Notes from the 17th century

[gwendally]

I went back to the 17th and 18th centuries today.  I like hanging out in living museums because I keep finding useful stuff about how to live and function without electricity or gasoline.  These are skills I want to have.  Small Boy is interested, too, so we spent a big chunk of our week-end at Historic Deerfield.

Here are some notes.

Comments

[gwendally]

Also: I saw an adult cradle used as a sick bed for people with T.B.

It looked like a coffin.

They were so skinny.

And died so young!

[kuangning]

Ashes probably went back into the soil for the potassium in them and also got used as pest control. Shaking (sifting, really) a fine layer of ash over a plant will kill aphids, plus spreading them around the base will keep away slugs and snails.

[gwendally]

A little goes a long way with wood ash: I can use a few cupfuls around my alkaline-loving asparagus, but it is a killer for my apple trees and blueberry bushes: it's just so base!

Every year I use some in my gardens and compost, maybe 1/5 of the ash we produce. The rest just gets dumped in a pile where nothing will ever grow.

(That was the best use I saw, by the way: to kill off invasive plants in scrub areas.)

[kuangning]

It does depend on your soil and your crops, yeah. Root crops suck potassium from soil like no-one's business; if you're growing grain and plowing the stalks back under, though, they don't take nearly so much. But if I had a ready supply of ashes, and my soil was neutral or alkaline, I'd be very inclined to mix the ashes with something that would balance them out (probably manure, but maybe straight to aluminum sulfate) and use them anyway. Oh, and those ceramics that bored you? Wood ash for some of the glazing. :)

[rev_mac]

Wood ash for some of the glazing. :)"

Or for the some of the textiles for bleaching.

[docstrange]

Was ash mixed in with the manure for the fields? I know we use a little of our ash as a fertilizer boost (garden, not fields, but you get the idea...). It can be over-applied, so thus my assumption it might have been mixed in with the manure or spread as a late fall soil adjuster.

ETA: exactly as kuangning said (silly me to take so long to reply! :0).

[rev_mac]

marjoram, a very nice herb, even neo's should like it! :)

Not much for tin around, but there is copper, and there are many useful household metalwares made from copper. Though smelting copper is a bit more difficult than tin, but it can be done with hardwood charcoal, and of course it is more expensive. England has been a traditional source of tin, one of the reason Rome had interests there.

Oh and as zinc to copper you get brass.

and has been said ash does go back nicely into the soil also potash was made and sold.

[3fgburner]

It's also used in petering (refining potassium nitrate from manure). Saltpeter from manure is contaminated with sodium and calcium nitrates, and thus tends to be more hygroscopic - soaks up atmospheric humidity. Alternating layers of wood ash and manure causes the potassium to displace the sodium and calcium, leaving a higher potassium nitrate concentration.

[Recollected from Bert Hall's Weapons and warfare in Renaissance EuropeIn the 14th Century, Western Europe was getting into the whole gun thing. They had to import saltpeter from India and places east. Europeans learned about mining manure heaps in the late 1300s, but were having the contamination problem. By the time they found out about wood ash, they'd also discovered a workaround for the humidity issue: making the powder into a dough with water, then molding it into bowl-shaped lumps (The Germans called them "Knollen", a variation on "Dumpling") and drying them out. This kept the stuff in the middle of the lump dry, until it was ground up prior to shooting. As a side effect