Buttons - discovering features on permies

Permies has all sorts of buttons and features that I've never noticed.  This thread is for buttons like that.


Today I discovered

It's at the bottom of each thread and if I press it, I can write a reply quickly without loading extra pages.  The downside, I don't have the cool formatting buttons for inserting pictures and stuff.  But for text-only replies this is my new favourite button.  

It took me longer than I want to admit to figure out where the affiliate link was located on posts in the digital market place. I signed up to be an affiliate and struggled for a fair bit to find the link - just never scrolled down far enough to see it. Not really a button but still a feature that took me a while to "discover".

Lily Hope wrote:
What is the source plant for those?  I don't recognize it.

Black Walnut.  The shell grows all through the meat, which makes it difficult to get the meat out (impossible to get it out in one piece), but makes for really pretty buttons when sliced up. The shell is hard as heck, so they last a looong time.

When I was growing up, one of my neighbors raised sheep and hand spun their own wool into yarn.  The lady would then knit it into sweaters and the husband would run black walnuts through a bandsaw to make buttons for the sweaters.
Other than some cotton thread, it was all hand made / home grown on their homestead.

This was before 'permaculture' was a thing, but they lived pretty close to the permaculture lifestyle.

Peter VanDerWal wrote:Black Walnut.  The shell grows all through the meat, which makes it difficult to get the meat out (impossible to get it out in one piece), but makes for really pretty buttons when sliced up. The shell is hard as heck, so they last a looong time.

When I was growing up, one of my neighbors raised sheep and hand spun their own wool into yarn.  The lady would then knit it into sweaters and the husband would run black walnuts through a bandsaw to make buttons for the sweaters.
Other than some cotton thread, it was all hand made / home grown on their homestead.

This was before 'permaculture' was a thing, but they lived pretty close to the permaculture lifestyle.

Ah.  Thank you for the clarification.  Having now looked specifically at black walnut images, I can clearly see the difference.  

My maternal grandparents did a few different things pre permie label too.  One thing that stands out is they never bought fertilizer or any kind of soil amendments for their garden, and had a nicely established open compost pit tucked to the side of the kitchen garden that rested behind a more ornamental bed, in partial shade.  I seem to recall some years they got straw for overwintring...possibly from the Lima Bean farmer cousins a bit further to the northwest of us.

That side of the family had (sea) fisherman, so their extensive kitchen garden was fertilized with fish bits every year. (I only recall them using it there, not the other garden areas.)  My grandfather would take whomever from the family out on his Kris Kraft, and we'd fish whenever we could in late spring/summer/fall.  My generation of cousins spent many days at sea with him before we started working summers (resort town in southern NJ).  Prior generations fished in a larger scale fashion, but by my parents' generation most had moved on to other careers, a lot of them LEOs/firefighters/EMT/civil servants.  We sought mostly flounder.  Some blues, he'd keep the occasional skate or small shark for bait because if you left the skin on, it was harder for the fish to nibble the bait right off the hook.  (Though now I'd have wanted to keep more skate because it's rather delicious.)

We'd catch enough flounder in the summer that we'd still be eating it at lent the next year.  Never dried.  Always frozen in a full size front door freezer they had in the utility room.

Both sides of my family did little smart things here and there that now I see extolled in permie/thrifty living exchanges.  Never the buttons, though.