Ambergris

People around here recommend Viking (redskin) and Kennebec (brown).

Commercial growers grow by the row method. The cans are for when you don't have the room or the water for rows.

One thing you should also know is that early potatoes, like Yukon Gold, don't make layers of potatoes as you add more soil into the barrel.

Great work, everyone!

Make sure they are food grade. Some stores will tell you everything is, and some will tell you nothing is, when the truth is some of their buckets are food grade and some are not. Stick your head in it and smell. Do you smell petrochemicals? Your food will soak up that smell and get nasty. Buckets you get from a deli are fine. Food grade buckets have a 2 in the triangle on the bottom, and are usually either clear, translucent, or plain white. Not all white buckets with a 2 in the triangle are food grade, though. That's why I like to get deli buckets! You will have to either get an airtight seal or seal the food in a bucket liner to make it last a long time. White flour just won't last more than a year in a bucket before it goes funky. White rice is good for a long time. Brown rice goes bad in less than a year, unless kept cool. White sugar might turn into a bucket-sized brick, but won't go bad. Whole wheat (not cracked, not ground into flour, not rolled, whole!) will last many years if you keep it cool. Whole wheat flour goes rancid in as little as a few months. Salt does not go bad. Oil goes bad surprisingly fast, even if kept in a cool room or basement. Plain cheap pasta stays good a long, long time. 30# fills a 3.5 gallon bucket. Whole grain pasta goes rancid. We got some gamma seals, which are expensive screw-on lids, for the buckets of stuff we rotate through fastest: flour, rice, sugar, black eyed peas, corn meal. When a bucket goes empty, it's filled from the oldest bucket of the same we can conveniently identify. Someone here was talking about using soda bottles. This has caught my imagination and I will probably be trying it for peas and beans.

You're way north of me, so your day-length changes are dramatic.

Make sure you're only feeding fish to the young growing chicks. When my laying hens get into the cat food or the fish-cleaning area, we can tell by the taste of the eggs. You can also tell by the taste of the pork when a pig has been raised largely on fish, so I'd be wary of raising meat chickens on too much fish.

Drove across town, $7 in gas round trip, but used a pile of coupons there to get $37 of groceries for $11. While we were on that end of town, we visited a Goodwill store we don't usually get to; found a bagel-friendly toaster and the loose-weave cotton blanket my son likes.

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When I switched to Firefox I stopped having that problem.

At the bent can store I scored four cans, about 1.75 lbs each, of dry whole milk for $2.79 each. They had some plastic bags about the same size of dry nonfat milk; maybe those will still be there come payday.

I have heard somewhere of an organization that provides free housekeeping assistance for people on radiation therapy. You might look up whether it's available in her area. One less thing for her to worry about.

I think I've finally got the hang of couponing. Got 6 200-ct bottles generic Benedryl, 6 headbands, two generic Vaporub jars, a 40-ct box of nitrile gloves, 60-ct jar guaifenesin/dextromethorphan pills, 96-ct pseudoephedrine, 24-ct ephedrine, 5 32-oz bottled 91% isopropyl alcohol, 1 24-oz bottle ethyl alcohol, 6 32-oz bottles hydrogen peroxide, ichthammol, Bacitracin, Abreva, 12 double-rolls TP, and a jug of Tide HE for $45.21.

You can freeze them whole (set them blossom-end down on a biscuit pan and freeze, then wrap and bag) or measure puree by the cup, adding a little lemon juice, and freeze in zipper-lock bags.

Persimmon Cake Beat together one stick of butter, two cups brown sugar. Beat in two ex-ex large eggs (or half a cup of banty eggs, or two extra-large eggs and a spare yolk or white), plus two teaspoons vanilla, plus juice of half a lemon. When fluffy, stir in pulp of four large or five smallish Kaki persimmons. (Remove any grotty-looking dark seeds.) Stir in two cups of self-rising flour, a quarter teaspoon of baking powder, and either two teaspoons of pumpkin pie spice or up to a teaspoon of some cool spice mix you've been looking for a place to use. (Ras el hanout? Five spice? Warning--if you're experimenting with something that might be potent, take it very lightly so you don't make a block of chicken food out of this cake.) Stir in a cup of chopped pecans if you have them and like them. Stir in a cup of raisins or chopped dried figs if you have them and like them. Bake like pound cake. It's heavy and good.

Thank you!

Where can you get it in 50# buckets? I sometimes take a rosemary-based blend for low thyroid. I can't say I've noticed any difference in my energy level, though, and it gives me awful gas.

Cat, when they reopened the old Cuban base, they found 30-year-old soda in glass bottles. By all accounts, it was great. I bet it was. The old stuff had real sugar and more carbonation than is used now.

Some people swear by white grits to get rid of ants. I've also tried cinnamon and finely ground pepper, which sometimes work.

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Whey can be used instead of water in baking or as part of the liquid in making oatmeal. Dogs, cats, and chickens love it. There's also supposed to be a kind of cheese made with it.

If you haven't planted Tendergreen before, you're in for a surprise. I have never seen anything sprout and leaf out as fast as that does. I sometimes put an old floorless birdcage in my chicken yard and sprinkle Tendergreen seeds on the bare ground. A week later, the hens have shouldered aside the cage and ravished the mustard. The yolks become substantially deeper yellow. I was advised to do this with millet, but the Tendergreen is much faster and more satisfying. Edited to add: I water them in good.

Wait, Mother! Please tell me more!

I used to have a book about the work of a group of people that went around with a $50 kerosene fire-thing; they'd build an adobe dwelling, scrub the inside walls with salt, block up the windows and doors with brick-sized blocks of mud, and turn on the kerosene thing. By night the building would glow red-hot, and the kerosene would have burned out. When the building cooled, and they pulled out the brick blocks, the dwelling itself (walls and roof and floor and all) would have baked into brick. When earthquakes came, the uncooked dwellings collapsed but the cooked ones stayed standing. These were I think about 500-800 sq ft dwellings, but think about it.

I've seen a stick-and-mud chimney catch fire. The people immediately went out and lassoed the chimney, and pulled it away from the house to burn in the yard. The chimney was built to pull away easily. This left a hole in the wall, but it beat losing the roof--or maybe the whole house--to fire.