Sarah Lennie

My big northeastern city apartment kitchen window gets a few hours at most of early afternoon light- I planted a swiss chard seedling (purchased from an enterprising youth at a local yard sale) in a exterior window box over the summer and it's February now and still chugging along after a few winter snow storms. Lettuces in general, especially dwarf/gem varieties could be good candidates for window sills with limited direct sunlight. Pretty and tasty and so cute too!

I live in a 100 unit coop building in a big northeastern city and we have pay a woman around $10-12k per year to maintain the 4’ deep strip of garden in front of our building (maybe 200 ft long?) plus 4 small plots surrounding the street trees in front of the building. The fee includes plants and I think her rate is around $50/hr. She shows up a couple times a month (more frequently in summer) and does a lovely job maintaining our mostly perennials, swaps out seasonal annuals, and keeping an eye on the soil quality. We are one of dozens of similar buildings in the area, and her fee is around 1% of our total operating budget- and everyone loves the garden and would never consider cutting its budget. Long way of saying, targeting buildings may be an easier sell than individual homeowners, and the ftsq is relatively small and easy to manage/access, while still being a fun ongoing project that is appreciated and admired by dozens of people.

I have a very basic question for the experienced folks in this thread- which end of the bales go down? Do you want the hay oriented as it was when growing, or laying on its side? I can see some logic to each orientation but was hoping someone with experience had a definitive opinion on the matter.

Hilarious Chipdrop story:

We signed up and didn't get any drops for months. It put some "nice to have" projects behind so my husband did the option where you pay the $20 fee and then it was winter and we kind of forgot about it.

Fast forward 2 months, we had a bunch of trees cleared and with them gained a woodchip pile the size of an single-wide trailer, with another 2 regular sized piles in front of it. We're set for woodchips for life and will probably end up with soil at the base before we get through the pile.

2 days later...Chipdrop dumps a pile of woodchips in front of our chip piles. And we get charged $20.

"Affordable" is such a tricky word, but I'll put that aside for now.

Regarding approach, there's a firm in the Hudson valley that's trying to address this mix with their Flexhouse series, which ups the ante by incorporating the Passive House standard- they use simple forms that are not dissimilar from the shapes of the 100+ year old farmhouses that dot the adjacent landscape and design them to be flexible to evolve with the owner's long-term needs.

Check them out- They're called North River and are based in Ulster County NY

https://nriverarchitecture.com/flexhouse/

I used to work in theatrical costuming so have had many fast-turn laundry situations. Serving a similar function as dryer balls, you can toss some dry towels into the dryer to help kick the wet stuff around more- the purpose is to expose more wet surface area to the hot air, and draw moisture out of the wet stuff and into other surfaces.

The dry towels also can help with the maddening racket of overalls in the dryer (and they make less noise than balls bouncing around).

Added bonus, if your towels come off the line less than fluffy, this can soften them up without making you feeling guilty for burning energy to have dryer-fluffed towels.

The other thing to do is to spin the heck out of the wet laundry or wrap it in towels to pull out excess moisture before it goes in the dryer. If there's less water to begin with things will dry faster.

You can also split the difference and start things in the dryer then let them hang dry from damp, or vice versa.

Be careful with tennis balls & other plastics- if things get too hot they can break down or melt, possibly ruining your clothes or dryer or both.

I want to make sure everyone here knows about the Beal Seed Experiment that's been going on since 1879! They're testing seeds every 20 years to see what will still germinate (the seeds are buried in a secret location on the MSU campus between germinations).  

https://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2021/unearthing-a-scientific-mystery

My husband and I are taking a stab at splitting the difference- it requires a car but our day to day life isn't car-dependent. We live in the city still but have 5 acres outside of town that we visit about every other weekend plus holidays. We've been camping (there's a well on site that uses a generator to pump plus a simple Jackery solar system to charge tools) but plan to build a Passive House so we can stay for longer stretches and rent it out (selectively) for income.

This allows us to live a walkable/bike-able life for the day to day grocery store/doctor/school/work stuff and earn city salaries, but then we pop upstate and have hugelkultur gardens and mushroom experiments and apple trees and wild blueberry bushes. We have the car to get between the two but we rarely use it in the city, so we were able to make a low-mileage lease work no problem. Once the house is built we want to switch to a plug in hybrid or full electric vehicle, depending on where the technology is.

I don't want to in the country full time because it's at least 20 minutes of driving to get to anything and I hate being car-dependent and having a milk run or a soccer practice drop-off take the better part of an hour.

We got into permaculture concepts in part because we have to set things up to work with nature- we're not there enough to fuss with it.

Basically a variation of the popular sandwich option, we do quesadillas- drop a tortilla on a skillet and melt some cheese on it, then fold it over or top with another tortilla and flip to heat the other side through- works for both corn and flour tortillas, but a stack of corn tortillas will keep in the fridge forever and takes up very little space, so it's a staple at our house. If you're fancy, add some hot sauce or chipotle sauce, or throw in whatever fillings you can find in the fridge- great way to use up the last little bits of previous meals. My son does a pizza version with mozzarella cheese and pepperoni. I like to add a schmear of tomato paste or sauce to that version- if there's an open jar in the fridge.

Another quick meal is to whip an egg and go to make an omelet, but when it's still a bit gooey lay a flour tortilla over it rather than fold it over. Then lift it out and generously butter the pan and flip the egg-tortilla so it's tortilla side down and fry/toast the tortilla. then roll the whole thing up and devour. Serve with a handful of whatever leafy green is closest to becoming compost.

I also like to keep a head of cabbage in the back of the fridge so there's always some veg on-hand- shredded cabbage sautéed in salted butter topped with a fried egg is immensely satisfying.

This thread just got resurfaced the day after I read a chapter from Hope Jahren's "Lab Girl," and I had an "aha" moment about the "sacrificial plant" observations. Many people have observed that one plant gets hit harder than its neighbors and assumed it's weaker, but I'm wondering if it was simply unlucky.

In her book, Jahren talks about how plants communicate- through roots as well as through VOCs, and I'm wondering if the sacrificial plant was the initial bug target, but as soon as it got attacked it started signaling to neighboring plants that they should up their bug defenses.

So it's not that it was weak, it was that it was first, and the other plants are doing better because they got a warning shot.

I highly recommend "Lab Girl" for anyone interested in plant biology, chemistry & evolution- it's beautifully written as well as being hugely informative.