I’ll confess I do this with some regularity. If I unwrap a piece of cheese and see it’s moldy, well I’m not tossing a nice hunk of aged gouda in the trash! I’ll slice the mold off, then do a sniff and nibble test. If it still tastes moldy, keep slicing until it doesn’t.

I’ve done this since I was a kid, so who knows if it’s actually safe, or if I’ve just spent decades rolling the dice and getting lucky.

I’ve come to learn your brain is really good at subconscious processing of things that don’t quite make it to conscious awareness. Some part of your brain saw the cop and the deer and was trying to alert the rest of you.

I had that happen once when I was out hiking alone doing geology research. I reached this area of the woods and was suddenly overwhelmed by this feeling of TIME TO LEAVE. I tried arguing with myself that there was still enough daylight to check out an outcrop I could see in the distance, but the feeling got so powerful, I finally gave in and called it quits for the day.

I realized while walking out, that with all the little noises of the quail and other animals I’d been hearing all day, that spot in the woods had been silent. The next time I visited the area (and not alone this time), I found a cave right behind where I’d been standing, with fresh mountain lion tracks. Who knows, some part of me might have seen a mountain lion in that cave and was doing everything it could to tell me to get the fuck away!

Hah, the number on my bank account sometimes feels like it’s just pixels.

But most valuable to me would be old irc chatlogs with people who’ve passed. It’s been years since I’ve felt the need to pull them out and read them, but I’m happy to know they’re there.

I grow pretty much everything from seed because it’s crazy cheaper (after some upfront costs). For the price of one or maybe a few seedlings, you can buy seed packets with hundreds of seeds. Seeds also make trying out unique plants possible, as often times nurseries don’t carry a wide variety to choose from.

Depending on the zone you’re in yes. I’m in 9b and rarely get freezing temperatures, so I can grow things over winter that might not survive in colder areas. Some brassicas are especially frost tolerant, so it would be worth looking into and seeing what you can grow in your area.

Not to make light of things, but the first thought that came to my head for counteracting bad tasting medicine is a spoonful of sugar.

Here’s to getting all those achievable goals!

On the pill front, is it possible to crush them and mix with something more easily swallowable?

You sure can walk through it, it’s tall enough my 6’ fiance fits standing underneath. We usually only barely kiss freezing a few times in the winter, so I haven’t bothered to use it to try to keep things warmer. I weave tomatoes over it in the summer and peas in the winter.

I need to take an updated photo (the arch is fully covered now), but here’s a before/after of pruning and weaving this year’s tomatoes on it after they went wild when I was on vacation in May:

Yep! I wanted to kill the pervasive bermuda grass without RoundUp, so I used ChipDrop in late 2021 and got something like 70 cubic yards of mulch piled on my front lawn. Gave a little bit away, but used most of it to bury the grass around my front yard garden, which is about 1,750 square feet in total. Here’s a before and after.

Annoyingly the grass is so persistent, it’s still poking up through the mulch, but by pulling those stolons when they appear, we’re slowly winning a war of attrition. I don’t use the mulch on my raised boxes or where I’ve planted in the ground, there I use straw, but I run drip lines under the straw so it really shouldn’t matter for water infiltration.

I have noticed a massive uptick in the bugs in my yard, the mulch is decomposing fast and is loaded with worms, millipedes, grubs and beetles, which has brought a lot more birds around too. I also noticed that the tomatoes I planted in the ground adjacent to the mulch took off way faster than those in my boxes, despite the boxes having been filled with the same soil from the front yard (excavated for a driveway expansion), and lovingly amended with excellent compost.

[Image description: two rows of young tomato seedlings planted along the edges of an arched trellis. The closer row is planted in a raised bed, and is noticeably smaller than the farther row that is directly in the ground, despite them having been planted at the same time.]

Maybe swimming for exercise? Not in a gator-pond, but are there local community pools nearby?

The sign of healthy soil! I live in a dry area, and buried my lawn with about a foot of mulch, and I find it funny when wood-loving mushrooms pop up overnight, within a day or so they’ve been dried into little pseudo-rocks.

I wouldn’t say too much change in flavor, but a bit more heat.

Yeah dang, that’s definitely more than just watering stress, it does look like viral damage. That’s often hard to treat, best bet is to just trim away all the affected leaves and stems, and hope what’s left can keep producing.

Hrm, yeah more pictures would be helpful, but the fact that only the tips of your healthy leaves are browning, and how hard the leaves are curling in on themselves, makes me suspect under watering.

Do you have a photo of the plants? And what size buckets are they in?

Oh no, what’s up with your plant?

There is one!

!hotpeppers@lemmy.world

There is one!

!hotpeppers@lemmy.world

As someone trying to diet, 100% the calorie deficit 😖

Delicious! Sweet, but not overly so.