Five Things Friday: assorted favorites, oddities, time-sensitive announcements, discoveries, random thoughts, life tidbits and whatever else pops into my head. Cue the intro. Boom!
Weekly Awesome: Permaculture Design Course Kickstarter
My buddy Paul Wheaton is running a kickstarter. You may know Paul as the Crazy Permaculture Man-Giant in Overalls behind Permies.com. You may also know him as the guy who called my ass up when I disappeared into malaise for a year, and shock-doctrined me back to both my garden and this website.
I owe Paul one.
But that’s not why I’m sharing his Kickstarter. I’m sharing it because it’s awesome.
He’s got a bunch of Permaculture experts coming to his farm for 4 weeks to teach a homesteading-focused Permaculture Design Course and an Appropriate Technology Course. They are gonna record over 200 hours of instruction and make that material available to stream or download to Kickstarter backers.
All the support level rewards seem generous, but I think the sweet spot is the $120 level, where you get to download all 220-ish hours of instruction from both courses as mp4 files. The live cost to attend both classes is over $3000, as a point of comparison, and the courses are sold out! I think the frugal sweet spot is $5, which gets you a ton of digital goodies including huge packets of instructor notes for both courses.
So if you’ve been interested in getting the information conveyed in a Permaculture Design Certificate Course but you don’t actually need the certificate, or you want to learn how to make a rocket mass heater without blowing up your house, check out Paul’s Kickstarter.
What I’ve Been Watching
I found us all a new YouTube channel to stalk! It’s called Guildbrook Farm. Husband and wife team of new-ish small-scale homesteaders talking about gardening, chickens, goats, frugality, canning, preparedness and more.
The video production quality and editing is excellent, the content is great, and both Jaime (wife) and Jeremy (husband) are compelling, relatable presenters. The videos tend to be longer-format. Most are 15 to 25 minutes long, and get into some good detail. The videos are also panic, hype, fear-mongering and drama free (always a blessing in anything that deals with preparedness!). Two thumbs up!
I recommend starting with “How to Start a Prepper Food Pantry” because who doesn’t love a homestead pantry tour? If you have 40-ish minutes, the video “Earthquake: A Real SHTF Survival Story” is fascinating, too.
What I’ve Been Eating
Eggs. Oh, mercy, do we have eggs. Chicken eggs and duck eggs. Little eggs and big eggs. Brown eggs and white eggs. We have so many eggs describing the situation turns into a Dr Seuss book.
We’re eating eggs with vegetables, eggs with ham, eggs with cheese, eggs on toast. Egg rice and egg drop soup. Okonomiyaki, the Japanese savory egg pancake, and oyakodon, the Japanese chicken and egg rice bowl. Huevos Rancheros and breakfast burritos. Omelettes, egg-with-a-hat, fried eggs, and lots of simple, skillet-scrambled eggs.
If you have a lot of eggs right now too this old post might help you: What To Make When You Have Too Many Eggs.
What I’m Loving – Waffle Weave Towels
Do you live in the Pacific Northwest, or someplace even more prone to in-house molds and mildews? Allow me to introduce you to waffle weave bath towels.
I remember a post on Mr Money Mustache years ago – or maybe it was a forum discussion? – anyway, someone was saying that machine drying your bath towels is basically a crime against nature and your wallet. And, I mean, in theory, I guess I agree. But some of us live in places where towels don’t hang dry so much as hang mildew.
During Seattle’s 7-week long summer, we hang towels outside on the line, and the sun and breeze dries them right up. But for most of the year, our towels were washed and machine dried more frequently than I’d prefer, just to ensure they didn’t start to grow fungi. (In the house where I grew up, legit mushrooms grew right out of the avocado-green shag carpeting. It can happen.)
These waffle weave towels dry all the way through, on the towel rack, without mildew-smell, even in winter in the Pacific Northwest. Miracle! Towel laundry has gone down, and despite their thinness, we actually find these towels more absorbent than the fluffy kind.
Weekly Weird: Naked Gardening Day
Tomorrow is World Naked Gardening Day. I’m not kidding. All. Naked. Gardening. In my neighborhood, the high on Saturday is supposed to be 60 degrees. There is such a thing as too perky.
So, no, I won’t be stripping down to my Bogs and raking out the garden beds in my birthday suit.
What about you? Will you be celebrating Naked Gardening Day? Yay or Nay?
First participants of World Naked Gardening Day?
That’s it for this week’s Five Things Friday. Nothing can really follow Naked Gardening Day. Come back next week and see if I can keep this feature going for more than a week in a row. Have a great weekend!
Missed you! Rooting for a two week run on 5TsF. Be well.
Thanks Barbara!
I’m glad you’re back. I bet your year off was tough but worth it in a weird way. Being ill or disconnected from your passionate life can teach us a lot. I just completed treatment for cancer and it was horrid in a lot of ways but I learned so much. About me, about my world, my people, my strength, my passion.
Just keep trying.
Hi Betsy, I wish you well post-treatment. Thank you for your kind and wise words.
LOL. Naked Gardening Day. You just made my day. TWICE. Because-mildew resistant towels? Sign me up. I despise the way our towels smell like mildew after a few days, despite the open bathroom window (of course there is no bathroom fan in our 1940s Ballard house) and using hardly any soap. And lately, in an effort to combat the smell, a splash of bleach. I really dislike bleach, so you know things have gotten bad when I start using it. Thank you. Ordering some of those towels ASAP. It’s wonderful to see you back here, Erica.
Thanks Emily – Exactly. In this climate, in winter, the fluffy towels just never quite get all the way dry and then the smell. I think you will love the waffle weave. Kinda spendy but you don’t need as many. We did just fine with 2 to try them out, then bought an extra pair.
I live in damp winters where towels may not dry (nor Cal). I have found the drying off first with a washcloth (wringing it out as needed), and then toweling off whatever water is leftwith standard fluffy towels is the trick. Towels dry even in rainy cool weather, and since the washcloth is thin and wrung out, it dries too. Just an alternative for folks not ready to buy something new, if they’re willing to do an extra step.
Great tip!
? glad.
The Kickstarter looks very interesting and a very different take on participating in the learning for knowledges sake- i’m currently doing an online course at Oregon State University in Permaculture (it’s free it’s very good and they’re more than 10 1/2 thousand people worldwide participating!)
We haven’t had an egg in months so totally jealous of your glut.
Looking forward to next Fridays five top things
The OSU online course sounds cool! I’ll have to check it out, thanks for the info!
Glad to see you are back! Convinced this is the summer I go back to all those projects that got abandoned the last two years in a fit of “don’t puke” pregnancy followed by “don’t sleep” infancy. In comparison toddlerhood seems much easier (so far). Have I convinced you to get bees yet? I really do love them although it will inspire a “what to do with too much honey” post…
Toddlers are the absolute best except when they are being the absolute worst. 😉 May the ratio be ever in your favor! No bees for me this year at least! But my neighbor has them so local honey is easy to get.
You made my day! I love 5 things Fridays!
Have a great weekend, let’s hope the PNW gets some sunshine! We had crazy thunder/lightning/wind and rain in Olympia yesterday.
My six year old thinks everyday is naked gardening/play on the dirt pile day ;0)
Great sun today at least! Yeah, my six year old agrees with your six year old!
Hi Erica!
Thanks so much for the shout-out on your channel! We are both thrilled you found us and are enjoying the content! :0)
You’re putting out great videos, thank you for the effort I know it takes!
Glad to see your blog active again, you have fans far and wide!
Another awesome youtube channel that you probably already know about is VinoFarm, by homesteaders in Massachusetts. They have great tutorials about beekeeping.
Keep up the good work!
My garden is at a community garden, so I don’t think Naked Gardening day would be such a good idea. ☺️