Christopher Weeks

My mother used to complain about people with a "lawn fetish" who wanted to tell her how to keep her yard or occasionally do it for her.

A little high on the pasta to chili ratio, but good.

This is kind of fun!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chili_mac

I have some leftover chili and was thinking of serving chili mac for dinner. It isn't really part of my family's vernacular -- more like something they made occasionally in the school cafeteria. In my head, I just boil some pasta al dente, and then drain it, add it to the pot with the chili like I would with a marinara, cook it briefly, and serve it to plates topped with some cheese maybe. But a lot of the pictures of it online show it layered with a layer of plain pasta under a layer of chili. And that Wikipedia article talks about kind of mixing the chili with prepared mac-n-cheese.

Do you eat this? What's your local style? Any little tricks or techniques to suggest?

Hey Yash, I probably don't have any useful knowledge to pass along, but I'm curious what your interactions with Somerset County have been like so far? I've found that county officials are usually willing to help you figure out a way to make things work when you approach them as a collaborator rather than an enemy, so I hope you've taken that route.

I know for zoning purposes, you can petition the county for a variance. And I know here in Minnesota, if you want to e.g. dispose of human waste in an irregular manner, you can get permission from the county/state if you can convince the sanitation folks that you know what you're doing. What are your similar options? You should assume they have good reasons for the policies, but you also have good reasons for your own actions and want to find some way the county can understand what you're doing so they can help you figure out how to make it legal.

(Honestly, I'm only responding because 25 years ago I lived 10 miles from where you're farming -- just up on Sourland Mountain, so this is a small-world moment for me.)

I do hope that you can work something out with them!

I'd also vote for Sand Hill in Iowa -- they're doing a lot of great stuff.

I dug around for info on that guy's greenhouse and the *kit* was $250,000! (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/passive-solar-greenhouse-alberta-1.6289155)

The only potato experiment I have queued up this year has to do with seed fermentation. I’ve left the berries I collected, intact and in a sealed jar that I vent when the lid gets puffy. My intent is to pour them out on bare soil, crush half the pile with a foot and then spade a light layer of soil over the mass. Usually, I blend the berries, let them ferment, blend more, pour off the fruit solids, decant the water, and dry them in the dehydrator. That works but it’s a lot of steps. If this works too, that seems like a win, though maybe not when the point is to share.

In this spring cleaning BB: https://permies.com/wiki/118883/pep-homesteading/PEP-BB-Homesteading-Sand-SpringClean, you are to fill a pickup bed. I’m trying to parse the specifics of the phrase “fill a pickup bed”.

One of the people who has done it filled a dumpster and in another case the bed isn’t densely filled. So it seems like there’s a spirit of the thing that needs to be met rather than a perfect following of that phrase. (This is good because I don’t have a pickup!)

It seems from some quick research that the most normal bed is about 5.5 x 6.5 x 1.75 feet. Is the goal to round up roughly that much junk in the spring? I was originally planning to fill the back of my 4Runner all the way to the ceiling (smaller bed, taller space) but some of the crap I’m cleaning up is grosser than I want to put in my car.

If I show a space that’s clearly a bit bigger than a normal truck bed, will that do?

Pics added as an example of where I am.