Julie Anne

Stacy Witscher wrote:I have to say that if anyone I knew wanted me to meet one of their friends, a dinner party is a perfect opportunity. I love dinner parties. No pressure, just friends introducing other friends to each other. Beautiful and if nothing else, you get a lovely evening out of it.

I agree this is a great way to meet people, but it's fallen out of fashion in most circles. I do remember my parents having a lot of dinner parties, and sometimes inviting divorced friends in the hopes that they would hit it off.

I teach online and coach online, with my kids at home. They are a little older, but they homeschool, and there are still a lot of online opportunities that would work with younger kids. I worked with a psychologist at a school who worked remotely and had her little baby with her at home. Something like editing or writing would be good for having young kids at home.

I could see combining the farm and daycare ideas. Maybe an after-school program where you could devote the afternoons to the kids--show them the animals and do nature activities with them. Then most of the day would be free for farming or other enterprises. Or run classes for homeschool students so it's only a couple days a week and then you have time for other activities.

It sounds like bee sting cellulitis (secondary infection in the skin). Vitamin C is a natural antihistamine, and anti infection. So if I get stung I always make up a big glass of water with sodium ascorbate (neutral form of vitamin C) and drink it down. Like 10,000 mg. I have also cured bee sting cellulitis that way. Vitamin C can give you diarrhea in high doses, but it's not harmful.

Also use topicals that are antibacterial. You have some good suggestions. I've used coconut oil on cellulitis with success. Rub it in frequently. You can treat it naturally, but it is an infection, so keep an eye on it and go to the doctor if it starts looking worse.

Good luck.

To add more "evidence" that this is the way to go. I haven't checked my own turtle yet. I might later.

Buckwheat crepes

Soak one cup of buckwheat overnight. In the morning, drain and rinse. Combine buckwheat with 1 c water, 3 eggs, and 1/2 t sea salt. Cook in a medium sized skillet (I use ceramic) on medium heat. Barely grease the skillet. Flip when the top looks firm and the edges curl up.

Thanks, Hans and Nancy. Your comments made me realize that there are a lot of apple trees along the path that runs next to the Erie Canal here where lots of people walk and bike. I never realized it could be from people throwing their apple cores there. So that would be a good home for it.  But I'll pot it up and try to nurture it along in the meantime.

I live in a townhouse with a garage that never freezes, so my best option for composting is vermicompost. Plus I just love worms, so that works out.

I don't have access to good leaves, so when I started I mostly fed them peat and kitchen scraps. They liked that.

Then we got a pet rabbit, and when I added the bedding to the worm bin (I only had one bin at that point) it really reduced the population. I didn't realize how dry the pine shavings were, even with the litter box that was "wet," but wet with ammonia pee, the woms didn't like that either. So I pulled the bin apart, took out the stuff they didn't like, and put the remaining worms into a separate bin with their normal peat and scraps to get them jump started again.

Meanwhile, I made a bin of the rabbit cage litter (pine shavings and shredded paper, hay, poop, and the litter box which has pine pellets--breaks down to sawdust--and urine). I bought an em-1 type product called ProBio https://www.scdprobiotics.com/collections/probiotic-mother-cultures/products/probio-balance-original and started "pre-treating" the rabbit litter with that for a few weeks before adding and mixing carefully with the new worm bins.

I had a bin of treated litter that had been sitting for a long time, so I threw a few worms in there to see if they could handle it. Holy crap, they could not! One was half dead and one had an ulcer on its side. Poor things, I threw them back in a good bin.

Next new development, we got another rabbit, and I had a ton of work papers that needed shredding, so I bought a crosscut shredder that makes really small, fluffy shreds. So now I am bedding the rabbits on mostly paper (the pine isn't good for them anyway, but I'll use up the little that's left.) The litterbox pellets are still pine, because they're SO cheap. Is this bad? Should I suck it up and buy hardwood pellets? I also got some biochar, and I added some to the existing worm boxes and some for the litterboxes. So the biochar will get peed on, then innoculated with ProBio solution, then added to the worms eventually.

So now with the addition of lots of shredded paper, the worms seem to be happy with the cage litter. Even with the cage litter being relatively fresh (not sitting long treated with the ProBio solution), if I bury the kitchen scraps with a big wad of rabbit litter and shredded paper (and a bit of peat) the worms seem happy. The new bin is thriving. I wonder, is it the fluffiness of the paper mixture that they like, or does the paper absorb ammonia from the urine? Or is it that they don't like moving their little bodies through the straight pine products, even if they're wet?

Another question, for the bin ProBio-treated of rabbit litter (without paper) that almost killed a couple worms, should I be stirring that or adding anything else to make it break down faster? If left to its own devices, the top gets a fuzzy white fungus, particularly on the rabbit poop. I've attached a picture. I can eventually mix it into other bins, but I'm just kind of wondering what's going on, and how I can do any of these processes better, both in terms of worm health and the  overall finished product of the compost.

I should add, the seed starting mix had homemade vermicompost, which frequently sprouts squash or tomato or pepper seeds.

This unusual seedling popped up out of a tray where not much else germinated (old seeds). Is it an apple tree? The seed was brown and oval.

If so, what should I do with it? I know most good apple trees are grafted, but Sepp Holzer grows them from seeds. I don't have access to much land (unless I just plant it in a hedgerow). Should I keep it in a container and bonsai it?