Elfriede B

decanted my lemon balm tincure and put it in an empty palmolive bottle. Easy to get some out and rub on.  I take the goats to some rough brushy place where they would not go by themselves.  Mosquitos live there. I did not put the stuff in my face much and I had one mosquito on my eyebrow.  Don't know if the balm stuff worked or if there were not more.

I have a book by Maria Thun.
http://www.considera.org/pbtsres.html

http://sites.google.com/site/wyeswomancelticshaman/wye-s-woman/gardening-with-the-moon-stars/maria-thun



Her ways would be right down my alley.  Since homeopathy has really worked for us, I don't see why bd would not work.  It is too work intensive for me, I can not sit and stir something for a whole hr.  Well, we do the best we can.  I try to work with the moon cycles and there definetly seems to be something to it. Btw,  Sepp Holzer dowses and pays attention to the moon cycles. 

when I was a kid we lived on potatoes and milk.  I remember pulling out plants (my job) and it seems a dozen tubers would be hanging from the roots. Not to mention those still in the ground.  Fantastic, wonderful tasting potatoes.  We did not know they were organic. The only fertilizer we had available was manure, animal and humanure.  That had been used on the fields  for hundreds of years.  I take it after all those years the ground worms had done a good job of balancing the soil.  My soil here looks like perfect 'potato soil' but I have yet to have a harvest. Three spuds to a hill is nothing to write home about, or maybe it is.  Beets and carrots also did terrble. I added  CalPhos to the soil and the beets are now acceptable. A few decades of modern agriculture seem to wreck any soil.  I am glad to see that I now have worms in my soil. 
To me, potatoes are an absolutely essential crop.  Over the years I have heard of all kinds of methods of growing them.  I have tried two barrels last year and it was a flop. 

I have a recipe someplace for a lemon balm mosquito repellant.  I think I just make a tincture and try that.  We hardly had any mosquitos in the past, but this rainy spring, the pond overflowed and with it went all the pollywogs. 

does anybody kow where I could get seeds?  It is of the cranebill family and spreads like crazy if you have it.  I used to pull it up as a weed, though the pink flowers are really pretty.

what is a tiny amount of flax supposed to accomplish? 
We get good alfalfa hay from a local farmer.  The feedmill down the road has a hay grinder and we take a load of bales down there and have it ground. They add  anything that you want to the mix.  There has not been a bit of waste since we have been doing that. I had to put bedding down.  I feed them a bit of loose hay to make sure their digestion is not upset. So far they have been doing just fine. It costs a dollar to grind one bale, and I save about half of the hay, so i come out ahead.

I would not use it this year, but I would use it in my compost heap. 

I am wondering, flies and maggots are a problem with manure.  DH is forever hanging up fluystrips.  Would this bucket method work using manure?  I am going to try it.

That is what I thought, too.  I can not go to the mailbox without a procession of goats following me,  but if I want to take them to the pasture I wan  them to be in, they seem to read my mind and think, hey, lets give her a rough time and walk in the opposite direction.  They all come to the barn in the evening, sheep and goats, and we keep them locked up, to many coyotes howling.  But darn them, it is a procedure to get them to the lower pasture. They rather eat everything down to the nub where I do not want them than to go to a goat paradise.
do you order your ingredients? I have never seen dry molasses anywhere,  and the cloves and flaxseed, that must get expensive.
I am not  surprised they like the organic garlic better.

red cloud,
thanks for posting.  I have some chicoree growing here. we are talking about the blue flowers that grow along the highway, right?  I use the leaves right now for salad. the blue flowers are bitter and good for constipation. so maybe they would be good for worming too.  What I am wondering, how do you plant it and where? From what I know it is a plant that indicates compacted soil, like the plantains, too.  where do you get seed and how do you go about planting it?
I have some wormwood plants,  I want to plant some tobacco, too.  Do you have trouble with them taking garlic?
Could you post your recipe for feed? I take it you are not mixing that every day?  I really want to get into growing natural wormers.
One more question. How do you get them to go to the paddock you want them to be in? My goats are ALWAYS underfoot when I am out doing something, but if I want them to follow  me nobody wants to come, even if I am carrying a feed bucket, and it is a procedure to get them where I want them to go to, since nothing is close or handy here on our bumpy farm.