Carrie Savo

We have one real anvil and two poor mans anvils (bits of discarded railroad track).   We use ours all the time for repairs and making things.  

Funny though, we had to almost to a major city to find an old one for a good price because the country folks around us collect them, throw them in their kitchens or family rooms and call it “primative decor”.    It pains me to see good tools hanging on some guys wall used solely as decoration.  

r ransom wrote:Protonmail is the only provider I found that treated me like an adult and doesn't protect me from emails I want.

Haven't seen a long term solution for other emails yet.

Tuta mail is another private email system that is very user friendly about decided what you want in spam.  Very happy with them

We have a tramontina machete.  They are Brazilian, lightweight, and the go to for landscaping.  Plus they are cheap as heck, about $20-25 dollars US, and you can get them everywhere.  

They are very tough. My first one came from my landscaping job days in college and lasted a good 20 years.  I’m on my second now and we are not nice to it. It keeps on going though.  

Cécile Stelzer Johnson wrote:
Asparagus are the number one I can think of. Just a scattering of wood ashes, winter mulch against the weeds and pick to your heart's content.

I planted my asparagus along with strawberries since they are shallow root plants.  They keep the weeds down but don’t interfere with the asparagus crowns growth.  So far so good, though i’m keeping an eye on them to make sure they don’t fight.

I am also testing asparagus as an erosion preventer along my driveway since i’m up a steep hill.  Not eating those per say, but trying to spread out the supply in case my main stand of them have problems.

Daniel Andy wrote:The perfect homestead vehicle is the Slate EV truck.

I want one too and I haven’t bought a new to me car since 2009.    Honestly i would gladly go work for them.

Two that got me going when i got started are:

Jerry Baker’s Old Time Gardening Wisdom which i think is out of print but you can usually pick up used very cheap.  The style of writing drew me in and made me feel confident to get start and I still use his grandma putt’s recipes in my veg now.  It’s honestly very detailed for a starter book and talks about all the permie things, just back when they were considered old-fashioned know-how.

The second is a good regional book of trees, shrubs and flowers with pictures, ideally in color.  Internet is great, but a good picture book is invaluable for planning.  It will give you an idea of the size, shape and general charactistics of plants that grow in your area.  It’s helpful when you are trying to figure out if a plant you are thinking of is a small bush or a 30ft tree in a one gallon pot.   The one I started with is The American Horticultural Society’s Encyclopedia of Garden Plants.    We also have Michael Dirr’s books which are wonderful, but may be too detailed for starting with unless you like learning about plant identification.

Keep in mind if you get an older book the planting zones will have changed so just be sure to look at updated maps or use a range like i do.  (For example, I’m zone 6-8 depending on where on my land I plant something.)

The permaculture books are all awesome and a great thing too.  They are also online for free in many places if you look.

Tomatoes for us for sure, we grow amish paste and I can sauce, ketchup, tomato paste, bbq sauce, salsas.  Husband is italian-american so we eat pasta at least once a week.  Canning sauce alone is a huge savings for us.

Rasberries.  The are our snacks, our juice for drinks, our jam, in desserts.   1 cane turns into a thousand and we have extras to share and swap.

Ramps though our are true literally money maker.  We have a patch we maintain and I harvest and sell some locally to a few local restaurants and a health food store.  They pay for all our annual garden expenses & projects.   Ah the perks of living near the bourgeois.

Yes.  We wardened off the northeast corner of our basement, insulated it against the rest of the basement and added an in-line fan to vent out the gases released by the crops to prevent spoilage.  It’s our deep pantry, cannery, and our cold storage for food we harvest and keep overwinter.  

What happened to all the covid gardeners?  I thought covid got everyone back into life’s simple pleasures?  I guess people got traumatized.

We’re good.  I will be a bit more diligent with continual harvest this year in case I need to share even more with family, friends, and neighbors, but I believe our garden is well stocked otherwise.  Will pass on more seeds to my local library too in case the panic has started.

I do need to get some supplies for this year’s home maintenance projects that I better get on before tariffs and fuel costs blow it up, but otherwise life goes on while the stupid goes on around us. (That concludes my thought on politics.)

If there is a will…

https://docs.joinpeertube.org/api/embed-player

There is also a way to do it via an html iplayer but i haven’t tried tinkering with it