Jay Angler

Did you know that Muscovy Ducks are absolutely terrified of empty black garbage bags lying in a heap on the grass?


(Seriously? I'd brought a garbage bag to the field to clean up a mess, and dropped it on the ground while I organized their nightly feed ration. They all came up the hill in a line, ready for bedtime, stopped as a group in a semi-circle and stared intently at the bag. They would *not* go into their shelter. I finally had to pick up the bag and hide it near where I needed it, go and look after a group of khakis, and finally the Muscovy had got over it enough to go to bed.)

What do you call a flower that’s always full of energy?

A hypericum!

Why did the storm break up with the hurricane?

It felt like the relationship was too intense and just kept blowing hot air!

Yes - this is a game. Fill in the two blanks with experiences from your life... exaggeration and humor encouraged!

To get us all started:

Did you know that those oversized urban pick-up trucks are absolutely terrified of 1 ft high wire stakes with pretty little pink flags on them?

I wonder if that is why the anti-bullying campaign has Pink Shirt Day - bully trucks that hurt my grass are afraid of pink?


Ya'll don't have to use the bold. It's just to show that you're adding a phrase, not just one word.

The most critical statement is at the end, "don't use  plastic milk bottles".
As I get older, and things I've owned for a long time get older in lock-step, plastic sucks.  It gets brittle. It is not as "solid" as it appears. For example, food in glass jars lasts longer and better than the same food in plastic. It's just so available and cheap.

But we all try things and hopefully learn from our mistakes. I *really* appreciate you posting an honest appraisal of what went wrong.

Tereza Okava wrote: I would love some oxen, but unfortunately I know from training horses (and dogs, sigh) that this kind of skill takes a while to train and needs to be exercised often. In all that spare time I don't have. Maybe I could teach the dog to plow my garden, which would be the ultimate multiple-birds-one-stone thing.....

My bold. Unless your have uses for the same or similar skills multiple times per year, this would be tricky. If there is wood to be moved in the winter, crops to be sown in the spring, goods to go to the markets weekly summer and fall, and you had will to do this rather than just jumping in a truck, they could be no less useful, because I'm sure the tasks still need doing, but fossil fuels don't need to be fed and watered daily!

Teaching your dog to plow would be a neat trick! I always prefer to have "pets with benefits"!

Cécile Stelzer Johnson wrote: I heard that Native Americans used to bury fish under corn. I don't know how that turned out, but it should add *some* fertilizer.

I heard the Native Americans learned to do that from the European settlers. Prior to that, if soil fertility dropped, the Natives moved to a new location. Since they grew corn as a polyculture, it was less of an issue. Usually, easy firewood was getting scarce by that point also, so moving allowed trees to recover also.

That looks way better quality than the "campfire" oven we bought years ago.

Yes, the wire racks falling out was a major problem in ours, so is there are other spots that bent wire could clip in to stabilize the shape of the oven, or keep a rack from falling out? If it comes out of the current spot easily, maybe that's just its "storage location'.

Carol Sloanes wrote:Would you start at the top or the bottom ?

I suspect that would be incredibly location specific.

When I was trying to keep heavy rain from damaging our sloped, gravel farm road, it was important to start at the top where the rainwater hadn't yet picked up speed. Then it took only a little effort to redirect that high-up water off the road into an infiltration area.

Then the next section of road, also only needed a little work because I wasn't dealing with rain hitting as many feet of roadway.

However, slope, average rain vs heavy rain events, soil type and the specific purpose one is terracing, would all be factors I'd be thinking about when I made my decision.

R Ransom pretty much covered the "year round weather effect", but I had also thought of another factor not mentioned:

Do you work from home, and do you have the ability to control your own hourly schedule?

If outdoor light wasn't such a limited thing for chunks of my year, I could set my hours for things like cooking meals, based on taking the best advantage of the solar panels. I need consistency in my eating schedule, but that doesn't mean it can't be consistently at 4 o'clock because I decided that was the most cost effective.

If you're tied to a worky job with defined hours, that's trickier.