Judith Browning

another thought to add to my post above ...for both the berkey filters and the white ones they need to be removed from the caraff and scrubbed under running water.
The berkeys then needed to be reprimed but the white ones I mention above do not.

Bruce, are yours from before Berkey quit selling filters then?

When we had berkey filters they recommended scrubing with a heavy duty scotchbrite scrubber every 6 months to actually remove a layer from their black filters.

What we have now are white, (diatomaceous earth, I think?) and they recommend just scrubbing with a soft brush every month. https://www.aquaceradirect.com/products/cerametix-gf-gravity-chloramine

We are filtering municipal water and there is a build up of what I suppose is 'biofilm' visible as tan against the white filters....I'm never able to remove it all and they say to replace them yearly.  Berkey's lasted 3 years.
We have a similar caraff to you I think, gravity flow on the counter but only two filters not four

I did try rain water sometimes with the berkey filters but strained through a few layers of cloth first.
I would do that for creek, river or even well water probably before the filters.

thank you Jen!
The tithonia (mexican sunflower), is the big attraction here and then coming in second for attracting pollinators and butterflies is my bright lights cosmos, oranges and yellows and big tall plants....both flower for a long time, even better if I dead head and they don't mind the heat.  This year I am watering some of them.

I have a lot of the cosmos seed and could send you some?
The tithonia seed I'm having to share with the goldfinches and my share is quite small🫤

May, those are beautiful ears of corn!
I'm so happy to see our friends corn carrying on!  I'll share your photo with his kids if that's ok?

I did keep some very small jars of the dark kernels in the freezer and the rest is gone.

I think some of the light colors were what he used for hominy?

Did you have to water it at all?

Living in the moment
is learning how to live
between the big moments.
It is learning how to make the most
of the in-betweens
and having the audacity
to make those moments just as exciting.

Morgan Harper Nichols
(1990 to pres., musician, songwriter,
mixed-media artist, writer)

Maria Popova writes about Wendell Berry....
https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/12/14/wendell-berry-sabbath/?mc_cid=3df02bff6e&mc_eid=a3782d59bf

 The poet, farmer, and wise elder Wendell Berry, who once defined wisdom as “the art of minimums,” takes up these immense and intimate questions throughout his wonderful collection This Day (public library) — his series of sabbath poems composed between 1979 and 2013, celebrating the sabbath as a “rich and demanding” idea that “gains in meaning as it is brought out-of-doors and into a place where nature’s principles of self-sustaining wholeness and health are still evident,” a place where “the natural and the supernatural, the heavenly and the earthly, the soul and the body, the wondrous and the ordinary, all appear to occur together in the one fabric of creation.”  

drought prognostication....

thank you Joao!
I have only a pint so in this big tub of soil it shouldn't be too much.

I usually add a handful of Sea 90 to a tub this size also.

The bakery ashes usually have quite a lot of charcoal bits, not biochar but useable.

Joylynn, we would be in the same boat if we had not finally got a pump for this well.
Municipal water is just not an option for us because of cost and all of the water treatments on top of that....and, more importantly we are both here every day so able to schedule the well water use...I think that's called retirement🙄
Before well pump, other years, even with stored up rainwater and additional grey water very few things would get watered this time of year.
You might be surprised what plants, perennials anyway, survive a drought.

May, looking at that map and others I've seen, we are in a very dry area but not 'drought' again yet...I think we had some good pop up showers into july, the kind that seem to drop on one place and not another close by...1.5" in august that helped,

Empathy is the most radical of human emotions.

Gloria Steinem
(1934 to September 2, 2026, journalist, feminist activist)