Jay Angler

You will be soooo... ready for Hallowe'en. Please find some way to put the Grim Squeaker on your front door!

Carla Burke wrote:Toasted chicken salad sandwiches - from the spatchcocked chicken, night before last.  

Glad I'm not the only one. Mine was a little rooster I culled which I roasted a couple of days ago.

Sourdough bread, mayo, chicken breast, home pickled onions and homegrown tomato slices.

Simple but yummy. I needed simple as I'm busy processing Italian prune plums. The humidity has dropped - maybe I should try filling the dehydrator with half plums?

Which kind of snake keeps the car cleanest?

A windshield viper!

Looks like they got a last meal too!!! Joel Salatin would approve - a really good life with one bad day!

Well done!

How does the economics work out? I have no doubt it's worth it from the food quality direction, but how much of a time and money perspective does this investment represent?

I am reading Patrick Whitefields, How to make a forest garden. He talks about taking topsoil off the top of paths and adding it to the planting areas beside the paths, and then using the path to double as shallow drainage ditches for heavy storms. So Joylynn Hardesty is not alone in her solution to this problem.

We've been trending towards bigger storms, so managing slopes and *choosing* where to send unexpected water is becoming more important. Slowing it, so it is stored deeper in your soil, is an asset also.

​​​​​I give this book 8 out of 10 acorns.

First a disclaimer. I picked up this book thinking I wouldn't find it too interesting because I live with huge deer pressure where any small tree's life is in constant danger. I hoped it might give me information that would allow me to grow cherries, but that was my only goal - a small cherry tree I could build Fort Knox around!

However, I know too many people on small properties, so knowing something about the techniques Ann Ralph is promoting seems like a way to help my community become more food secure. This book is totally worth reading, even if you can't follow her techniques due to animal predation without adaptation.  

Good ideas I hadn't considered:

1. putting 3 different related baby trees in the same hole rather than grafting 3 varieties on the same tree. Each tree has its own roots, so the roots compete as well as the fruiting branches so less likely for one variety to become dominant. I had heard of planting a nitrogen fixer along with a young tree, but not this option!

2. Using baby fruit trees as a hedge or fence if wildlife permits - keep them small but get a hedgerow effect. Different species work for this technique. You might not get as much fruit all at once, but may do so over the season, without taking up a larger footprint than you can afford.

3. The genuine benefit for urban or suburban permies to plant a wide range of fruit and be able to manage it easily. Three or more apple trees all with different ripening periods and still have room for 3 plums which ripen sooner or later. A definite help for food security.

A couple of things that as a permie I disagree with:

1. "dropping that fruit to putrefy on the ground" - many bountiful fruit trees produce during our driest season. Any fruit that falls gets cleaned up by the rabbits, the deer, taken to our ducks, or dumped in our composts to add some much needed moisture there. Organic material is never a waste, at least not in my ecosystem!

2. The author pretty much says you have to start with professionally grown trees. I suspect permies' ideas of starting from seed so the roots are sound, then grafting if you get a dud, isn't in her toolbox. I'd have liked more information on how permies could start with a seed and get to the same place.

Sabine, I would definitely give it a go. Even if you don't get what your wanted, you might get something equally delightful. We have a volunteer plum tree in our field. The fruit is much smaller than either of our modern grafted plum trees, but the fruit is delicious out of hand, and makes great jam.

If you end up with too much of a good thing, ask around and you may be able to get scion for grafting to give you a longer harvest window.

Our current living room came with a small, built-in bookshelf which has a mixture of books and games on it. Other than the children's books we kept, most of the books are non-fiction.

I think I figure that the public library can provide me with all the fiction I want, as I would normally only read a fiction book once. Nonfiction I want because I will refer to them as needed. Although largely spoiled by the internet, I'm loath to trust it, or even my computer, as a permanent repository of important information. Some of the gardening books are at least 30 years old.

Andrew Welser wrote: The solder normally used to join copper pipes and fittings might be more of a toxic gick issue...

There is a distinction now for solder safe for water pipes vs other uses, and more awareness about solder dangers, so even the non-pipe version is safer than it was from the lead perspective. Of course the problem becomes, what is the long term effect of the new version vs the one we knew the dangers of?

Soldering is a skill, just like every other skill. If I was planning to work on house pipes, I'd be looking for lower risk soldering projects that I could practice on. I have seen old soldering jobs with gobs of solder all over the place. I've also seen jobs where the minimum solder was used, and in particular, there were no big globs of solder on the inside where the water was going to be. The dose does make the poison.

I also recognize that there are humans who are *much* more sensitive to certain metals than other humans. Doctors have documented people whose bodies simply don't eliminate nasty metals as effectively as other people. If you are one of those unlucky ones, avoidance is *much* more critical. If anyone reading this thinks they might be one of those humans, please get yourself tested. One of my in-laws had hemochromatosis, which prevents the body from eliminating extra iron. Luckily they determined this before any damage was done and the solution was literally, taking a pint of blood off him every few months.