Sara Do

if weather and sun are the factors to change your ponds water quality i am guessing it's algea?
i am not a pond expert but only recently installed several small ponds at home. as starting plants i grow water hyacinth, pistia and azolla as pond cover, hornwort, watersprite and eichhornia diversifolia submerged, and i try to go by the rule of thumb of having maxium half of the water surface covered. in fact, if there is more than half of the surface covered the water will be very clear and the fish and tadpoles appear a lot more hungry, so i am thinking the hyacinth and pistia with their long submerged roots are cleaning the water too much, and i try to throw some of them out as mulch or compost before this happens. so, i agree with what Devon said, the floating plants do a lot of cleaning in the pond! and they are fast growing and easily removed.

thank you everyone for your replies and suggestions . i ended up painting some concrete posts with that paint and i did throw on and around a compost pile whatever i scratched out of the bucket while cleaning it for the chicken. now after some weeks it appears those solidified last rests of paint have disappeared o.o. i wonder how nature ingested them so fast.
i guess the best use for old paint is always painting something, because i see corners that i could have painted as well everywhere haha!

we have these rests of 5 years old white wall paint, its not dried up yet but it doesn't smell too pleasant (although i think it already smells "cured", it has been worse last year lol) and some kind of bug/worm seems to also have lived in it. the liquid on top is brownish but the paint itself is still white. it says environmental friendly , but i can't read much on the bucket since its either in vietnamese or really faded.
i want to use the buckets so i need to empty them, but the question is what to do with the old paint. i had asked my husband to paint the interior of a storage with it but he says its too old to use. what else could i do with the paint?
one idea i have is to paint the mango trees, they have been here and in bad condition since we moved here.placing compost heaps right next to them has helped somewhat, but in some the bark is also broken. would be using that old paint on the trees be a good idea or could it harm the tree?
as i understand white paint is mostly made up of lime which i guess we have very little in our tropical soil here anyway, so i wonder how to put it to use. add to the compost maybe? just dilute it and spread? or pour it in one place, let it dry up and spread crumbles later?
any suggestions are welcome

about shooting with plastic pellets at cats, my husband did that and one of my cats did get a bleeding injury on her leg from it. i was not amused. a water sprayer works just as fine (shorter distance of course).

well where i live it is common that most animals are allowed to roam freely. people don't seem to have issues with cats and chickens since they do keep mother hens who can guard her young ones very well. cat gets scared and learns its lesson.
also a nice little story, at one point i had 6 cats and the day came we wanted to start breeding ducks. our neighbor, a local farmer who knows her stuff helped us setting things up the way people do it here. she build a cage kind of thing on the lawn that was not completely closed on top (! i knew it wouldn't end well), and all my cats but one were at home and present when the 10 ducklings arrived and got placed in their temporary cage. of course the cats were curious but i think they understood by observing that those ducks were mine (i sat by the ducks all day lol)
the next morning however all ducklings were gone , i could find 2 and a half dead ones. the half dead one was lying under the open window of the empty room in which the cat that had't seen us placing the ducks in the cage slept. her belly was round like ready to burst lol! yep, i think she had a nice night meal of 7 and a half ducklings she mistook as accidentally being trapped in our garden. what i want to say is, that i think that cats , if they are sort of smart and close to you will understand not to touch your chickens (as others have said as well)

oh funny, i had just replied to a much older post about the same game (same link), i found via google search. i should have replied here i guess ^^;
i see you're planing to hold this a little simpler now which i bet will work just fine for the start the next version can always be more elaborate.
i haven't heard of a specifically permaculture oriented game but i see a lot of people online see the connection - farmville addicts (or any game addicts since in all of the games people are "farming" to some extend) and how great it would be if those people invested their time and energy in something real instead. so i very much do believe the need for such a game is there! i can imagine you might find interest and support from companies that produce educational material, since i think that is what the point of the game would be. i like the idea of 2 hours updates, keeps them gamers hooked and hence hopefully realizing the next step for a even greater kick is as simple as to stick some real seeds in the earth. yes, optimistically thinking if well executed this could be quite a success. and to answer your last question, hell yes, if this game could help game addicts to actually want to do something not in the game that also helps this planet and its people, the value would be ... huge
i think the basic ideas of your game idea are right. but i also think it doesn't really matter if its 100% realistic. a game like this needs to a) get people hooked like a good game and b) bring across the point that how great it would be if we tried just the same thing in real life.
i support this idea very much and i would also like to play the beta of it when available and give some feedback on it

this is a fantastic idea and a lot of work haha! any updates on the game? are you still working on it? i sure hope so can contribute to it already? or can i apply to be a beta tester? i'd only hope i don't get glued on the screen again if i touch the game xD being a recovered game addict myself *ahem*. but seriously yes, the step from "farming" in a game to actual farming isn't that big. real farming is just as time consuming and addictive and there is no game as much fun as the real thing. if i could have a wish for next year (the time after the end of time ) it would be that people realize this on a large scale. maybe a complete blackout would be needed to move the people away from their screens. but maybe a game like this could move them just as well (in case "that end date" doesn't bring any real surprises *sad face*)

being half finish, i love fiskars products! xD love their scissors and my branch-cutter thingy and i think i have that shovel too! its of plastic and its stability amazes me. fiskars is one of the traditional high quality labels from finland with most useful, stable and easy to handle designs. in fact i am now wanting that mower lol!

how is your battle with cogon grass going?
i am battling the same species with different non chemical methods and i think with some success, although a lot of work goes into it.
in some areas i have tropical kudzu which is out-shading large cogon grass invaded areas. since the only crop in that corner of the land is some fruit trees and big rose myrtle bushes out-shading is not much of a problem. if kudzu goes into the trees i come with my scissors and feed the mulch bed under the trees i don't mind if the rose myrtle does get overgrown since i need to cut it back for regrowth sometimes soon anyway. out-shading works pretty well!
in other areas i ripped the grass out by hand; painful, even with gloves. i think now i would just cut it down with scissors or if i don't care about other plants growing inbetween just mowe it down. then used the grass itself to mulch that area heavily and stuck cassava sticks in between which is growing nicely now, and trying to establish soy bean and butterfly pea there as well. every now and then i remove single new grass coming through the grass mulch by hand.
and then there are "lawn" areas where i just ripped it all out by hand and keep doing so when it comes up again so other grasses and clovers have a chance to grow first. basically i am starving the grass by not allowing it to get much sunlight.
it gave me huge compost piles lol! thanks to the peepee method it composts in a decent fashion.
i realized the extreme roots it forms are not bad at all, loosening the soil and adding some sort of plant matter even to a decent depth to it. so after/while starving the grass away halfway succesfully i think i can commence with no tilling cultivation pretty well.
today i went with scissors through the garden cleaning cogongrass from areas that are only 50% cogongrass 50% other weeds anymore
heavy tilling is in my oppinion not a great option since it doesn't need much for this grass to grow back anyway.
cultivating it away is what i would do.

i am aware this topic is over a year old, how did you end up dealing with mimosa pudica unns boy?
on my land, here in vietnam, i have lots of that weed as well. first i was going to rip it out a lot so i can walk barefeet everywhere but then i saw the rich nodules on its roots and something clicked in my head - this is how my internet research on permaculture and a much better garden started ^^;;
anyhow, i am not so far into a perfect garden/ food forest yet but - as a legume mimosa pudica is excellent compost and mulch material and i am using it as living mulch under some trees and even flowerbeds etc, aside from helping the soil i think it keeps the dogs from rummaging in those places because it is so prickly. its flowers are great pollinator instect attractors too!
to get rid of it i think ripping out is your best option. ripping it out (and compost it) before it can throw seeds, its how i killed almost all my tropical kudzu (Pueraria phaseoloides ), which i now let come back once i realized how useful it is. i noticed the end of the rainy season is a good time to remove plants before they seed since things flower and seed when the dry period starts in this tropical region anyway.
my husband had this land cleaned up a couple of times to the point of bad soil erosion and then a cogon grass invasion - which i am battling now by ripping out in some places and letting mimosa pudica and tropical kudzu grow over it in others.