Chris Clinton

pollinator
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since Oct 14, 2024
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Biography
Georgia native. semi feral neo-peasant animist skill collector. Founder with my wife, Isia, of Crack in the Sidewalk Farmlet located on the edge of Atlanta in 2008. Been growing an expansive diversity of produce and more recently flowers for local farmer's markets as well as offering many foraged edible plants and mushrooms continually full time since. Turned on by traditional and primitive skills, natural building, bioregioning, community, the outdoors, old tools and machines, books, etc etc blah blah blah
Looking for a larger landbase to serve as custodian of in lower Appalachia, generally near where Ga, TN, and NC meet. Would like to build and support community. Teamwork makes the dream work.
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Recent posts by Chris Clinton

Might be slash pine too, not that easy to tell from photos. There's lots of pines in Ga, range maps here:  https://resources.ipmcenters.org/resource.cfm?rid=15836
1 day ago
I removed a fence that was put up a number of years ago by a coinhabitant here to keep dogs out of a garden plot. It was cobbled together from various types of welded wire fencing attached to mostly t-posts. The dogs are no longer here and the fence has just been a hindrance for a while and was well on its way to becoming a weedy hedge of unwanted saplings, briars and vines. Time for it to go! It measured out at 120 feet. I went through and removed the baling wire and zip ties that held the fencing to the posts and snipped the vines near ground level to free the mesh. I removed all the fence posts with a puller and stored them against the side of the red barn and the rolled up fencing on the inside for the time being. I removed the saplings and mowed it all down some time later, much better now.
3 days ago
We're having a droughty Spring around here so I set up a bee watering spot using the bottom of a broken chimenea. I added broken terracotta, rocks and sticks and then some shells and flowers to make it a little easier on the eyes. A quick and simple way to support our insect cousins.
3 days ago
Here's my submission making potato-leek-nettle soup. Aside from those ingredients it also included a carrot or two, a stick of celery, garlic, butter, tallow, and ground sausage.

I melt butter and tallow and add chopped carrots, leeks, and celery. Cook a bit and then add the sausage. Chop potatoes and nettles and add. Add water to cover and cook until potatoes are done. Add garlic and puree with immersion blender. Salt and season to taste.

Simple and satisfying.
I have a lot of shorter offcuts and such of this 100 year old true dimension old growth pine I salvaged from an old house to use on my pole barn build. It's mostly heart pine and therefore rot resistant and I have long thought I'd make birdhouses out of it. This was the first attempt which brought up some issues. In the future I'll have to deal with the cupping in the old wood better as when I screwed them together it would want to crack, and also it's rather heavy. This was pretty much the design for blue birds in the book pictured. It has a double roof with wide overhang, drip edge kerfs, and the corners nipped off the floor for mitigating water intrusion. I gave it some linseed oil on the exterior for added protection and mounted on an old power pole, the odd wooden bits below it are the remnants of a weird trellis I made in the past.
Making brown rice again, this time on the gas stove. This is how I most often cook large amounts of rice, a similar method to cooking pasta. Fill a stock pot 2/3 or so with water and bring to a boil. Once boiling add the rice (here two cups) and cook with the lid on (cock lid if necessary) for 30 minutes. Turn off stove and immediately strain rice in to a colander and then return to the pot. Let sit for 20 minutes with the lid on to finish cooking with the residual heat/steam and it's ready. Perfect brown rice every time and no need to measure anything.
I like seeing the experimentation going on with the tannins and glue. If I wasn't so busy I'd enjoy playing around too. In the Skillcult video I posted above he brings up formaldehyde as making glues waterproof. That would lead me down the line of experimenting with seeing what effect wood vinegar/liquid smoke/pyroligneous acid would have on the glues. The aldehydes in smoke play the protein cross-linking (tanning) role in making buckskin, assuming that is still an up to date assessment. Just wanted to throw out that direction of inquiry. Didn't see anything in Dawidowsky  about it, but saw a reference in making elastic glue water resistant by the addition of even a small amount of caoutchouc (latex).
1 month ago
I got a huge amount out of Steve Solomon's Gardening When it Counts early in my journey.
1 month ago
here's where it got on my radar, Steven Edholm of Skillcult making glue for a knife mod experiment
1 month ago