Chris Asmann

We call it Trout Lily here too, or Dog-Tooth Violet. In NY is was fairly uncommon and I couldn't imagine eating the few I'd see.

Here in WV I have a north facing mountainside with some areas carpeted with it. Ramps and morels grow in the same areas so I often forage those two and trample the spotted leaves of the Erythronium sp. since they're up around the same time. I haven't tried eating them. I don't know if they can sustain their numbers against annual digging for food or not. The fact that no one does it around here makees me think probably not.

Back in NY I tried transplanting some into a shady garden several times. They always came up and flowered for a few years, then just leaves and after about 6 years they no longer appeared. I also bought them from a native plants nursery and had the same result (actually I don't think the nursery ones ever flowered).

I think they need copious moisture when they're actively growing and they are not tolerant of sun. I wouldn't try transplanting them again myself. Mine here all have nice, fat seed pods around morel time so if I wanted to establish them somewhere else, I would put mesh bags on the seed pods in the woods, come back later for the seeds and scatter them around or start them in flats.

I also doubt very much that they can handle any competition from grasses. Here we are zone 6b with 40" average annual rainfall.

About 7 years ago, shortly after I moved here (WV) from NYS, I had to relocate an electric panel that was inside the collapsed barn. I knew there was a water line nearby as well, and figured I had to be prepared to turn off the mains, dig all around the box to find the power and replace whatever we damaged in the process. No one knew anything about the location as the lines had both been in place since about 1976 and everyone who had any part in laying them was long dead.

My neighbor pulled some coathangers out of his truck, cut and bent them into a good shape and dowsed the location for the lines, but couldn't tell how far down or whether both lines were there. He immediately called his cousin who, in his words, was "good at witchin' burred war and lines"

Paul arrived in about 10 minutes. He was retired from the phone company and we had a nice chat. He pulled out a similar pair of bent coathangers only his had wooden handles. He quickly located both the water line and the electric line, in the same places my neighbor dowsed. He told me that the water was down at 3.5' and the electric he felt was above it by a foot. They shared the trench in some places, then split off. The water line would not be disturbed by our work if he was correct. He marked the ground with some paint. He explained that dowsing was easy and let me try with his wires. I also had them cross in the appropriate locations despite the fact that I was sure it was nonsense.

We dug, and both lines were exactly where Paul said they would be.  Whenever I have to locate some of the many thousands of feet of buried water lines here, I can dowse them and I have found lines in unexpected places many times. This is pretty convincing. Often the lines are not in the location you'd expect from common sense, so it's not as if the dowsing confirms an existing logical guess.

When trenching for our outdoor wood boiler's buried lines, I called the power company to locate the buried wire for my service entrance. I had dowsed it, but came up with a really improbable route. The power company guy came and located the line in exactly that location, and when we carefully dug to get under it, it was right there.

So yes, it definitely works.

In older pattern books, the garments called capes were cleanly fitted over the shoulders and genererally shorter. They had more shaping, less volume and were roughly equivalent to the short jackets women wear today. In the 19th century, the sleeves of womens' clothing might be extensively decorated with lace cuffs, ruffles or puffy parts, none of which made it practical to have an outer garment with sleeves.
Any style of sleeve worked under a cape or mantle (which terms seem to be used interchangeably in this time period). the shorter length made it easy to carry a muff and to opeen doors or otherwise use hands without difficulty.

A cloak is a traveling garment which is long and relatively shapeless. It would keep dust and rain off one's clothes and keep a person warm while traveling in an unheated coach or out in the open in a cart or wagon. A large wool cloak is heavy and somewhat cumbersome.

Nowadays we don't get wet or dusty while traveling, and our clothes underneath are cheap to replace and easy to launder.
My two cents...
Edited to add why I think one is better:
Oh yeah, I think a cape is better because of convenience. A heavy wool cloak gets hung up on twigs and thorns and the hem drags up leaves and dirt, especially when traveling downhill. Uphill you can accidentally step on it and tear the fasteners off it or trip yourself. A cape that goes to hip length or so with the front divided to allow easy use of hands is a clear winner. It will still keep rain off and keep core warm, and it will fit over as few or as many layers as I want to wear.

(can you tell that I wear capes often, and that my lovely cloak sits in the closet and hardly gets out to play?)

Our place has  railroad tunnel directly under the house about 400' below it.
You hear the trains down there and the sound stops as soon as the engine is within the tunnel. On the opposite side of our property is the exit, and you hear the train come out and blow the horn while traversing the short bridge to the tunnel on the other side of the river. No matter which side you're on, the point where the train vanishes, is where our property begins. So we called it The Vanishing Point from the start, many months before we bought it.

Welcome!

I get great yields here in SE WV at about 2000' elevation in full sun.
Last year I got about 8# of harvested potatoes for every pound planted.
I think this year might be better yet. I always plant late, some went in just 3 weeks ago, the earliest were planted in May and we dug some yesterday.

I would love to compare total pounds planted to total pounds harvested.
Do you have that information?

Also, I use raised beds without sides and minimum digging, no tilling. I mulch heavily with everything from cardboard to grass clippings to dried horse manure. I kinda do the Ed Smith thing.

The video is nice, and I don't want to take anything away from a good job but...

I have been washing fleeces for over 30 years and some seasons I've done 15 or more, keeping each seperate.
If you have regular wahing machine (the kind where the tub fills up with water) You can do a better job with less handling thusly:

Fill the tub with hot water and your choice of soap. More water and soap for larger or dirtier fleeces
with the washer turned to 'off' , gently press the fleece into the hot water
Leave it for a while, several hours is not too long. Don't leave it so long that the water gets cold.

with the washer lid open, move the control to 'spin' and close the lid
(you want water to spin out but no agitation)

lift out your fleece and wipe any dirt out of the washer drum

Usually I will do it a second time with only water. A coated fleece it may not need anything more.
The fleece is almost dry as is comes out of the machine and will quickly finish spread out anywhere.

In all the years doing this I've never clogged the machine or had any problems, the only caveat is that it uses a considerable amount of water.

To spray people and animals, this realy works to keep ticks off when you're in tall grass or brush: Pyranha Zero-Bite All Natural Fly Spray.
It's mostly water with plant oils and soap. It will even kill ticks on the horses. if I had more time and less money, I'd make it myself.  It has 4 ingredients plus water.

One of my mules had several ticks attached near her navel and developed a football sized sweling that oozed for over a week. so now I wipe the repellent on their legs, tail and around their necks to prevent ticks from climbing up onto them. One horse gets them all the time, others don't. And I sometimes find them dead on the horses but i can't tell if it's because of the fly spray or not.

I know more than a few people who have chronic infections of Lyme disease or other ticket-borne diseases. When I moved here and commented on how many ticks I found crawling on myself every day, my new neighbor who's in his 70s commented that he'd never been sick from a tick bite. He's recently been tested by his doctor and now on Doxycycline for who-knows-how-long. The symptoms in his case are subtle, but the difference once he started taking the doxy was noticable, especially his cognition. It was diagnosed as Lyme disease but I don't know if they can or do test for all the possibilities. Also don't know how an antibody test determines if there is any active infection. Debate for another time.

I had just heard about the mouse bedding trick earlier this year, working on that now. I will put them in our fencerows for the mice. Our biggest concern are the smal deer ticks that we can hardly see. They are more likely to carry Lyme bacteria and they are (despite the name) hosted by mice. Idon't care too much about ticks all over the place, but I would like to reduce their numbers in the areas around the house and barns.

I am surprised that none of the discussion mentioned nadiring, or adding more space to the hive by lifting it and placing an empty section underneath.
This is more natural and less disturbing to the colony than supering.

There is no need to inspect a super. Beekeeping for All discusses the many types of hive the Abbe trialed and why he settled on the design in the book.

In his climate, bees need one full box of honey for winter, and whatever boxes are full above that, are ok to take. Colder climate bees will need more. In this system bees are always raising brood in new comb, which is their preference. The queen doesn't go into the honey storage area, she stays on the new comb where she lays eggs.

I know this is an old thread, and we all enjoy Sepp's approach to most things, but I would encourage anyone interested in natural beekeeping to read up on it at biobees.com and check out Beekeeping for All which David Heaf made available in English for free.

The Warre design does comply with regulations too. The beekeeper can remove a frame for inspection if the inspector requires that. It isn't that hard if you consider that when you make and fasten the top bars. I did it a few times just to be sure I could, though it never came up.

I could go on, but everything I could say has been already said, and better, by others at the biobees site.