Antony Serio

I share two urban garden plots with my 87 year old neighbor. He has an old Mantis compost tumbler (discontinued post-covid), while I have a newer (and smaller)  dual chamber polycarbonate drum from Home Depot. I probably put too many grass clipping’s in my neighbor’s drum, because it has been smelling sour for a while, and has been way too damp. Mine has been similar, but to a lesser extent. I’ve been adding tried leaves to both, to limited effect. While I was running errands today, I noticed that somebody had abandoned two boxes of pasta. One family sized box of fettuccini, and one of angel hair pasta. The boxes had ruptured, so four pounds of pasta was just sitting exposed to the elements in the gutter. It was probably no longer fit for human consumption, but is it compostable? This afternoon, I decided to find out.  I collected the pasta, and added three cups of broken up pasta to each drum  (a cup being a bundle between my index finger and thumb) and gave them a spin. I figure, since pasta is dehydrated semolina, maybe it will absorb the excess moisture in the compost, and start to rot on it's own. Has anybody else experimented with composting dried pasta?

Burdock is edible. I was actually surprised when I found that out.  It grows everywhere on my .125 acre urban lot as a weed, and it's leaves are huge. I used to pull it whenever I could, now I keep it for the greens. Mature burdock is a little bit on the tough side, but a few minutes steaming or sautéing usually fixes that. I've been told that the young roots are edible, as are the seeds. I've seen it used as a basket ingredient on 'chopped'.

I also have german mustard growing on my property. It has a spicy garlic-y taste that goes well with Italian food. I've also had it raw in salads.

Purple dead nettle is one of the first plants up in the spring, once the snow melts and the ground thaws. It has a strong, but not disagreeable taste, which I think compliments cheese grits.

Lambs quarters is another common weed in these parts. it tastes a little bit like spinach. There is one next to my front door that I am letting go to seed. I've heard tell that they are quite tasty, especially when toasted.

I have one that I use for cutting roots and whatnot. It works well for what it is. I haven't used it on anything larger than three inches in diameter. It tends to bind, but I thread it under a root and cut from above. Since you are going to be cutting above the branch, you shouldn't be having that problem. The one that you purchased sounds better than mine.

A few years ago, I had a batch of dried great northern beans that were infested with moths. From there, they spread throughout my kitchen and pantry, getting inside tubs of flour, opened boxes of crackers, other bags of beans, rice, etc. They even reduced an opened bag of slivered almonds to a dark brown goo. Since then, I've deep cleaned my kitchen and pantry and keep pheromone in my kitchen and pantry The problem is that I still have the moths. Even though I swap the traps out every few months, they are always filling up. I don't know where they are breeding, or what they are eating. Is there a way to eliminate them, short of taking my kitchen and pantry down to the studs and rebuilding?

I am in Northern NY. A few years ago, SUNY Canton had a 'Local Living' exposition, which had speakers, classes, etc., on their experimental farm. Associated with this, they had tours of a few off-grid households. One such tour was of a farmstead belonging to an individual known to the local community as 'Crazy Ray'. He had a solar powered wood-splitter that he demonstrated to people that were visiting his home. If I recall correctly, it involved a solar powered electric motor and a flywheel. When the flywheel got up to speed, he would engage a clutch, and a wood-splitter would travel a 180 degree arc and split a baulk of wood.

I've had good luck with secondhand HP laptops running Linux. I found an excellent essay on the how's and why's of doing so. Near me, there is a second-hand store that has used laptops for $250+-. I had one with a 15" display that I nursed along for years. It even survived cat puke on the keyboard. Apparently with older HP laptops, you can swap out the keyboard by pulling a few screws and prying the old keyboard out. Eventually the drive gave out, and when I tried to replace it, I could never get it to boot again. I had to unplug the ribbon cable for the display, and afterwards, I never could get it to work again. When I went to the used computer store, they had a HP gaming laptop with a 17" display for $250.00. It would throw a CMOS error on boot (unpatched Windows 10) , but I figured that I knew how to fix it. The store gave me a discount because of the error message. After installing Debian Linux, it still gave the CMOS error, so I opened the hood and looked for a watch battery. Couldn't find one. I began searching  various online forums, only to find out that newer HP laptops incorporated the CMOS battery into the main laptop battery. So, for thirty bux, a replacement battery made my laptop good as new.

I found BABW in a funky antique and craft store while I was on vacation in Isle Minnesota a few weeks ago. I'm already more than halfway through it. I noticed that throughout the book there are urls to various threads here at Permies which expound upon the ideas espoused in the book. Has anybody indexed all of the links anywhere at Permies?

First post under this account. I used a website generated 'strong password' when I created my account. However, I was unable to copy my password, so I could use permies on multiple platforms. My desktop is a new Mac Mini running Monterey and Safari (firefox doesn't play nicely with Monterey, to my dismay. I don't know when that will be fixed.). My laptop is running Debian Linux on a secondhand HP laptop, running Firefox. Yes, I could export my passwords from Safari, and import them into Firefox, but that is a pain. I do understand why password security is important, but is there a reason why I can not see my password in a human readable format?

The other day I was working in my back yard, when I found what appeared to be morels growing up along my fenceline. I picked them, for later investigation. Unfortunately, I left them outside overnight, and varmints took off with them before I could get a positive identity. The mushroom had the same type of honeycomb cap that a morel does, but I am wondering if there was anything else that it could have been. The cap seemed to be solidly attached to the stem, so I don't think it was a verpa thimble cap mushroom. Should I keep an eye on that part of my fenceline to see if any more of that variety might come up in the future?