In a previous note, I referred to this cat as the least helpful helper I've ever had. I would like to submit additional evidence to reinforce this claim:
#cats #grownostr
Anyone on here order tree saplings in bulk?
I’ve gotten shipments from Missouri dept of conservation the past few years but am wondering if there’s other states or businesses that offer something similar. Heard Kentucky also has a program.
https://mdc.mo.gov/trees-plants/tree-seedlings/order-seedlings
I always set a remainder for sept 1st when ordering opens back up. Generally they deliver them in early spring.
Hope this is helpful for someone looking for #permaculture or #homesteading trees. ✌️
#grownostr #nostrees
Texas A&M has a nursery out near Lubbock that sells seedlings in the fall. Bundles of 25 seedlings, they're generally a buck or two each. Mostly landscape trees, but some that are productive (pecans, wild plums, etc).
We took a stroll through the pasture today to collect some Bluebonnet seeds. The Indian Blanket (aka firewheels) and Horsemint are really going insane this year! This field was literally humming with bees today. The buzzing was surprisingly loud - so many bees in the flowers, it sounded like it does when you're standing right next to the hive. Not a bad way to spend an afternoon.
#grownostr #farm #flowers #texas
If you live near a Northern Tool store and are looking for some raised garden beds, they've got 3x6 raised bed kits on sale for $42 now:
We put several of these in this year to expand the garden area, and were pleased with them even at full price. They're fairly sturdy once filled with soil, and have folded edges on the top and bottom so they're not razor sharp like the cheap ones you can get from Amazon. Given the cost of building materials, you probably can't even make one this size out of wood for this price, and galvanized steel should last much longer.
#grownostr #growfood #gardening #garden
Buenos dias! Duke would like to wish everyone a happy Cinco de Mayo!
He also would like someone to take this stupid sombrero off of him and throw it into a fire so he doesn't have to pose for a picture in it every year like an idiot.
#grownostr #dogstr
When we first got the farm, we were advised to start small with livestock before jumping in big with with cattle and sheep and herding dogs.
It's possible that we started *too* small, though.
Realizing we had made an error, we decided to upscale the operation.
#grownostr #cats
On the other hand, no animal shows less restraint about fucking up everybody else purely for its own amusement. There is no such thing as a cat that subscribes to the non-aggression principle. If you don't believe me, place something fragile near the edge of a table in a room with a cat.
I started with a Raspberry Pi 3B, and it worked great. The 4 would work even better. Going that route greatly simplifies the install, you just burn the image to the Pi and start configuring.
I recently switched my HA server over to an old laptop I had that wasn't doing anything so I could put the Pi to use as a Kodi front-end to my MythTV DVR. We recently "cut the cord" and dropped cable TV, so I had to dig out the old HDHomeRun digital tuner boxes and put them back into service recording over-the-air TV. I probably would have just bought another Pi if they were in stock anywhere...
Last week, I got a call out of the blue from a neighbor (out here, ten miles away is still considered a neighbor) who drove by our place and saw the huge pile of wood chips out front that the tree trimming guy brought by.
Seems this fellow has several large piles (I'd guess maybe 8-10 cubic yards each) of old rotting hay. It's the leftovers after the cows trample a round bale to death, which he scoops up into piles and lets it compost naturally.
I guess the pile of woodchips marked us as people who might be interested in accumulating organic material, so he called to see if we wanted to haul it away for him. I was expecting it to just be moldy hay, but it's mostly beautiful finished #compost! I dragged this trailer full to my place yesterday, and if it passes the bean test for persistent herbicides, I'll go back for more.
They moral of the story is, it pays to advertise. A pile of mulch is as good as a billboard if what you're wanting to communicate is "fertility welcome here"...
#grownostr #growfood #growsomething
If you're in the Austin or San Antonio areas and are looking for somewhere to buy bulk livestock feed, try Freewing Farms in Gonzales. I picked up 400 lbs of NON-GMO, soy-free #chicken feed from them last week for 53¢ per pound, and the chickens love it. You have to bring your own containers, but I store the feed in barrels anyway, so it's no problem to just take the barrels down and fill them up.
Their website doesn't appear to be functional, but their Facebook page has all the contact info:
https://www.facebook.com/FreeWingFarmsTX
I have no affiliation, just a satisfied customer wanting to help promote a local business run by good people.
#grownostr #livestock #Texas
If you have any liquid fertilizer that'll give it a quick nitrogen boost (like liquid seaweed or kelp), that will help it start to put leaves back on faster.
If they didn't tear up the root crown too much, it will probably recover if you give it a little TLC.
Excellent choice! My go-to carry rig is a 642 in a SideGuard leather IWB holster. I've fallen asleep on the couch wearing it, because it's so comfortable. It probably saved me from a very nasty bruise once when one of the donkeys kicked at me, and made square contact with that revolver instead of my hip bone. It's got so much wear on it from being carried, it looks like it's 20 years older than it is, but still shoots great.
A tip to help "train" deer to avoid your fence: fold a small sheet of aluminum foil over the hot wire to make a sort of flag hanging down from the wire. Apply peanut butter to the foil flag. Find someplace hidden to watch the action.
When a deer's shiny wet nose meets 5000 volts, the deer in question is very motivated to travel very far away from the source of the voltage, with much haste. This is also a lesson that they appear to remember quite well, and the ones who have been shocked tend to stay away.
She's pretty badass exterminator. Her name is Junebug because "you are what you eat" and she sits under the porch light and munches bugs all summer. She's hell on mice, too.
Last week she brought a rabbit she had killed into the kitchen through the open window. The rabbit was about half as big as she is, so she had only managed to chew the poor thing's head off. I came home to find blood everywhere and a corpse in the kitchen, and the idiot cat sleeping peacefully on a cardboard box like "Huh? What dead rabbit?"
This little idiot is the least helpful helper I've ever had.
#grownostr #cats
The ledger idea is pretty cool. How did you do that in HA?
I agree. It's a platform that can be a little bit daunting to get started with, but once you get over the hump, it's astonishing how much it can do. I'm still coming up with all kinds of ideas for things I can integrate into it. I'm looking forward to having a "smart" chicken coop one day.
I played around with adding Rhasspy to the system to bring in voice control, which I did manage to get working. It's pretty cool to ask what the greenhouse temperature is and have it tell you. That feature is still a far cry from user-friendly to set up, but the potential is there to have a completely self-hosted version of something a lot like Amazon's Alexa, integrated with smart home features and security cameras that don't spy on you.
Bitcoin has been up and running for over a decade, and the incentives to crack it are massive. The fact that it hasn't been done yet doesn't necessarily mean that it's impossible, but it strongly suggests that it might be.
The real weak point of attack will always be the exchanges and other systems that require you to give up control of your keys.
Here are some photos of the guts of my remote outdoor temperature sensor for my #HomeAssistant setup. I will eventually probably expand into a full weather station to measure wind, rain, humidity, etc, but what I really needed this winter was a thermometer to warn me when temps were getting close to freezing so I could check the greenhouses, cover sensitive outdoor plants, etc. The location of our farm is in a natural depression, so on cold, clear nights it can be almost 10 degrees colder than what the local forecasts predict in nearby Austin (and they're wrong about that about half the time, anyway) so I needed to start collecting my own data.
This is an off the shelf cheapo solar light from Amazon. The light function still works, but I usually leave it off and not in "motion detect" mode to preserve battery life. Inside I added a clone of the Wemos D1 mini microcontroller board, wired to the battery through an MCP1700 LDO voltage regulator and a couple of capacitors, with a DS18B20 temperature sensor dangling outside the case through a hole I drilled on the bottom side of the light housing. I sized the hole to be a tight fit for the cable, which sort of causes it to self-seal. No issues with water infiltration yet.
I used the ESPHome plugin for HomeAssistant to program it, set up on a cycle to sleep for 10 minutes and wake for 40 seconds. That gives it just enough time to wake up, connect to wifi (tip: using a static IP address instead of DHCP lets you reduce the wake cycle by a few seconds), and transmit the temperature reading. I tried five minutes between readings, and would run out of battery power overnight, so on this battery, ten minutes is about the minimum.
Not shown in the photo is a strip of thin plastic I cut to fit over the original circuit board that runs the light to keep the D1 board from possibly touching it and causing electrons to go somewhere they're not supposed to go.
Total cost of this setup when I built it six months ago was around $12. Half of that was the solar light, so if you already have some lights, you can add this kind of functionality for about six bucks.
#grownostr #homestead #automation
