Jackson Bradley

As mentioned, a messaging app. We really liked it as far as group messages, international messages, sharing pics, etc. They changed their privacy policy a few years back and we exited it because of that and having a second messaging app was a pain no matter how nice it was.

Very strange that you need that to buy a product. Especially since you have purchased it before without it...

We have "laundry to landscape". Well laundry to a 36'x24' mulch bed. I have QTY 3 - 2" pipes with holes drilled in them at the top, 1/3 mark and 2/3 mark. The run on grade and are in a 16"x16" deep mulch swale, so to speak. We grow all kinds of stuff in there.

We only use diluted castile soap for our laundry and in 2-1/2" years of having the system in place, I have not noticed any issues whatsoever. I imagine spraying diluted castile soap on the plants should be fine based on all of the plants we have in that mulch bed.

Anne Miller wrote:This is something I have wanted since the first day I saw one sitting on our daughter's kitchen counter.  Were they called Instapot when they first came out?  Or is that a different brand?  The one I received for Christmas is an Instant Pot.

I think it has always been instant pot and there was never an instapot. I am not sure if it was due to lack of desire to annunciate or some people like to shorten it to that one word.

We make it a point to say the actual two word name of that particular kitchen appliance in our household due to my neuroses with acronyms, slang, etc.

Jay Angler wrote:I hear you - hubby complained similarly when he'd get a tiny piece of crab shell when I'd catch local crab. It was frustrating for me, as it was great having an afternoon by the water and getting food out of it! Now, once in a while, I go crabbing with a friend and eat crab at her house and leave Hubby to fend for himself.

We have made a lot of memories as a family catching crabs in traps and cooking them. Sometimes handlining with a chicken drumstick. I have big smile on my face reminiscing due to your mention of it. The crabs and meat rabbits are a nice variety but it sure seems a lot more productive to process a deer instead of the multitude of small animals it takes to get that amount of meat! It does not stop us from doing it though.

Jay Angler wrote:

Jackson Bradley wrote:... we had trouble finding recipes everyone liked when we tried cooking it whole or portioned with bones in...

Muscovy Duck is also very short on fat. If you want to try a couple of "bone in" recipes, here are two that have gone over well with my lot, and that I think would work OK with Rabbit instead of Muscovy.

Jay, our problem mainly centered around the different slow cook methods. We ended up with a lot of tiny hard pieces that were impossible to remove when shredding/eating the rabbit meat. I suspect they were some of the pieces that remained when I was going through the deboning process and had to remove. It soured the experience for the kids when they bit down on what the thought was going to be a soft piece of meat and were picking out small pieces of cartilage or whatever it was out of their mouth.

If we didn't have other options, we'd get used to it and be fine but I guess we are a little spoiled. It was not the low fat content.

We have reached the end of the meat rabbit season here due to the heat. I have 8 grow outs left to process and we'll "over summer" the breeders until it cools down.

The whole deboned rabbit worked great for recipes like the 2nd video in the original post. Our issue is that we do not currently raise pigs and don't have a good source for non cafo bacon.

After I process the remaining grow outs, we will have processed 56 grow outs this season. Once we ran out of bacon, I started processing the rabbits differently. The front quarters are the most difficult due to scraping the shoulder blades and ending up with some tough bits left from the shoulder blade that take some time to remove after deboning.

I got pretty fast at deboning everything under the front quarters. I don't take the time to keep the front quarters all in one piece with the rest of the deboned rabbit and instead remove then and debone them separately without as much care as the video and include what is left of them for bone broth.

Due to the lack of good bacon for wrapping the boneless rabbit, I have been grinding all of the boneless meat. It is very versatile and I believe it is worth the extra investment of time to debone.

My wife has been making Meatzza crust with the ground rabbit and it is excellent. We've used it in may other recipes and feel this is the way to go for meat rabbits as we had trouble finding recipes everyone liked when we tried cooking it whole or portioned with bones in.

I can mention our experience with bushes as the the fruit trees are too young to produce currently. Also, our current goals do not include preserving excepting freezing. One day...

There are 8 of us. 2 adults, 6 kids, 10 and under. In our climate, the strawberries fruit first, then the raspberries, then blackberries, then blueberries. When I say "make fruit" I mean that it is ripe and we can eat it and there are some fruits before and after the times I mention but they really produce during the times I mention.

Strawberries - They are in different places but if we combined them, it would be a 24'x30' patch, roughly. They make fruit in April, May, June.

Raspberries - We have about a 16" wide by 16' long patch. They make fruit in May, June.

Blackberries - We have 6 large bushes and they make fruit in June and July. Plus the wild berries around our tree line perimeter.

Blueberries - We have 16 bushes and they make fruit in mid-late June and July.

All of the cultivated bushes/patches are 2 years old. We all graze as desired when walking around the property. The kids are able to go and eat as  much as they want anytime of the day. We are intentional about using them in meals and smoothies. We freeze the excess and this will get us through until September/October timeframe.

This seems to be the right amount for us to eat as much as we can stand for 6 months per year and we enjoy the natural process of going from one type of fruit to another. I am supposing that as the kids appetite increase, time will increase the size of the bushes/patches (production) and it should be about the same but I am not certain at this time. We do not need to supplement our diet with any berries for that 6 month period, at least.

So for 6 months a year, eating mostly fresh and some frozen, this is where we are. The bushes and strawberries are comingled in with a bunch of other stuff along swales, in garden beds, medicinal plant beds, among the fruit trees and misc. vegetables we grow in the ground. The raised beds are currently dedicated to vegetables and some flowers but I would like a raised bed, maybe 12" high instead of 24" for a nice strawberry patch.

The strawberries grow year round here and get our of control without some managing. I think I could do a better job with management if they were in a dedicated raised bed. Or maybe 2 beds to keep a steady rotation going between 1,2,3 year plants.

The berry bushes seem to all be happy and we are happy with their location as they just need a little pruning from time to time. The raspberries and blackberries need more attention than the blueberries but the meat rabbits love them so they get all of the pruning's.

Val Vetter wrote:The tongue-in-cheek answer I got from the local good ole boys about finding the septic tank was “when it has a problem, it will show itself”. (True, but hardly proactive.)

This is great. I am going to remember that saying!

If you like to read, I think this book would be very informative and demonstrate differences in chicken keeping philosophies. The book would tend toward not having a coop or fenced chicken area. You can read some commentary by scrolling down the comments in the thread.

https://permies.com/t/265718/Free-Range-Survival-Chickens-Florida

Edit to say that I see Timothy Norton already mentioned the book.

May go without saying......

I am not sure how you can tell the difference between bocking 14 and 4 and different types of virile comfrey. There are some threads on here but, at times, my bocking 14 looks like bocking 4 from what I have read and seen in the pics. It was sold to me as backing 14 so I just go with that. https://permies.com/t/175487/determine-Bocking-Bocking-Comfrey

I do not think the flower color, except the blue flowers, tell you too much. I have pink and purple flowers from the same plant/seeds.

I think you can figure out if you have some type of bocking and sterile verses other types that are virile. My bocking 14 flowers, drops the flowers and never closes to form seeds. The true comfrey closes and grows in size and forms seeds.

It could be safe to say that you could just label them as sterile or virile and go that route depending on what you observe with the seed pods. Or self seeding and non self seeding to be easier to understand.