube.
The winnowing I did with a leaf blower, and worked pretty well, I think I would use this strategy again, but I suspect if you were going to do it more often it would be very easy to build something that would help mechanically.
I have a friend with a little home flour mill which took a while but was perfect for turning it into flour. If you were to do it fresh when you wanted to make bread these little mills are fantastic.
There's a book I highly recommend reading called Small Scale Grain Raising [1] that has a lot of good tips, and ways to do this kinda stuff.
In this book they recommend using a leaf shredder or wood chipper which would be incredibly effective.
I'd be interested to hear about the bucket thresher. Most of the DIY options I found when I was looking where larger with custom flail mechanisms and bike-chain drives etc. Honestly, building the thresher itself seemed like kind of a cool project on it's own, but it was just more effort than I was willing to put in. But a 5 gallon bucket option that runs of a drill sounds much more my speed.
How much did you process? What is the maximum amount you think you would have been willing to process with that method?
I did about 3 pounds at once, but could have done more. Maybe 5 pounds. It goes fast, so you can do multiple smaller batches more quickly than the bigger batch.
I made a round out of plywood to put in the bottom of the bucket, drilled a hole in the center, and put a steel pipe end cap in it. I put a ball bearing in the end cap. Then a threaded rod up through the top resting on the bearing. I cut a round of plywood for the top of the bucket, chamfered to fit snugly. I drilled a hole in the center of that and put a pillow block on it to fit the threaded rod. On the bottom of the rod I put two pieces of flat stock about 1/2 from the bottom and about one inch above that one, just held on with nuts. That's pretty much it. There are lots of YouTube of variations on that design. Runs with a corded drill. Cordless might work for very small batches.
There are open design plans for homestead scale hand fed threshing and winnowing/seed cleaning machines. Put them in series. Sheeves of wheat in one end, clean grain on the other. Well worth the time to build if you are cleaning that quantity of grain.
I would suggest that the edge of a typical busy boulevard features 10-30 thousand vehicles per day, whose brake and tire particles in particular end up in the soil around the road. Typical farm fields might see 30,000 trips over the span of what, 100 or 1000 years? It's not in any way comparable to an urban roadway.
It was erosion control after some new road work. I sorta suspect they did bring in new dirt for it as well. I do only use it in small amounts.
Not really gonna make a difference over time in terms of pollution/heavy metals. But it was still a worthwhile project.
I thought about adding this but due to stale growth put it aside. If I can see more people using it and requesting this I can assure I'll add integration in a week :)
I don’t know if this is the same one, but a quick Google came up with the Turbo Air Radiance Series TMW-1100NM. Never seen these but I want one, microwave UIs are the worst.
That’s more of a commercial one, a cheaper version (Impecca) came up too but the link was broken.
OMG that one looks like it'd fit right into a Fallout game! How many bottle caps? Here, take them all! Anyway, mine is a Samsung. Affordable too! Edit: Note to self: Stop telling dad jokes on HN.
This is really neat! Must be very little overhead for you running the service, and lets business get a bit of extra with some of the space that they have extra in the back.
Edit: How did you start this? And did you notice an inflection point where it started to pick up steam?
What were the most effective ways you found to advertise, to users/businesses.
Call backs! A really good practice. As having also worked on a historical ship the bit that always gets me is when working on helm when needing to communicate our heading we say "one five three" rather than "one hundred fifty three" and then that is repeated back.
Makes it much more difficult to make mistakes this way.
Same in aviation, the ICAO phonetic alphabet is meant to reduce uncertainty over historically poor radio communications. Plus readback to air traffic control and so on is relatively standardized to allow for a few chances to realize you got the wrong thing down.
It seems to be about 50/50 nowadays if something that has the Prime stamp takes 2 days or 5 or more. It used to be a nice comfort knowing I could order some supply up to 2 days before it runs out, and I’d have it at my house when I need it.
But now my confidence in the two day shipping is gone, and I often run to a local Walmart to get the same item for the same price, but guaranteed to be at my house that day.
It seems when I get an item through USPS or UPS it’s on time, but a lot of the packages that go through Amazon’s own shipping service (often a large unmarked van that parks in weird spots!) end up delayed an extra day or two.
I've been using prime since 2010. At first, it was incredible. 2 days, every time, no matter what.
Now it's almost always 3 days because they do the "USPS last mile" bullshit. It never makes it early enough on day 2 to make it on the mail truck for that day. I've complained about this and still the same thing. Before I'd get a free month with a quick chat. Not anymore. Now I get a half-assed apology and have to pull teeth for any sort of compensation.
I don't care about next day. Some people get lucky and say "sometimes it's 1 day!" I don't care. I want 2 day shipping. I want to know when it will arrive and that it will arrive at that time. And it's too inconsistent now for me to rely on.
I've since cancelled my membership - only a few more months now to go.
This so much. USPS is literally the worst service I have ever used. If I see an Amazon package switch over to USPS I immediately email and get them to send it again and switch it to FedEx or UPS. You're right though that it is becoming harder to get them to switch it back to a delivery service that actually cares about delivery.
Weird. UPS has always been the worst. I'd say about 50% of UPS packages either get misdelivered or marked as undeliverable for me. The numbers on my street are a little odd, but it's not that hard to actually find my house, and it is listed correctly on Google/Apple maps. No matter how hard I try to get UPS to get on the ball and fix their mistake, nothing ever changes.
The last three orders I placed from Amazon took over a week to ship. Every product was sold directly from Amazon, and shipped from their New Jersey warehouse to Ohio. It's my opinion that they are intentionally delaying orders that aren't Prime.
I've never been someone who used Amazon for everything, so a Prime membership never made sense. I'd estimate 2-3 orders a year at most. Placing 3 orders in a short time frame was an anomaly. But, all three had abnormally long delays compared to nearly every other retailer.
That's also my experience. I'm in Ireland, ordering (mostly books) through amazon.co.uk (since 2000) so Prime never made sense for me either, but delivery times from the UK have definitely slipped over the past two years. In-stock items 'sold & fulfilled by Amazon' used to ship within 24 hours, but now regularly take 5 days or more to ship. The result is that I shop elsewhere.
I've had a couple Prime free trials. Once there were two items I bought that were sold and shipped by Amazon, however, they weren't "Prime eligible" for no reason I could understand. It's just totally confusing to exclude random items from "Prime."
They also tend to have one thing in common - a very supportive, stable home environment.
This bit is key, and really tells me that the best way to address issues in science and trying to help students is not to have more programs for students, but to have more programs for helping families.
You really need a holistic approach to this sort of stuff, rather than targeting say funding someone who is good at a specific thing.
There are many more people who can't focus at school and so fail because they don't get enough food, or they don't have the support they needed to succeed.
This is why programs like the food stamps has a high return on investment, because it addresses the actual issue at hand rather than a symptom.
I actually like my glasses! I like wearing them, and only rarely do I dislike having them. Maybe it is because my vision is not that bad without them. I can imagine that if it was worse I might hate them more.
I've harvested 25lbs of wheat berries from a boulevard in my city. I then threshed, winnowed it myself. I still have some of the flour and berries left and use it to make bread.
I did my threshing using a lawn mower on a big tarp. This actually worked fairly well. Were I to do it again I would probably want a more repeatable setup. Ive seen some good strategies on youtube.
The winnowing I did with a leaf blower, and worked pretty well, I think I would use this strategy again, but I suspect if you were going to do it more often it would be very easy to build something that would help mechanically.
I have a friend with a little home flour mill which took a while but was perfect for turning it into flour. If you were to do it fresh when you wanted to make bread these little mills are fantastic.
There's a book I highly recommend reading called Small Scale Grain Raising [1] that has a lot of good tips, and ways to do this kinda stuff.
In this book they recommend using a leaf shredder or wood chipper which would be incredibly effective.
[1] https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/small-scale-grain-raisi...