Kathleen Sanderson

World events are very troubling, but honestly, my biggest stress is in my own home - my handicapped youngest daughter (adult), who also has serious medical issues and is autistic and - when she's unhappy or not feeling good - screams, cries, and generally fusses like a toddler. Sometimes 24/7 for weeks (we are just starting to come out of one of those cycles, though she's still not completely out of it). Add to that, I'm not getting any younger (I'll be seventy next year), and have a bad back that has me just about crippled.

My response to both world issues and home stresses is the same - prayer, Bible reading, and remembering that God is in control. He has a plan both for the world and for our individual lives; we are in His hands; and we can trust Him completely. I still worry sometimes. I'm still very troubled by all that is going on the world - I can't imagine how scary it must be for people who don't know the Lord and aren't familiar with Bible prophecy. (And even scarier for people who do have some familiarity with prophecy, but haven't put their trust in God!) I still get tired and stressed with the care of my daughter, and frustrated by my own physical limitations. But I have Someone who I can turn it all over to - I keep going, one day at a time, with what is within my own sphere of responsibility, and let Him take care of the rest of it.

It's a daily thing. Sometimes hourly. We have small 'hope and trust' batteries, LOL! They need to be recharged frequently. But as long as I remember where my charger is, and use it, I don't run out completely.

I would also guess a weak spot in the shell. I've had eggs laid that had excess shell in a few spots, and wouldn't be surprised if the opposite happens sometimes. I really like 'boiling' eggs in the electric pressure cooker - even fresh from the hen house, they peel superbly once they've cooled down.

I'm kind of skimming through this (have major RL distractions going on at the moment, sigh), so I probably missed it, but if it wasn't already mentioned, elevation is extremely important, too. That's why Sunset Magazine developed a gardening guide specifically for the Western half of the US, because you can be in a southern latitude but gardening at such a high elevation that you can have frost in any month of the year.

Gardening guides for the North are interesting to me even though we now live in Kentucky, because I grew up in Alaska. Too old to want to go back now, but still have family there who can use information like this.

Dishes. It's not that I really even mind washing dishes (we don't have a dishwasher), it's that my back hurts when I stand. I can't stand for more than a couple of minutes before it's too painful and I  have to either walk or sit down. Also, I'm getting sick and tired of the kitchen sink drain being clogged up. My brother, who lives next door, spent two days trying to fix it a few months ago - successfully, eventually, but he had to crawl under the house and strap the long run of drain pipe up so it didn't have any sags in it. Now it's clogged again, and I'm considering just giving up and dumping all the liquids out the back door like our ancestors used to have to do. I hate having to ask my brother to help with it again. I'm thankful for my paid-for old house, but old-house plumbing (and wiring) is the pits.

Never. I have a livestock guardian dog (Anatolian Shepherd, weighs around a hundred pounds) in the pasture with the goats -she's only been on a leash once in her life (when I took her to the vet to be spayed), and I can't even keep a collar on her. She gets plenty of exercise out with the goats.

I also have three small dogs - twenty pounds or less - who have half an acre fenced around the house to run around in, and they do. They keep each other busy out there for a good chunk of the day. They do have collars on, but only the Rat Terrier has ever been on a leash. I wouldn't want to take them away from the house on walks, because then if they got loose, they would probably wander farther away from the house than they do now if they get loose (doesn't happen very often, but so far, they've never gone far).

Because my handicapped youngest daughter and I are mostly only eating meat (to deal with chronic severe health problems), I was curious. I'd heard people say, the carnivore diet isn't 'sustainable' because 'the whole world can't eat that way!' So I did some research. I don't have the figures in front of me (handicapped daughter took that notebook and ripped all the pages out of it just for something to do), but it would be possible to feed every human being on earth a diet of just animal proteins, combining all the land presently used for crop agriculture with all the land presently used as pasture. That wasn't even including forested land (much of which would benefit from being managed as silvopasture) or seafood, which is a plentiful source of animal proteins. Given that animal proteins are much better source of nutrients than any plants in existence, it seems to me that that would be a net benefit to the world! And there would still be room around the edges (and through the middles, if you grow food plants in the silvopastures) for plenty of fruits and vegetables. All you'd end up missing is the stuff that seems to not really be all that healthy for a lot of us anyway. (Also, I didn't figure in dairy products or eggs, just meat, at least two pounds per person per day. Add dairy and eggs to the total, and there is an abundance of nutritious food for everyone. And I was mostly looking at grazing livestock, not the ones that need row-cropped grains and legumes, like commercial chickens and pigs.) There is also a lot of potentially-usable land that isn't being fully or properly managed for grazing right now. Much of the far-north, for example - cattle and sheep can be raised clear up to Fairbanks and reindeer even further north. A good chunk of the land would need to be used for growing hay, but that's entirely possible. That land didn't get figured into my equations, either.

I know that wasn't what the original question was about - just something that I thought was really interesting.

My place used to be a small dairy farm, and had to be able to handle big trucks coming in and turning around. The areas for that purpose are graveled (heavily and deeply, to handle the trucks), but most of the time you can't see the gravel because of the grass growing through it. In one area, you can't see it at all, and in two other areas the grass is still a little thin and when freshly mown, the gravel is still visible. One of those grid systems could serve the same purpose; I don't know which costs more, is more easily found locally, or is made of more sustainable materials. Properly done, though, a gravel area lasts a long time, and it will allow grass and clover, etc., to grow up through it. We still have a big truck turning around here weekly (the garbage truck - we are at the end of a dead-end road), and it's been at least fifteen years since gravel was last added.

M Pearson wrote:This is one of the "issues" I have with the focus on gardening here :) Not that there's anything wrong with it, but my diet is quite beef heavy. I would have to raise a bunch of cows and grow maybe 5 tomato plants a year ;) All the gardening just doesn't really fit my lifestyle haha.

That's the same problem I have! We need a permaculture focused on livestock. Not that I don't love fruits and vegetables - I do. But I *feel* much better on a meat-based diet. So the plants need to be raised to feed animals. And for other purposes that plants are good for, like building materials, firewood, wind-breaks, beauty, wildlife diversity, fiber, and so on.

At going-on-seventy, and (even with the better diet) a bad back, I'm not going to be doing much, but the information should be there for younger people to make use of. Regenerative ranching and farming is a good beginning, but probably not the be-all and end-all of what can be done.  Silvopasture - using tree crops for shade, soil improvement (legumes fixing nitrogen), erosion control, shelter, and livestock feed - is another step in the right direction.

I see I posted to this thread a couple of months ago. Wanted to add this - there's a guy in Arizona who owns a couple of nursing homes. He changed the way he fed his patients to ketogenic or carnivore, and A LOT OF HIS PATIENTS GET WELL AND GO HOME!!!

It can be difficult to get anyone to change their diet. It's often even harder with an older person, who has a lifetime of habits, and dementia can increase the difficulty by an order of magnitude. But it is well worth the effort, if the person is someone you really care about.

Andrew Welser wrote:

John C Daley wrote:I am amazed at the expectation of some people who wish to invert the seasons and refuse to put a jumper on in winter.
No wonder the world has trouble with fuel bills and climate change.

I work HVAC for a campus that has some office space, and every season change we get a few people requesting set-point changes to their office where their heating set-point is higher than their cooling set-point: I.E. they want their office cooled down to 70*f in summer, but heated to 75*f in winter! <shaking my head & facepalm!>

We've had serious issues with this kind of thing, with my daughter not being able to regulate her temperature well. One hot day, I wasn't thinking, and took her to a doctor appointment without a jacket - the inside of the clinic felt cool even to me, and she had goosebumps and was shivering, and on the edge of getting blue lips and fingers. Now I try to always remember to put a jacket on her when we have to go to town.