Christopher Weeks

I do about half and half water-only and half-strength (half a TBS of powder per load) Charlie's Soap which is EPA Safer Choice certified, but I don't really know how to tell what solution is safer than another. We started buying it in five-gallon buckets that would last us for years about 20 years ago. I'll try vinegar and see what I think. I prefer vinegar to citric acid because I can make it myself.

Neat! I didn't realize they were a vintage tool. I have one on a handle and one on a wheel-hoe and they both came to me sharp. I just run a hand-file over the blades (remember it cuts on both sides) every hour or two of use. I'll be watching to see what advice you get for restarting something that out of prime.

The Dock is a pretty sweet build and from all the pictures, it's obviously quite multi-purpose.

Come see all this stuff first hand!  

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Here is the link to all our stuff about cabin rentals:
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Step outside your cabin and pick food straight from the garden.



Join the bootcamp to learn the skills you need to build your own home and create permaculture gardens.
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Wheaton Labs has openings for long term residents too!  You can live on an acre of community land.  Build your own humble home and large garden with the help of our community.  You can raise livestock, grow veggies or other cottage industry to sell or trade within the community.
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Learn to build beautiful, lasting structures with mud rocks and sticks.






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Jack Sato wrote:would regular bar soap be fine?

These are the instructions Dr. Bronners supplies for using their bar soap for laundry: https://www.drbronner.com/pages/castile-bar-soap-dilutions-guide#second-heading

I bet just washing yourself while trodding on your clothes would get them pretty clean. You'd need to spend some extra time rinsing and then figure out how to dry, but that's all doable.

Kim Wills wrote:He also couldn't say refrigerator for a while so sometimes I still might say "fridge-ee-ator" to him.

Oh, that reminds me that I said "free-idger-ator" as a little, but it didn't stick for whatever reason.

Tereza Okava wrote:...and had some real unique words. she said "anticues" for antiques, cue-pons for coupons, reseeps for recipes and, my favorite, oinkment for ointment.

I sometimes play with anti-cues as an alternate pronunciation, but it also doesn't stem from a child mistake. And if I'm understanding you right, "cue-pons" (or maybe queue-pons) is how I say that word and the most common alternate "coup-pons" sounds weird to me. Oinkment is fun!

Antiques reminds me of another one, though I was much older (9, I think) -- the first time I saw the name Albuquerque on a highway sign, I mispronounced it Alber-quee-quee and I now sometimes do that on purpose to be silly like Tereza's aunt. (which is pronounced ant )

An interesting (at least to me) aside is that Garrett was an incredibly precocious talker and it's easier to come up with a list of his cute baby-talk words and phrases. Kivi started talking at a much more normal age and had fewer of those. I bet that's a cause-and-effect thing but I don't have a large enough sample.

When I was a toddler, I'd apparently ride my father and say "Gibbit, Dave!" They figured out that gibbit was my baby-talk for giddyup. Oddly related, I heard "yeah mule" and reproduced it as "yeah mewdle". Both of these stuck as occasional replacements for "hurry up".

My son is now 31 but a few artifacts of his baby-talk still live in our family lexicon: mushroom is sometimes "mupper", yellow might be "aldo", olives are "awbers", and a wash cloth could be a "quash-wash".

My daughter pronounced guacamole as "grockamomily" for just a short while, but we sometimes use that. Also, her first word was down, but not just down, "dowwwwwn" so we sometimes say down like that.

There are others that have drifted in from friends or more distant family. If I call a helicopter a "hoecopper" or bologna "bony", my wife knows what I mean.

What about for your family?

I knock the stalks over and then step on them to break them up a bit and just use that as mulch.

Rice and lettuce soup from another thread!