Charles Rehoboth

Nikki Roche wrote:My husband and other family want our daughter to have an outdoor playset, and they're waiting on me to pick one out. I'm overwhelmed by the options and am having trouble committing to one long-term. Is it worth it to invest in a playset?

Personally I'd vote for nature. Can I put in a plug for Charlotte Mason and her emphasis on getting children outside, so that they can encounter nature, here? =)

Mike Lafay wrote:Just in case you want to confirm it is celandine, cut one leaf, and look at the sap. If it's orange, it's celandine.

The sap is definitely orange! Thanks again.

Eino Kenttä wrote:Looks like greater celandine (Chelidonium majus) to me. Fits with the yellow-orange milk sap... It's toxic, probably not among the most dangerous, but also probably not good to feed to the chickens.

That does look like it! Hyvä, kiitos Eino!

And a quick Wikipedia search suggests that it is indeed toxic to chickens. We'll compost it instead.

We have this stuff growing all over our raised bed area. The root looks remarkably like a carrot, but the top of the plant looks nothing like a carrot to me, nor a parsnip: neither wild carrot nor wild parsnip leaves look like a match. Poison hemlock leaves don't either, thankfully.

The root and sap are a very notable yellow-orange and stain everything they touch, including skin.

It also doesn't seem to have a complicated lifecycle: the pictures are what it looks like every year, except that every year it seems like it's showing up in new places. Whatever it is, it is very invasive.

Any thoughts? I have no interest in eating it myself, but I'd love to know whether it's OK for chickens.

Thanks in advance!

Hey, OP here. Looking back, I agree, uncomposted manure would not have been a great idea. Nowadays, anytime I hear of free horse manure, I ask what the horses eat. Usually there's at least one bought (and non-organic) component.

We ended up using some of the questionable manure to fill in the deep trench where we put the geothermal system for the greenhouse -- it was a great big trench and one truckload of manure disappeared into it.

We have chickens now, so in future I'll probably focus on hen manure in place of the horsey stuff unless they finally take the super-persistent chemicals off the market.

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:as a supplement to a mechanical connection -- not a replacement.

I wanted to highlight this part of what you wrote. Yes. First you repair the connection mechanically, then you use the solder to ensure a reliable electrical connection between two things. Trying to use solder to provide strength for the connection will not provide for a durable repair.

You may be able to find a new plug, or adapt an IEC standard plug (those ubiquitous 3-prong ones that they used to use on things like computers) if the opening in the case is of an appropriate size. The latter approach would require a new cord, although it is a common type.

We looked for years before we found our farm. Stay with it!

Is it possible in your area to look up contact info for owners of land that looks worth considering? Many homesteads never formally go on the market. You'll have some promising starts that go nowhere and meet some very unusual characters along the way, but it only has to work once...

Ahh, old vehicles!

Our farm truck is an old Tundra that had been a plow and salt truck for awhile. AC doesn't do anything, body is rusty and dented absolutely everywhere. Re-framed like many northern Toyotas. The exhaust pipe was hanging off it when I bought it, although the seller was a parts manager for a local Toy dealer and had a bunch of exhausts sitting around that people had taken off their brand-new trucks to put loud pipes on. That was a nice freebie with it. I think it was actually off a tacoma, but our welder is a genius and managed to adapt it somehow. It's a half ton truck but we've had absurd amounts of heavy stuff in it and it's never complained. Someone must have upgraded the suspension in the past.

Current project is a prius we bought for $1200 because the previous owner took off a coolant line to replace a headlight bulb, forgot to reattach it, and fell asleep in the passenger seat while his daughter drove it down the turnpike with no coolant...

We got something like 14 years out of a $200 Caprice. I still miss that car, it was like driving a cloud! It had its own unique anti theft feature, it always started on the 4th try. I think the carb bowl ran dry overnight and it had to pump fuel all the way from the next area code (this was a wagon, so the tank was waaaaaay in the back) before it would fire.

We also had a heroic unstoppable 87 maxima that went to the salvage - under its own power - after 21 years due to terminal rust. I knew it was time when I had a flat tire and the jack kept going through the unibody instead of lifting the car. It always started, unless it had rained and water got into the ignition system. After awhile I learned to use the Caprice when it was raining.

V Rogers wrote:I would have married my high school sweetheart, bought 50 acres of land and built a home right in the middle of it. I would not want to be off grid, but have a fireplace, a generator, some farming tools and a work shop. Off grid living is hard work just to maintain yourself, something I do not want to do, especially as I get older and live alone.    

You have a very good point that there is a range of "off grid"-ishness.

If you choose wisely, it is possible to buy a property that is not currently off grid and then reduce dependence on the grid, possibly to a point where you could get by without it at all.

It is often more difficult to go the other direction if you decide that off-grid is not the life for you.

Also, +1 to all the folks mentioning the value of privacy, especially in regions where self-sufficiency is far away from how people imagine life. As a wise friend put it when we bought our homestead, "Just remember that you are as foreign to them as they are to you." I have often reflected on his words while trying to imagine why people living nearby do things like cutting down beautiful, healthy trees or paying money for gas to run leaf blowers, thus depriving their lawns of leaf compost which they then pay more money to replace with artificial fertilizers.

A few of my own points --

- Flat land: you need at least some land that isn't too steep. Very steep land has limited use and often acts as a funnel.

- Previous uses: if your land was not fallow before you bought it, what was it being used for, and how?

- Access: you may want to use machines at some point. If you do, is there a way to get them there (and without destroying existing improvements)? On our homestead there is ... barely.

If you're solarizing, letting things sprout, and then solarizing again, do you need the organic herbicide in between?

+1 to the farm torch for areas where it makes sense. Use it carefully, because it's easy to burn more than you had intended to: plastic fencing, straw on the ground, dead grass, etc will all catch fire if you use the farm torch around them.

But as long as you're thoughtful in how you use it, it's great for giving the plants you want in an area a head start. We love ours. Propane is a lot cheaper if you buy it from a welding shop or u-haul (I still don't get why u-haul sells propane -- but they do, and cheap) than if you exchange cylinders.

Any thoughts on plastic weed barrier? Got a big roll of it for free some months ago and was contemplating trying it in the tomato and pepper area, since it got a ton of weeds this year. But I didn't use it yet, because I didn't really like the idea of leaving plastic all over the place.