Lynn Garcia

I am an arthritis sufferer as well. Many of the herbs and spices that grow in your garden have anti-inflamatory effects. Use lots of herb and spices in your cooking! Tumeric, cumin, thyme, and rosemary are some of the more powerful as far as I have found.
Hot peppers are another wonderful pain blocker if you can handle the burn. I use them often myself because they cause your body to release natural endorphins and  provide about two to four hours of greatly decreased pain. There are some topical rubs that use capscacin as well which can be useful to help soothe joints. I have found that any pepper hot enough to get you to sweat a bit will kick off the endorphin release.

Another key thing to keep in mind with joint pain is WATER! HYDRATE!!! Very very important. All joints have a layer of water acting as a lubricant between the cartilage layers and bone. When you are dehydrated this joint fluid is among the first water pulled back for the rest of the body to use to maintain balance. Just keeping yourself hydrated can go a long way towards keeping your pain at a bearable level.

I know of several people in Montana between the late 1800's and early 1900's who hand raised Elk and rode them like a horse. There are numerous photos of this in the Montana historical society. It seems that Elk would be a suitable species to domesticate since they are known to form very large herds. It's common throughout MT to see herds into the hundreds. In Helena, MT right now there is a herd living in town that is around 80 head, just wandering the valley munching away. They are quite large as well, making for some of the best wild game you can hunt.  Moose on the other hand would be pretty hard to work with. They are solitary and quite agressive. They are incredibly strong but that can work against you as well.  I would assume that the pic from the 1880s of those two Moose pulling a wagon were probably gelded since bull moose are notorious for aggression.

Casie Becker wrote:
I missed this the last time I read the thread. How big do these rock piles need to be to show benefit? I line almost all my beds with rocks, but it's just a single layer.

We had TONS of rocks we pulled out of the garden. The pile was at least five feet high. What we did was pile about three or four (size dependent) rocks on the bottom layer around the outside of each bed. Then piled a couple more up above and just one on the last layer.  It wasn't really high around the beds, maybe one foot or two at most but we had enough to surround all the beds we prepped.

In the winter the rock piles would create drifts of snow that we would stamp down to encourage more to build up. This usually got us into the dry summer without much watering.

Leora Laforge wrote:
Supplement as mothers milk- I think it is supposed to be better than cow or goat, this would be due to similarities to human milk, however it is not exactly the same as human milk so it is not ideal.
Same properties as colostrum- absolutely not, domestic animal babies are born with a fully functioning immune system and no idea what to do with it, the purpose of colostrum is that it is a complete copy of the mothers antibodies, our domestic animals are born with leaky intestines that allow the antibodies to go straight through them and into the bloodstream. Humans have no need for colostrum, mothers transfer antibodies to their children in utero.
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No mammals are born with fully functioning immune systems, they develop largely after birth in response to their environment. Milk in mammals holds a dual purpose and that is to both feed the infant and provide antibodies that the infant will need for survival. Humans definitively do produce colostrum within the first three days after birth and do NOT transfer antibodies in utero. The only thing that passes between mother and child during pregnancy is oxygen, carbon dioxide, proteins, fats and carbs. These are passed between the placental barrier, which is there to keep the mothers bloodstream and the fetus's bloodstream separate.  If antibodies are passing in utero it is a sign that something is wrong with the placenta and can often end in miscarriage. This is true across all placental mammals.

Milk in Ungulates is much higher in fat than human/primate milk. This is due to the differences of how the young need to grow. Ungulates need their babies to be up and moving rapidly so they can move with the herd. Their young need lots of fats since they cannot feed as often as primate mothers do. Humans and other primates carry their young around and their infants feed often. Their milk is low in fat due to frequent feeding. Most primates have milk that is largely water with just traces of anything else. Camel milk may be more easily tolerated but it is hardly similar to human milk in content. It is considerably higher in fat and proteins.

As far as intestines go in animals leaky is an odd way to describe them. The entire alimentary canal is capable of absorbing nutrients, however it is not a passive process. Only water can truly pass through the barrier without an energy assist. All other nutrients that we need must be helped across the barrier with various different mechanisms and energy requirements for each type. Antibodies in particular require immune cells to pick them up in the intestines and must be passed back and forth by these cells to be added to the immune arsenal. An animal with a leaky intestine is an animal that will not live long thanks to a massive bacterial infection.

Len Ovens wrote:I wonder if something like this would be able to be transformed into something like that. The land ought to be very cheap if they are done mining. Getting it to start growing stuff again might take a while.

Be wary of buying abandoned open pit mines.  If it was mining metals the chances are it will be highly toxic for centuries to come due to either the metals themselves or the chemicals used to help extract the metals. Gold mines are a prime example, most large scale ones are cyanide leech.  Most of them are superfund sites anyway though and would not be up for sale. Another prime example from Montana is one of the most toxic lakes on the panet, the Berkley Pit in Butte Montana.  You may have read about it recently due to snow geese dying by the thousands after landing on it. It is also a great concern for Butte's water, since it has been filling with more water every year and will eventually start spilling into the groundwater and streams around Butte.

Otherwise if it was a quarry for rock or gravel you would have a much easier time converting it. There are millions of abandoned gravel pits in the US alone, many of which would probably be workable. There are still the concerns of oil, antifreeze and other gunk from the large industrial machines used to remove that soil of course. Just driving around my hometown there are at least 15 gravel pits within the valley some that have ponds already formed and thriving. I imagine many of these would be less expensive to purchase since they are pretty torn up.

I find this to be a fascinating project.  I will be keeping my eye on this thread.

Regan Dixon wrote:I've known individuals of more "primitive" breeds like malamutes and eskies to seek out wild saskatoons and rosehips, with no human encouragement, and eat them.  Wolves and kin may eat 80% meat, but what about the other 20% of their diet?  Probably the berries give nutrition and fiber, and taste good to them, just the same as with us.  Then there was my husky, who was a menace in my garden...stripping the peas off the vines at the peak of perfection, nipping off the tender little broccoli heads just forming, denuding the raspberry bushes...she had a taste for food at its peak of tender perfection.  Oh, and wild strawberries.  She would make a point of stopping to browse.

From what I have read some of that 20% is from the stomach contents of their prey. Fruits and nuts make up a smaller portion, along with some grasses.

While dogs were domesticated from wolves who eat about 80% meat, we have changed them into omnivores just like us. Thousands of years of feeding them from what we cooked that day will do that. One study I read recently said that dogs digestive systems had shrunk because humans have been feeding them cooked food for so long that they didn't need the longer tract anymore. Our digestive tract did the same thing around 1.8 million years ago when Homo Erectus started cooking meat.

I had a boxer who went nuts for oranges and bananas.  He would smell them from anywhere in the house and be all over me for his share.

I do know that you require permits to do so. In Montana there are specific times that they are allowed with permits and during droughts there are no permits are given. The amount of land I will be moving onto I will never have a reason to use this. I was just curious if others were doing so. Most of the state of Montanas attempts at this have been blocked by logging interests over and over even in the wilderness areas they can't log. The problem is only getting worse though since the methods logging companies are using aren't actually improving forest health as they so often claim. The millions of acres of beetle kill in Montana are going to burn like mad in the next drought and most of it isn't of much use to the building industries.

What I was thinking and apparently cut from my earlier post is that people who have land which is forested would be wise to plant fire resistant species while slowly removing the torch trees from their property.  This would give them a much more resilient forest in the future. Especially considering how many are now moving out into the thick forests out here, and how often those houses burn to the ground when the droughts come on.

Fire is something that seems to be missing in many of the permaculture projects I see in the dry Western US. It is such a major part of the ecological cycle of the West which has been discouraged for decades by federal and state land practices. Without it we see mass proliferation of fire prone tree species in enormous tightly packed stands that burn fast and hot when the conditions are right.  These species have grown because the original fire hardy species like Cedars Ponderosa etc have been logged without replanting. These fire resistant species tend to grow with more space between them and so they take up more land per tree, but at the same time the fires that burn through just clear out undergrowth instead of entire forests. It is also a major factor for grassland health in the semiarid plains as many of the native species of grasses and forbs rapidly return to fire scared areas and gain a significant boost from the burnt material.

So I am wondering if any permies are using controled burns on their lands as a method of land management or even a way to provide disturbance to reset their land for new plantings. Perhaps I just haven't searched deep enough. I know some use biochar, but their methods are not what I am talking about as they seem to mostly use fire place or campfire ash.

My sister lives in Alabama, and she says that the last year or so has shown her who amongst her friends were just pretending not to be racist. With the Trump win they have started to be vocal and not worry about the backlash. In the long run thought I think the backlash will shut them up again. Sadly up here in the Northwest the Nazis have been coming out of the woodwork.

I never heard much of anything against Asians in the South in my time there. It was almost all against blacks. It seems that Southern hospitality is still alive there though and that does tend to lessen the spewing of hate. People get more pushback over not being hospitable than anything else. I imagine it is an even stronger tradition in the rural areas.