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If you watch through the seasons in an area you can wander frequently enough to become really familiar with it, and that can just be even your local park, then you'll spot the mushrooms that come up, and you start to recognise them. Oysters, Chicken of the Woods, Jelly Ears, the birch...

Can you replace a zip ? Seriously, look at the jacket and figure out if it's possible, because I have a drawer load of decent zips meant for jackets like this and if there's one that will fit, then you're welcome to it. Thanks to the wonders of modern machinery there are very few truly bad...

:) I'm telling myself that Tradeston's a nightmare to get to and to find parking .....:rolleyes:

I think of coffee as the product of something roasted, be that beans or roots like dandelion. Tea is just the stuff soaked in hot water. So, technically the chaga is a tea, but it's boiled in the water, and it drinks like coffee not tea.

I have endured rheumatoid arthritis, dermatographic urticaria, and ibs for over thirty years....they only came on after I caught chickenpox as an adult. Now there's talk that some virus' seem to be the 'cause' of such auto immune system issues. The coxsackie B virus/& Epstein barr has been...

Well chaga is mushroom, and it's good as a 'coffee', much used in the far north apparently. I've made it using fomes fomentarius too...the De'il hoof fungus.....and it wasn't so good. It was a tad tcp like.

Beetroot does the same...but because it's pH sensitive it shifts and eventually the pink ends up grey, sort of.

Honestly, leather dyes are stains, and they will stain untanned skin (you) just as easily as they will dye the leather. Waxing or oiling helps gently mute a too light leather, but so does soaking it in something like strong tea....which is tannin rich and will darken the leather nicely if it's...

It was the most notable feature of the flu that killed millions during the early 20th century; that it took out the fittest. My son who had covid is a cancer survivor. His immune system is riddled with scars from the dozens of tumours that the oncologists managed to kill. His immunity is...

We're retired, it was easier for us to isolate, easier for us to have time to keep things seperate. Son2 literally lived in his room, the bathroom and the back garden for the week he was infectious. Everything was washed seperately, and we did use the disinfectant sprays a lot. I think...

So far we've avoided it, even though the son who still lives at home did catch it. We were just very careful and practiced good hygiene. I don't want it. I have had real flu and it literally took me months to get back to feeling like me again, and I was fit and healthy then. I react really...

They make good pets according to a zoologist I know ..... maybe so, but, y'know ? rats.

Depends on your compost pile apparently. I use bins and they produce the most beautiful worm worked soil for very little effort, and no rats :) The pest control fellow who came to do a talk at one of the guilds said that rats like to tunnel; they like to burrow along a wall, or an edge of some...

I was told that it was the remains of food and the dry grass for bedding that was an appeal to the rats. No idea how true it was, but a neighbour complained about another neighbour putting the old bedding/cage sweepings on her compost heap, and that's the reason she gave. Personally I'd have...

Hello :) Life gets busy, but it's good to catch up with friends again.

I'm old enough to remember when 'plastic' was bakelite, and casein ( plastic made from milk...buttons, etc., used to be made from it) and otherwise wasn't very good stuff at all. Those early plastics decayed and crumbled. We got better at making it and now it's ubiquitous, it's the ultimate...

Today was dandelions and nettles. I'm going to pot up some dandelions and see if I can grow big roots. I like dandelion coffee but digging up the plants in our heavy clay soil is not fun. If I pot them in good home made compost though...... :)

You know how elder cracks off branches if you grab hard ? Well those branches usually split a bit too, and you can pull that split apart and break off a decent hearth board. It's pretty reliably good.

When I don't have to make it all from scratch, I use paracord :) I was taught on a bow that was strung with blue polypropylene rope...cheap as chips, site was on a very tight budget, and we could go through metres of that stuff for a couple of quid. In hindsight it was utterly carp stuff, but...

@Broch, sorry, I totally contradicted you there. Not intentional, but I've been using hazel as a preference for my drill for over thirty years now. I find it works well. It works on ivy, elder, pine.....the man who taught me how to use a bowdrill to make an ember and fire used pine and hazel, so...