Jan White

When my husband and I bought our property, we scrounged up every penny we could for the downpayment, including cash advances on low interest credit cards. Then we got a line of credit for the rest. We spent another year at our rented place while my husband finished  his degree, then we moved into a tent on the land. I don't remember how much money we had at that point, but it was less than $5,000.

Neither of us had jobs and since we didn't want to live in a tent over winter, we spent the summer and fall just building our house. That meant living on credit cards. We probably had $20,000 of so of credit card debt from building the house and living expenses for six or seven months.

Neither of us works in high paying jobs, so $20,000-$30,000 combined income was normal for the first few years. We paid off the credit cards and line of credit for the property in less than five years because our living expenses could be so low. Not having to pay rent was the big one.

Getting land is the hard part, but after that I don't think you need much, if any, money saved. If you have some, it's way nicer and easier, though. Not having any money meant we had to do things like wait until midway through a very cold winter before we could buy insulation for the floor of the house, which was pretty shitty.

So I guess how much money you need to save depends on how much comfort you need.

Every winter, despite all efforts in the fall, at some point we move a jacket hanging on a hook or slide a stack of clothes off a shelf and two hundred ladybugs fall out and WHEE! AWAKE!! WE DANCE!! is exactly right. Forget "herding cats" 🙄

I made a ladybug house to put them in and transfer them to the woodshed where the good little ladybugs overwinter. Ive never managed to get them all in the damn house, though.

Luckily we have a huge hoya that blooms constantly, and they seem to like the nectar.

Brave vs Firefox. Firefox has the light background.

I've got email preferences open in Brave so you can see how the heading says privacy settings.

This is all desktop view.

Those screenshots are all desktop view. When I open email preferences, I get a heading that says privacy settings, and then all the email stuff.

Hmm. Must be something to do with Brave. I just logged in using Firefox and it came up fine.

We were at my in laws a couple years ago and my husband and I were sitting around with his dad.  My husband started talking to me about the pick up truck he wanted, kinda building it up. Eventually he gets to the point where he's describing a one ton dump truck.  

This seemed really dumb to me. I said, "We've already got a pick up. Why don't we just get an actual full size dump truck?"

At that point, he burst into a big grin. "See, dad, I told you. Did you hear?"

Since then he's tried to talk about dirt bike purchases with me in front of his friends. Now I just roll my eyes and keep my mouth shut. My stubborn refusal to play along is one of things he loves about me.  Right? 😁

I've got some pockets of nice stuff throughout my hugels, but mostly they're just silty sand with almost no organic material. I'm amazed at how well things grow, considering.

I'm sure whatever you do will work well. And if you don't have to worry about the hugel holding moisture for a long time, that makes it even easier.

Yes, I am blind. I finally found privacy settings under email preferences. I still don't see the options you guys had screenshots of, though. Under the box with my (blacked out) primary email, it just has the save and back buttons.

Help cure my blindness!

Hmmm. I may be blind.

Devaka's link brings me to this screen, and I can't find privacy stuff under any of the headings.  I started out in mobile view, then switched to desktop to see if anything changed, but it didn't seem to.

What am I missing?

Just look for HT on the pallets. That means they're heat treated, rather than chemical treated. Of course, you never know what has spilled on them, but you could say that about a lot of things.

I've built a few open ended boxes out of pallets that sit on the ground, and then I fill them with dirt and sticks for a hugel type planter. The oldest one I built out of 1x has been getting a bit rough the last couple years, but still hanging together. It's six years old. A five year old one built out of 2x shows no signs of rot yet. I do have pretty dead soil, though.

I dont grow much in containers cause they need too much water, but when I do I mostly grow in terra cotta. I haven't actually looked into it, but I assume that the ones made in the EU are safer from contaminates than ones made more cheaply elsewhere. So I buy the Italian and German made ones, which are easy to find here.

Al William wrote:

Jan White wrote:

Apologies for the thread necromancy, but could you update on this, or is too early to tell?

I forgot to update last year. Both my plants made it through the winter. The one in the herb garden by the Saskatoon stayed very small and is probably dead. That garden has really terrible soil in it, plus some mugwort (allelopathic) kinda crowded it out.

The plant under the birch tree in the ornamental garden did pretty well, but obviously would have liked a bit more sunlight. I forgot to check on it through the dry part of the summer. By the time I remembered it had gone without water for a couple months and looked really rough. The spot under the birch is sheltered from light rain and stays drier than other places. I'll see how it is when warm weather stuff starts growing here.