Inge Leonora-den Ouden

paul wheaton wrote:I suspect that if you do some serious hunting, you can find good incandescent lights in the netherlands.  Buy lots of them now. 

I'll do my best Paul. Maybe not here in town, but somewhere else

Lyda Eagle wrote: ...My electric company pushed for everyone to get these even offering some free, or very cheap.  Now I feel like I have been duped and  wonder just how bad they really are.  Why were these pushed so hard if they are worse than the incedenscent ones we had?  Seems we just traded one bad thing for another.

Lyda, I have the same problem. Many years ago there was an offer to get a free box, promoted for making your house more sustainable. In it were a.o. five CFLs. In those days I believed it was true what they told, that CFLs were more 'environmently friendly' than incandescent light bulbs. When a light bulb stopped burning I changed it for a CFL (I am Dutch, we're known to be penny-pinching ;) so I did not change functioning light bulbs ). Those five CFLs were of good quality, most of them still function today. So I didn't have to buy new light bulbs.
If I knew then what I know now, I would have bought a box full of cheap incandescent light bulbs. Now that's become impossible. Only very expensive special incandescent light bulbs, meant for special purposes, are still for sale here. The cheap stores only sell LEDs and CFLs.

In my living room, in the lamp standing next to the seat, where I mostly sit, I had an incandescent light bulb. It was the last one I still had, that I bought in the time they were sold everywhere. In the time of the big promotion of CFLs I changed every light bulb that was broken with a new CFL. That was before I was on Permies. When finally I found out about the problem with the CFLs, I only had that one incandescent light left.
Now (some weeks ago) that last one has gone, stopped working. I am sad, I can't get these light bulbs anymore. Only one very specialised lamp 'boutique' sells incandescent light bulbs, but those aren't the ordinary ones, they are very expensive. If I'd known before, I'd bought the light bulbs in bulk, a box full of them

Jeremy, I'm sorry you didn't meet the criteria for getting the hand-knitted woolen hat. In fact nobody did. Maybe next year.

raven ranson wrote:... Nettles are part of the plan for a future book, but I'm not quite ready to write about them yet.  I don't feel I have enough experience with them, so I'm trying to gain more.

We have a small problem with one of our neighbours who enjoys chopping down my nettle patch just prior to harvest, so I haven't been able to harvest a significant amount yet.

It's difficult to find the right information on working with nettles, I found out too.

Did you explain your neighbour about the purpose of the nettles? Then if he still chops them down, he's a ...... (not a nice name)

Surprisingly this topic came along in the dailyish.
Yesterday I saw a lamp someone made of a long gourd. Different shaped holes were cut out of it and there was a string of led-lights inside.

Raven Ranson, your book about flax / linen is ready now ... Will the next book be on nettles?

We have a food forest now in our town too. With permission of township it's in a municipal park, but designed and planted by volunteers of Permacultuur Meppel. The first trees and shrubs were planted November 3 (2018), which was national 'work in nature day' (Natuurwerkdag) here in the Netherlands.  Of course this isn't the first food forest in this country, but not all food forests are the result of such a good collaboration between the township and a volunteer permaculture group.
About three years ago we (Permacultuur Meppel) started a community garden in another corner of the same park. This works so well, we have the goodwill in the neighbourhood so we could expand further in the park with this new food forest.
btw our community garden is a public space, there are no individual lots there. Everyone can help and everyone can pick (it's not considered stealing). It's amazing this works fairly well.

Planting fruit trees

I'm interested to know more on growing edible plants in water (without much effort or high costs). Could you share photos of your experiments please?

In my tiny pond (without fish, but with other living creatures in it) the only edible plant is the water mint. I wanted to show a photo, but found out I first have to photograph it

Though I am a 'lady' I am not at all fussy about my hair. As long as it is short in my neck and not in front of my eyes it feels OK. I pull a comb through it before I leave the house, but then I ride my bicycle so when I arrive it's a mess again.
I cut my own hair too. Not always, sometimes I try a hairdresser. But that's always disappointing. I pay a lot of money for them doing the same thing I can do myself.
When my sons were young I cut their hair too.

My method for cutting my own hair I found in a booklet (from a second hand book store). *This is for short hair, a boyish look!* It explained: do not look, but feel. Take a strand of hair between your fingers, feel the length, cut off as much as you desire. Then do the same with the next strand. Go on with all of your hair in this way. Only then when you think you're ready, you look in the mirror. First you comb. Then you look. If some part is clearly longer than the rest, you can cut it.
I think this method doesn't work if you have very straight hair. My hair is a little 'wavy'.