2 Topics for Doers: Health and Food-growing

[BroJones]

0HIIT vid.jpg (153.96 KiB) Viewed 392 times

Who else is interested in focussing attention on these two positive topics? Please share what you’re actually DOING.

1 - Health, including fitness, optimum wt, eyes, ears, memory

2- Food-growing, including DIY gardens/indoor, micro-nutrient growing, algae, nutritional yeast, chickens/eggs…

I’m in, hope you will join the free exchange of ideas.
Also, as long as I can edit this OP, I plan to provide an INDEX of posts that seem most salient.

Health: I do Intermittent Fasting and High Intensity Interval Training HIIT. So today, I water-fasted until noon, ate some hamburger + cheese (NO carbs) to end my fast.
Later, I will climb stairs fast - goal is to get my heart rate above 130 beats-per-minute (bpm) at least twice. (I’m 74 years old.) I get up and stretch/move often, stay limber. I found this video informative and motivational:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eB3z1mhlBw&t=0s

Food-growing: We’ve planted a garden, last Saturday I added raspberries to it, the kind that bear twice/year). Today, will add onions. It’s raining right now… lots of rain here in NW Missouri!

[Ymarsakar]

I mostly drink V8 pomegranate, and not tap water due to avoiding sodium fluoride. I also changed my toothpaste to ayurvedic auromere and also threw out or stopped using artificial hair cleaners and what not. Only use soap with essential oils now for everything. The oils make the hair perfectly fine and clean. Not dry or damaged.

Intermittent fasting is mostly a lifestyle now. I only eat 1-2 meals a day. MOrning and maybe some snacking and a light dinner.

I don't exercise, as I try not to given my physical work. Which can be like 5-9 hours a day depending on business.

I do chi gong, breath work, but not yoga. Some basic legwork from Tai Chi that also applies to my life/work.

The specific breath work are variations of embryonic breathing.

I don't do meditations as I don't need them any more. Although I intuitively visualized 3 colors in a pyramid shape as a teen and pre teen. It helped with programming my body for anti disease and other things.

I used to grow some herbs like thai basil and genovese basil. THey were really good with rice.

LDS teachings gave me the idea to challenge myself with a no water, no meal fast for 2.5 days. That was the longest I went, and it felt like the entire world had morphed and I was about to get elevated, so I had to stop. And my mom was freaking out scared that I had stopped eating, except 1 black cherry a day. Material food no longer held any interest to me. I no longer felt hunger nor any attachment to physical food or desire for it. That was when I knew it was serious, a serious decision point. Whether to go or to stay here on Earth.

Now you guys are stuck with me ; ) There won't be another portal ride for me in some time now.

[Jason]

Was down hard sick in mid-February...got the bright idea need to be combat ready in 6 months...halfway through that now.

Started with foundation of strength training...primarily stronglifts 5x5 program. Wish I'd had that when I was 14 rather than 5 decades later. Long hour desk jockey work certainly reeked havoc on health. Sweet program for getting re-initiated to the iron game.

Some TRE (time restricted eating) and heavy sauna until the rapid detox flared up prostate...couple weeks of pain until cranberry, saw palmetto, cinnamon mix cleared that out.

Downsized from nearly 500 chickens to 100 or so. Starting plants indoors under lights this year. Working on expanding ground cover gardens (mini-beds). Getting fired up to build a greenhouse next to the house and embark on aquaponics after studying it for several years. Trying to expand growing to cover what we eat...but odds are long. My 13 yr old is now 6' 2" and 270. The 15 yr old is 5'11" and pushing 310. Luckily the 250 lb 18 yr old is leaving on a mission in a couple weeks which should help some on the food requirements. Luckily the 3 yr old is still a small fry and the girls aren't anywhere close to that with a couple of them already out of the house...but football training has started already this season.

Need to start ramping up cardio now that the strength base is mostly in place...die of a huffing puffing heart attack after a minute or two of I'm up...you see me...I'm down games...

I still think the wheels are coming off the bus late summer - early fall...but I've been wrong plenty of times previously as my family is quick to remind me...

[RaVaN]

5:30am alarm goes off
Let dogs out go back to bed for a few more minutes.

Get up let dogs in, take one out to do chores. Water greenhouse, feed goats sprouted barley, start next batch of barley (we are on a five day sprouted barley cycle for 60 goats.), check chickens, do a quick garden inspection.

Return inside for burdock tea(or chagga, goldenrod, wormwood...whatever we have brewed), coffee, pineapple juice, and some homemade kimchi. Have a bit of a sit down. Get dressed, prepare for work.

Go to work, do drywall all day till we have done what we had planned or worn out.

Return home,have light snack of jerky,summer sausage or suchlike. Herd goats across property for about an hour and a half with dogs.

Return to barn, do chores of water animals, check eggs, water greenhouse, and other things that need doing.

Head out to garden to work til 7:30ish doing what needs doing. (today I planted 160ish hills of potatoes and am half done)

Wash drywall tools.

8:00pm Eat only real meal of the day. Read/watch movie/play games til lights out at about 10:30ish.

Interspersed in this is building things, mending fences, cutting firewood, and many other things.

Fact is, hard work keeps you healthy and eating proper. Me and my companion are in our mid-forties and have been doing this for years. Our garden is 20000 square feet and we process most of it for food for the year. What she says is a body in motion tends to stay in motion, a body at rest tends to get fat and watch tv.

Anyhow, this isn't a brag or looking for kudos, but rather to say doers do. My companion's father has rheumatoid arthritis and puts both of us to shame in what he gets done in a day.

Saturday we try to get done things we been ignoring all week.

Sunday we rest by doing the things we feel like...

[BroJones]

Thanks for personalized comments - you are Doer's of the word!!

"What she says is a body in motion tends to stay in motion, a body at rest tends to get fat and watch tv." -- A valid Law of Physics I think!!

[RaVaN]

Food math for food production is important. A person needs 1 to 5% of healthy bodyweight of food per day.

1 hill of potatoes will hopefully produce 2 potatoes at the worst but in my area in a normal year it is 2 to 7. This means that for two people you need roughly 300 hills to be sure to have enough for the year plus seed for next. This generally translates into far more than you need but there are always people who have need and likely to be more.

Using the three sister method of planting corn, beans, and squash. If one hill has 7 stalks, that is roughly 1 week of food for two people when processed properly. So we plant 80ish hills.

One 5 to 10lb cabbage is more than two people will want to eat in a week. Convert the cabbage to kraut or kimchi and you increase the food value. We eat alot of this, so we have 200 we plant, plus other brassicas.

Anyhow, this math is both interesting and spooky when you see just how far your food won't go in a time of need with sharing with those around you which is why we are constantly increasing capacity for rapid expansion should need arise.

This sounds like alot of work, but it really isn't...you just have to keep on top of it and love it. We do most of it by hand. Anyhow, God has truly blessed us with his wonderful creation.

[Cruiserdude]

5:30am alarm goes off
Let dogs out go back to bed for a few more minutes.

Get up let dogs in, take one out to do chores. Water greenhouse, feed goats sprouted barley, start next batch of barley (we are on a five day sprouted barley cycle for 60 goats.), check chickens, do a quick garden inspection.

Return inside for burdock tea(or chagga, goldenrod, wormwood...whatever we have brewed), coffee, pineapple juice, and some homemade kimchi. Have a bit of a sit down. Get dressed, prepare for work.

Go to work, do drywall all day till we have done what we had planned or worn out.

Return home,have light snack of jerky,summer sausage or suchlike. Herd goats across property for about an hour and a half with dogs.

Return to barn, do chores of water animals, check eggs, water greenhouse, and other things that need doing.

Head out to garden to work til 7:30ish doing what needs doing. (today I planted 160ish hills of potatoes and am half done)

Wash drywall tools.

8:00pm Eat only real meal of the day. Read/watch movie/play games til lights out at about 10:30ish.

Interspersed in this is building things, mending fences, cutting firewood, and many other things.

Fact is, hard work keeps you healthy and eating proper. Me and my companion are in our mid-forties and have been doing this for years. Our garden is 20000 square feet and we process most of it for food for the year. What she says is a body in motion tends to stay in motion, a body at rest tends to get fat and watch tv.

Anyhow, this isn't a brag or looking for kudos, but rather to say doers do. My companion's father has rheumatoid arthritis and puts both of us to shame in what he gets done in a day.

Saturday we try to get done things we been ignoring all week.

Sunday we rest by doing the things we feel like...

Living the dream Hermano, good for you!! I admire you and your lady

[Ymarsakar]

One thing I noticed/experimented with is that while fasting for the moon days in LDS fast and testimony and other incidences, I started being able to eat the sunlight. Meaning I could go outside, absorb the sun by sun gazing or facing it, even with clothes on, and the hunger would disappear. I would feel energized physically as if after a good meal and 2-4 hours of digestion, but in minutes of the sun.

This was after the 2.5 day fast though, but it may have been operating years before then. IN terms of Divine DNA activation (what they call junk DNA), this is likely an upgrade. I always felt better in the sun in terms of emotional health, but I didn't start experimenting with the food issue until recently.

So survival preppers, yalll have another method of "solar ray" prepping that does not involve lithium ion batteries and electricity ; ) For those that are factoring in food needs for normal human DNA in the historical records, they don't account for solar/moon sustenance. This should ease a lot of people's food and supply concerns, if they can manage to obtain the upgrade DNA wise. WHich is, of course, part of why the MRNA exists, to get people to choose to block their own DNA from activating and upgrading.

[mudflap]

1. Health: we cut out sugar about a decade ago. it sucks. every activity at church seems to center around food, and folks always default to cupcakes, cookies, and other sweets. makes it hard to want to go, so we usually don't so as to avoid the stares. It shouldn't be this way in our church, IMO. For exercise, I get plenty working on my house. I'll get plenty more once we get serious about gardening.

2. Food growing: not doing an annual garden this year, so we can focus on moving into the cabin this summer.
But....
- our blueberries survived the spring-freeze sneak attack from Mother Nature, so we'll get plenty of them.
- And the primary president gave us 20 blackberry canes that we stuck in the ground.
- My bananas also survived the winter - they look like they might do something cool this year.
- The apples look like they are going to try this year as well. might get a dozen from our 2 year old trees.

we fenced off a small 5x10 plot for our daughter so she can grow things in her garden.

IF we can get moved in and somewhat settled, my focus will be on ramping up a huge production area for compost. I'm interested in no-till gardens because the WorstFakePresidentEver will surely come for small gasoline engines next.

As for "what should we grow?" - you should grow stuff you'll eat, and stuff that will keep you alive. growing onions is fun, but what if you could only eat what you are currently growing? I can't imagine onion soup is going to be a staple you'll stick with for a whole year. We eat a lot of bread, pasta, fruits, veggies, milk, butter, cheese, meat, and fish. I suggest focusing on the stuff you eat the most of, which is probably going to be wheat, like us. The good news is: wheat is easy to grow, and it'll grow just about anywhere. It's a grass, after all... Don't forget having the equipment to process it (a mill, hand-harvesting tools, air-tight storage, etc.).

Next, you need variety - sweet potatoes pack a lot of bang - you can eat the whole plant - leaves, stems, and of course roots. They are easy to propagate. The only trick is storage - they need 80+ degrees with high humidity for about 10 days to "cure" them (makes them sweet and they store better). Once cured, they'll store for months in your 55 degree underground root cellar. What's that you say? you don't have a root cellar? me neither. better get on that....

- Beans - like navy, black, pinto, and others store well and have a lot of protein.

- Milk and butter would be one thing that I assume will be hard to get if things collapse - keeping a milk cow isn't the easiest thing to do, so I haven't solved that hurdle.

- Honey is cool because it's sweet, it stores forever, and has plenty of uses. The wax is great for candles for when the Pedo-In-Chief will only allow you 5w light bulbs in your ceiling fan "because climate change!". (yup. look it up. And here I thought "Progressives" were all about "progress"...<sarc>).

- Beef would be hard to get too, except my neighbor has beef cattle, and another neighbor is a professional butcher - he does all the deer processing for locals. I need to volunteer sometime on a day when he's not too busy so I can learn his techniques. Maybe we could substitute goats or rabbits for our red-meat requirements. I already know how to process chickens. and we get plenty of eggs. I need to learn how to hatch them. so, "not today, vegans!" Actually, letting the rabbit be the vegan, and then eating the rabbit is still technically vegan, if push comes to shove, and they ban cows.

I encourage folks to get on freedomcells.org and band together with others in your local community to help each other out. Mostly because our church is doing a terrible job of focusing on this kind of stuff. Maybe it's because food storage is no longer necessary.... lol!

[RaVaN]

Burdock root tea: This is our energy drink of choice. Take ten or so roots, cut off the crown(which is bitter), slice across into 1/4 inch pieces. Boil a large stockpot of water(ours is 14 quarts), let cool slightly and put in burdock pieces and steep for 24 hours. Jug up and drink about a cup or so each day. It has a clean taste and is an interesting bluish-green. Don't drink it at night or your body will hum with excess energy...or it does for me anyhow. It has alot of benefits and is a general tonic.

We have been venturing into cured meats lately. The latest being a type of bresaola. This is a salt cure with spices soaked in wine for a period then air cured for 19 days. We changed the recipe using homemade dandelion wine with one and homemade apple cider vinegar with the other. It turned out very good for a chunk of meat hung out for the better part of a month. While not the raw meat that the lehites ate(which I suspect was closer to the sundried meat of the native Americans), I think they might have liked this more. But most important, it didn't kill us. Alot of knowledge in preserving meat was lost with the advent of refrigerators. Having a working knowledge of these things is important. This has been my preherding snack lately.

Sugar is important for preserving foods. White, brown, maple, honey, all of it can be used to preserve food. I am not partial to it in general or for a mainstay...but it is something that has its uses. We make maple syrup in the early spring. 20 trees yielded 5 gallons this year, but it was a short run. That was 200 gallons of sap, some of which was hauled out on snowshoes. We boil down the sap on our greenhouse stove which heats our greenhouse. The syrup we have gotten paid for the equipment and the propane twice over. It's quicker on a wood evaporator but we aren't quite there yet in investing in that until we figure out how to get to the other 30 trees easier carrying 5gallon buckets on snowshoes in 2-3 foot of snow crossing fences. We kept 2 gallons last year out of 3 and had a quart left from 8 trees tapped...it was a much longer run. Crazy you can stick a straw in a tree and get sugar. The sap sucker birds poke holes in the trees and the sun will literally create maple syrup in golden droplets on the side of the tree. The work of God's hands is amazing!

[mudflap]

Burdock root tea: This is our energy drink of choice. Take ten or so roots, cut off the crown(which is bitter), slice across into 1/4 inch pieces. Boil a large stockpot of water(ours is 14 quarts), let cool slightly and put in burdock pieces and steep for 24 hours. Jug up and drink about a cup or so each day. It has a clean taste and is an interesting bluish-green. Don't drink it at night or your body will hum with excess energy...or it does for me anyhow. It has alot of benefits and is a general tonic.

We have been venturing into cured meats lately. The latest being a type of bresaola. This is a salt cure with spices soaked in wine for a period then air cured for 19 days. We changed the recipe using homemade dandelion wine with one and homemade apple cider vinegar with the other. It turned out very good for a chunk of meat hung out for the better part of a month. While not the raw meat that the lehites ate(which I suspect was closer to the sundried meat of the native Americans), I think they might have liked this more. But most important, it didn't kill us. Alot of knowledge in preserving meat was lost with the advent of refrigerators. Having a working knowledge of these things is important. This has been my preherding snack lately.

Sugar is important for preserving foods. White, brown, maple, honey, all of it can be used to preserve food. I am not partial to it in general or for a mainstay...but it is something that has its uses. We make maple syrup in the early spring. 20 trees yielded 5 gallons this year, but it was a short run. That was 200 gallons of sap, some of which was hauled out on snowshoes. We boil down the sap on our greenhouse stove which heats our greenhouse. The syrup we have gotten paid for the equipment and the propane twice over. It's quicker on a wood evaporator but we aren't quite there yet in investing in that until we figure out how to get to the other 30 trees easier carrying 5gallon buckets on snowshoes in 2-3 foot of snow crossing fences. We kept 2 gallons last year out of 3 and had a quart left from 8 trees tapped...it was a much longer run. Crazy you can stick a straw in a tree and get sugar. The sap sucker birds poke holes in the trees and the sun will literally create maple syrup in golden droplets on the side of the tree. The work of God's hands is amazing!

I'd love to be in your camp!

Any recommended reading on meat preservation?

[Seed Starter]

I'm learning and sharing through my gardening blog.
My wife and I started growing and selling microgreens for the farmers market last year.
I grow cut and come again lettuce under lights through winter.
Since 2020 I start everything that makes sense to start indoors rather than buying starts.
We have 16 chickens for eggs on our standard .18 acre lot.
We tossed our microwave so our teens would learn to cook
We are (my wife is) experimenting with electroculture, just sticks and copper wire
We teach our kids and involve them in our food production.

What I've recently learned about our gut microbiome is life-changing. I believe focusing on this aspect of health is a huge game changer. Nobody ever told me gut health was inherited and is rapidly degrading in the west. Something fun to look up is the gut-brain axis. We should be eating a huge variety of different/wholesome things. Studies show that our poor gut health is connected to behavioral disorders. Yogurt isn't enough.

Antibiotic over use is epidemic in this country. Most people don't even understand there is good and bad bacteria. Also consider antibiotic use through eating meat. I'm certainly not saying stop eating meat but perhaps be selective of who you buy it from.
Some people with c-diff (antibiotic overuse kills too many gut microbes) have benefited from FMT (Fecal microbiota transplantation) but companies struggle to find donors who have healthy gut microbiome.

This company pays $500 per sample https://www.humanmicrobes.org/donors That's how rare a healthy gut is. Luckily there are other ways to improve microbial health. I recently found this company who sells microbes in capsule form https://seed.com/reference/syn-wk It's like compost tea for your gut. It's like $50/month but they seem to have a great product. When I try it I'll let you all know if I notice changes.

These are things I'm doing. Great conversation!

[RaVaN]

@mudflap

Stay away from the American books since they tend to make a bigger push with nitrates. Steven Lamb's "The River Cottage Curing and Smoking Handbook" is a good start.

[Jason]

I'm learning and sharing through my gardening blog.
My wife and I started growing and selling microgreens for the farmers market last year.
I grow cut and come again lettuce under lights through winter.
Since 2020 I start everything that makes sense to start indoors rather than buying starts.
We have 16 chickens for eggs on our standard .18 acre lot.
We tossed our microwave so our teens would learn to cook
We are (my wife is) experimenting with electroculture, just sticks and copper wire
We teach our kids and involve them in our food production.

What I've recently learned about our gut microbiome is life-changing. I believe focusing on this aspect of health is a huge game changer. Nobody ever told me gut health was inherited and is rapidly degrading in the west. Something fun to look up is the gut-brain axis. We should be eating a huge variety of different/wholesome things. Studies show that our poor gut health is connected to behavioral disorders. Yogurt isn't enough.

Antibiotic over use is epidemic in this country. Most people don't even understand there is good and bad bacteria. Also consider antibiotic use through eating meat. I'm certainly not saying stop eating meat but perhaps be selective of who you buy it from.
Some people with c-diff (antibiotic overuse kills too many gut microbes) have benefited from FMT (Fecal microbiota transplantation) but companies struggle to find donors who have healthy gut microbiome.

This company pays $500 per sample https://www.humanmicrobes.org/donors That's how rare a healthy gut is. Luckily there are other ways to improve microbial health. I recently found this company who sells microbes in capsule form https://seed.com/reference/syn-wk It's like compost tea for your gut. It's like $50/month but they seem to have a great product. When I try it I'll let you all know if I notice changes.

These are things I'm doing. Great conversation!

Getting paid thousands for good shiznit...but it's gotta be good shiznit!

[Ymarsakar]

Honey can be used to regenerate skin, as it stores a lot of life essence. If one has a spiritual affinity, honey can be used ritualistically to bolster health and energy, on top of a placebo/faith healing effect.

[RaVaN]

Homemade apple cider vinegar: So we have few true apple trees here but many "trash" crabapples that are the rootstock of grafted apple trees that people planted and did not properly care for. So my companion and I decided to get some use out of these fruitful trees last year. After gathering four 5 gallon buckets of crabapples. We took a paint whip for mixing paint, slurried up the crabapples, put the slurry into a 5 gallon bucket that we set into a pan. We then took another bucket and set it inside the slurry bucket, set a board on top and sat down. This pressed the cider out giving us about 4 gallons of cider. This we put into a lidded bucket with a carboy. This was batch one.
Next we took some of the slurry and filled a bucket 2/3rds full, filled with water, added a lid and carboy. This was batch two.
So the third batch we slurried up some crabapples, left it out three days, filled with water...lidded and added a carboy. This is an old recipe that people did with barrels to never run out as long as you added as much water as vinegar you took.
All three batches resulted in vinegar after a few months that is 3-5% as we tested for acidity. The best was the first batch...it was just great, flower notes and just delicious, I often just drink it or add it to water for rehydration.
The third batch was fine, but the second tasted more watery...sorta like the "cheap" apple cider vinegar. Some of the bottles turned to acetone tasting later as well. Anyhow, we have all the vinegar we need for canning now .
We also took about 2 gallons of the slurry and made some really nice tasting applesauce. We used a food mill to remove stems and seeds.
Anyhow, it was a cheap experiment that is easily replicated by others.

The mental health aspect of figuring out how to do much with little is important. Breaking things down into their simplest components and processes speeds up the learning and innovating. Most things can be broken down to cup, stick, string, edge, and hammer. This is very similar to the simple machines. These can be used in concert to more complex machines and processes. By the way, your hands are all 5 things...just saying...anyhow your best tool box is your mind unfettered by preconceived ideals.

For example, someone I know decided to start tomatoes this year. They bought the fancy expensive trays, individually planted one seed per cell...generally wasted a bunch of time and money. They asked me how we do it, I told them we take a deeper container like a sour cream tub or bigger, poke some holes in the bottom, add dirt sprinkle some seeds, cover with dirt, and voila, 25 to 50 plants in one container that takes less space. By the time frost danger is over, they are ready to be put in. The individual cell thing is a preconceived idea put up by greenhouses to make more money selling less plants. If we had to buy our tomato and pepper plants we couldn't afford it. We plant over 200 tomato plants and about half that in peppers. More if we don't stay on top of the cutworms or if we have a late frost.

[RaVaN]

Today was fun. We are on a hell job, working to get home early enough to beat the first rain since we planted everything(I do not water my garden beyond settling the roots of transplants in general, God does the rest.). Told my companion we didn't have time for dillydallying in order to beat the rain. We get home and one of our does had a kid. It was about a month early by our reckoning, but we run our buck with the does so really we could come home(and have) to baby goats everywhere. Since we dried up our last does a few months back in anticipation, it will be great to have fresh milk again. We do have some sweetened condensed milk from the earlier excess...but that really is for cooking. In general, three milking goats gives us more than we can use, but due to laws and regulations on raw milk, we just use for ourselves. When we get an over abundance we just make cheese. Goats really are amazing, and far better than sheep or cows for areas that are scrublands really. We have pygoras, which are a breed that is relatively new that are a mix of pygmy and angora. The result is a fiber goat, with great meat, and milk that had a high butterfat content and very sweet. They also kid 3 times per two years...thus resulting in 60 goats. Once you embark on a good goat collection, its really hard to quit...but its nice to have food in the bank...so to speak. We started with 5, and brought in two others over time to build the bloodline. They are smaller, so they are easier to care for and keep contained. Anyhow, busy busy...

[BroJones]

Thanks for additional posts, which I just saw and need to catch up on...
Traveling tomorrow to Nauvoo.

My health seems good... doing what I can to boost HGH each day...
Eye cataracts diminishing with use of NAC drops, ordered some Gold Standard MSM drops, will try those, too.

THANKS for comments!

[Seed Starter]

Homemade apple cider vinegar: So we have few true apple trees here but many "trash" crabapples that are the rootstock of grafted apple trees that people planted and did not properly care for. So my companion and I decided to get some use out of these fruitful trees last year. After gathering four 5 gallon buckets of crabapples. We took a paint whip for mixing paint, slurried up the crabapples, put the slurry into a 5 gallon bucket that we set into a pan. We then took another bucket and set it inside the slurry bucket, set a board on top and sat down. This pressed the cider out giving us about 4 gallons of cider. This we put into a lidded bucket with a carboy. This was batch one.
Next we took some of the slurry and filled a bucket 2/3rds full, filled with water, added a lid and carboy. This was batch two.
So the third batch we slurried up some crabapples, left it out three days, filled with water...lidded and added a carboy. This is an old recipe that people did with barrels to never run out as long as you added as much water as vinegar you took.
All three batches resulted in vinegar after a few months that is 3-5% as we tested for acidity. The best was the first batch...it was just great, flower notes and just delicious, I often just drink it or add it to water for rehydration.
The third batch was fine, but the second tasted more watery...sorta like the "cheap" apple cider vinegar. Some of the bottles turned to acetone tasting later as well. Anyhow, we have all the vinegar we need for canning now .
We also took about 2 gallons of the slurry and made some really nice tasting applesauce. We used a food mill to remove stems and seeds.
Anyhow, it was a cheap experiment that is easily replicated by others.

The mental health aspect of figuring out how to do much with little is important. Breaking things down into their simplest components and processes speeds up the learning and innovating. Most things can be broken down to cup, stick, string, edge, and hammer. This is very similar to the simple machines. These can be used in concert to more complex machines and processes. By the way, your hands are all 5 things...just saying...anyhow your best tool box is your mind unfettered by preconceived ideals.

For example, someone I know decided to start tomatoes this year. They bought the fancy expensive trays, individually planted one seed per cell...generally wasted a bunch of time and money. They asked me how we do it, I told them we take a deeper container like a sour cream tub or bigger, poke some holes in the bottom, add dirt sprinkle some seeds, cover with dirt, and voila, 25 to 50 plants in one container that takes less space. By the time frost danger is over, they are ready to be put in. The individual cell thing is a preconceived idea put up by greenhouses to make more money selling less plants. If we had to buy our tomato and pepper plants we couldn't afford it. We plant over 200 tomato plants and about half that in peppers. More if we don't stay on top of the cutworms or if we have a late frost.

On the tomato planting how long do you let them grow before you pull them apart and plant? Any issue hurting plants untangling roots? I plant mine about 8-10" tall and decently thick stems to get a jump on things here in Utah but in the right climate with that many plants I like your idea. About how much space do you use to grow annuals?

[RaVaN]

Tomatoes:
We plant heirloom romas and cherry tomatoes. We have been using the same varieties for about a decade now because they are resilient, producers, easy to process, the seed will survive our 5-7 month -40f winters, and just vigorous.
This year I planted 16 rows of 15 plants 1.5 feet apart with the rows 3ft apart. I let them generally get 8 -12 inches and plant them when I feel the chance of a hard frost is over...roughly around now.
In my method, I dig a small trench for each plant, break apart a chunk of tomatoes plant, tease one out without breaking the stem(you break the stem its generally trash), lay it flattish in the trench with just a few inches sticking up, and gently cover with dirt. Then repeat. I then water each plant just to settle roots...no soaking or anything. I expect some loss, so I keep back some for filling in. This year I did something different and sprayed everything with a solution of borax. I did this with everything I transplanted and haven't had any loss at all, which is wierd. 1 tablespoon to the gallon.
Generally, we get more tomatoes than we can use, 10-20 lbs to the plant for the romas.
Anyhow, out of time..more later.

[RaVaN]

Tomatoes the second:
So when you start tomatoes the way I do they get leggy with a weak root structure in the container. They will begin to shoot out roots on the stem. This is a good thing for trench planting rather than vertical planting. Trench planting allows for a very strong root structure since it will root the plant along that buried stem. In many cases, even if hit with a frost or felled by a cutworm, it will put forth a new growth that while delayed a bit, it will still produce almost as much. That root system will make watering in our area unnecessary, and even detrimental once established. The drought two years ago did not even slow down the tomatoes. Now beware, when you hoe improperly, you run the risk of severing that root system, so hoe correctly. Sharpen the hoe and slice the weeds, don't chop. Run the hoe at most 1/8" below surface, and do it when the sun is out, not when its cool. I have seen weeds reroot themselves in the corpses of their fallen brothers if you do it in the morning or cool of the evening.
To cage or not cage. I prefer not to cage, the plants will grow up, and fall over due to the weight of the fruit, new growth will occur with more fruit. The heat of the ground will speed ripening, so the opening up of the plant allows more light. It also protects the plant later in the season from light frosts.
Mind you, this works for my area. NEVER base your garden off what others are doing. What works great for them, may not work the same for you. Gardens just 100ft apart may need different approaches based on light, soil, moisture, bugs...and suchlike.
Now caging, depending on variety determines need. I like will need to cage the current tomatoes I am testing this year because they are more of a vine supposedly. Caging our tomatoes results in less fruit, more cost, and more work. This has been proven repeatedly to my satisfaction. It does give you prettier, well formed looking fruit. I don't care about any of that. My dad cages, and come harvest, he's gets more out of my garden than his. He knows all of this to be true as well, yet he wants that pretty fruit.

The borax thing:
I transplanted beets this year. We have poor luck with beets and so I read up on beets, found out they need a bump of boron in some areas. Then I read up on boron deficiency and decided to just spray borax for many reasons. The main being the importance of boron in reducing or eliminating arthritis, which will be an issue at some point for most people. Look into it. The complete lack of loss of plants transplanting amazes me, but correlation is not causation.

My main garden is 14000 square feet roughly. We have 5 others that I haven't counted the footage for but in thinking about it, probably is another 5-10000 feet...two of them are herb gardens for permanent plants. Mostly thyme, tarragon, oregano, mint, and the medicinals.

Anyhow, I know to some this seems like alot. It really isn't if you plan and do the work. People have become accustomed to not being discomforted. That attitude doesn't feed you. The romance ideas of fairy dust and sunbeams and the pristine magical no work garden doesn't exist. It's work, hard work, dirty work, and those that love it. Anyone claiming anything else is selling a product. The otherside is that God does the work for you, and recognize that fact, but he expects you to make an effort.

[RaVaN]

Sundries:
I know I have been going on quite a bit. Understand I am no expert, but have been building successes off of failures for a while and merely am showing the "success" things we do, rather than the complete fail upwards cycle. For whatever reason I rub people the wrong way. My companion and I even have a hate club that apparently has meetings and discuss our shortcomings and seems to annually elect a spokesperson to come and dress us down about our many shortcomings and how bad we are at what we do, and if we just would listen to them, we would be doing everything right...listen to those people, take what is true and ignore what is useless. It is a strange thing however, and tends to make you a bit jaded and for me who is more than a bit OCD(you know, where if you don't do everything exactly right, terrible things will happen and it will all be your fault), somewhat distressing.

So to be clear, my goal is to feed people and to help others feed themselves. Everything my companion and I are doing revolves around this. This means learning processes that can be adapted easily and with little infrastructure. They may not be perfect, but they are effective. Anyhow...I am thankful for a righteous judge in Israel.

Kale:
We plant kale two ways. One way is we have some big pots, 5-10 gallons. In the greenhouse we take one, fill it with soil and sprinkle a bunch of kale seed(we save seed so we have alot of kale seed) on it, cover with 1/8-1/4" of dirt and voila...table kale for salads or snacking, or greens. It sits on our deck. This does for us until the second method is ready. The second method is a wide row of kale about 30 feet long. I just take my earthway seeder, and run 5 rows 1" apart. This is what we eat into the winter. We generally make about 5 gallons of kale kimchi or so. It freezes well, and is just awesome with most things really. Kale kimchi uses kale instead of cabbage. We do something similar with brussel sprout leaves. Btw, making packets of kale leaves containing asiago cheese, lightly steamed, drizzled with infused olive oil is a cheap 5star addition to a meal. Works with brusslesprout leaves.

Peppers:
We plant many types of peppers. The system is the same. Start a bunch in containers inside in February or March. Transplant into larger individual containers once the greenhouse is running(late march or April) at 50f at night.(we still get -20f in march and unless we curtain with space blankets at night, peppers don't like it). Then plant about 1ft apart after last likely frost. Generally around memorial day. Some areas got frost last night...mostly lower areas. We plant yellow Hungarian wax because they are early and prolific, and makes a nice substitute for homemade pepperocini. We also plant green bells for cooking, Thai Chili's for spice, pepperocini, and a bunch of others. I like making my own siracha because it is awesome, and I use alot of Thai chilis for that. Thai Chili's are nice balance of heat and flavor. I like spice, not chemical burn. I learned today I have been stupid and should have been freezing the unripe ones since they had a bunch at the new Asian market in town...

Notice anything? No mention of fertilizer? Compost? Well, we put the year before last manure on our gardens in the fall, unless we get a too early freeze. We till it in to mix it. Last year we didn't make it in time and so this year its haul in 5 Gallon buckets and put between rows...which is NOT my prefered method. Our soil in our main garden is sand, so it has taken years of improvement. It's the good thing about goats you feed bought hay during the winter. You are importing someone's topsoil and making it your own. This brings me to another topic.

Tilling: If you garden, you till no exceptions. Many seeds till naturally. So someone selling the idea of a no-till garden is really only promoting a certain type of till or the amount of tilling. This tends to set some people off for whatever reason. I use a tiller in the spring and in the fall or to break new ground. A tiller is unnecessary, but in this time of Babylon, many methods are too much work, too time consuming, too inefficient, or just straight up stupid. The time tested methods work, and have for thousands of years. There are no new ways of doing the things, just variants along the same theme. Just saying, alot of people selling snakeoil out there...make sure your method isn't one of those or just a way for you to snub your nose while virtue signaling while your forefathers shake the ground underneath you laughing in their graves.

[mudflap]

Notice anything? No mention of fertilizer? Compost? Well, we put the year before last manure on our gardens in the fall, unless we get a too early freeze. We till it in to mix it. Last year we didn't make it in time and so this year its haul in 5 Gallon buckets and put between rows...which is NOT my prefered method. Our soil in our main garden is sand, so it has taken years of improvement. It's the good thing about goats you feed bought hay during the winter. You are importing someone's topsoil and making it your own. This brings me to another topic.

Tilling: If you garden, you till no exceptions. Many seeds till naturally. So someone selling the idea of a no-till garden is really only promoting a certain type of till or the amount of tilling. This tends to set some people off for whatever reason. I use a tiller in the spring and in the fall or to break new ground. A tiller is unnecessary, but in this time of Babylon, many methods are too much work, too time consuming, too inefficient, or just straight up stupid. The time tested methods work, and have for thousands of years. There are no new ways of doing the things, just variants along the same theme. Just saying, alot of people selling snakeoil out there...make sure your method isn't one of those or just a way for you to snub your nose while virtue signaling while your forefathers shake the ground underneath you laughing in their graves.

The whole thing, but this part in particular - Tilling -

I'm looking into some "no till" methods, simply because I can see a time where the Pedophiles in D.C. will come after "small gasoline engines", and what will we do then - broadfork a 100'x100' garden? yeah, right.

But then I read in the scriptures that God created man to "till the earth", so the 100% no till folks who say we are putting a gash in the earth when we till are probably not correct. There must be some kind of balance in between, and I'm looking for that.

Last year, our neighbor offered to till a spot for us with his tractor, and he went pretty deep. Our harvest still sucked - mostly because we didn't spend enough time tending it, but partly because (I think) we didn't feed the bare ground with compost or manure or anything. We have a high clay content soil - no sand at all, so if you only till, you just wait for the first heavy rain, and the ground will go rock hard afterwards.

That's why I'm looking to make a lot of compost - I read a lot of gardening blogs, but I think this guy is correct - the answer is always more compost: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC20847 ... dkDDbB0vHQ

I also like this guy: https://www.youtube.com/@OldAlabamaGardener , but he died - shows you how to plant, harvest and store your food. pretty practical stuff.

I appreciate your insight!

[RaVaN]

@mudflap
I am not going to pretend I know your area, so take what is useful discard the rest.
Gypsum loosens clay soil, I don't know the amounts so that is wisdom unearned. In general adding to your soil structure always works over time. First year gardens tend to always produce poorly I am unsure of exactly why but what has worked best for me is planting land tamers in a first year garden. When I start break in a new garden, I plant tobacco in it. The tobacco "tames" the ground, pulls out nutrients weeds and quack grass thrive on, and loosens the soil. Corn works too, but doesn't seem to work quite as well.

I have looked into alot of methods over the years, and the traditional pre-mechanized methods are the best, specifically the ones people used in your specific area wherever a person is. The natives had alot of things down to a science. Some of these things we don't get to do because of laws and regulations. Controlled burning is an example. Works similar to compost in making the soil more friable. You add in the the trash fish from spring runs, plus some other things you have a relatively weedfree garden in easily worked soil that over time is very fertile. The goal is not to till the whole field, but rather just where you need it. And these native Americans did this with digging sticks and shoulder blade hoes over acres and acres. Conceptualize that. It was work, but you work smarter not harder. The problem with that system is making money,it is not efficient for growing a cash crop, and that is the issue the Europeans had, they wanted money for the things and looked down on those that didn't have "proper" things. This is throughout period books.
Now that being said, what I do with these methods is take the useful trash the rest, but you need a baseline for it. The best way is to find an old farmer, and tell him the method, if he spits tobacco near you and goes "Well, it sound like a good way of growing tomatoes, but it wont feed a family", maybe listen. And always remember we all know how to be better farmers than we are. God bless you and your family in your endeavors.

[Fred]

This guy grosses six figures a year on one acre by himself in 35 hours a week: