Cécile Stelzer Johnson

Anne Miller wrote:If I wanted to start a food forest from what I could get at the grocery store I would start with fruit that will grow in my area.
A lot of items from the grocery store will regrow though these are not likely candidates due to a small yield.  Like onions, celery and carrots.

I second the motion, in particular for all biennials, like celery and carrots.
Biennials will grow a root and strong reserves to last the winter. In the second year, they are more interested in making seeds. So if the idea is to harvest the seeds of some carrots or some celery, that's certainly a great project.
By the way, I bought some lovage seeds this winter. I once had a lovage plant that regrew and the taste of celery was stronger than celery. It might make more leaves, less stalk, and the stalks may be thinner. They also said that in perfect conditions, these enormous celery-like plants can reach 6ft!
I'd be happy with less, but hey, if they grow that big, who am I to complain?

Katya Zaimov wrote:
“I think the foliage and the green beans will be the parts we eat, with the dried beans being seed for the next year and a fall back food source

”

I think the best part to eat are the young green pods, although the young leaves also taste excellent. I have also dried the pods successfully for later use. They are excellent in stews and casseroles. I am not a fan of the dried beans. When I was a kid my grandmother would roast some beans on the stove top of the wood stove and I loved them but now I don’t have teeth for this type of snack.



I would not have thought of roasting dried fava beans. In fact, I've never even tried favas. This year, however, I bought fava bean seeds, so I'm grateful for the idea. I got this recipe:
https://www.fearlessdining.com/roasted-fava-beans-recipe/
Does that sound like the beans your grandma made for you? In the fall of the year, I figure on yanking the vines and tossing them to my chickens.

Riona Abhainn wrote: Last year I tried planting in late April (zone 8b) and nothing happened, it might have been because I was using seeds from grocery store peppers, both javanero and seranos.

I'll try again this year.  I like trying something twice before giving up on it, in this case "it" being those seeds saved from grocery peppers.

Don't give up! I bought some sweet peppers earlier this year (January) and saved the seeds. I figured that I had better plant a whole bunch, because, coming from a grocery store, they probably wouldn't grow.
Well, they all came! I like the yellow, red and orange the best, so that's what I planted. I put 2-3 seeds in each little pot... and they all came. I have 18 of each, which is probably way more than we'll need (Hubby doesn't like sweet peppers... Oh, darn!)

As I'm looking at the prices of seeds for planting in the big box stores, I figured it is time to make some changes and plant everything you can plant, from every source you can find, all the time. Even weird stuff that I would not have thought of before.
Pomes, such as apples, will not grow true to seed but plums & cherries will do a bit better. I'm not sure why but stone fruit have a better chance of coming up true to seed.
A packet of cucumber seeds can cost you $4.00 and have only 20 seeds! It's getting ridiculous! When I started gardening, like 50 years ago, a 25 cents packet could grow you enough of that one food for a year for the whole family.
So I bought a package of 7 bean soup mix, separated the spice packet and looked at all the many different beans! I'll be planting those! There is a food store where I can get all sorts of grains in bulk. That's the way to go, I think...

If you know how to, install *real wood shutters* on each side of the window. They latch tight inside, which is also great if you are in a tornado prone area.
You never have to uninstall them. Or rush to the store before a storm to screw some 4'X8' in front of your windows.
I had the experience in France with temperatures that would cook and egg on the sidewalk, yet our home stayed cool.
I should say that to complement the shutters, we also had tiled floor that keep the heat in winter and the coolness in the summer.
https://youtu.be/TWgOg_HfUe4?si=9mndrYZa_YZEkzBg

All great suggestions, R. Ransom. The best one for me is making sure that in 1 trip, I accomplish as much as possible and I make a list. I found that making each trip pay off also lowers the number of trip total that I take, and, BONUS : I plan exactly what I'm going to buy and can find the cheapest option online. So I reduce my expenses and do a lot less "impulse" buying.
I plan to make a "Victory garden" of sort. Plant maximally, harvest and share maximally. Planting for my chickens is something I have not done reliably (they only got all the kitchen scraps), but I didn't go out of my way to grow something for them. This year, I will, as chicken food is getting more expensive too.
Another, but maybe that's what your meant when you said "bike" is a motorcycle. I have a Spyder with 2 large saddlebags (that I would not be able to fasten on a bicycle (which I don't have anyway)).
If you don't drive like a jackrabbit, you get a decent mileage. In the winter, in Wisconsin, my option is still limited, but as soon as good weather comes, I will be using my Spyder for everything (except large lumber).
Hubby loves his big Nissan Titan that barely fits in the garage, but because I don't have a cab separated from the cargo portion, I can haul 14 ft lumber, which he can't.
I had an employee follow me in the parking lot saying :"this, I gotta see". I lowered that passenger window and introduced the lumber that way, with the passenger seat laying down (my back sitting is always down, to max storage). I had the board sticking out of the front a bit, but not illegally.

Genevieve Lisa Pearson Coleman wrote:Something nobody ever mentioned to me, but which has been very useful on several occasions, is to have a secondary pen/holding area nearby - so, an area for ill/injured birds and plan an area next to the birds you already have for 'new' additions.  I have found that over the years birds die and you want to build up your stock - but when you introduce new birds to your original flock, they can be aggressive, so time spent next to each other, but with a fence between, can help the old birds get used to the new birds. After about a week or so, they usually have got used to the newcomers and can join without getting pecked on.

That's a very good point. I thought I mentioned at least having a "winter run" so they can step out of the coop but in a secure area while I'm cleaning the coop, but I did that before their first winter, so I didn't think of it as a correction.
But yes, and that is something I did later. I didn't do it exactly as a correction, but first, as I had a brooding hen, I built a small enclosure, covered, inside the coop where she could tend to her new babies while still being in sight of her friends. Moving a broody hen is always tricky and you risk her abandoning the clutch. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't; that's why I bought a brooder to finish the job if she quits.
But I also built another coop, in the second orchard and with a common fence because I wanted some ducks. Well, ducks are a pain to clean, but now that the secure coop is built, I used it to place the new chickens that I incubated, knowing that it might be hard to mix them later.
The 2 enclosures do, however, have a common fence, and while I was nervous opening that fence, it turns out my fears were unjustified: They had just a couple of days of mild "tiffs" to figure out the new pecking order when I first put them together (after about a week of looking at each other through that fence).

I have no experience whatsoever in this domain. My grandma told me that a good team of oxen can work wonders, and for a long time, especially in hard to access terrain, can turn better in tight corners, so I assume that they would be better suited for small properties.
But as has been mentioned elsewhere in the thread, working with oxen requires special skills. It is not just the handling in the field, but raising, training, feeding etc. as well as all the tools of the trade, the yoke, the leather harnesses...
If someone is interested in doing this, I would suggest approaching our friends the Amish, and paying them handsomely to do these chores for you before attempting to wrangle a team of oxen on your plot.
Tomorrow is the Spring Equinox, so it's a bit late to try working your plot this way for this year anyway.
The Amish have always been of sound advice in my experience. That would be the way to go in my humble opinion.

Coming from "the old world", my mindset has always been on "setting money aside". I thank my parents for teaching me to be a squirrel. Perhaps it's because when they lived under the Occupation in France, they had to make do with not much, so my mentality has always been that of a miser: I can live on "not much", so I've been able to manage fairly easily and never feel deprived:
Maybe that's what happiness is...
My tastes are not extravagant, especially now that I'm retired and in my late 70s.
I hate numbers, so I've never made a budget, but except for my first car, I never bought on layaway or installments. I think of layaway as a scam: It is a luxury, a convenience that we pay dearly for
Perhaps it's a cultural glitch in this country where we are constantly tempted to buy this or buy that: these commercials are a veritable assault on us (and on our wallets).
You know the "Never a lender or a borrower be"? Well, that's my mentality, and it has served me very well. I'm almost physically ill at the idea of owing money.
Not every decision of mine was good: I remember my twenties and how I felt it was "cool" to smoke cigarettes. For a couple of years, there, I smoked close to a pack a day. When I learned that the tobacco companies had been aware of the connection between cigarettes and lung cancer, I got really upset and felt that the only way to "punish" them was to not purchase their products. I quit cold turkey. (Well, in all honesty, my fiancé at the time helped. He said he really loved me, but kissing a chimney stack did not appeal to him..) That was an easy decision.
The most important expenses go to my health: fixing my teeth, my knees etc., that's priority #1.
I've bought cars and motorcycles, (maybe just shy of a dozen of each over the years) never on credit. As soon as I bought one, I'd start a fund for the next one, and I didn't buy until I could just buy cash.
Even for my homes, I was parsimonious in how I used credit: I put up front all the money I could and made sure I repaid the principal first. The home I bought in between 2 marriages all by myself cost $120,000. I put $60,000 up front, which lowered my payments (a lot) and paid the other $60,000 in 2.5 years. It was work, (don't buy much, no restaurants or cinemas, no travel). But for those couple of years, I worried. "What ifs" were on my mind constantly. I celebrated with cake the month after I paid my final installment.
I made mistakes too. I was young and in love when I bought my first timeshare. I tried to cancel it. It was very hard. but the second time I fell in love, I did it again. I ended up getting rid of the second one but I was hooked pretty hard on that first one and they didn't make it easy to cancel that share (It's a real sinecure for these crooks!). I ended up walking away from it. I still get bills and I throw them regularly in the circular file: I told them I felt hoodwinked and I gave it all back to them (They refused to hear me, so now, I refuse to hear them).
My advice, if you can call it that , is to examine what you are getting for all these "conveniences". You may be appalled at what you pay for it

Juan Roble wrote:Hi!.
I’ve also been thinking about protecting the hive in winter from the outside, using insulating panels like an outer shell or box around the hive. I’m not sure whether this would actually make things more comfortable for the bees, but I suspect that reducing some of the cold exposure might lower their winter stress.
Where my land is, the cold is usually not too extreme, but temperatures can still drop to -12°C (around 10.4°F).

You are correct that reducing stress from the cold will help your bees be more comfortable. You mention "insulating panels". Be careful to maintain adequate ventilation as these panels do not let any air in or out when they are tight: even though bees do not have lungs, they do have "spiracles" through which they absorb the oxygen from the air. They also need to fly out, even in the deep of winter to "cleanse"/ get rid of feces.
I live in Central Wisconsin, and we have severe winters, with temps that can reach -40F (=-40C) exceptionally, and they do survive those winters.
More important is to make sure that they have enough "stores", that they have made enough honey, (so don't take too much for yourself). To insure the bees survive, some beekeepers let them have all their honey and do not plunder their stores until dandelions come back.
Unlike  some mammals, bees do not hibernate, in the sense of going into a torpor. They cluster around their queen to keep her warm. They eat the honey they gathered during the summer for energy, and with that energy, they shiver.