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Last year I got 5 from Edible Acres and they all grew even when I stopped watering them. They did great. Flower stalk comes the second year. They are sunflowers, technically. They will grow even if you forget them. I harvested a few and we roasted and ate them but all the rest I replanted to fill up the raised bed they were in so I can hopefully fill the whole thing up within a year or two. They say 1 meter/yard square should produce about 22 pounds of tubers. You can get them from Burgess Seeds and Gurney’s Seeds, too.

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I would. I sold sewing and craft patterns on Etsy for 12 years but their new bank verification system required terms that said you agreed for them to sell your banking information. No thanks! Even my own bank said that was not a good idea to agree to.

I might also go back to making the items to sell if I had a place to sell them to like-minded folks.

There is one thing though. Justin Rhodes’ Abundance Plus has a marketplace but it uses a payment system that requires a cell phone – Stripe, I think. I don’t have a cell phone and am not getting one. There has to be a way for people to sell without getting MORE plugged in to the internet.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 9 months ago by  Redcap.

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What a great system. I have thought about putting some solar in just to power the most important (to us anyway) items we’d like to have in a long outage. Thanks for the explanation.

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That is so gorgeous!

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Heidi, are you still on-grid as well as use solar? If so, when you say you’re using solar, are you able to disconnect from grid when you don’t want to use it? Or is there some way to connect solar to just some things? In the end, though, I’m thinking we’d still get a bill just for having grid power even if we didn’t use it. I’m curious how you’re working that.

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Agreed!

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That may be, but her name tag says Vet Tech and she’s getting paid as one. In fact, she’s been Head Vet Tech at her last three jobs. Legality isn’t everything. There’s technically no such thing as a certified herbalist in this country, no recognition of one by any governing or educational body, yet schools give “certification”. I was a trained midwife. I also got certified for some time in Arizona, which at the time certified trained lay midwives, but this was illegal in my home state. Legality isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. She’s a trained vet tech. She just didn’t get trained at a school. She was trained by her vets. And they recognize her skills. Apprenticeship is a viable method of learning and I would never rate anyone else’s experience by only legal standards, because I might not be taking their actual ability into account. We know plenty of legal doctors who are morons and plenty who are lovely. The legality doesn’t make them good or bad automatically.

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My husband keeps wanting to build one of those.

I watch a lot of Townsends videos. They really shaped the direction of how we decided to live a couple of years ago. What if we were like colonists living outside a town, having been taught by the local natives about the wild plants and medicines, growing a small garden, foraging for nuts and berries, eating hunted meat and maybe having a butchering hog? Most colonists didn’t have chickens, but they ate fowl. They fermented and dried food and packed it in fat to preserve it.

We did get chickens but also switched to all off-grid food preservation and storage. I already forage a ton of food and plant medicines. I learned a tremendous amount from Rain Country about drying and storing dried foods also.

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She didn’t. She worked her way up from receptionist and in 6 years was in high demand and doing emergency vet medicine in Seattle. She has since moved back to the southwest. She was not a book-learner much. We didn’t know until she was an adult that she had a tracking issue (eye-brain). She’d like to go get certified, and we’re all trying to save so she can not work while she’s in school because she will need to focus on the books. But she’s a natural and everywhere she goes, the vets fight over her. She felt bad about not being a good reader when she was younger because we’re all super-readers. But her hands-on learning skills are incredible. You only have to show her something once and tell her the formulas or reasoning or whatever and she’s got it forever. None of us is like that.

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That’s a really good idea! Thank you! I don’t freeze dry but I do dehydrate and that’s a great use of the water – to rehydrate our meals. Also I don’t pressure can, but I do make jam, applesauce, and can a little fruit, but only in late summer, and I just hadn’t thought to use those jars during the year. They have been sitting empty. And like I said, I do have more than I need since I can much less than I dehydrate anymore. Takes a community to find the little things we might not notice ourselves!

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Awesome collection!

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I know what you mean about being out in nature. Real nature. As for your B12 levels, I wouldn’t worry unless you start feeling very tired and even cranky/sad a lot. You must be getting enough from the fish and such. The FDA, IOM, and USDA recommendations are always based on a sort of “ground zero” where you have none and therefore need “this much”. But we tend to have some stores of most nutrients. And to be honest, we don’t “get” vitamins, like C or D from foods or even sun. We synthesize them in our own bodies. Foods give us the building blocks we need to make them. Oranges don’t have vitamin C; they have 16 main and more than 200 minor elements we need to synthesize C. That’s why taking ascorbic acid is useless, regardless of anecdotal experience (I feel great when I take it!). Ascorbic acid is not and never will be vitamin C. People don’t like to hear the truth because they think I’m telling them to do things “my way”. But it’s not MY way, it’s how it works. It’s chemistry, botany, and biology. You might feel good taking a C supplement and that’s fine, but facts say you’re not getting C from those ills and never will. I love learning facts. They simplify my life and make me much less of a consumer and more of a producer and contributor to my world every single day.

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Thank you. I don’t think the rights revert to me until the next issue comes out in fall. At least that’s how it usually works with magazine articles. I think it’s their first issue of a new magazine. I’ll find out though.

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👍

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Same here. Why mend the socks? Just go get more! People ask about all the darning on my sweaters because sometimes I use outrageous colors or designs. Sometimes I use the same color and it just blends in and then they never see the mend. It’s like people never saw that in their whole lives!