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permaculture - Re: [permaculture] Mesquite Milling this Saturday

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  • From: Greg <FarmerGreg@UrbanFarm.org>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Mesquite Milling this Saturday
  • Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 07:34:52 -0700

Milling Questions

The milling went great for our first one. I followed it up with a visit to Tucson for their milling and mesquite pancake breakfast. What a fun time.

The biggest challenge for for putting on a milling is locating a mill. The one we used was from Tucson. If is a gas powered hammer Mill. See desertharvesters.org. A steam or hand powered one would be great, just need to find it.

From 5 gallons of beans we were getting about 1 to 2 gallons of meal. An very little chaff.

Mesquite beans can be VERY plentiful. Last year I harvested 20 gallons of beans from a tree in a matter of a few minutes. A tree can put out hundreds of pounds of beans. Mesquite wood is used for furniture, I suppose it could be used for tool handles.

Mesquite is a desert plant so it is very drought tolerant. Not allelopathic. A mesquite farm could be feasible, but there is so much that grows in the wild you may not need to. A hammermill is suggested as the beans are so hard that the power is needed to mill them.

Greg






Hi Greg and all,

How did the milling go? I am quite interested in seeing if we could do
comething like that here in Central Texas - we've got a lot of mesquite. I
bought some meal and have been serving up mesquite meal pancakes to my
neighbors to see if I could generate enough interest in pursuing a milling
demo or operation here.

Is the milling fairly easy to do and not too manual-process oriented? Can
the beans come from any variety of mesquite - or are there only some that
work well? How much meal can you make from say, a five gallon bucket full
of mequite pods? Could the mill be run via a steam engine?

How about a human powered mill? Use an 18 speed bycycle connected to the
mill directly or to a gearbox connected by V-belt to it. A steam engine
is a good idea. Burn the chaff from the milling process plus twigs,
stems and branches for complete combustion and extraction of max BTU's
with minimum smoke. When you look at the loads steam locomotives are
able to move, the power they can unleash is truly amazing.

A few questions:

Are mesquite trees plentiful in their natural habitat? Can the wood be
used as lumber or handles for tools? Is it rot-resistant?

What plants grow naturally with it and what crops could be grown
successfully within a grove used for bean production?
Fertilizing and irrigating the crops would benefit the mesquite
while it provided some shade. Is it allelopathic? Is it drought
tolerant? Would a mesquite bean farm be feasable? What kind of mill is
required to make flour? Can grits be made?

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The Urban Farm
Growing good food
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Greg Peterson
http://www.urbanfarm.org
602/565-7045




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