Sam Potter

I do a green veggie mix of sweet potatoes leaves, lambs quarter and nettle every year to add to soups during the winter. The hard stem bits that dont powder down are good in soups and you wont notice them. But for baking I will send the powder thru a electric coffee grinder. It works really well and breaks up the dried fibrous stalks and leaves. I dont like blanching before drying them, It sounds counter productive so I take care of it this way.

My husband and I are just looking into Tai Chi. We'v been doing yoga since the start of this year nearly every day and the improvements have been so nice! But some variety is always welcome so we don't stagnate and get bored. Dose anyone notice a difference between the two for back and hip pain?

Iv never delt with them personally but i know ground wasp can be easily flooded out if you want to with water. My grampa connected his truck exhaust to the entrance and he just killed them all that way. It seemed pretty effective and they didn't freak out really during it.

I recently got a 60lb bag of coffee grounds for practically free and have discovered how cool they are! You can buy coffee grounds from most farm stores but they can be a bit spendy. Most coffee shops are happy to share there used grounds with folks thou for free. I picked it up originally just for our cat boxes and Im so pleased with how its been!

Our cats have been using those big bags of shredded cedar thats used for horse bedding. We switched from clay cat litter for cost reasons and health. Our home has 8 elderly cats and they were going right next to the litter boxes due to arthritis making walking on the pebbly clay litter painful. Think of walking on the beach compared to walking on a woodchipped pathway. We used pine for a spell but I found out I'm allergic to pines so we moved onto the cedar. To keep it smelling good I was emptying the boxes every other day, well... theoretically. It has not been completely sustainable cleaning 9 cat boxes everyother day. So I added coffee grounds in about a 1 part coffee to 5 parts cedar bedding ratio as a hope of keeping it smelling good if I miss a day. Iv been cleaning them like normal until now, we had to leave the house for a few days. With so many cats when routine is broken it gets stinky quick. But there was NO smell when we came back!!! Pet owners will get that when you come back to your house after a break, your nose picks up any pet smell you become blind to. I had resigned myself to just that's how it is. I did some research and found out that coffee is a deodorizer. We can go 5 days now without having to clean litter boxes and its kind of magical! I have time for so many more things, like reading permies!

Other uses wev found for coffee grounds

Degreaser on cabinets and sinks
Cleaning your hands after they are greasy from changing the oil in the car
Sprinkled onto the carpets to deodorize them  
We used coffee grounds to dye my wedding dress a nice light creamy coffee color
Fridge and freezer deodorizer instead of baking soda


I hope this is useful for any other folks living with pets, children, people or other sources of odd smells and unexplainable messes. And let me know if theres anything else we should try out with our bounty of coffee grounds besides sprinkling on the plants.

I was just looking for these and somehow I always forget that permies has people selling the odd plants Im looking for. Please keep us posted on when you have some ready.

Id plant herbs there personally if your going for that small spot. Alot of them like the conditions you are talking about and can be very decretive for a front garden. But Id love to hold all that soil there with a retaining wall made of rocks to match the one against the house all the way along the driveway and side walk. looks like you could taper it off towards the entry walkway. Completely remove the grass in the L shaped section there in favor of a stepped garden bed. The grass there looks unhealthy and unloved anyways!

I love the concept of solar punk. Taking the idea that oil gets so high that instead of depending on it, we expand out as a community to modernize our older energy production methods and other needs of a community. Alot of what we see in pictures is very much fantasized. But people instead of a corporation being in charge of energy would create localized diverse methods that would use cheap locally sourced junk, er I mean resources and celebrating our different cultures and life style while doing it is a pretty cool permi idea. Theres also the idea that a city should have everything you need daily within a 15 minuet bike ride and to bring back the god darn trains gosh darn it!

Also I think earth ships fit into the solarpunk genre quite well.

I actually just used a few pairs of jeans as mulch for my flower garden this month. I figure that they have to be better then the plastic lawn fabric the garden center sells right? I dont see any problems so far. I covered them with mulch so it looks pretty and they dont blow away. I guess wel have to wait and see if it retains moisture well!

So I have tried a few meal planning rotations and love cooking. But I find that since we eat seasonally and closer to our front door it is harder to predict what we will have available in a weeks time or even a couple of days ahead. Maybe we will find a mess of oyster mushrooms or the neighbor drops off a 55 gallon barrel of sweet corn. Now of course preserve to use later is a important tool for spreading out these blessings but when there's a fresh glut I like to base our meals off it. I have a loose system of vague meals that can take a lot of fluctuation of ingredients that I pick from.  Such as Soups and chilies on Saturday, Leftovers on Sunday. Monday we have a meatless bean dinner. Taco Tuesday is more of a general Mexican theme. Wednesday is for rice and a topper. Thursday is not my problem and I make someone else cook. and Friday we grill stuff. This normally works for us but come the hot months it gets busy and I will stop using it.  I want to try changing how we do this and was wondering what others do to help them keep cooking to provide three meals a day, every day, for every mouth at the table. With a pantry of ever changing ingredients.

I did our living room floor in used laminate flooring. I had to nail down the planks after cutting the tracks off them cause they were a bit beat up and warped. It was a quick free way to redo our floor. Im not sure how long it will last but for now its very nice.