R Spencer

Fair enough, I guess I'm underestimating the harm that even clay ammo in a slingshot can cause.

Jeff Lindsey wrote:Ok, some more on slingshots.

Cans hung from trees and lined up on boards, IMHO, make the best targets. It is simple and cheap and traditional for a reason. The feedback from the ammo hitting the can is instructive and fun. You will probably be shooting at things on the ground, below your normal line of sight, and things higher than your normal line of sight, so practice those shots. Shooting down is always tricky. When you get good, have someone toss the cans up for you. You can get good enough to hit those.

After a while, don't buy ammo packaged as such, except the clay stuff for use when you can't recover your ammo. It is too easy. Scrounge it. Go to good riverbeds and beaches to find smooth round rocks, find marbles and ball bearings in thrift stores, cast your own .50 caliber lead balls for the serious shots. If you value your ammo like a poor kid values their ammo, you will shoot with more care and you will have more fun as the ammo sourcing becomes part of the process. Paint balls can be shot, with all sorts of effects, but you can't squeeze the pouch hard.

Keep the clay, marbles, and ball bearings to the inanimate objects.  If you are ending varmints larger than mice, the animals deserves the clean kill of a heavy lead ball or a heavy steel hex nut shot vertically at short range, not a broken bone or a slow death from internal injuries because you have some fear of lead. Wear a  thin glove if you must.  Don't shoot birds at all unless you mean to kill them, a marble or even a bb can maim their fragile bodies. I have seen with my own eyes a turkey's breast plate stop bird shot. I have also seen turkey's  tragically blinded by bb shot and turkeys trying to survive with a broken wing.  Either kill the bird or use a method to scare it away. Don't wound animals.

Inspect your bands before every practice session, paying special attention to the ends of the tubes on wrist rockets. Cracked tubes at those points, on the sling or pouch, are the main points of failure.

Wear eye protection. It only takes one little failure of a bit of rubber to ruin your eye. It is really the only danger, except shooting your own hand that is supporting the slingshot. Just wear a pair of safety glasses.

There's a lot of options for carrying ammo. A small Crown Royal bag was the cool thing in 1985, and anything cool then is magically cool in these lesser times. I personally believe that a green Crown Royale bag gives you a +1 to hit, but your mileage may vary. Cigar tubes are the best paintball carriers if you are packing these discreetly.

For the real sling, paracord works as well, if not better, than natural fiber rope. Leather remains the best choice for pouches. River rocks and old billiard balls are your easily sourced ammo for these slings. You can fit 4 billiard balls in a 1980's era army surplus M16 magazine pouch and still close the pouch securely, in case you were wondering.

Happy slinging again.

What do you think of using a slingshot with clay ammo to scare away deer? I am thinking the ammo would be pretty harmless, not causing lasting injury, but enough of a surprise to be touched by it that they would start to get less comfortable around that area (they're starting to come closer and closer to home and garden, even over fences they didn't used to cross)

Thanks everyone. Sounds good to use it in a test bed or two, seeing how beans grow in it. I'll go ahead and try that! I guess if the beans grow well, I'll take that as a good sign to enjoy the beans and keep working with the soil.

I moved to my current place a couple of years ago and it had one previous owner, who's relatives built the place for them. It includes a cinderblock barn with wood rafters and a metal roof, a great outbuilding they used for horses. They stopped keeping horses years before selling, but the barn has been left more or less as-is, except we can see the wooden stalls they had attached to the walls within the barn were removed at some point.

The floor of the barn is just soil, uneven and built up toward the back where the horse stalls would've been. We want to put floors into part of it and will be excavating and leveling out the soil that's there. What can I do with this fill? There are some garden beds I'd be happy to build up with it, but I'm wondering about its safety.

Is there anything I should be concerned about, or any ways to test it for contaminants, before plopping it onto garden beds? We try to grow organic equivalent but are just growing for home and neighbors, not commercially organic. I am pretty paranoid about paint, plastic junk, livestock pharmaceuticals, etc. But it seems like after 5-10 or more years, pharmaceuticals from horses would degrade into less worrisome compounds, and I have no reason to believe the building itself would contaminate this soil given its made out of such inert materials. There's some plastic junk in the soil here and there but even premium organic compost ends up having microlitter in it.

What do you think?

It seems like 16oz canvas might be the best starting point, considering sheets and whatnot are just so thin.

I'm trying to decide between:

- untreated canvas which tends to be thinner and certainly not as weather resistant. Here's an example, maybe I could DIY making it into oilcloth with more natural 'treatment' using beeswax or natural oils https://www.chicagocanvas.com/product/10oz-untreated-natural-canvas-tarps/

- treated 16oz canvas which has unidentified oils and wax for weather resistance: https://www.chicagocanvas.com/product/16-oz-canvas-tarpaulins/ I could ask what oil and wax is used but undoubtedly it's petroleum-derived

This is just for an over-chicken hoop house, nothing too major, but ultimately what I put there will make its way to soil, grass, bugs, chickens, my community and my compost.

We all use tarps, right? Right now, I want to at least partially moderate sun, rain, and wind for part of a chicken run to give more 'outdoor living room space' for the chickens (their truly indoor area is on the small side). Well, like most tarp uses, I know if I slap a woven plastic tarp on there, I will put micro-litter all over the place within just a few years. Birds will nest in it, mowers will mow it, before long I will probably eat it. I don't want to eat plastic. I want something I can reuse or compost, or at least let biodegrade in a wood pile over decades, that will be non-toxic. And during its usable life, I want to pin it to a hardware-cloth hoop house that chickens shelter under, in zone 6ish mild winters and hot and sunny summers.

What do you use for tarps that balances being strictly not toxic gick with being relatively functional and relatively affordable?

Painters canvas seems very affordable and mildly functional. More than a 100% cotton bed sheet from the thrift store, in that it is a little thicker (I guess? I don't know much technical details about all these fibers).

Waxed canvas seems far more waterproof and durable, but is also hundreds of dollars more. It seems like I could buy many generations of painters canvas tarps for the price of one high-quality beeswax 'duck canvas' like those used for primitive camping.

Fleece tarps, to put over compost piles, is something I just learned about. This sounds promising. I am in the northeast USA and it would be great to support regional wool markets. Maybe this makes sense but I'm just guessing as to how nice a fleece tarp is for chickens seeking drier, shadier space out of the wind.

Any other ideas? Any votes for or against the above ideas? Thank you!

We'll certainly be using clothes lines. The question is more about getting a washer.

Thanks for the replies everyone! Speed Queen sounds good. The ones I'm finding are actually more expensive than even HE washers from other brands like Whirlpool or Maytag. I'll keep looking.

My partner and I are moving to a new and long-term home that won't have a washer dryer when we get there. What do you think we should look for in a washer/dryer?

We thought of getting used and refurbished and may reach out to a dealer for options. We have a lot of other things on our plate now and are not up to buy direct from someone on Craigslist or something like that, we'd want some assurance the appliances work.

Our priorities are energy and water efficiency and reliability, and ideally sleeping-bag friendly. So we're thinking to get an HE top-loading machine with an impeller, as simple and small as we can find, ideally made in the US where we live. The setup will be in a basement on a dry concrete floor next to a sump so noise and vibration is not a concern. Water efficiency is a priority because we'll be on well water but draining to sewer, at least until we get graywater setup which I think is a good possibility. Energy efficiency a priority as we're progressing on much reduced energy use.

We currently use store-bought laundry detergent. It looks like even if we make our own, which we might do later on, it's possible to make low-suds laundry soap which works with HE washers.

Another strategy is internal:

Take astragalus 1g daily, indefinitely, and practice a habit of daily self-examination. (Self-exam is good for various reasons.)

As Dr. Stephen Buhner says in many Q&As:
"Astragalus 3000 mg daily for 30 days, then 1000 mg thereafter as a preventative."

Flora Eerschay wrote:Oh dear, reading the title of your post I thought you mean a nuclear bomb... as I just spoke with my student who is in Belarus :(

Wow, sorry for the confusion! Will update title.


Thanks for the input everyone. Someone asked the power plant type. It is a boil water reactor with Mark II containment.

As for home value, it is near a big city so values are likely to continue going up. The area around the power plant is steadily becoming more developed, which is sad but also part of this house's history.