John Weiland

Nice images, Nancy!  Have you met any of the soil nematodes cruising past your view?  A dollop of soil mixed with water and allowed to settle out on a slide should allow you to see them a relatively low magnification....just like the beasties you are seeing now.  After years of looking at soil critters, I'm convinced the film director Ridley Scott got his "Alien" creatures modelled from soil organisms.....Ha!  Good photo from web image here:  https://www.leica-microsystems.com/science-lab/industrial/studying-caenorhabditis-elegans-c-elegans/

Just going to add my $0.02 USD worth on top of what Glenn H. recommended, but from a different region and angle.  We have 3 nice steel-skinned, post-and-beam out buildings on our property all built by the same builder with essentially the same design and materials in each building.  However, the last building to be built was purposed for housing animals and my wife wanted it to be insulated.  So it got an insulated ceiliing, walls, doors, and windows.  What I find amazing is how much cooler that building is in mid-summer...even with all doors open!  The other two buildings with no insulation just seem to radiate heat throughout the entire building.  Almost needless to say, the opposite is true in winter where the insulated building needs the smallest amount of supplemental heat to bring it to a comfortable temperature...and it is 50% larger than the other two buildings!  I haven't yet decided what the priority should be on retrofitting one of the other buildings with insulation, but the effect is very clear.  So I would second that insulation, in some way, shape or form, to keep that garage space cooler would be paramount in your decision making.  Good luck!

Wow....can we ever relate to your post, Jen!   From our location in the northern Midwest, the hot, muggy, buggy and chaotic weather has us anticipating with glee seeing the 'tail-lights of summer 2025'!  In another thread, I was lamenting the loss of our potato and paste tomato crop to an unusual late-summer flood,....which occassioned the explosion of a epic mosquito population...of just the right species to transmit west nile virus (WNV).  This followed a heavy tick season and the storm that brought the flooding packed enough wind to fell some trees, a few of which threatened outbuildings before they were sawed down.  Throughout all, my wife's zinnias were slowly growing as usual...then burst into color over the past few weeks.  Oddly, the monarch butterflies showed up late this year, but were honing in on the splash of color provided by these flowers.  I'm hoping now that the moisture and humidity of summer will translate to some spectacular fall colors once the temperatures turn seasonal.

For the combination of home energy, farmyard vehicle propulsion, and potentially future EV purchase, I continue to try to keep up with developments in solar energy and storage.  While very tempted to sink money into LiFePO4, I'm more inclined to spend only 'dabbling' amounts of cash here and wait to see where battery storage is heading.  So much change in the battery industry and with sodium ion battery technology moving quickly, that may turn out to be a less costly and more eco-friendy option in the near future.  Wife uses an electric Polaris 4X4 Ranger for farm chores and we are sticking with lead acid for the time being, but I will likely test LiFePO4's in my electric golf cart which also is a farmyard 'go-fer' vehicle. As we reside not far from the Canadian border in the northern Plains (USA), I was very encouraged by a bar-stool discussion this past week with a gal from Germany.  She was mentioning her family farm in a mid-central location of that country where she had helped her father install a solar system that is grid-tied, yet supplying a good portion of their home power.  Germany has a decent committment to solar and likley subsidizes these installations (??), but I'm not sure about that.  At any rate, successes in northern regions have me still leaning towards solar integration (or stand-alone?) with grid for our remaining days here.  Just seems from my limited experience so far with that technology to be extremely under-utilized at this point.

John F Dean wrote:..............I found my boar and sow a full face to face embrace…yes, arms around one another.

Pigs do have their favorites and this is especially noted when one of a pair/companionship passes on leaving the other solo.  For those who observe pigs in a pile regularly, this face to face might be considered unusual.  My wife typically observes them side-to-side, alternating head to rump....apparently a probable survival tactic to monitor all sides of the sleeping passel in the wild.  In winter, you will find one or two cats curled up on top of some of the larger sleeping pigs as their body temp is usually over 100 degrees F (~40C).   Just now I hear 'Felix' outside the window, a large Yorkie, moving through the wild plum thicket.  Awesome crop this year and he will vacuum up loads of ground-fall with the others over the next week or two.

Randy Bachman wrote: ...... a zero-turn would get destroyed due to all the ruts and heavy woody weeds. I may get a subsoiler to break the ground up and smooth it out. Probably a one-time event, but doable with a tractor. ...

Struggling through with repairs on a Kubo L3200 just now, but almost finished.  Oddly enough, we live in one of the flattest regions in the U.S., but the heavy clay soil, deep winter freezing, and action of flooding and high water table contribute to uneven land.  In fact, it was bad enough that my wife did not want to mow pasture with the smaller John Deere tractor with rear brush mower for fear of tipping over.....that mower finally went onto the Kubota with wider stance and longer wheel-base.  But for us, the landscaping for an even surface probably would only last for a few seasons before the pot-holes and odd bumps reappeared.  The larger tractor just smoothes out those effects and you just have to be aware of your mower height when going over bumps.  But also in keeping with the read topic, we are 'social capital poor' and just too many projects needing to be done by ourselves....the tractor(s) here are a necessity for this lifestyle.

Inge Leonora-den Ouden wrote:I think the rain is not the problem, it's the combination of rain and clay soil.
I have sandy soil. If it rains a lot (and it often does, here in the Netherlands) it's ideal for sowing! Then the rain does the watering, I don't need to use the watering can.

The Red River Valley of the North that is split by the border of Minnesota and North Dakota and runs all the way through Winnipeg, Canada is essentially a flat, glacial lake-bed.  So depending on where your agricultural land is, it can be more sandy or more clay.  It's a well-known area for growing potatoes, but it's also flat as a pancake which can lead to flooding problems.  We live along a small, winding river that typically floods while the ground is still frozen in the spring, but may flood as well with early summer heavy rains.   This year, moisture was about perfect....enough so that I did not need to add extra water as we approached August.  Moreover, the garden potato crop was looking the best it has in decades, truthfully!. (photo below)...No Colorado potato beetle, no blights or leaf spots, no premature wilting of any kind.  Then.....

....against all normal patterns, a torrential rain hit the area and the watershed that feeds our river in early August.  Widespread 5" rain on flat ground,....but I was hopeful that the gigantic fields of corn (maize), soybean, and wheat would soak up most of that deluge.  Alas, it  was not to be.  The river rose to flood stage (just shy of a concern to the house) and engulfed half of the garden.  Unfortunately, it was the half with the potatoes and our other favorite staple for freezer stock, our roma paste tomatoes.  As bad, with the flat terrain, the water did not recede from the garden for several days and the temperatures reached the 90s (F) by day.  The paste tomatoes were pretty devasted almost immediately.  Growth was arrested, vines died, and the fruits themselves began to rot early.  What fruits we could salvage and bring indoors had poor ripening ability...and most went to rot rather quickly.  Some of the very green ones were saved and have ripened off, but only a paltry representation of what was there.

I waited on the potato rows until a few weeks of drying could pass, then discovered the sad truth.  The anoxia from the water was too much....very large potatoes that had developed from the excellent early summer vines had turned to mush!    Only the vines furthest from the edge of the flood water were spared, but even here, only the potatoes closest to the soil surface were spared.  Very disheartening after such a good looking early promise.  Wife want's me to raise the height of the dike around the garden....I'm ready to move important crop items nearer to the house in raised beds.  Really don't want to experience this again....

Steffani Rideau wrote:

John Weiland wrote:Home-brew of both oat and flax milk can be accompanied by the slime factor present in both from carbohydrate complexes, but overnight incubation of the finished milk with some digestive enzymes seems to help with this.  Will continue experimenting with different enzyme sources to see which is the best, but welcome comments from others on solving this issue in the home kitchen.  Thanks!

Any update on the enzymes for flax?

I have been making milks for regularly for many years (sunflower, cashew, almond, soy) mostly for baking and cooking, and have been venturing into making ice cream. I made a peanut milk for peanut butter and banana ice cream and it was very good! I used a combo of oat/cashew and it just tasted like oatmeal ice cream, coconut milk just made it taste like our coconut, and straight cashew was just too creamy/strong despite add-ins. So now trying more combinations and am interested in flax!

I have not had the chance yet to try this with flax but hope to do so in the fall when in the kitchen more.  I do still need to adjust my oatmilk recipe....last batch probably was too concentrated on amount of oats used and the bitterness from overblending came through.  But the slime reduction from the enzyme mix worked well, usually added as a last step in preparation and then allowed to sit overnight in the fridge.  Regionally, oat, flax, and sunflower all are fairly common crops in North Dakota and it's nice to know that one can locally-source organically-produced seed of these.  Liked the idea of peanut milk ice cream!  And I like using bananas or banana chips as well for certain flavors and end-product texturing.  I hope to come back when flaxmilk has been tried and will let you know.....   Good luck!

Off-grid electrical power centers.  Using the Tesla Powerwall by way of explaining what I mean, there appears now to be many such power stations being offered for emergency or even daily off-grid power.  My interest would be ratings, reviews, and critique of the plug-n-play nature of such a station, whether it's meant to be portable or better off as a stationary unit, and how scalable the station is for capacity and peak power.  These factors as well as current cost of the system would be helpful for others to weigh when deciding on future power use and sources (solar, wind, hydro, etc.).  Thanks!

Timothy Norton wrote:I'm tired of being a chicken chaser. There has to be a better way!

How do you catch a chicken that is not used to you picking them up? .....
Help a guy out please.

What is the purpose of the pick-up?  Is this for examination, caging, or for slaughter?  Ours are shedded at night but otherwise very free ranging.  Catching them for caging/transfer would need to be an active and noisy affair of keeping doors closed, corraling them in the building and using hands, nets, etc. to make the catch.  No chance catching them once outside.  For us, many roosters end up in the freezer over a year or more of running about.  Hens rarely do as they are the target of choice for owls, hawks, foxes, coyotes, and probaby mink/river otters. (Dogs do a good job most of the time keeping watch, but the predator populations are healthy and stealthy around here.)  So for that purpose we use anything from pellet gun to .22 cal rifle.  Occasionally wife will be making up food for other animals and some kamikaze rooster will dive-bomb the food bowl.  Wife snatches him by legs and dispatches him quickly---evening dinner menu solved!