They are doing exactly that for a sometimes hefty markup. I got something like that with a gift receipt, so ultra lazy, looked up the item and it was $11 cheaper. Like that totally defeats the purpose of going elsewhere.
I reported the seller then returned it.
I’ve got heritage breeds, olive eggers and buff Orpington, and they fly just fine. The Orpington have really fluffy pants on, but both breeds are pretty lean (not really meat birds, more cold-hardy egg layers) and have no issues taking flight. They even fly across the yard for snack time, or when they spot a hawk/eagle.
They aren’t likely to be flying any significant distance, since they prefer running and staying home where they’ve got a good deal, but they could if they had to.
Baby animals
I think baby primates of nearly all varieties are adorable, personally. I got to hold a baby spider monkey at an animal sanctuary nearby and omg, it was the best! I just like primates in general. They are a fascinating glimpse of close but not quite familiar.
I wonder if dogs see other dog breeds that way, or if they are just used to the diversity.
I won’t tell you what to stock up on because other than food items that are difficult to grow in large enough quantities for yourself, I’m not sure that’s the right question for someone with access to a bit of land. What I would want to do in your position is start setting up systems for reusing what you have efficiently, and cutting down on future costs, since that’s where you’ll make the biggest impact. I’ve been on the brink of unstable for a very long time, and I’ve become very good at not falling over the edge, so this advice comes from there. Nothing you can stock up on will last long enough in useable condition to make a really substantial difference long term. Except maybe cinder blocks and bricks if you are handy enough to build stuff, and canning jar lids. Maybe a nice set of rechargeable tools, a bunch of fasteners, stuff like that.
Instead of buying fertilizer, chickens or quail and various kinds of compost are great options. You can make a couple different compost containers/piles using things birds can’t eat for worms and soldier fly larva, the birds love them and they are super healthy foods. Add the dirty bird bedding to the compost once you’ve let the birds eat the larva, let sit for a bit so it’s not so “hot” and till into garden soil. The bird-poo-rich compost is just amazing for plants. Worm compost runoff liquid (because it is done in containers typically), aka worm tea, is more of a potent liquid fertilizer you can use throughout the season as needed, so they work well together, and reduce your waste. Worm castings are a super great soil addition when you till or top-dress. Then you can supply eggs and fishing worms to people for income if you want. Plus chickens can eat most garden scraps, like leaves and spent flowers, so literally free food!
Look into permaculture plants that you can plant once and harvest for years to come with no effort, and give them the absolute best planting conditions you can manage based on whatever they need. Fruit trees, shrubs, vines, and bushes are great, but if you are willing to expand your horizons and plan ahead for maintaining them, there are plants that can be eaten in a variety of ways including as salad greens, and will come back for 2-20+ years. I would suggest to focus your efforts very heavily on stuff that will continue to bear food long term because it’s no effort for all that stuff, so you can put that effort into a garden of single season crops that round out your needs rather than struggling at addressing all of them. Plus you can plant smaller things like rhubarb, mint, chives, asparagus, strawberries, etc. around the footprint of the bigger stuff and everything is happier with the reduced direct sun (“full sun” doesn’t mean all day). A big key here is variety. You want as many different permaculture plants as possible growing (tho keep in mind cross-pollination requirements for things like apples and plums that need a bloom buddy) because if the local climate shifts and something fails, you are more likely to have things that survive and are already producing, no down time while you replace what failed, and that’s huge if you are relying on it for sustenance or income. You’d probably be really surprised at the sheer variety of things you can get to grow even in the frigid north. That’s what you want to stock up on now: permaculture plants. Seeds or cuttings or grafts, whatever you need get those going.
Set up rain barrels or create a pond that you can use for watering. Maybe set up an automatic drip irrigation system from it to reduce your effort and ensure consistency. If you want you can grow aquatic foods in a small pond or rain barrel, and/or raise fish if you have enough space. If you do rain barrels and they aren’t huge, you can put guppies in them seasonally, which will reduce mosquitos and produce a lot of guppies (they typically do not eat their own young) which can be harvested to feed to chickens or fish (like perch) as well.
Consider building a well-vented greenhouse to extend your growing window and help prevent weather related growing problems with more sensitive plants. If you live somewhere with cold winters, and you can source large used barrels (and if you live rural you probably can), you can fill them with water, paint them black and place them somewhere in the greenhouse that gets sun, and use them as freeze-resistance for your plants. Sometimes this is enough, if you build it right, to keep plants growing year round even up in Canada.
If you can, build a root cellar somewhere to store whatever you manage to grow, and learn how, and how long, to store each crop. It doesn’t have to be huge, but if you lose electric, it’ll still work when a fridge won’t. This doesn’t have to be a new space if you don’t want to build something and bury it, so if you have a weird empty basement room you can convert, or a crawl space or something, that might be plenty. I use a weird big cabinet the stairs down to my basement are built around and part of, because it’s otherwise a huge empty cold waste of space that’s inconvenient to access, with the door being on the stairs. A dark place that stays consistently cool and humid, but not stagnant, will keep produce good for considerably longer than refrigeration or sitting at room temp. If you commit enough space to it, you can use it to store home-canned goods (like in jars) in the dark to prevent light-related degradation.
If you don’t have one, invest in a large pressure canner, and as many jars as you can get your grubby mitts on for cheap (or free if you know people who throw out canning jars), and learn to use it. Find approved canning recipes, and save them somewhere offline. (the USDA actually has a ton of tested and safety-approved recipes for home canning, or you might be able to find books at local thrift shops. It’s wild what you can preserve with a bit of forethought!).
If you don’t already have solar, consider looking into it. It’s an upfront cost, yes, but it will save you down the line, especially if the grid, or the value of money, goes wonky. You can buy everything used from solar farms for well cheaper than new retail prices, and have someone install them or do it yourself if you feel comfortable, but then have it inspected and hooked up by a professional. The panels and stuff coming from solar farms still have most of their effective life left, they just cycle them out on a schedule to produce peak energy. If you go this route, make sure you have a way to disconnect from the grid if it goes down so you can continue using your solar. That might be standard, I’m not really sure. If you think inflation will make your savings worth less than not paying for that ongoing bill, it might be worth it. Keep in mind that you can always add more later if you need to, so don’t think you need a $20k system upfront. You might be good with $5-10k, which buys you a LOT of used solar capacity if you have space for it.
This is the trouble I’ve got. Deep red rural area that’s very clearly deep red. I don’t like going out around here because everyone supports Trump, and I have zero interest in supporting or interacting with people or businesses like that. Sure there are good people around, but finding them is incredibly difficult because they mostly keep to themselves because gestures at the entire area being regressive
I’d love to be able to actually find people to work with directly, but they would be very very very unlikely to actually be neighbors or even particularly local.. so instead I’m focused on my diaspora. People I already know and care about, who are unfortunately not local to me anymore (1-5 hrs away), but who have less regressive communities, and more chance to extend the network themselves, and who I can help support in some way. I’m also working on some things that I hope will be able to help support people more widely. It’s not the community network I’d like, but maybe it’ll help. We can only do what we can do.
Weirdly, this post made me realize that not a single one of my siblings or cousins has reproduced, and that’s 7 on one side and 12 or so on the other, plus 3 for myself and siblings. And we are mostly mid 30s to early 50s.
IMHO everyone should invest in waterproof mattress barriers. Being waterproof, they prevent all the night sweat and body oils from soaking in and degrading the mattress faster (which is a legit issue that contributes to the body valley), but it also makes them dirt and bedbug proof. And if you put it under a mattress pad, you won’t even know it’s there. They aren’t like the thick noisy plastic of days gone by. If it’s directly under sheets you might hear it, but they are not particularly loud.
They are also dirt cheap; the last one I bought was $13 for a queen size, and as long as it doesn’t tear, it’ll last basically forever. It rarely even needs to be washed. Small price to pay to keep my mattress a bit nicer a bit longer, even though it won’t make it last forever. :)
The morphological characteristics of extinct relatives of the giant panda suggest that while the ancient giant panda was omnivorous 7 million years ago (mya), it only became herbivorous some 2–2.4 mya with the emergence of A. microta.[64][67] Genome sequencing of the giant panda suggests that the dietary switch could have initiated from the loss of the sole umami taste receptor, encoded by the genes TAS1R1 and TAS1R3 (also known as T1R1 and T1R3), resulting from two frameshift mutations within the T1R1 exons.[54]Umami taste corresponds to high levels of glutamate as found in meat and may have thus altered the food choice of the giant panda.[68]
Wikipedia says otherwise, despite them still having many carnivore/omnivore features. It’s also -very- unlikely there haven’t been suitable prey species in their range in the last 2.4 million years.
Their faces, bodies, behavior, and various aspects of their metabolism are adaptations for bamboo-eating. They were omnivores, but they are no longer.
Two of the panda's most distinctive features, its large size and round face, are adaptations to its bamboo diet. Anthropologist Russell Ciochon observed: "[much] like the vegetarian gorilla, the low body surface area to body volume [of the giant panda] is indicative of a lower metabolic rate. This lower metabolic rate and a more sedentary lifestyle allows the giant panda to subsist on nutrient poor resources such as bamboo."[62] The giant panda's round face is the result of powerful jaw muscles, which attach from the top of the head to the jaw.[62] Large molars crush and grind fibrous plant material.[64]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_panda
I like how everyone replying to me is giving pandas all these special asterisks to their classification that don’t actually exist or matter, when it’s literally just an exception to the predator rule, and has been for over 2 million years.
For giant pandas, they don’t have to be prey, they just aren’t predators.
Their young get eaten, the adults aren’t particularly threatened by anything other than humans.
Red pandas are small enough that I’m sure they are prey. Probably for some large cat.
Really?
That show was great. I just rewatched it a couple months ago :)
Gravity.
It was a single season about a suicide survivors support group, it ended on a cliffhanger in an ongoing story and was unceremoniously canceled by iirc Netflix.
I was quite into it.
"Up to" in terms of anything. Up to inherently also contains zero.
I feel exactly the same way about “a fraction of” especially when it’s “a fraction of the price”, because 99/100 is a fraction, as is 100/100.
Pandas (both giant and red) would be exceptions I would think, since they aren’t predators, and in fact almost exclusively herbivorous.
Well below freezing, best I can tell. That was the only time I’ve ever seen anything like that. But it was way back when I was living in a shitty apartment (14 years ago) with whatever shitty appliances they had. Really hard to say.
This is privileged tantrum-having.
My tantrums were never property destructive. I grew up poor and I would have been murdered for that. I rage plenty, but never outwardly toward objects.
My tantrums, instead, were and have continued to be personally destructive. I make people hate me, I ruin all the things that matter.
I bit bread like this once and I can still vividly taste it.
I’ve accidentally eaten various kinds of mold several dozen times in my life, and in some cases I could barely tell. Slightly dirt flavor. That’s the dangerous mold.
I was also in my 30s when I found out some people don’t know what mildew smells like. They know the sour smell in clothes, but don’t realize it’s mildew. My partner was one such person, and they -still- don’t care but that smell drives me bonkers.
Unrelated because I didn’t eat them, but it reminded me of the time I made cookies (specifically Russian tea cookies, aka snowballs) and put them directly in the freezer without letting them dry out, and it was humid enough in the container that months later when I went to eat one, they had tiny adorable mushrooms on them.
I fucking love his cabbage outfit. I want it. I would wear that shit daily.
That’s why it stays unplugged except when in use.
Taking no chances.
That is very cool.
It’s not really all that different than photosynthesis, which is also using radiation as energy.
I wonder if something like this can be adapted into something that can be used to clean and neutralize nuclear waste. Obviously the present mold wouldn’t do it, but with modifications maybe. And it could probably be a somewhat self-limiting thing, such that when the radiation is no longer present, the thing dies off.
Wild, I refuse to go to packed restaurants because my experience will be markedly worse.. my favorite time is between 2-4, because everywhere is dead then.
To each their own, I guess.