Randy Eggert

If I have to do chores out in a rainstorm, I wear an oilskin drover (the short kind) and a cowboy hat.

We replaced our Kentucky Blue Grass lawn with a hybrid from High Country Gardens called Dog Tuff https://www.highcountrygardens.com/product/sustainable-lawns/cynodon-hybrida-dog-tuff. It's pretty, nice to walk on, dog-resilient, drought-tolerant, etc. You don't have to mow it because it grows out not up (it will take over if you don't have a separation between lawn and other parts of the garden), but I prefer keeping it shorter. In the summer, I use a reel mower on it as needed. In the spring, we have a bunch of dry stuff from last year that's not so pretty, so I go through with a scythe to remove it.

This is one of my favorites:

I'm responding to some very old posts, but this might help future readers. We bought a house with a huge, beautiful boxelder that was probably the same age as the house--about 100 years. It was on the west side, and it gave much needed shade in the afternoon. However, it started dropping huge branches--fortunately they never landed on anything but a bench I'd built.

We had a tree expert come, and he said that boxelders typically have a life-span of 60 years at most, so ours was living on forty years of borrowed time. We hired people to come and remove it. The tree-climber took one look and said, "I'm not climbing that." What the bidder for the company missed is that the tree was totally hollow. They brought in a cherry-picker and got it down successfully. The trunk of the tree was 3 to 4 feet in diameter, and it had maybe six to 8 inches of wood around the perimeter.

In short, I'd be wary of any large boxelders. They're beautiful, but not safe. I'm grateful the branches that fell didn't land on a car or a person. If the tree had blown down, it could have crushed our house and taken out the people inside.

Mike Haasl wrote:Saw these on reddit today.

I live in Utah, so I guess I'm safe from outbreaks of both Lyme disease and excessive drinking.

greg mosser wrote:i heated the sap up in a little pot, added the other dried vegetable matter, and poured it out to cool. then the sheet of cooled, hardened incense gets broken up into the aforementioned pebbles.

Great!

greg mosser wrote:pine pitch is the magic ingredient. no pinyon in your area? i’ve made incense from pinyon sap with juniper and sagebrush…it’s not the kind that you can light a stick, though. more the kind to put a couple pebbles onto a hot piece of charcoal.

Thanks! There are pinyons--though climate change is killing them rapidly. I could probably harvest some sap. You mention pebbles, so do you make small balls out of the sap and bits of juniper or sagebrush?

I love burning incense, and I was thinking that it would be nice to have natural incense in our earthen structures. Any tips on making your own?

I'm passingly familiar with smudging, but it's not my culture and I don't want to do it for ritual purposes, just for the smell.

I'd like to make the incense with the resources we have on our land, which is in the Southern Utah desert and where there's plenty of sagebrush and juniper trees. I've made bundles of thin, dried sagebrush branches (similar to what's used for smudging), but I can't get it to stay burning for long. Basically, I get a strong initial scent, a little too strong, which dissipates quickly after it burns. I'd like something similar to what you get in the store where it burns for a while and slowly releases scent.

Nicole Alderman wrote:You know you want to sing along...

I simply can't let this thread continue without posting this one:

I started a thread (https://permies.com/t/126364/vegan-sandwich-stew-suggestions) five years ago asking for vegan sandwich ideas. My favorite was a suggestion for an ELT (eggplant, lettuce, and tomato). You fry some eggplant marinated with liquid smoke and soy sauce and substitute it for bacon.