Jan White

I recently got a huge 2L thermos and have been making soup in that. I love it. Our favourite "soup" so far has been a lentil soup. "Soup" because it's more stew thickness.

I don't usually cook soup from a recipe, but I have to make sure it all fits in the thermos, so I've got measurements for this one.

Bring to boil and simmer for a few minutes:
1 1/3c red lentils
140g carrots
165g celery
240g tomato
1 fist-sized onion, diced
4T chopped parsley

Add to thermos containing:
1T shiitake powder
1tsp ground coriander
1tsp dried tarragon
1 bay leaf
(Salt) and pepper

Shake to combine dry ingredients, lay thermos on its side and let sit for a couple/few hours until lentils are cooked.

I leave out any fat while cooking cause it's easier to clean the seal on the lid without it. You can cook it with or add fat later if you want.

Whatever you end up doing will probably be fine.

My husband once brought home some bearded iris roots that had been dug up on a construction site he was visiting.  He threw them in the back of his work truck and forgot about them over the long weekend...a very hot and sunny long weekend. They sat in the sun for four days before he brought them home and planted them. They grew fine.

Earlier this year I scored a huge amount of bearded irises and daylilies that had been brought to the local yard waste drop off centre. It seemed like they'd been lying in a big pile for quite a while. The bottom layers were stinky and slimy and wherever the leaves had space, they'd started to change the direction they were growing, adapting to their new location.

I brought them home, pulled off all the dead and rotten stuff, and put them in a single layer in a tote bins until I had time to deal with them. I kept the bins mostly in the shade and splashed water on them whenever they seemed dry. I got the last roots planted three weeks later. A month or so on, there's new growth on everything I put in the ground.

Pansies and johnny jump ups might be my favourite. They taste like bubblegum and grow like weeds. Here, the ones that overwinter start flowering before anything else in the spring. We have very poor, dry, sandy, rocky soil that they spread themselves through just fine. They're even growing in our 2-3" deep pebble paths. They also grow like weeds in my mum's rich loamy soil, so I don't think they're picky.

I was going to suggest wild strawberries, as well.

So many herbs would work. My parents have had mint all through their lawn for years. Smells amazing when mowed!

As long as you're using gluten free oats, any recipe should be fine I would think.

I've never used a recipe - just mixed to taste oats, salt, sugar (white or brown, depending on type of fruit), and whatever spices or not were appropriate. Sprinkled that over top of the fruit and covered with slices of butter or coconut oil.

If your soil is poor and the lettuce grows slowly, that can make it bitter, too. You want rich, moist soil so the lettuce grows quickly and stays sweet. If you've got hot sun on it, that won't help either. I very rarely can grow nice lettuce cause our "spring" goes from too cold and wet to grow anything to really hot so quickly.

I've written this somewhere on here before. We don't have a bathroom, so I pee in the garden all year. In the growing season, things get pretty crowded in the garden and there are only a few places with room to squat. So those few places get peed on a lot. I move around,but often I'll pee in the same spot for a couple days in a row.

It's possible my chickpeas didn't like it, but even the ones growing in spots I didn't pee weren't great that year. Other than that, I've noticed no problems with direct application.

Oh, and we get little to no rain for two or three months in the summer. I also don't water my garden, so undiluted  pee is all it's getting. I do drink enough water that my pee has little to no colour, though.

I got 50 yards of free sawdust that ended up being mostly cedar. I made a few lasagna style beds with quite a bit of the sawdust in them. The green layers in the lasagna were mostly grass clippings with a little bit of food scraps and dog poop - so not crazy high in nitrogen.  Peas, radishes, and rye have all grown just fine in those beds, in the year of building and after.

Maybe the higher surface area of the sawdust means the allelopathic properties break down more quickly. Just to be safe, I'd use the cedar as mulch on perennials first, so I didn't end up mixing it into the soil when I planted or harvested annuals.

Maybe you just need to reeeaally spell it out for them. Something like, "It's been nice talking to you, but I only have energy for one thing. If I talk to you any longer I won't be able to get anything else done today, and I have things I really need to do." Or, "Every time you come over I have to lie in a dark room for three hours [or whatever] to recover afterwards and I'm falling behind in my chores because your visits are so exhausting."

I admit our nearest neighbours are three clicks away, so I don't have any actual experience with this though - mercifully!  If I were in your position and not particularly attached to the property I'd probably move.

Right now I really like bidens/beggar ticks. I've got some kind of beetle i haven't got around to identifying yet kinda like a cucumber beetle. The larva is similar to a ladybug's. Judging by the skeletonized cottonwood saplings it leaves behind it could be a wicked garden pest. I still don't know if it likes any of my garden plants cause as long as I have some bidens growing throughout the garden the beetles swarm those plants and don't touch anything else.