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Good morning gardeners. The October weather here in East Central Mississippi has been nothing but amazing this past week. We have had a few rainy days that have helped keep my compost pile moist as I am still working on building it up. It is satisfying to see the steam rise from it when I give it a turn on these cool mornings. If you are a gardener or you are just starting out and are in need of advice or just encouragement please feel free to join in and enjoy the friendly discussion. Our Freeper community is full of...

A Massachusetts family got the Halloween scare of a lifetime by getting lost inside a dark and creepy Salem-area corn maze and had to call 911 for rescue. Danvers police say they got a call of distress from a mother of two about 6:32 p.m. Monday. The woman alerted the 911 operator of their situation in the Connors Farm in Danvers, a short distance from Salem... He said a Danvers police with a tracking dog quickly plunged into the depths of the maze with a farm manager to search for the disoriented dad, mom and two young kids. Within a...

If you have planned, prepared, and trained well.....snip.....you can relax and enjoy the simpler life of time gone by where everyday is a satisfying accomplishment if you just live through it. So what about the money? Where does it fit in? Money will be the insurance for what you have forgotten, lost, broke or had stolen from your list of essentials above. You will hopefully be able to use items of value (currency, goods, gold, silver) or some combination to trade for what you need at that moment when the local Wal-Mart has been looted and burned to the ground....

Good morning gardeners. Wow the first week of October! The garden has been officially put to rest and my compost pile has been tilled into the garden and is now depleted. It’s going to need a lot of leaves, grass clippings and other plant materials to build it back up for next years garden. The leaves on the trees here in East Central Mississippi have awhile yet before they turn color and start to fall in quantity so I am letting about half of my grass clippings turn brown before adding them to the compost pile and mixing them with...

Following approval of a revised wolf management plan by the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today proposed to remove the gray wolf population in Wyoming from the Federal List of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife. Due to recovery efforts and the provisions of the revised state plan, the Wyoming wolf population is healthy and stable, current and future threats to wolves have been addressed, and a post-delisting monitoring and management framework has been developed. Today’s formal proposal follows an agreement with the state of Wyoming that serves as the blueprint for returning wolf management to...

Introduction Who doesn't like roasted chicken? Fresh, crispy with a little salt, it falls off the bone into your mouth. It's a great thing, unless the price is US$2.5 million of your tax dollars. As a Foreign Service Officer with a 20-year career in the State Department, and as part of the global wars of terror, I was sent to play a small part in the largest nation-building project since the post-World War II Marshall Plan: the reconstruction of Iraq following the American invasion of 2003. My contractor colleagues and I were told to spend money, lots of money, to...

So, I grew all these mammoth sunflowers ..

Good morning gardeners. Fall is in the air here in East Central Mississippi on this last day of September. It has been beautiful weather for cleaning up outside and taking care of the yard. Our daytime temperatures have been in the 70s with an occasional bump up into the 80s and the overnight lows are ranging from the 40s to the 60s. While I am waiting for Spring to arrive I will be occupied by continuing to hone my skills at home brewing. If you are a gardener or you are just starting out and are in need of advice...

John Place wanted to get in to the commercial milk business when he opened his dairy farm in 2007 in Moore Township but found it wouldn’t be worth it. Small-time farmers got so little back on the sale of milk that he wouldn’t be able to make ends meet. Place and his wife, Amanda, instead have developed a business selling raw milk, cheese and grass-fed beef from the Route 248 farm called Keepsake Farm & Dairy. The couple's raised awareness today to make national agriculture policy more equitable to small farmers like them. Farmers and their advocates in Bethlehem, Harrisburg...

Good morning gardeners. I am getting a late start posting the thread this morning. Cleaned up my garden plot and will be tilling in some of my compost and wheat straw when the soil dries out a little more. I put a bail of straw around the base of my Fig trees in the hopes the straw will help them through the winter. If you are a gardener or you are just starting out and are in need of advice or just encouragement please feel free to join in and enjoy the friendly discussion. Our Freeper community is full of...

UCLA life scientists and their colleagues have discovered the first evidence of the H1N1 virus in animals in Africa. In one village in northern Cameroon, a staggering 89 percent of the pigs studied had been exposed to the H1N1 virus, commonly known as the swine flu. "I was amazed that virtually every pig in this village was exposed," said Thomas B. Smith, director of UCLA's Center for Tropical Research and the senior author of the research. "Africa is ground zero for a new pandemic. Many people are in poor health there, and disease can spread very rapidly without authorities knowing...

NEW YORK (AP) — Northeastern states are facing a jack-o'-lantern shortage this Halloween after Hurricane Irene destroyed hundreds of pumpkin patches across the region, farmers say. Wholesale prices have doubled in some places as farmers nurse their surviving pumpkin plants toward a late harvest. Some farmers are trying to buy pumpkins from other regions to cover orders.

Good morning gardeners. It has been another beautiful week here in East Central Mississippi we have had moderate daytime temperatures with cool nights. Perfect weather to get out and do some garden and yard clean up. My Fig trees have finished producing and it is time to winterize them with a thick layer of straw. All my of the pears have been picked and either canned or eaten. My vegetable garden is basically through producing except for a few Jalapenos that are still hanging on and still producing large peppers. My Beer brewing experiment is still progressing nicely with 6...

You’ve decided to take the plunge and raise your own chickens. What’s next? In addition to building a chicken coop and mulling over the egg-eating options — scrambled or over-easy? — you need to consider what kind of chicken breed is right for you. There are 60 different breeds of chicken today, and each breed has unique qualities. Your decisions should be based on what you want (and don’t want) from a chicken. Are you hoping for steady egg production? Meat production? Both? Do you get a kick out of multi-colored eggs? Do you need a chicken guaranteed to thrive...

A university teacher has plans to grow green tea using panda manure as fertilizer and sell it at sky-high prices, the West China City Daily reported. An Yanshi, a teacher at southwest China's Sichuan University, learned during a conference that pandas only absorb 30 percent of what they eat, leaving 70 percent of the nutrition in their manure. He then secured a patent to grow tea leaves with panda dung. He expects to sell the tea for 219,865 yuan ($34,422) for half of a kilogram. An's version will be priced 10 times higher than the most expensive tea on the...

Good morning gardeners. It has been beautiful weather here in East Central Mississippi. We received about 3 inches of rain out of TS Lee on Monday and the daytime highs have been in the mid to high 80s with overnight lows in the 50s. It is 50 right now. This is quite cool for this time of year for us. My garden is basically done for the year. I bottled my first batch of beer yesterday, 30 quarts. Now it is wait for two weeks and maybe up to a couple of months, while it conditions, until it is ready...

Collin County is the first community in Texas to put its cattle branding registry online. The county's information technology department has created software that allows ranchers to register their livestock and tattoos online. "The old method was all paper," County Clerk Stacey Kemp said. Cattle brands mark an animal with a unique design so it can be identified if the animal is lost or stolen. In Collin County, the process dates back to the 1860s -- and so did the registration process. Ranchers registered animals in huge, handwritten albums that can take 40 minutes or longer to fill out. Deputy...

I was insructing my Daughter into theymystries of CanningPickels. She is a Graduate of Culinary School along with several other degrees which added nothing to her employabilty. I bought a cheap mandolin to insure consistant thickness of the cukes we were slicing, she proceeded to cut the tip of a finger off, The blood, the blood, after doing first aide I sent her off to the ER. Is this normal? I mean cooks deal with sharp stuff, how many fingers lie at the bottom of our salads?

Good morning gardeners. I Hope all is well with you, your gardens and your endeavors. To make saving your prized tomato seeds easier than ever try using some Oxy-Clean. Oxy-Clean? Yep the same stuff that Billy Mays pushed in all those TV commercials! Thanks to Freeper “who knows what evil?” for the heads up on this easy to do technique. Here is a link to a web page that describes the procedure - Saving Tomato Seeds Now how easy is that? If you are a gardener or you are just starting out and are in need of advice or just...

Korean news outlets are reporting that an udumbara -- a legendary flower in Buddhist literature believed to bloom once every 3,000 years -- has sprouted at a humble Family Mart. Store manager Kim Jong-woo was cleaning when he spotted the 17 tiny flowers growing on the window. He recognized the flowers, he said, from images on television.