Josh Hoffman

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since Sep 16, 2024
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Recent posts by Josh Hoffman

Home made popcorn!

Regular made with olive oil and butter or bacon grease with some garlic powder or salt. You only need a pot with lid and the ingredients. Great source of fiber. We do 1/3 cup corn, 2 T olive oil and 1 T butter in a 3 QT pot. I can do that 4x in the pot before the pot is too hot and stove burner is too erratic to be consistent anymore. I have tried larger scale ingredients and larger pots but the results vary.

I have a friend who doesn't use any oil/grease/butter. Air popped and he adds toppings. I don't really trust him because of this but I now know it can be done .
3 hours ago

Nancy Reading wrote:Well, I've ordered a small pack of MSG from an Asian supermarket (rather than the link above which needed a mobile phone number for some reason and wouldn't accept a fake one). I also ordered a little pack of dried seaweed (which happens to be one of the more concentrated natural sources of glutamic acid) but that's not for me.

I will report back on the 'rice with sprinkles' effect on me in a week or so!



This is a good choice and I will be very interested in your results.

Author Wendell Berry talks about, how some of the folly of our culture, has to do with the notion that we can know everything. When you think you can know the human body completely and do not allow any mysteriousness, you then create categories. These categories don't acknowledge the uniqueness of every individual or the mysteriousness of the body/creation/etc.

Most negative studies or experiences on any widely accepted thing in our culture, especially in the medical and pharmaceutical industries, will be hard to turn up.

I expect you will confirm what you wrote in your initial post with your experiment.
5 hours ago

William Bronson wrote: Let see...
I only start my own via volunteers.



Likewise on tomatoes and melons. volunteers only. It is easy to leave a few on the vine or tuck under the wood chips. The volunteers seem to come out at exactly the right time and produce better than any other pot started or direct sowed seed.

It is fun to see what the garden will provide on its own before we start adding other things.
1 day ago

r ranson wrote:Clothing protection from dust, light, etc.  But also darkness is a moths best friend.   I'm on the fence about this one.

One of the things I really like about a closed closet full of clothes is the noise insulation between bedrooms.



I am not sure of the benefit of noise insulation unless the closet is the length of the room or a situation where the closets of 2 rooms take that entire wall up. In those cases, good point.

I imagine this conversation would be directly related to the amount of clothes you own.

Our family of 7 uses a 24" deep by 24" wide by 72" high space for clothes. We do 1 small load of laundry per day, everyday, is the trade off. I don't think we would be bothered either way.

Also, if a room does not have a closet, some places will not let you list is as a bedroom if you sell. I think you can only call it a den or study.  
6 days ago
I just cycled my 30 pint Hisense dehumidifier and watched the power monitor. At peak, it was using 3.8 amps. The tag says it could use up to 5.5 but that was not the case at the settings I had. It is set at 50% and used in 156 sqft RV interior. I would estimate cycle time per hour at 20 mins on days at 80%-90% and down from there. It was readily available at Lowes and would handle your SQFT just fine

Rv's are not normally sealed or insulated well, including ours. I bet you could get a low cycle time if you seal and insulate well.

Our biggest problem, this time of the year, is the heat the dehumidifier generates through its cycling processes. During winter time, it is a bonus. You mention that heat generated is not and issue so no concern there.

To recap, if you do a poor job on sealing and insulating, have a family of 7 who open and close the doors all the time and have 90% humidity days, you'd be looking at using 30.4 amps per day plus whatever loss you incur through the inverter from DC to AC if your cycle time is 20 mins per hour.

A small system with a 100AH would handle that just fine if charged daily with SLA batteries. Lithium would need charged every 2 or 3 days.

6 days ago

Anne Miller wrote:Deer will eat almost everything, except rosemary ...



1# of raw deer meat has over 500 calories. You would not be able to stop them but you could get a return on your gardening investment if they are eating your food and you eat them......food for thought
6 days ago
What are some things you learned the "hard way" due to your region or site conditions?

An example for me would be that southern exposure in the south is its own category. When a seed pack says "full sun", it may or may not do well in our central MS full sun. It is absolutely brutal.
6 days ago
I can provide some observations on the swales. We have torrential rains in the spring and then periods of drought over the summer. We got 11" in May alone, which is unusually late for that much rain. It has been a very wet spring in Central MS.

I have 300'+ of swales. They are small, 16"x16" roughly. I use a 2 wheel tractor and rotary plow to dig them. At first, I left the ends on contour and filled them with mulch. This was to help retain any summer moisture. It works great in the summer but requires maintenance during the rainy season due to the material washing out. We had a downpour 2 weeks ago that showed 2.5" in the rain gauge in about 45-50 mins. We are on a gentle sloping property and not at the peak.

I ended up removing the mulch out of the swale and cutting a trench in the ends 2 or 3" below contour. This allows for the runoff from the torrents to leave the swale and not burst through the lower mound but still holds water to seep into the ground.

I can say that they provide a huge advantage during the summer drought periods. They also provide a place to plant fruit trees and bushes and flowers, etc. I get the sense they even hold the dew longer or more of it or something. Any depression on the property looks pretty good in the summer verses the surrounding areas. Something about it that I don't quite understand but can clearly observe.

All that to say that I think swales are still something to consider.
6 days ago

Van Das wrote:

Josh Hoffman wrote:My takeaway from reading the book was that I have the following 3 options:

1-Fence the chickens
2-Fence the garden
3-Move the garden far away from the chickens or vice versa  


There's a fourth option, which is to garden with plants that chickens wont bother. Many plants are inedible to them for one reason or another, such as the texture or flavor. As just one example, I have a large garden of prickly pears that the chickens will never bother in the slightest



There are, more than likely, even more options. I limited it to what the author presented in the book.

Part of the premise of the book (included in the title) is what would happen if SHTF and you could not get feed? For our family, we would eat our chickens, and rely on gardening, foraging and hunting.

I like the chickens and eggs but mainly use them as a source for great compost. If they were not here, I would forage the compost from the floor of the surrounding forests if I needed it. The more established the garden gets, the less we need due to the many green manures such as comfrey that we have growing.

This year, our garden is almost entirely volunteers that I let go to seed, or put under the wood chips, or brought when I added the chicken compost to the garden area.
6 days ago

Tereza Okava wrote:

I got soaked yesterday trying to adjust rain barrel overflow, and my wet clothes just stayed wet here in the house (despite the dehumidifier going).
Wet clothes is the hardest thing since we do not have a dryer, all clothes must hang outside.



Have you heard of a spin dryer? It does not use heat and used very little electricity. We can spin out our clothes and hang them inside the camper with the dehumidifier on and they will dry. You can place it in you shower or tub while it is spinning or catch and reuse the water it spins out.

Makes a HUGE difference in drying time compared to soaking wet or out from the washer spin cycle.

This is the one we have, it used to be $100:  https://laundry-alternative.com/products/ninja-3200-rpm-portable-centrifugal-spin-dryer-with-high-tech-suspension-system
1 week ago