Rez Zircon

Something to be aware of when stone-grinding grain -- some grit comes off the stone and ends up in the flour, and it's really hard on your teeth, even if you don't notice it. Historically, it was common to see teeth worn down to the gumline from eating  the resulting bread.

William Wallace wrote:Permethrin is a very effective spray, but some caution against having it against your skin.

Sawyer who sells it suggests spraying it directly onto dogs, and that it slowly seeps out from their glands over a few months.

I would rather risk some Permethrin than Lyme, but that is my choice.

I sprayed it directly on myself (and in my bed) for years, when I lived where the fleas were knee-deep. "Repel-X" horse spray to be precise, and I found half-strength sufficed. Also used it on the dogs daily, to keep flies from chewing their ears off. As you say, it is a much smaller risk than the various diseases. Pyrethrin comes from an African chrysanthemum; permethrin is the synthetic form, and has a little more duration, but either one disappears within a day or less.

Turkeys also eat ticks, but we have wild turkeys and you can't tell that they make any difference.

You'll be lifting toolbags and climbing around in odd spaces. That counts too.

Also, consider that any time you're not doing something else, you can be flexing an arm with a dumbbell.

LOL, yes, I understand that desire. More than discovering how they did stuff, you'll also uncover some of how they developed those methods. Reinventing stone-age tech from the ground up! I look forward to seeing what you come up with.

I would hazard there isn't any "authentic" style, but rather a whole lot of them, as varied as the hunter-gatherers and primitive farmers we know about historically, but probably considerably more advanced than those whose lifestyles survived to the present (because those that outgrew the stone age were sophisticated enough to presage the age of metalworking, and here we are today).

Our stone-age ancestors weren't dumb, and certainly were creative in the same ways modern humans are. And as you say very little preserves that wasn't stone, but it stands to reason anything available that could be worked by hand got used. Neanderthal camps have revealed that they had birch-sap glue and little portable oil lamps, and lately there was discovered the remains of a shaped-log cabin that had been preserved because it had partially burned. (I have long contended that we have so little of their tech because they used a great deal of wood.)

I expect stone-age lives were full of objects made from wood, fiber, leather, and other animal products that didn't preserve, and that pretty much anything you can make (or decorate) without a gas-fired forge is fair game. Otzi was stone age, but he was not a primitive.

And there's evidently a lot of interest beyond our little corner of the internet. "Primitive Technology" on Youtube has over 10 million subscribers. He makes all sorts of stuff starting with just himself and whatever he can find in the wild. (My favorite was the brick tiny-house with a tile roof, fireplace, and a sort of hypocaust, but he's also made little iron knives from rust bacteria found in streambeds. Gonna be some puzzled future-archeologists.)

I quite like your stone-age garments and toolkit. Looks functional, comfortable, and useful, what more do you want?

Mondo! Congrats!!

Not only a new career, but essential work that keeps the lights on. What could be better?

I know the local electrician would grab you and make you into an apprentice... they never have enough people.

There is no one-size-fits-all for water access, especially here in the western U.S.

Where I lived in the SoCal desert, well water was plentiful -- at 270 feet down (plus another 150 feet to have it reliable) all of that drilled through rock. In 1999 my well cost $56,000, but it would do 70gpm all day long.

Here in south-central Montana, my well is only about 20 feet deep, good water but very hard, about 10gpm. 50 feet to the west the water is so alkali it's unusable. Five miles from here, they haul water from town. My neighbor just down the hill has a mini swamp in his pasture.

Where I lived before (further west in MT) you could drive a sandpoint and have lots of water, tho better test shallow water for natural arsenic. Half a mile upslope, water was at 1500 feet if you even found any. As a fair general rule, water depth is about the same as the surface of the nearest major river.

Point is -- don't guess. Find an experienced water professional, and ask about a specific property, not "the area". Anything less than absolutely specific is meaningless. Most well drillers know what's likely to work or not. And if you're off-grid, that limits your options. Tho there used to be windmills all over, precisely to pump water off-grid.

Catchment water is all well and good until you have a drought year and suddenly there isn't any for months on end. Much of the American west gets only 10-15 inches per year, half in winter.

I have a summer irrigation ditch here that comes off the river, it's paid for as part of my taxes. Otherwise I wouldn't be growin' no garden, and the apple trees wouldn't produce much. That's something to look into. Note that ditch rights don't always exist, even if the ditch runs through the property.

Peas. Back about 2001 I bought some "Burpee heat-resistant peas" which did poorly in the SoCal desert, but the seed moved with me back to Montana. In 2015 or so, I planted a few of them, and they all came up and made peas. So far so good, seed that stores well.

Next year I planted the rest of those seeds, along with two kinds of snap/snow peas. They were adjacent and hybridized however they liked, and made a mix of both types of pod and pea (the snap/snow type had bigger, square-cornered peas, but not as tasty). As usual for peas, when it got really hot they expired. I saved seed somewhat haphazardly, being whatever was dry on the dead vines when I yanked them up in the fall (so usually very late peas).

Rinse and repeat for a few years, and now I have peas that... this year produced very well through two weeks of +100F temps, peaking at 106F. They've finally slowed down, but new pods are still appearing. The vines show no sign of dying off. They are somewhat shaded as I plant them with the sweet corn, and train them to climb the corn (which doesn't seem to mind).  They are ditch-irrigated and don't lack for water. They actually do best if planted in the fall (get bigger roots), tho they don't sprout until late March.

As for the eating -- now instead of going starchy once they're full-sized, they stay sweet up until the pod starts drying out, and are larger than the original peas, but not square-looking like snap/snow peas, and the snap/snow type pod no longer appears (tho they are a little crisper than I recall of the plain-pea parent).

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The garlic also does as it likes, and drops bulbils wherever. I think it's a hardneck. This year I have three sorts of scapes growing in three adjacent clumps (each of all one type).
-- Regular pink/purple bulbils (this is all I've ever seen til this year)
-- Pink bulbils with tiny pinkish flowers regularly spaced
-- White flower heads with straggly-every-direction flowers but no bulbils.
I wonder if they hybridized with the elephant garlic that used to be next to this stand, but died off this spring. (Came up, then disappeared. Used to make purple flower balls.)

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11 Aug. addendum: after a week of cool and rain, some of the peas are blooming again, and making pods.

Also, most of the garlic flowers are making seed.

Poor man's scopes exist, but they're not very good.

Good point about the impacted ear should have an initial inspection by the ENT -- because it could be a grass seed or insect causing the issue, and that needs to come out. (Grass seed can work into the brain and kill you. Really rare, but I knew a dog it happened to.)