Thomas Dean

Christopher Weeks wrote:

I have an issue with the graphic posted by Chris.  Where are all the cattle?  Last summer it was a big deal all the dairy farms in Michigan with cows testing positive.  I feel like the data it is based on is inadequate.

I also have chickens, I'm also the Poultry Superintendent for my county fair. The politics and rules about whether or not to have poultry at the fair last year were quite a headache.  I'm hoping this year is better.

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:

r ranson wrote:But also, there is a rebellion against how streaming services only have a limited number of movies.  The example in the news was 28 Days Later.  Apparently, no one is streaming and they stopped making dvds.  There is a growing market for physical mediea from the 1990s and early noughts.   Thrift shops are loving it.

Vive la rebellion! I too hoard physical music CD's and DVDs (and a few select VHS tapes) of things I want to listen to or watch again. Anything that's online can vanish in a moment.

This summer I grabbed two giant shopping bags of free music CD's including both commercial recordings and home-burned mix tapes. I returned about half. I'll have fun this winter flipping through the rest for anything good. I have been hoarding disc players, which are free for the taking.

We also resist.  In part due to lack of viable internet options, in part because we recognize the reality of things disappearing down the memory hole.  
My kids still watch VHS... their friends were amazed by the idea of "rewinding" tapes after viewing.
We used to have a local electronic repair shop that would fix our VHS players... they are now closed.  We have a few spares in storage, but players are hard to get.

We have similar perspective on books.  Thousands in our house.  Some go with our interests: Theology, Science, History, but also lots of fiction - for our kids and for us.   It's amazing what the library can't even get for us by interlibrary loan...

On that note, does anyone have a VHS copy of the movie "far and away"?  I heard some music from the soundtrack the other day, and want to re-watch it with my wife.  

Jordan Lowery wrote:we have "wild" apples around here from the days when the miners were looking for gold. they brought all kinds of fruit and nut trees with them. well now days there are just very very old trees scattered all over the place. what i find amazing is none of them need ANY pruning, ANY summer irrigation, ANY pest control and they produce so much fruit in the fall if no one picks them the ground is solid covered with apples and they keep falling all winter. until the deer herds roll through that is.

Here in Michigan, we have lots of feral apple trees in our area.  My wife has a mental map/calendar of where the good trees are and when they are at peak ripeness.  Some trees are worthless for eating - poor flavor OR pest/disease prone, others are excellent - good flavor and/or not hit hard by pests and diseases.  We harvest as needed.  We have planted some known cultivars in our yard, and we do not generally treat them.  I am also playing with grafting, to bring some of the good "landrace" apples back to the yard, so they are near at hand and are propagated for if the source tree is killed.

I can get free "Screenings" from a local mill - the chaff, small seeds, etc that get sorted out from the grain.  
I've been using the rye screenings as cover crop in livestock pens for the past few years and am VERY happy with it.  I can plant it late in the season, and then let it grow more in the spring before letting the animals have access.  This has worked best for the ducks, but I also do it in the cattle and goat pens.  Last year had vetch seed in with the rye, and I see that the vetch is coming back this year after being utterly trampled and eaten over the mid/late summer.
This year I am trying it in the garden.  I know that I am bringing weed seeds in with the screenings, we'll see how much I regret that.  In the animal pens, everything gets eaten down by the end of the season, so weed seeds are (generally) a non-issue.  
I also experimented with Daikon radish last summer, may do more of that in the future.

When my wife and I lived in Rochester, MN we biked extensively.  She worked/went to school downtown and rode her bike until first snowfall, then the bus until spring.  We biked to church, for groceries, etc.  I worked ~20 miles away and would bike 2x a week, weather permitting, otherwise I drove.

Now we live back home "on the farm"  I work some 5 miles away, and my wife's hobby/job takes her to various locations, sometimes over an hour drive.  I don't bike to work, as much as I'd like to, because every day I carry 5 buckets (5 gal each) with food scraps home from the school, and I often run other errands on the way home from work (I'm a book mule... my wife homeschools and generally has 100+ books checked out of the library at a time, and I am always carting books to and from the library).  I've also gotten a bit lazy... it's so easy to use the pickup truck to move hay and grain... 10 buckets of grain and 15 haybales in one trip on the weekend instead of carrying them across the field a few at a time...

And my bike has a very flat tire now... and I can't find the ambition to fix it.

But if you live in a bike-friendly area and can bike for most of your errands, that is something I support and would do myself.

Anthony Powell wrote:I'd be concerned about bird 'flu. Plenty of wild birds visit the house roof. Not so many the shed roof - which seems to be the domain of the local cats.

The MIDARD info (Michigan Dept of Ag) info being distributed due to the presence of HPAI says to only use municipal or well water for poultry.  Biosecurity is key they say.  But as my father-in-law pointed out, one of the cases of HPAI in MI was at a big producer that scrubs all trucks, etc in and out... if their biosecurity didn't save them, how is my choice of water going to save my free-ranging chickens?
I use rainwater when available.

I lived and taught in rural Alaska in a native American community.  I ate what they ate when at community gatherings.
Odd things I ate:
*Mousefood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mousefood
*Walrus Skin (it's like really greasy pork)
*Seal Meat (very dark meat... looks like liver, but tastes like fish)
*Whitefish eggs minutes after being taken out of the fish
*Fermented Seal Fat (imagine a rancid chunk of yellow fat with the texture of a bicycle tire)
*Whale blubber

Here is a video I made with (mostly) my pictures.

Jim Fry wrote:We will occasionally get a pumpkin that makes thru Summer, but it's rare. Dem cows do like eat'n some pun'kns.  

I've just been surprised that basically all of the volunteers in the cow pasture seem to have harvestable fruit in the fall.  The volunteers that we lose seems to be due to chickens pecking holes in them, not the cows.  
I wonder if it matters that our cattle are just a few head of feeder cattle.  If they were dairy cows and had pumpkins year after year previously, maybe they'd be more apt to eat them, recognizing them as food? Also, they often go on their one-way trip before we harvest the squash and pumpkin (before they are fully ripe and as tempting)

So, the past few years we have had very healthy volunteer squash and pumpkins in the cow pasture (the cows are also in the pasture).  We have been able to harvest them, and although the varieties are not our choice, they are edible and have grown with almost not labor from humans.
I am considering PLANTING squash/Pumpkin seeds directly into cow pies in the pasture this summer.  The cows have not eaten the squash in the past few years, so I am willing to gamble that at least SOME of the plants will produce harvestable fruit.  I have plenty of saved seeds.  
Anyone have any feedback?  I won't be out more than my time planting and some free saved seed m(of which I have too much anyway!), and I could potentially have a great squash harvest (food for humans and winter food for the cows... they have not eaten them when growing, yet when I cut them up in the winter and feed them out, they are happily consumed).

My compost is the manure pile at the barn.  It's big enough to take anything I choose to put in it.  The hens "work" the pile for me, so bread and meat won't remain anyway.  Big bones (talking deer femur, etc) go to the dogs, then get burned in a bone pile in the garden a few times a year.  Small bones end up in the compost, no big deal.
Unless smells or nuisance animals are an issue, I'm inclined to compost all biodegradable materials, even if they take awhile to break down.

We have a seperate compost pile for dog fecal material.  Due to parasite concerns and general "yuck" factor, it doesn't get turned, and will never be used in the garden.  Long term plan is to wait a few years after pile is finished and then use it around trees, so as to not contaminate food sources.