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Homegrown Furniture

How do you make furniture out of solid wood?  Try growing it as a single piece.  Okay, maybe it isn't something that amateurs can do at home, but the results certainly are intriguing.  Gavin Munro has come up with special molds and pruning and grafting techniques to get the trees into the proper shape.  Full Grown Furniture in England sells them, but they cost thousands of dollars and you have to wait many years.

Oh Shane, Will You Ever Learn?

I'm not sure how I've missed it for two years, but there is a deliriously funny series of pictures of notes to a Walmart employee by the management.  One of the best:

The complete list from the original poster:

• Shane, quit offering extended warranties on the fried chickens -Management
• Shane, stop asking, "Is that your final answer?" and offering to let them phone a friend after each order -Management
• Shane, when a customer asks where to find a product, give them an aisle number, not directions to Albertsons -Management
• Shane, quit putting price tags on deli equipment and trying to sell them to customers -Management
• Shane, stop implying that Walmart keeps the "good stuff" in the back -Management
• Shane, I don't know what "Swinecraft" is, but ham can not be sold as a building material  -Management
• Shane, quit putting on multiple name tags and pretending to have a personality disorder  -Management
• Shane, the deli is not an appropriate place to practice your ventriloquism, please stop making puppets out of the paper bags  -Management
• Shane, stop putting "Stoner approved" seals on the fried chicken  -Management
• Shane, stop putting out samples labelled as "Mystery meats"  -Management
• Shane, stop putting "Some assembly required" stickers on the 8-piece chickens  -Management
• Shane, any free samples you offer must come from the deli, not electronics!  -Management

While the real-life Shanenigans stopped there, on the Internet they have taken on a life of their own, with an entire subreddit devoted to Shaneisms.
 

A Maze of Twisty Little Passages....

If you played D&D in your youth, you probably had to rely on your imagination quite a bit.  Someone's imagination was quite stimulated to create the most amazing D&D map ever created.  I think I would go back to playing if I could play on that!

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I in TEAM

Spread Shirt

When You Can't Afford A Berkey....

Water is a basic need, and dirty water kills lots of people every year. Luckily there are lots of ways to make water drinkable.  No-Tech Magazine has a good review of OHorizon's open-source biosand filter plans.  It is a relatively permanent solution, with a concrete case, yet only costs a few dollars each to make in quantity, as the form is made of wood.  If you want the plans directly, go to OHorizons and fill out their form.

Look, Out In The Field...

It's A Flower!

It's A Food!

It's A Fiber!

It's Flax!

Learn All About Flax.

Dry for Cheap...

You're probably familiar with the simple PVC ponchos and thinner-than-paper Mylar blankets that, while cheap, do not always provide the protection from the elements they promise.  Here is another, repurposed option:

$3 Rain Gear That Doesn’t Act Like $3 Rain Gear

The reviewer includes instructions for making it waterproof with duct tape.

Don't Blink....

Snorg Tees

Hot Stuff....

You may have seen people collecting aluminum cans to recycle, but probably not like this:

Mobile Foundry for Recycling Aluminum.  They use the molten aluminum to cast decorative but useful objects like chairs.

Animal Power

English: Llama trekking experience, Forest of Dean Treks are available, starting from the Speech House Hotel, either with llamas or donkey/pony and trap. Here the animals are resting at Mallards Pike Lake whilst the trekkers take on refreshments. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Theresa Crouse at Survivopedia lists 5 animals to raise for survival transportation: horses, mules, donkeys, llamas, and dogs.  To that I would add goats and oxen.  Green Solutions Magazine points out that camels and elephants are important beasts of burden in some parts of the world.  Mythcreants covers most of these plus using humans or exotic animals -- of course, they're talking about creating fiction, but their goal seems to be making it realistic.

Pulling Up Roots

As a general rule, you will get better results from plants if you start them from seeds in the place where you want them to grow.  However, this is not always possible: seeds don't always breed true, your growing season is too short, etc.  In these cases, it is important not to let the plant become pot bound, where the roots hit the sides and start circling around.  These roots can end up killing the plant -- imagine putting a solid piece of wood around a child's neck and leaving it there as the child grows.  What was ample room at first becomes impossible to get food and air through by adulthood.

What appears to work best is treating the pots with a copper hydroxide solution ahead of time.  This kills the roots as they touch the pot, so they never start circling.  If that is not done first, you may want to remove all the soil from potted plants and cut crooked roots before transplanting.  This should work well when the plant is dormant; it is the way most plants are shipped by mail.  I'm not so sure how good your results would be for an actively growing plant, however.  For those, you may want to use slicing, butterfly pruning, or teasing to get more fibrous root growth.

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Just Say Yum

  

Skreened.com

Swimming Au Naturel

The latest fashion is not swimming without bathing suits, it's swimming without chemicals.  It's called wild swimming, but it is frequently man-made. You can find plenty of directions for making your own natural swimming pool. And they aren't just swimming holes; plenty of options are available.

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Worth A Hill of Beans

When I was younger, my parents and I would go to the New York state border to a restaurant that featured Amish style cooking.  Sadly, after a few years it closed, but Mavis Butterfield over at One Hundred Dollars A Month blog came across a Mennonite recipe for Baked Beans from scratch that looks like the kind I enjoyed so many years ago.  I will have to try making it myself.

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The Park Grill at Home

NCJeeper made a great post on the forum at The Survival Podcast on how to build a park-style grill at home.  It definitely requires some good metalworking skills like welding so it is beyond my capabilities, but it looks like it would be fairly simple to make if you had the right tools and materials.

Credit Card Survival....

No, this has nothing to do with financial advice....  People are taking notice of SurvCo's new Credit Card Ax.  While it is fairly unique to have something that can be turned into a hatchet be the size of a credit card, there are too many multi-tools to mention that fit that dimension.  Indeed, you could easily end up needing a second wallet if you got them all!

ReadyMan has an interesting break-apart version (shown on the right) which they are giving away for "free", plus shipping and handling.  They do have a video showing you how to use it they send a link to you when you order.  Of course, they do try to get you to sign up for a monthly membership in their organization.


One of the oldest and probably one of the best values is the 11-function one on the left.  I've had it so long I've forgotten where I put it!  It's hardly worth buying by itself, the shipping is more than the cost of the item.  My guess is any patent protections have run out, that's why there are so many inexpensive copies.

To my eyes, one of the sleekest of the genre is the Wallet Ninja.  Having a Phillips screwdriver is unusual in itself for a credit-card survival tool, but I think the function I would use most is the box cutter/letter opener; that's what I wish I had on my Gerber shard.  Interestingly, while I've never tried them yet, KnifeCenter lists 30 items in this category (although a number only differ by color), some of them quite pricey.

Perhaps the most whimsical of the entire bunch is the PocketMonkey.  At only 1 ounce and 1 mm thick, I don't expect it to be the most durable, but it might just be the most convenient to carry around -- they even say it is TSA compliant!

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A Pen is Mightier than A Sword...

Especially when it is a gun....

Survivopedia has instructions for turning pens into guns: either spring-loaded BB guns or rubber-band dart guns.

Now, I don't think they're legal where I live, but it's nice to have the knowledge if I ever end up somewhere the police aren't around for protection.

When It's A Cat's Ear....

When is a dandelion not a dandelion?

When it is Hypochaeris radicata, also known as Flatweed, False Dandelion, and Cat's Ear.  My mom asked me what the yellow flower out in the yard was, and my first answer was "DYC", which stands for "Damn Yellow Composite".  That gives some indication of the, um, "affection" botanists have for that class of flowers, because of the difficulty in narrowing down exactly what it is.  In the end, the Peterson Field Guide to Wildflowers: Northeastern and North-central North America on Google Books ended up being most helpful in coming up with an identification, but IdentifyThatPlant.com Dandelion and Cat's Ear made me confident that I had identified it correctly.

Learning more about it, Cats Ear is quite interesting.  It is edible, although it may be toxic to horses in large quantities.  Unlike dandelion, it is not supposed to be bitter, and like chicory, you can dry and grind the root for a coffee substitute.  I don't drink coffee, so I won't be trying that, and it's a bit late in the season to be eating the leaves, as they are probably quite chewy by now, but I look forward to sampling some next year.

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