Technology – Gallifrey Forest Farm

Chemistry for Fun & Profit: Cracked Heel Balm

2024/04/05 Danielle 0

Alright, mostly for fun, not so much for profit. Unless you count a good foot ointment as profit (which I sort of do)… I suffer from dry skin and cracked heels on my feet. Used to be, I could just use whatever body lotion I was using on the rest of my skin (I also get really dry skin on my knees and elbows, so body lotion is a thing I have opinions about). I have tried using just a straight skin-friendly oil, which works pretty well (I believe that coconut oil is popular in the African American community, so […]

Lost Skills: Soapmaking

2022/10/26 Danielle 0

Soapmaking, as a hobby, tends to get either the enthusiastic interest of people who are into homesteading and do-it-yourself make-your-own hobbies, or half-amused references to the 1994 Fight Club scenes about stealing medical waste from liposuction operations and turning the fat into soap to then sell back to the wealthy customers of those same cosmetic surgery clinics. That is possible, by the way. The making of soap from human (or, more usually) other animal fat. Lard (beef fat) and tallow (sheep or lamb fat) are traditional ingredients for soapmaking, and make a nice, hard soap with a good lather. One […]

Lost Skills

2022/06/12 Danielle 0

A lot of the things I post here are about farming, more or less. Horticulture, agriculture, permaculture.. growing food (and fibre, and animal fodder). Which reflects the fact that the production of our base necessities is really important. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs places basic physiological needs at the bottom for a reason, after all – they underpin everything else. But growing ingredients isn’t the only part of that picture which is important. Over the last year or two, I’ve been looking at various sort of ‘old fashioned’ skills, mostly just because I’m interested and I’m that sort of nerd. I […]

June 9: bread is life

2016/06/09 Danielle 0

Someone said to me recently, joking about our mutual bread-making habit, “Bread is love. Bread is life.” It may have been said in jest, but there’s a certain truthiness to the statement as well. Bread has been central to a lot of cultures around the world; to the best of my knowledge, the East Asian cultures whose main subsistence grain was rice through most of their history are the only ones in which bread hasn’t played a central role (cooked rice replaced bread for those cultures). Even the Australian Aboriginal peoples appear to have had a tradition of breadmaking […]

urban agriculture and space habitats

2015/12/09 Danielle 0

I’ve been thinking a lot about space, recently. As in, spaceships and stars and planets. I know, I know, that sounds like it has nothing to do with our fledgling smallholding – but in reality it has quite a lot to do with it. When I say I’m thinking about space, I mean I’m thinking about humans going to space. Space habitats and the ecosystems we’ll need to support them, producing enough food not just for a few scientists but for entire villages of people living in colonies on the moon, or Mars, or Venus, or even in permanent space station […]