Anna Demb

Jeesun Pak wrote:How about simply sun dry Schizandra.

For cold tea.
dried Schizandra 5-10g, cold water 500mg, steep for 12-24 hours

For hot tea
dried Schizandra 30-40g,  water 2liter, boil it for 10minutes
You can add the thin slice of fruits, honey, pine nuts...whatever you like.

Sun drying tends not to work in our cool, damp coastal weather. I ended up making a kind of sauce by boiling down the berries with cinnamon stick and clove, adding honey after cooking, and sieving them. Here's the tiny, intense result, which hopefully will last in the fridge while we gradually consume it through the fall:

denise ra wrote:For those of you using bucket composting toilets in your homes...would you hesitate to put a bathtub for soaking in the same room as your toilet due to smells?

With woodchips and peatmoss on top, there is very little or no smell. That being said, I might separate them with an alcove wall if they are in the same room.

Mk Neal wrote:I've never heard of these.  What do they taste like?

Schisandra chinensis is called "five flavor fruit" because is has all the flavors: sweet, sour, bitter, pungent, and salty. And the berries do have a really complex taste. According to Traditional Chinese Medicine, it benefits all five organs/energies, and it'a used as both a food and a medicine. Here are a couple of pictures of my vines and a link to a video about schisandra by herbalist Deb Soule :

I just harvested my first schizandra crop—a bowlful of berries—and would like to make tincture or syrup. Any recipes for fresh schizandra berries? Thanks!

My squashes were decimated by powdery mildew too. There has been a lot of research on using milk to deter powdery mildew. I'm going to try it next year. You need to spray it on the leaves as a preventative, before the mildew shows up, and then repeated every couple of weeks or after rain. It should be diluted in water—people have tried different dilutions, but 40% milk to 60% water seems to be a good dilution. Also, I have heard that it needs to be applied in sunlight—there seems to be a reaction between the milk and the sun.

leila hamaya wrote:yeah i saw this when it was posted earlier. very cool little vid.

while everything about it is cool, watching them do this...one of my fave things about this video is the girl helper/intern.
now- it's more gender politics than i like to get into, but for the time and place i am happy to see sister helper there. and she kicks ass too =)

Did you hear the narrator called her a "land girl"? They went out into the countryside in WWII to replace the men gone to war...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_Land_Army_(World_War_II)

We live on the coast. There's a lot of wind. We have raised beds contained within 2x8s that hold in the soil and mulch somewhat. TWe shred our mulch leaves with a lawn mower and put a layer of seaweed on top. Sometimes it's very thin, but even a thin web of fronds seems to keep the leaves from blowing away too much. We're lucky to have the seaweed resource.

Beautiful, Clifford. What tools do you need to make boots like this?

We live in town and don't have animals and started using bokashi a couple of years ago. It works well for us because we can put all our food scraps into it, including meat and fat, it doesn't smell so we can keep the buckets indoors over the frozen winter and then in the spring bury them in the gardens or under leaf piles to help the leaves compost faster. At first I was using the commercial, pricy EM, but now I'm making my own out of yogurt whey and using coffee chaff (free) instead of the traditional rice bran (costly) and it's working fine and finishes much more quickly and easily than our compost piles. Simple and efficient once the buckets are built. The garden waste still goes into a compost pile.

I'm also a professional book editor, and Tereza's advice seems sound to me. Journals and newspapers usually use different styling than for books, but for book style, I can also recommend The Canadian Style by Dundern Press, The Canadian Oxford Dictionary, and, if you want to go more British, New Oxford Style Manual. I mostly edit USA manuscripts, and for those I use The Chicago Manual of Style.