Chard Irking

Anne Miller wrote:If all I had was a 1/2 cup of the mix, I would water in down before pouring onto my soil.

My first thought was to pour this onto the compost pile.

Yeah just half a cup or so at a time. Mixed into a couple gallons of water and poured into the beds.

Hey folks, I've been doing a lot of drywall repair lately and have been using Easy Sand Joint Compound. If you're not familiar with it, it comes in a powder form and you take a bit as needed, add water, and mix it up into a paste to patch drywall. Inevitably, I mix up a bit too much for the section I'm working on and end up with maybe half a cup of waste that I toss into the trash to dispose.

I took a minute the other day to read the ingredients list and was surprised by the simplicity of it. Picture is below, but it looks like the ingredients are:
1. Plaster of Paris (this has been discussed here https://permies.com/t/93912/Plaster-Paris-gypsum-calcium-sulfate)
2. Limestone (may contain mica)
3. Perlite
4. Attapulgite (apparently this is a naturally occurring mineral in the clay soils of the southeast, which is where I am)

My uncultivated soil is heavy clay and runs a bit on the acidic side. Do y'all think I can add this to new beds I'm creating? Would it have any benefit or drawbacks that I should be concerned about? I feel bad wasting it even if it is only a little bit each time. It dissolves easily into water easily, so I'm thinking I'd just mix it into a five gallon bucket and pour it into the beds.

I saw a discussion about adding scrap drywall to soil here https://permies.com/t/99983/Composting-soil-amending-drywall-scraps, and agree that I'm not sure what is in drywall that makes it do what it does. The joint compound by itself though seem to be benign.

Megan Palmer wrote:@chard irking, what did you end up planting in the bed over your septic tank?

A few days ago, I dug up the bed of saffron in the photo above.

There were hundreds of corms, kept the biggest ones to replant and am selling the rest as a fund raiser for our community garden.

Our water tank is fed from a stream that often runs dry so we have dug a bore but need funds to buy and install a pump and generator.

Wow that's impressive! Life got busy so we ended up just leaving it covered in woodchips for a few months. Then we planted bulbs (daffodils and tulips if I remember correctly) back in the fall. I'm excited to see what we get this spring!

I like to throw some frozen peas into mine near the end of cooking.

James MacKenzie wrote:
new vehicles are indeed crammed full of electronics and i noticed more interest in my vehicles welfare when i was "in the program" so to speak... same with my f150.. now that both the tractor and truck are paid off... they are regular joes.. (cue hints are upgrading/trading in)

so you may get better support as long as the company owns a piece == still their investment... you might even get a better deal on extended warranty which can save $$ in repairs

I had not thought about that, as I've never owned a vehicle under warranty lol... but that does sound like a good point. I know the warranties differ a bit between the major brands but not too much. I think I saw New Holland does a 6,000 hour warranty, which seems like a good indication. They are a bit farther from me than some others though so I don't know if I'd want to go with them or not. I know they also almost all offer the extended warranty which I would likely want since it is only a few hundred bucks.

I do fear the electronics and their lack of maintainability... I am fairly experienced maintaining and doing minor repairs on gas engines. I've never worked on diesels before but am sure I could learn. I've considered getting something a good bit older that can be more easily maintained; however, I am afraid I wouldn't know what I was buying and that I would spend more time repairing it than using it. I need a tractor that is reliable enough that I can use it for a lot of the heavy lifting since I am prone to overexerting and hurting my back. If it doesn't crank one morning, I'm too stubborn and will spend the day lifting everything myself and suffer the consequences on subsequent days.

I do not need to build my credit score. I am not really worried about not being able to make payments. Our jobs are very secure and we have diversified investments that we could liquidate in an emergency to pay it off. If the economy is so bad that we can't pay it off with those accounts, then I might as well not have a tractor since no one will be able to afford gas or maintenance then anyways. I'll stick with my wheelbarrow and hand tools lol.

Eager to hear more opinions from random people on the internet. I'll still be keeping my eye on the used market as well. Hoping to pull the trigger before this spring but we'll see.

Hey folks, so I am in the market for a tractor. Still debating between used and new, since used tractors are pretty scarce around me right now. One of the tractor dealers I have been looking at offers 0% financing for new tractors, and I am debating if I should accept the financing offer or pay cash up front (which I am in the fortunate position to do).

Financing:
- If I am going to buy a tractor anyways, I basically view this as the the dealership offering to give me a 60 month, 0% loan. Instead of paying a lump of cash up front, I can basically invest the cash I would have used into my conservative long term investment accounts, where I can count on a conservative 6% interest rate over the long term. If I wanted a loan from anywhere else, I'd be paying a lot more for it.
- I have never relied on a loan before though whether for cars, the RV we lived in, or our current home. I've always saved and paid cash. The only "loan" I ever took was career starter loan that had a 60 month term and 0.25% interest rate. The day I got that money, I just put it in my investment account and let it grow at a rate greater than 0.25%. I basically saw this as free money for me.

Paying Cash:
- The only benefit here is that I get a $700 cash discount, which when buying a tractor is fairly negligible in my opinion. The "interest" I would get by investing the cash price of the tractor would exceed that $700 easily.

I have never had a loan and take pride in that. If I take the dealership's 0% financing loan, am I selling out? Or am I making an advantageous investment by saving that money, investing it, and using my own cash flow to make the monthly payments.

It's been a few months, so maybe you have already gotten the trees removed...

I recently had to get two large (2 foot diameter) trees removed that were leaning over my house and my neighbor's house. They were standing dead, on a hill where they couldn't get a bucket lift close to, and were in close proximity to other things around them. Some suggestions:

1. Get multiple quotes. I got two. One was for half the amount of the other guy. The guy I went with was no less professional or experienced, he just didn't have a lot of machines or a large crew to increase his cost. Different folks have different niches (large jobs, small jobs, road clearing, etc.), so they will quote you differently for your specific job. Some folks also might just have less business at the moment and need a quick job to fill a day.
2. If you are getting a stump ground, ask your tree guy if it would be cheaper to hire that out separately yourself. Some guys don't have a grinder, so they have to rent one which can be expensive, and that cost gets passed on to you. Some guys grind stumps for a living and own a machine, so they will do it for much cheaper. Your tree guy probably doesn't want to grind the stump if he has to deal with renting the equipment. He will just do it for you because that is what folks typically expect.
3. Don't pay the tree guy to remove the debris. We had ours buck it at 16" so that I could maneuver the 100+ pound pieces into an upright position. After the guys left, I spent a few days splitting the rounds into pieces I could carry and stacked them to dry for firewood. I burned a lot of the smaller stuff that couldn't be used for firewood. Having the felled trees removed would have doubled the price! You could also hire out the labor for cheaper after the fact. The guy who climbed our tree was getting paid $100 an hour. No way I would let him stay and move wood when I could hire someone to do that for $15.
4. Work with your tree guy's schedule. Let him do it on a Sunday, three months from now, in the evenings, whenever works best for him. If you say you need the trees removed ASAP or on a specific day that you'll be home, it'll cost more.
5. If possible, hire your tree guy for more work. I had the two trees that I needed taken down soon, but I also had two others that were going to need to be taken down within the next ten years probably. I went ahead and had those taken down as well. It increased the price, but having four trees done all at once is cheaper than having two done now and two done some time down the road. Remember that you're paying the tree guy to drive to and from your property as well.

In the end we had four large, dangerous trees taken down. The cheaper guy I went with was in the area when I called and he asked to come out in an hour and quote me (on a Friday evening after he finished another job). He looked at the trees and asked if it was alright for him to work on Sunday morning. He came out without his crew on Sunday and did the work himself along with a tree climber that he hired separately. The climber climbed the tree and cut it down 16" at a time while the other guy worked on everything on the ground (cutting up smaller stuff, sharpening/gassing tools, etc.). They did all four tree in about 8 hours.

If I remember correctly, it was $1400 for all four trees and then I paid $200 for a stump grinder to come and grind about 10 stumps that I had around my property. Still expensive, but the other quote I got was for $2800. Both are  cheaper than the trees falling on my house or my neighbor's house.

Yeah I think since the rice is cold it keeps the butter from burning. I don’t cook it for very long after adding the rice. Just enough to fry it well.

I’d like to get into some of those less industrial products. Where do you source them from? I feel like if I got a bottle I’d never use it all before it went bad.

This may or may not fall into the category of bartering, but lately I've been offering to pay cash for more and more services/products. I've found a lot of folks and smaller businesses will offer 3%-10% off if you pay cash instead of card. I know they save on fees that way but I also think they see it as a way to get more repeat business (since they are doing you a favor by saving you money). I'm sure some also see possible tax saving opportunities as well.

Last week my mechanic took almost $100 off the $1400 of work they did to our truck because I was willing to pay cash.

Perhaps the barter is I give my time by going to the bank and withdrawing cash - you save money on fees (maybe taxes too) and get more repeat business. It's a win-win for both sides.

My goal with fried rice is usually to get it to taste like the stuff I buy at a takeout place, so it isn't particularly healthy. But I hear their secret is having a super hot wok. I don't think most home kitchens can match their heat, but I try to get my stove and wok as hot as possible.

I also add a glob of butter when I add my rice. If you've ever been to one of those hibachi restaurants where they cook in front of you, you see they do that as well.

The final thing I do before pulling it off the heat, which some folks may disagree with, is add MSG. If you want your cooking to taste like restaurant quality, I find that is the secret ingredient (along with lots of salt and fat). Like I said... healthy is not my goal (although the health affects of MSG are disputable - but I won't get into that argument here).