Eino Kenttä

Where my mother's from (the border between Sweden and Finland), they say that mare's tails are a sign that the wind will pick up in the next 12 hours... I guess a lot of these weather signs depend on where you are.

I'll start. I think English is lacking an elegant way to say a day and a night or 24 hours. You just say "a day", and let people figure out from context whether you mean the whole 24, or the part of them when the sun's up, or 12 hours, or...

In Swedish, we have separate words for this. Dygn refers to a full 24 hours, while dag covers the rest of the meaning of English "day".

All languages are different. There are things I can say in my native Swedish that I can't in English, and vice versa, despite English and Swedish actually being quite closely related (relatively speaking). Have you spotted any useful words or expressions that exist in another language but are absent from English, or words that are used in English but lack an equivalent in another language you speak? Let's hear them!

In cases where the seeds are heavier than the residue, I've found that shaking the seeds in a round-bottomed bowl helps. Shake with "round" motions, so that the seeds slowly move around the rim of the bowl as you go. The chaff will tend to gather on top of the seeds, mainly in the middle of the bowl, and you can remove it, with a spoon if the pieces are too small for your fingers to be practical. Think gold panning, only without water (and what you're after is arguably more valuable than gold!) For this to work optimally, you need to have enough material. It won't work very well if the seeds and chaff only just cover the bottom of the bowl.

One advantage of this method is that it also works well on tiny seeds that would be tricky to winnow. I've successfully cleaned broadleaf plantain seeds, which are extremely small, like this.

Oh, and welcome to Permies!

Christopher Weeks wrote:Just so we're on the same page -- you're saying the light is creating a microclimate of sorts, right? That's pretty neat.

Yep, that's what it looks like to me. I guess either it's messing with the photoperiod perception of the leaves, or the lamp puts out a bunch of infrared that raises the temperature locally. It's very distinct.

Just spotted this. Those branches of the birch tree that are illuminated by the street light have almost all their leaves left, and even though you can't really see it in the picture, there's still some green in some of them. The rest of the branches have dropped almost all their leaves. The difference is actually bigger in reality than it looks in the picture.

I've always heard that the sheltering effect of a barrier extends (to some degree) out to ten times the height of the barrier. However, two to five times, as Anne suggests, would probably work better. Otherwise, you could make several successive, lower, barriers, if that fits better. Or maybe put a row of the taller trees farthest from the house, then a belt of lower trees and bushes closer to the house? Just random ideas...

Another thought, from a different angle: My partner did hypnosis, and it helped her (mostly) get rid of her fear of spiders. Maybe that could work?

Hi Maggie, welcome to permies!

I can't say I get the same reaction, except occasionally when I stumble over a very big earthworm, which sets off an alarm in my head screaming SNAKE! It just lasts for a split second, and consciously I know it's not a snake, but this has made me jump a couple of times. I guess it's hardwired into our genes to some extent.

Not liking to see worms seems like it might be a good reason to do no-dig gardening. And maybe focusing more on seed and leaf crops, rather than root crops? How about planting lots of fruit and nut trees? Plant them once, and you never need to turn the soil again.

Edit: Anne beat me to the no-till/no-dig advice!

Timothy Norton wrote:When choosing a food source, say a raw carnivore diet as previously suggested, do you find that you have to do anything specific for dental health or are cats pretty good in the realm of teeth?

I only ask because I have experience with dogs (which I am more familiar with) that experienced dental issues if they don't have access to things that help them maintain their plaque levels when fed primarily soft foods. Luckily, once identified, we started a little tooth brushing routine but that dog was from years prior.  

It feels like frequently feeding them bones might help with this, no? Dental plaques are not as hard as tooth enamel, so chewed up bone might help polish off plaque? Just a thought, don't have any data to back it up.