Margaret Yoder

Has anyone ever tried to grow Elka poppy to gather the seeds? I'm getting interested, Fedco says "Lacks the distinctive flavor of the Breadseed variety but sweeter, with a more nutlike taste, none of the bitterness, and over 50% more oil content, making perhaps the best edible oil in central Europe. " And Adaptive seeds says "Produces mass quantities of sweet, nutty flavored white seeds that make an excellent paste/meal when ground into nut butter." I'm looking primarily for a substitute for Tahini (can't buy it around here, except stale, rancid, and overpriced).

I'd be interested in producing oil too, but don't know how.

Sadly, my husband wants the lawn to look perfect all the time - even though our neighbors actually sort of make fun of us for keeping it so nice! They're all more permaculturally correct  than we are. I feel I'm doing well to keep him from poisoning the weeds - an argument we have every summer, it seems. So unless I had the time to replace the lawn with something even fancier (perennial beds?) and more pretty, I'm sort of stuck with it.

What's the best way to figure how high you're mowing? We have an ancient riding mower with 5 settings. Say we mow it at the highest setting... then would I just go around the lawn with ruler, and shove it down into the lawn and measure?

My real problem is that we've been mowing pretty high ( I think) but then throwing the clippings out into the woods. We've found that if we let them lie, the grass under the piles of clippings dies. We have a huge lawn (30,000 square feet I guess), and don't mow very often. We have to wait until the grass is dry enough and how often does that happen? Especially in a spring like this one. Even if it were dry, it's hard to want to mow twice a week with busy lives and small children.

So the soil is eroding away down to the clay, getting worse and worse. We live in the country in Ohio. Sigh. I guess there's no good answer short of (a) spending LOTS of money on stuff like compost to add, or (b) spending all our free time mowing. I don't really want to fertilize even, as that seems like it would only make the grass grow faster.

I guess I'm just complaining, and know the answer... which is wait about 2 years until the child is old enough that I have more free time, and then start working to repair the damage we're doing. 

I dumped all our grounds onto our beds over the winter. The first couple of times the temperatures went high enough for my neighbor's bees to venture out, they swarmed all over the coffee grounds, digging through them. Does anyone have any idea why they would do this?

Margaret

How about a propane weed burner? My husband got me one for Christmas after I wouldn't let him spray round-up on our gravel driveway last year!  I can't wait to try it.

I wanted to make a comment regarding heating your cast iron dry after washing - you say to use your full attention so as not to leave it to burn up.  I find that as I get older I can no longer do this - I invariably forget about it.  So when I turn on the burner I set my timer for 45 seconds or a minute, and then turn off the burner when the timer dings.  Thanks for all the information!