u/habilishn

Hey, we are living close to the Aegean Sea in Turkey, we are thinking about buying some kind of boat to have little trips from bay to bay, along our coast, no plan on "long distance" / hard sport / bad weather or high wave adventures, only for relaxed free time, swimming, maybe fishing, good weather, low wind and wave traveling along the coast.

My friend also has a canoe, but an inflatable, that has its pro's about light weight and transportation, but for us seems a bit more complicated, because it needs more maintainance, cleaning off sand and stones (we are living off grid and our water resources are very small, anything i don't have to wash at home would be good for our survival 😅), also we have a bigger car and can easily transport a sturdy built boat on the roof, so no need to have an inflatable version.

my main question is this: i see two general models. i'm neither native english nor native turkish so bare with me and possibly wrong terms :D

model 1: "canadian style" (pic 1) just a classic boat, no "air containers", just a tub. lots of space.

model 2: "air container style" (pic 2) some kind of closed plastic container where you sit on top. probably unsinkeable (if not damaged), lighter, but smaller and a lot less luggage space.

my gut feeling tends extremely to the "canadian style", for the big space, the option to take friends, a dog, more stuff on the trip. just that it probably is not unsinkable...

can you drop me some more pro's and con's about the type of boat construction, concerning our circumstances? like as a beginner, maybe is there something that everyone (except me) knows, why a "canadian style" is NOT good for the sea?

just to get an idea for you i added a random pic (pic 3) of the type of bays and weather conditions that we are planning on travelling - the aegean sea is a side sea of the mediterranean, big waves only occur on storm days, on those days we would anyways not go to the water.

i tried to press them away but seems like i will not get these out. just leave it make sure it stays clean or somehow warm it up and press again? (read that in one cheesemaking book...)

this is kind of a weird issue, i'm asking you because i assume many here live like us with nature around, have different animals, maybe have ideas of practical solutions, that work without having a daily training session with animals (but maybe this is a special case... i don't know yet)

so we have a water bucket for our two german shepherds and our cat to have water always available on the front porch.

the cat is 4 years old now, for the past years this has been working perfectly.

i have to mention we encountered a funny thing: when we had the cat inside the house (in winter times or sometimes when she wants to or we want her to) she has been super interested in us using the toilet and after a while - without teaching her anything - she has been using our (human) toilet as well! super cute, she sits on the toilet seat and correctly pees into the toilet :D

we don't have a cat flap at the house though, so she can only come in/out when we open the door for her.

so for the past years the cat was peeing/pooping somewhere outside in the wilderness around the house - all fine.

but lately we noticed her peeing into the drinking bucket, also her own drinking water! of cause the animals refuse to drink then.

we assume the bucket with water inside reminds the cat somehow of a toilet?!?

the cat is a small breed, the german shepherds have big heads, i cannot think of a way of a contraption to build over the bucket so that the dogs can drink but the cat can't sit on it..

does anyone have an idea how to solve this? should i ask in a cat sub? should i ask vets?

growing in a rather moist spot (close to a by now dried out winter creek bed) in slowly but eventually dry turning Aegean Turkey, 300m altitude close to the sea. it's one spot with disturbed soil, on the side of a dirt road basically.

when it sprouted the fresh green leaves looked similar to "arum lilies" that scarcely grow here, i left it unmowed, but turns out it's some kind of apiaceae (looks to me as a layman).

these big leaves are unknown to me amongst apiaceae, i know my plants (or try to learn them all) but this one i have not seen anywhere else or before.

I hope the mods allow this, i want to post my last year's baby tortoise that lived in the strawberry bed, to be able to link it to my actual recent post of this year's baby tortoise living in the chickpea bed 😆 i thank you in advance for embracing our garden tenants together! ;)

did it hatch there? it's a new bed with sh*t soil (rather dirt), where we turned over lean meadow first time this spring, also reshaped the hillside into something like a level terrace. that's why lots of bad lower dirt came up and we probably will have nothing but legumes and adding compost there for the next year(s?). however baby turtle seems happy there!

EDIT: i learned it is a tortoise! And: i took the chance to also post last year's baby tortoise pics and link it here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/homestead/s/TMoWN0iM3G

😍😍

hi, the question might sound really dumb, i feel like i need to elaborate, maybe too much information, but then it will make more sense. if it's too long for you, then TLDR is the post title.

we got those two horses from a rescue station, we have a little farm so enough space to give them a peaceful life, they have no work other than eating and pooping for manure ;) we also have them since 3 years, so they didn't die of thirst yet ;)

however we are in aegean turkey, it's from now on hot and dry for the next 5 months. we live off-grid and for our house (on top of the hill) we only live off collected rainwater in tanks, that is limited.

the horses have a 10 acre pasture, in its bottom, in the valley there is an old well and that's where i have a drinking trough for the horses. there is a somewhat long and winding, but easily walkable dirt road from hilltop to valley (ca. 5-10mins walking). they know the path and the trough and have been there drinking.

the thing is, that now during summer the horses get super lazy and as we give them some hay and treats here at the house (again, on top of the hill) they seem to not leave the area here on top of the hill. don't know if they go down at night, but when ever we see them, we see them here on the hill. and they seem thirsty. and when we fill them up a bucket of water, because we give in to them begging, then they are really fighting for it and drink it all the way instantly so - they are thirsty and did not go down, i guess.

since we reaaaaally need to save water here (god forbid there comes a wildfire) i would really wish to not use our tank water for the horses to drink.

can i trust the survival instinct of the horses to go down and drink if they are really thirsty? it appears to me they are of the stupid kind 😭 i love them but they are really lazy and don't move their asses to the valley where there is 1. the water and 2. more grass to eat. it appears they rather stay at the house and wait for treats and us giving them a bucket once a day instead of just browsing around.

should we force them to search for water and make the oh so annoying walk down the hill by just not giving them anything here at the house?

hi, i know, every milk, every recipe, every setup and conditions is working different, just want to ask if this is somewhat normal :D (i'm not native english, hope everything is understandable)

pre conditions:

we have our own raw goat milk, we bought a "bergkäse" ("alpine style hard cheese") bacteria culture, there was a recipe for it on the website where i ordered that culture and i just tried it.

part of the recipe was the curd washing at 50C (122F). before the curd washing i was supposed to cut/break the fresh curd into 0,3mm ("grain size") pieces, which worked well. then i was supposed to take out 1/3 of the whey and fill it up with the same amount of warm water - done.

then, as soon as i reheated the pot, these small curd pieces started to glue together as hell :D like really into a huge big clump, and it didn't appear from the recipe that this was normal, as the recipe said "continue to stirr the curd pieces for 20mins" which was simply not possible because it became one huge clump and whenever i tried to separate it and the separated pieces sunk down, they sticked back together within seconds literally. (the pic doesn't even really display just how sticky that curd was)

is that normal? 😅

...man darf die Hoffnung ja niemals aufgeben.

hey there, i put "hard cheese" in quotation marks, as this is our experimental cheeses and i don't want to claim them being super proper hard cheeses (we are sticking to a recipe we once learned from some old italian farmers, that doesn't match perfectly with other hard cheese recipes, only our own raw goat milk used, no starter cultures or anything... we'll see where we end up... 😅)

anyways, these cheeses are in the ripening fridge for 6 weeks now and two of them have developed some darkish spots, no signs of mold or spores. also it appears that the bark is ripped open and there is a little cavity below it (pic 2).

is there anything special i need to do with these spots? like cutting them out and/or salting them? or just continue with normal care and cutting that part away once the cheese is used?

thought if anyone then you would enjoy this too.

yesterday near Izmir, Turkey.

i swear, some stuff you can't make up yourself...

the tomatos we are trying to grow/germinate are even in a greenhouse and they are maybe a few inches/10cm tall and only half is germinating...

the chicken coop is where we raised little chicks and were feeding them with kitchen scraps amongst other feed, about 2/3 months ago, we put them into a chicken tractor in the garden and since then the coop was not taken one look at.

today my wife comes screaming running, i have to see something and look whats growing there

🤦🏻‍♂️

Hello,

i don't know if this is the right sub for the question, please direct me to another if you know one, but i think there's lots of knowledgeable people here so i give it a try.

we are in Turkey and getting trustable products remains to be a hard task... similar to the "compostable except in California" thing :D

at the moment we have a small sewage system (two-chamber settlement tanks + reed pond) and i'm planning to reroute the grey water from the kitchen sink to become irrigation water. we are still searching for a somewhat readily available detergent that will neither mess with the sewage or the upcoming irrigation.

now we found this detergent product new in a store.

are the ingredients safe, or "somewhat" safe / acceptable, or in the end the same sh*t as any detergent, just with bio-advertisement?

of cause claiming "0% microplastic" is funny when you follow the findings literally everywhere, but other than that, i'm neither native turkish nor native english, what are the other ingredients? which ones are the troublemakers or are there really none?

thanks dor help!