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!
What I’m Reading – Weekly Reads
Random assortment of articles from around the interwoobles that I read this week. If it’s in this list it made me nod vigorously, tut aggressively, or emoji with verve.
American Chestnut. Source
Reinventing the Greenhouse (Low Tech Magazine) Must read for anyone building a greenhouse for an off-grid, homesteady-type scenario.
Where Have All The Insects Gone? (Science Magazine) Well, they aren’t on our windshields anymore. Even I’ve noticed that. I try not to get too soapboxey over here, but we’re at the point where if you have access to any land, and if you give a shit at all about things ecological, you should plant something for the beneficial insects.
Are Wet Wipes Wrecking the World’s Sewers? (The Atlantic) Quick answer – yeah, they kinda are. Indoor plumbing is pretty much the greatest thing ever. Let’s not mess it up just because a bunch of dude-bros are exploiting the tender butthole market in a new and exciting way.
New Genetically Engineered American Chestnut Will Help Restore The Decimated, Iconic Tree (The Conversation) Genetic modification is a powerful tool, and how you use powerful tools matter. (::cough::guns::cough::nuclear::cough::) So, while I’m not a fan of covering some of God’s best soil with miles of monocrop Roundup-ready soy and corn, the ability to bring the American chestnut back from the dead seems like it could be a powerful good. What do you think?
What I’m Watching – Primitive Technology
Here’s a YouTube channel you should put on auto-play and watch with your kids. Like, seriously, I’ve spent 2 hours in bed snuggling with my son and watching these videos. He loves them, I love them, and it’s not too hard to pass them off as educational.
If you don’t know about Primitive Technology, it’s among the best and most peaceful channels on YouTube. Start at the beginning with the Wattle and Daub Hut, and progress with Primitive Technology guy until, eventually, he leaves the stone age and makes iron. (Not kidding – this guy is amazing.)
What I’m Loving – New Favorite Budgeting App
Back in the day, Homebrew Husband and I stuck to our monthly budget using a very low-tech tool we called The Fun Card. Well, times have changed and the smartphone is never far from our fingers, so HH and I started investigating budgeting apps.
Spoiler alert: the winner is an app with a nice integrated website called Goodbudget.
We downloaded free versions of about a dozen different budgeting and personal finance apps. Most were, frankly, far too complicated. Not in a “I can’t use technology” sense – more like – I don’t want to swipe through 900 animated spending charts before I can digitally confess, “I just spent $87.46 at Tractor Supply”
I’m a big fan of the “envelope” style of budgeting. It’s simple, it’s intuitive, it works. It’s fundamentally the same budgeting concept I learned in 4th grade from Mrs. Marzoni when she brought in all her penny jars to show the class how to save for future vacations.
So when I saw the happy envelope logo of Goodbudget, I had a good feeling we might have found our budgeting app. We put the free version through the paces for about 3 weeks before committing. We liked the ability to very simply link both our phones to one family account. A dead-simple user interface and all the features we wanted – without a bunch of pointless bells and whistles we didn’t – sealed the deal. If you’re looking for a simple budgeting app, try Goodbudget.
(PS: This review is so obsequious and gushing I feel obliged to tell you I have absolutely no affiliation with the Goodbudget App people and get nothing at all if you check them out.)
Quote I’m Pondering – Wendell Berry
Wendell – well, you guys know Wendell. He’s the American farmer-philosopher extraordinaire, a man who seems to have a poetic heart, a stoic commitment to his agrarian values, and a way with words that has inspired generations. He coined the phrase “solving for pattern” – which captures pretty much everything, because if you aren’t solving for pattern you’re just badly managing repetition.
So, I’m trying to figure out what my real work is. Or, more accurately, I’m trying to figure out how many of my real works can be integrated at any one time. Wendell, as usual, says it better than I ever could.
I liked this quote so much I made little notecards from it. Here’s a version with the cool chalkboard background – it works best with printers that can print edge-to-edge. Here’s a grayscale version that’s better with most home printers.
Duckling Update
They. Are. Huge. The ducklings are three weeks old now and they are pretty much the size of a house. They are so cute – yellow fuzz is giving way to white feathers, their giant feet are plodding all over everything, and we’ve even heard a distinct quack!
Duck-wrangler Bella got a duck to pose! (It wasn’t happy about this.) Check out those gorgeous feet! Ancona ducks don’t yet have an official breed standard but everyone agrees that stripey feet, under eye markings, speckled beaks, and random, splotchy body markings are the best. I’m really happy with how all our ducklings are developing.
The babies got their first full bath the other day. I expected them to lose their mind with joy. They were actually a little freaked out to be confined in the sink and kept trying to jump out.
Duckling-cam is still running, so if you need a poultry break, stop by and watch our tween ducks motorboating their water and chasing after spinach.
Ok, friends, that’s it for this week’s Five Things Friday. Have a great weekend and I’ll see you next week!
![Source]("https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/American_Chestnut.JPG){kind=link}
I love when people do these! Thanks for sharing and I truly am glad to see you posting again. 😉
Thanks Misti.
I so love having you back. Honestly. Your voice is a gift.
Love the Wendell Berry quote.
Thanks Kyle. Wendell is the best. Really appreciate your comments. Please don’t ever change the radish avatar or I will be totally confused about who you are. 😀
I need to ask…are there any reasons not to get ducks? This is a serious question. I really want ducks. I’ve wanted ducks for the last 12 years but have never been able to jump into duck ownership, except for once when someone gave me a couple of ducklings and they disappeared…i don’t like to think about it.
I want easy-ish, I want to be able to keep them in the large chicken run and maybe give them there own house. I am a little worried about the duck penis thing…that was a life altering post. I don’t want to have to worry about managing a chicken flock with its own set of rules and a small duck flock with another set of rules…should I just give up the dream or is it really as easy as you make it look?
Yes. There a lot of reasons to not get ducks. I feel like this should be a whole post.
The biggest issue is water. Ducks love it and need it and make a huge flipping mess with it. Chickens drink it but other than that, hate it. Excess moisture in a chicken coop can make your chickens unhealthy. Not enough access to water can, at the very least, make your ducks unhappy (and possibly unhealthy – they need to dunk their head at least, and without a good bath every few days they get dirty and more prone to parasites.)
Which means co-housing is possible (we’re doing it) – but comes with water problems to be managed.
Boy ducks…just don’t. They are assholes. But you can avoid that by only getting females, so not a deal breaker.
In my experience free range ducks are pretty much a walking raccoon buffet. Which means you have to be at least as careful about predators as you are with chickens, and probably more so. Domestic ducks mostly don’t fly. A big juicy slow waddling package of duck meat is a very tempting and easy prize for raccoons. I’ve never lost a chicken to a predator. I lost way too many ducks to raccoons. So all told the heartbreak factor on ducks has been higher than I’d like and higher than anything with chickens.
So should you get ducks….I think ducks, when they are cared for as ducks, are wonderful. I love having them around. Personality wise, I do prefer them to chickens. And they are ideal in the Pacific NW climate wise – they adore slugs the rain. But co-housing with chickens brings up challenges that will make it….not hard, but maybe a little harder than “easy-ish”.
We’ve learned a lot of ways to mitigate these challenges. For example, going to a different coop litter made a huge difference. We use these wood pellets that turn to sawdust when they get wet. They are a zillion times better with ducks, because ducks have very wet poop, so straw or wood shavings just mats down and gets nasty. So there are ways to mitigate the challenge, but you probably can’t just throw a couple ducks in with your chickens and expect everything to work perfectly right off the bat.
Wow! Thanks for this and the full on post about it. It’s hard when you really want something but you know that you can’t give it your all so you’d better not. I’d like to have them for their slug control and their cuteness, but we do have raccoon issues (5 hens and a rooster lost last year) and it’s hard to lose animals and have to deal with the aftermath. Ducks and bees, i really, really want them, but I know that my full plate would be too full and something would fall off. No ducks this year.
“…because a bunch of dude-bros are exploiting the tender butthole market in a new and exciting way.” <-This made my morning!
😀 Thanks Lindsey!
The article on “Where have all the insects gone” prompted me to ask you, and your Washington readers, if you will, if anyone else has noticed a dramatic drop in the number of spiders they’ve seen this past winter and spring? I live in Whatcom County and normally have a lot of various spiders in the house with me; wolf spiders like to show up in the bathtub to ensure I wake up quickly in the mornings, cellar spiders, barely seen, leave their sloppy webbing over the ceilings and walls, and assorted other arachnoids take cover in my home. But this year I’ve only had *one* spider in the tub, and if there are any others around, I’ve not seen them. Also, my garden is normally full of ground spiders; I’m finally getting out to weed and have only seen a couple that look like daddy long-legs. Has anyone else noticed this? It worries me. My garden is organic so nothing got sprayed that might have caused a massive kill. Could it be the long, cold, snowy winter killed them all off? I’d really like to know.
and BTW, the house flies have started up already 🙁
We are seeing house flies already too. I have seen spiders, but not many. Looking around my living room I only see one gauzy web in the corner and I haven’t dusted in….awhile. Haven’t seen many webs in the garden either. I couldn’t empirically say, but it feels like spiders are low, yeah.
Thank you .SO glad you’re posting again… favorite writing and topics
Your own saying after Wendell Berry is pretty great, too! “…if you aren’t solving for pattern you’re just badly managing repetition.” There are a lot of stories in that one! Glad to see you blogging again.
I’m so glad you’re back. I need you more than ever. My husband and I are buying a house in the Seattle area so now I get to have a real, actual garden of my own! Maybe even, one day, chickens! And bees! And…and…what would I do without your knowledge?