Eino Kenttä

Do you know what metal it is? Looks a bit like bronze...

If you find a dry but somewhat fresh piece of wood, you can whittle the rough shape of the spoon with a knife, and then hollow it out with fire. You just grab an ember (you might need some form of tool for this), put it where you want to hollow out, and blow on it a bunch. When the hole is as deep and wide as you want, you can scratch out the charcoal and smoothen the wood with any tool of your choice, and/or sandpaper. The only thing to watch out for is getting overly enthusiastic and burning a hole all the way through. I suppose maybe if you wet the surface wood on the other side, that might protect it somewhat?

Also, this doesn't work that well with green wood, since the heat makes it dry and shrink too quickly, and there's a risk of the entire thing cracking. Ask me how I know...

I've been thinking along these lines too, and will try to grow peas with the sunchokes this year. I'm hopeful, since I've heard of people growing beans up sunflowers, and co-growing sunchokes and aardaker (Lathyrus tuberosus, another climbing leguminous plant). However, as E notes, the sunchokes do tend to grow quite densely, so maybe peas would mainly be a thing to grow along the edges of the patch? I'll report back once I know how it goes.

Thank you! They are. We have around -20 C here at the moment, and they hold up just fine for a medium-length walk at least.

Made these from unraveled yarn taken from two old, worn-out pairs of mittens, one I got for free, probably started out as military surplus, and one I bought second-hand for about five euro. Both pairs were worn thin and had some semi-well patched holes. I attached all the worthwhile pieces of yarn together, and doubled it (one strand from each old pair). For the thumbs, I ran out of yarn, but felt it would go against the spirit of the project to use new yarn, so I went and found another abandoned single mitten with a large hole in it to finish.

The technique is very simplified crochet, as it's the only yarn-type thing I know how to do. These are also the first ever proper woolen garment I've finished, although I have done a fair bit of repairs. I'm rather happy with how they turned out, except that the thumbs are a bit lumpy and clumsy. Even so, they're very warm and mobile enough to do all the things I want to be able to do with mittens (carry things, ski, use an axe...) It works. Just looks a bit strange. If it ends up annoying me too much I might redo the thumbs at some point.

I did take pictures of the starting pairs and some stages in the process, but unfortunately I think they are on my partner's old phone, which is now semi-dead, so they may be lost. If they reappear, I'll post them later.

Our garden plans for this year are:

1. Actively limit the number of new plants we plant (especially trees), and instead take better care of the ones that are already there. A lot of the existing plants grow slowly or not at all, probably due to generally poor soil. This needs to improve. I'm thinking large quantities of seaweed and biochar, etc.

2. Transport more soil from future pond sites onto the "garden hill", in order to increase the amount of veggie gardening surface. The priority crops are sunroots, potatoes, peas and buckwheat. The soil transporting will take some work, since wheelbarrows don't do well on our land (too steep and too bumpy), so it has to be carried by bucket or backpack. The plan is to do a little each day, so we don't break our backs.

Of the new plants we will try this year, I'm extra excited about scarlet runner beans and wapato.

Not sure you actually need that much clay specifically. I remember the Mythbusters did this with dung (in their proverb-testing special, while busting the saying "you can't polish a poop") If I recall correctly they at least partially succeeded, suggesting that organic material might to some extent replace clay... It was probably something like 15 years since I watched this, though, so I might be wrong.

I too am dreaming of crayfish. Specifically, I'd like to introduce the native European species (now rare due to a disease spread by an American species) to my ponds. Just need to dig some more ponds first!

Oh, by the way, does anyone know if crayfish work together with wapato (Sagittaria latifolia) in a pond-type context, or will they just totally demolish the plants?

The toxic bitter thing isn't restricted to home gardeners and small-scale seed saving, apparently. My partner and her parents recently cooked some sort of stew from bought squash, only to find out that it was horribly bitter. I'd guess most commercial growers don't save their own seeds, so probably the bitter gene somehow snuck into a "proper" seed growing operation?

If that's the case, it makes for an interesting double standard. If we're supposed to be so scared of this that we can't save squash seeds, and the gene also shows up in industrial seed, then what? Are we supposed to not eat squash at all? Or just blindly trust the industry to be better at doing stuff than we are? I'd guess a home gardener probably has a better chance monitoring all their plants and cull out any bitter ones than an "official" seed producer, even if the risk of the bad genes showing up might be higher.

I seem to remember Joseph Lofthouse saying that you can detect the toxin by tasting the cotyledons of the plant while it's young, so you don't have to waste garden space on a toxic plant?

I just now went through the "bargains" section of a Swedish seed company website (always a dangerous place), found three varieties of runner beans, remembered this thread, and felt "okay, let's give it a try." So next year I'll be growing runner beans. It would be just great if they could overwinter. Probably they won't in our climate, but one never knows until one tries, no?

And Ac, please do report the results of your experiment next year! I'm very curious.