Nancy Reading

Different varieties of carrots will have different flavour profiles. I would have thought that how and where they are grown, as S Tonin suggests, also affect the flavour. Commercial crop varieties are probably selected more for storage and uniformity rather than flavour too, whereas if you are eaing your own carrots fresh from the garden the storage ability is less importat.

My dogs also love vegetables (broccoll and kale stalks are their favourie, also neeps (rutabaga). I have customers who buy carrots especially as healthy dog treats; I expect it goes striaght through, but doesn't rot their teeth or make them fat!

You could try peeling the carrots before you give them to tthe dog - I gather that much of the bitterness is in the skin (also more of the nasties they may have absorbed from chemical farming if you haven't managed to get organic or better...)

Matt McSpadden wrote: So many people in the homesteading and permaculture movements seem to be coming out of tech.

I've never been much into computers (at least not since the Commodore 64), but as long as you mean 'tech' in a science and tech sort of way, then I came into permaculture via technology. Doing a science degree, because I found science involved far fewer essays than humanities, I used to subscribe to the New Scientist magazine even after starting my job in automotive engineering **. One of the leaflets enclosed one week was for the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT), now rather more mainstream technology these days, but CAT introduced me to permaculture in the 1990s and the rest is history.... I now run a shop as a workee job that (just about) pays the bills but gives me a better work-life balance, and a great office window view!



** funnily enough becoming a "6 sigma blackbelt"

I choose to take the best choice I can on this scale. Sometimes I am restricted by ignorance (thank you permies to helping open my eyes to possibilities), sometimes by circumstance.

Carla Burke wrote:How about a wearable dragon...

Ooh, I agree with Pearl - that's got possibilities...
I couldn't find a whole dragon outfit (lots of lovely probably AI generated...), but these knitted scales could be quite effective:


lavish craft on ravelry

I'm imagining a figure hugging knitted dress with shawl like wings and a dragon head hat.....

Hmm, not so many hats as I thought.
I quite like this one


cute (etsy source)

The best ones are crochet rather than knit.
This one I'd prefer nostrils rather than the whiskers


etsy source

Could be a (very small) gap in the market for a more detailed knitted dragon hat.

I'd rather have an answer or an opinion from a real person than an AI bot - permies is by real people for real people.

As r ranson says AI answers can't to be trusted to be correct, and the social cost is immense and mostly hidden. I dislike the way they are being promoted so you can hardly avoid AI, but there is a financial reason for that - it's not 'free'.

Thanks for the 'bump' JP!
It occurs to me, although I'm not sure what the OP is suggesting, that this could be a way of assessing your soil health too. Counting the worms per unit soil is one of the surveys you can do, and this could be a way of counting them with a bit less effort and zero digging.

Hi Christo, welcome to permies.
I'm not quite clear what you're asking. Are you wanting to set up an affiliate account, or just link to permies information? What payment are you meaning?

Let's think - resilience...I'm fairly well off for the big priorities: shelter, water, food, warmth.
For $200 I'd quite like some more books on herbal medicine - how to harvest and prepare various trees and plants (what exactly do you do to a willow to get the bark? what time of year is best to dig marshmallow roots? ...) I could probably stretch that to some equipment too, like a larger pestle/mortar.  
If the power goes off for more than 24 hours it will start to get inconvenient for us, I guess the dogs will eat well out of the freezer for a few days (!)...Having some means of charging devices after that would be good, we were thinking of a little overshot water wheel - not that efficient, but DIY possible with what we have around us. I think spending some money on the bits we can't make and don't have, like cables and controllers would probably eat up a fair amount of the $1000, with a couple of PV panels perhaps for when the stream is running rather dry, but we have more daylight.

I do like the idea of functional art - rather than something beautiful that is just going to catch dirt....

Cob is probably one way of making something awesome - like this bench:


source

Isn't that just begging to be a Rocket Mass Heater?

Various apple tree pictures: