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If your garden is like mine and perennial weeds are your main problem (lawn grass, twitchgrass, thistles, dandelions, dock, etc) then if you have the time and energy, even for just a small portion of the garden, it is WAY WAY worthwhile to spend some time with a spading fork turning it all up in...

It doesn't take much room before a several-parallel-lines setup (between T-shaped posts or one or both ends can be attached to something existing like house or tree) gives you as much or more laundry capacity and is EASY to make yourself for a lot cheaper. If you want the umbrella-style, get...

I've ben reading this thread with interest b/c I have a similar thing, never had actual doctor or xrays but it sounds like heel spurs type thing although mine was initially brought on by stepping hard onto *very hard pointy* plastic kids' toys in the dark. That went more or less away after a...

I do not believe it is possible to bag an entire thistle plant (which is about what you'd have to do to encompass all the flowers) and have the bag stay on for weeks without blowing off. You can't cut the flowering parts off, b/c new branches which will flower will just spring forth from the...

I think btw that a lot of handbooks from the 1920s-WWII (Depression era and the decade or so immediately prior) are particularly relevant to this sort of discussion, because most of the stuff that they tell ya about fixing/making/reconfiguring involves materials that would likely survive (for a...

I'm a big fan of the aforementioned "frequent soaks in water as hot as you can stand it, with enough epsom salts crystals in it that some won't dissolve despite stirring". However I would add that if the infection appears to be spreading down your hand, esp. with reddish streaks into palm or...

Not sure you can, or should even try. As others have said, if you want a dog with a different personality get a second dog with that personality ;) However, it sounds to me like you mainly want the dog to be percieved as intimidating. Strangers on the street are not going to know his...

Yeah but if you KEEP AFTER IT you do get rid of it that way. And not everyone has hogs, or is willing to use large quantities of herbicides repeatedly over a long time, or can smother the area lightproof for a couple years. Pulling/cutting/mowing/digging DOES work, but you can't do it...

Yes, that's the best substitute for pickling salt. Pat

Quite honestly, I think people are frequently full of bull when they say things like the guy quoted in that article; but even insofar as they truly mean it, I do not think it's going to be a major thing beyond the very early days of whatever collapse-of-civilization event one is imagining...

Me neither actually, but I find it entertaining and educational to think about in the abstract nonetheless :) Read the original novella (or the book it was expanded into)... that is mainly ABOUT how the bonds of social behavior pull us through. (Great novella. Hated the movie though, and not...

That. It is REALLY advantageous to have the eggs totally-syncrhonized, as opposed to having the hatch straggle out over days and days (which can easily lead to losing chicks thru various reasons); also it lets you have her setting more eggs than she might happen to be on. If she doesn't stay...

If you just want feathers and apparently aren't highly particular about exactly what they're like, it seems to me the most efficient thing is to skip the RAISING part entirely, and troll craigslist/kijiji/feedstore-bulletin-boards for people wanting to get rid of roosters. Then you can have a...

My impression (from muzzle-loader-aficionado relatives) is that unless you have recourse to generations' worth of extensive in-person tutelage and know your local material sources reeeeallly well, it is not practical to make these things from scratch (as opposed to from drugstore-bought purified...

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your point here, but isn't that sort of the whole point of "the end of the world as we know it" scenarios that people (not really me, btw) are planning for, though? You simply CANNOT make those things yourself, realistically. Not while doing everything else...

Flystrike is when blowflies lay eggs in damp ucky wool and the maggots start eating their way thru the wool and don't stop when they get to the 'actual sheep'. So you get the maggots eating away through the living flesh. Given that this tends to be associated with enclosed, damp filthy...

I'd try real hard to excavate down into the gravel, but if not, then yes I can certainly see that being another one of the exceptions :) Pat

You know you don't generally need the kind of magazine-photo-style raised beds that have ANY kind of fancy retaining walls... if you need raised beds at all (and far, far more people use them than OUGHT to, in my opinion, and end up wasting a lot of water that way) it is quite frequently...

And in fact I think that no matter HOW catastrophic or total the destruction of civilization you might get, people would have to be unimaginably stupid to be forced back to a TRULY stone-age way of life.... simply because there will still be so much of our modern cr*p that survives us, along...

In a more-likely it-actually-happens-sometimes SHTF scenario, as opposed to reduced to stone age living kind of thing, I would suggest that the most valuable skills that many of us are weak in would include things like: - Major carpentry, with emphasis on adequate seat-of-pants engineering...