Went out yesterday and found loads of Boletus edulus(Cep), Hydnum repandum(Hedgehogs) and Craterellus tubaeformis(trumpet Chanterelles. I didn't take any pictures so you will have to take my word for it. I Had the Chanterelles in an omelette for breakfast and will probably make some sort of pasta dish with the Ceps and Hedgehogs.

>>1880 not having any luck down my way, we need some real rain in the south.

Do you only pick Ceps or other varieties of Beletes too? I found loads of these huge brown ones (see one of the blurry pics above) but they wearnt very good (tbh I was so nervous about eating them it would have been impossible to enjoy them)

>>1881
I'm in the south. Things are much better then they were this time last year, mushrooms everywhere.
Can't be sure what you have from your pic but i'd take a gamble on leccinum scabrum or Xerocomus badius, which are everywhere at the moment and are both edible but, frankly, not all that.
You should never eat a mushroom if you cannot ID it 100%, therein lies madness (and death. This cannot be understated) But having said that, it's not hard to ID mushrooms positively with a little research from one or two field guides. Don't trust google for ID.
If you post pics here I will happily ID them for you, If I can.

>>1882 very kind of you to offer. I am sure I shall take you up on it at some point

Look at this photo. If anyone needed a clue as to where to find choice mushrooms then this image is a veritable gold mine of information. It's all here.

>>1846

Where did you see the comments about it? Please link to the comments.

>>1848

http://beforeitsnews.com/story/533/738/11_Emergency_Food_Items_That_Can_Last_a_Lifetime.html

European Freeze Dry have updated their site. It's gone over to Mountain House branding heavily. On the upside the tins are shipped from the UK. I think they are also all being made in the UK for our market, judging from the latest tins I've seen. Faster shipping times, cheaper prices and less risk to the goods in transit. Win-win for the UK buyers.

They still do some of their own plain pouches though for fruit, chicken and a smaller tin for prawns if you want to try them first instead of buying the large Mountain House ones.

The berry fruit is very good. Better tasting and quality than most dried fruit in cereal mixes. Very strong flavour. When dry it's like the strongest jam or drinking fruit drink concentrate neat. You tend to expect these things to be bland, but these are far from it. Almost too strong in the dry state for nibbling on its own although you could enjoy them that way. Adding them to cereal or ice cream while dry works great. You can also reconstitute them and use as normal.

I think the apples might be more suited to nibbling on its own. Strawberries weren't too strong either. The rasberries were powerful, almost eye-watering. Delicious.

Free shipping for orders over £24 in the UK. Not a big order as many of the tins are well over that amount.

>>1866

Checked the dates on the tins and they are being honest with the shipping and production times. I've heard some people complain about getting very old stock pouches and tins that have already had years off their shelf life from some supplies. Quite likely this could be because they are manufacturing them themselves instead of having to buy them in through the chan and store them. A big plus if you want the maximum shelf life you can get.

A tip for rehydrating freeze dried food. You can add water as normal or you can add flavouring into the water you use. A stock cube mixed into it can almost instantly marinade the meat. Similarly you can try other flavourings, spices, etc. for savoury or sweet items.

>>1839
On the cycle track near me there are loads of blackberry bushes along the side, it is very easy just to stop and get a decent snack from them.
I found that someone made a map of a load of the places which have edible plants in the city, but I can not seem to find it now.

Along with that had some nice elderflower cordial recently.

You can also encourage plants that can be foraged by planting wild berries and the like around, they can spread quite well as birds and animals eat them, then they get dispersed.
They also look very nice.

I'm fairly well served by my local area for fruits. Just around the corner is a large house converted into offices, I have permission to collect damsons from the 4 large bushes in the car park
A 20 minute walk takes me to the grounds of an abandoned orchard
Next door but one neighbor has 2 fruiting cherry tree's
Blackberry's and rose hips are absolutely everywhere
It does help I live a 10 minute walk from open countryside.
And what do I do with natures healthy bounty - process it into an unhealthy quantity of wine hic

>>1837

We can airdrop gold rings across the country. We all know that gives them an extra life.

So are they dying out in all of Britain or just England alone?

>>1685

Oh I know what you mean, but it is much better nowadays. The water was very clean indeed - if a little brisk!

>>1769

I appreciate the care taken to add that little hump bit.

Saturday was a good day. This is our lass in Esthwaite, watched by our hydrophobic dog.

We saw no Nessie, but she did get stared at by a fish later on in Loughrigg tarn. Very unsettling I can tell you.

>>1836

Had a go out in Gaddings Dam today. It is a fine place and is kept up entirely by volunteers (who amongst them raised the money to buy the place I believe).

If anyone cares I'll put up a picture. [x] Rage for swim blog.

>>1806

I wouldn't really want to refer to the old chap as a "twiglet" gives the wrong impression.

>>1807

Racist.

>>1805

Look at her biting her lip, that's obscene.

Whore.

>>1809

You just know she's considering shoving that multi-demensional treat up her fanny.

>>1809
She's definitely asking for it, that picture is basically
>You must be at least this tall to ride.
I bet that Gary Stone got his twiglet munched too.

>>1792 Ta. Ordered mine.

Me too, much appreciated. :)

I remember when Birdsong went off air. I was gutted.

Is there a torrent?

>>1801
Not that I'm aware of, but I'll see what I can do if/when the CD arrives.

>>1778
> Water in the dish below should be thrown out.
Many plants like the increased air humidity they provide a lot (especially in really dry office air or similar) so having some in there some of the time doesn't hurt. But it should be added deliberately, not left to stagnate as left-overs from watering them, you're right.

I'm guessing he means when plants are kept in a plastic pot placed in a stoneware or similar pot, instead of on a dish. The outer pot acts as the "dish".

OK, so, one of them is fucked, I think. The other one is much less fucked. I think I left them in their small pots for too long. I always prefered the less fucked one, anyway.

>>1780
It'll recover, give it time and plenty of sunlight. It'll probably impact yield, but tomatoes are surprisingly hardy when it comes to pure survival.

>>1781

I don't really care about yeald, to be honest. I just like the idea of having pet plants. Do you think the leaves will grow back on the right-hand plant?

>>1782
It may shed that particular set, but baring further mishaps it should continue to grow just fine.

AMBITIOUS BUT RUBBISH

>>1754
>societal collapse

ITZ more than just that. Jesus and lizards will battle it out for control of ARE MADDIES soul and stuff.

>>1755

This is why part of preparing should be mentally (skills, knowledge, attitude, etc.), together with the material stories. If you're utterly clueless and can't do better than a hideous shanty town that wouldn't look out of place in Liberia then you are doing it wrong.

Have any of you fine fellow read "How to live off grid" by Nick Rosen? It's pretty good as long as you bear with his slightly idealistic viewpoint, but there's a sequel/prequel (Can't remember which) in which he goes to the states to visit off-grid communities there, and he finds pretty much exactly this sort of thing IIRC, all the people are idiots or demented and haven't put any real thought into what they're doing.
Case in point: On the mesa, they have no water. NO WATER. They have to go to the rio grande to wash, meaning some of them don't wash for weeks. They have to haul all their water to their disgusting shanties by truck.
Second: NO FOOD. LITERALLY NO FOOD. They survive by picking up supermarket and farm rejects once a week from town and trucking it back to the mesa where people pick over it.
One guy had what he termed a greenhouse, then claimed that "it could feed four, five families, easy". When the camera goes inside, the greenhouse is tiny, has no roof, and he's attempting to grow tiny carrots in the terrible sandy dust they have for soil there. It's clear that it couldn't even feed one person for a week.
The mesa isn't off grid at all. It survives totally dependant on the grid. No petrol? No free food from the wasteful society? No mesa. It's a parasitic community in every sense of the word. These morons have absolutely no chance of survival should anything happen to the outside world. Absolutely none.

>>1759

I think it backs up what I've said before - that if you think some plan will work and you might rely on it sometime then you should test it out. Can you really live on what your greenhouse makes, for instance. I'd imagine there are a few people who mistakenly imagine being able to easily ramp up production when they've never had to rely on it or maybe even attempted it on such a scale. Same goes for everything else.

As you pointed out, you'll otherwise end up a scavenger and that only lasts as long as there is something to scavenge. They have a society that is as fragile as the one it depends upon.

>>1744
But where does their fucking poop come from? It comes from the plants they eat.
If a cow eats one ton of grain, it makes enough poop to grow one ton of grain, and so on.
Silage isn't a magic source of fertiliser, you only get as much out of one end as you put in the other.

>>1745
I love meat, I eat much more meat than I probably should, I am making an unbiased and rational argument.
Don't turn this thread into an ad hominem shit fest.

>>1746

If a cow eats one ton of grain, it does not make enough poop to grow one ton of grain. The process is extremely complicated - apart from the fact the cow is complicated, not all soil needs more poop. Some of it needs the opposite of poop, so we're restricted as to how much poop we put down each month.

Very few cows in this country are fed grain. They're nearly all fed grass in summer, silage in winter. Their poop is collected and spread on the fields at certain stages of the arable process, restricted by da law. Look up "nitrate vulnerable zones" if you're interested in how much poop can be spread on which fields in which areas and during which month.

Silage isn't a fertiliser. It's food for animals. It comes from cut grass which is made all squishy for feeding the animals in winter.

>>1747

I know it's complicated, but in terms of absolute quantities of chemicals and minerals in poop, you can't use it to grow more plants than went in initially without an additional source of the chemicals and minerals the plants need.

In short, livestocks efficacy at producing fertiliser is at best a very inefficient method of composting grass. At worst it is a net consumer of fertiliser rather than producer.

>Silage isn't a fertiliser.
Sorry, I always get that word confused with sewage.

And also, nitrate vulnerable zones are a problem caused by farmers using fertilisers aggressively to get yields high as possible.
It means more fertiliser is added to the soil than the plants utilise, all the excess is wasted.

>>1743
> And the land could be used to grow plants which feed a lot more people than the livestock would.
Not quite. Livestock maintains an area while the soil recovers between crops. There are plants which are fairly good at sequestering nutrients into the ground (e.g. clover) which also make excellent grazing for sheep and cattle, so the ground produces food (in the form of meat) while recovering for a new season of planting crops. With a well planned rotation no patch of land ever lies completely fallow while still keeping all lands sustainably farmable.

Feeding grain to cattle really is madness. It's because they can eat plants which are useful but nutritionally worthless to humans that they become desirable.

>>1717

I did read the rest of your thread. I only want to advise you that LED panels can be a mug's game. The cheaper ones do not work at all, there are mixed views on the grand-a-panel jobbies. It's your money I suppose, but it seems shady to me.

>>1717

Oh, and here's the final post in your thread.

>update on this, the haight solid state ppf-400 is okay, but just not enough. i wound up combining 4 sunshine systems glowpanel 45 panels together with the haight solid state ppf-400, all 5 of these panels together are kicking butt. that is a lot of panel for not a whole lot of coverage though, let's see, $110 average for each glowpanel, $165 for the used haight solid state, 202 watts of led that cost a total of $605 and it's doing about as good as my old 250 watt hps, i am saving a little bit on electricity but honestly, when i add up all that was spent on these leds the savings don't make much sense, even with bulb replacements every 6 months it sure takes a long time for the electricity savings to add up enough to off set it

>>1718
>>1719

And the people who disagreed with that earlier quote and others who said they were growing with them?

I guess people are only right and worth quoting when they agree with you.

I realised I am coming far too hostile about this for my tastes and you're only advising caution for the other lad's benefit anyway. I really don't want to go down that path, especially on /eco/. They can read up on these things more if it really interests them, etc. Especially now they've been given some key terms and ideas.

Sorry about that, fellow /eco/warriors.

>>1721
Don't worry, people here generally assume that a post is in good faith.

>>1700
Starting them off yourself is very time consuming. I have a tiny oak tree in a pot, it has taken five years to look anything like a tree. Buy one ready made, they're about 20 quid from a garden centre. I love them.

>>1701

How can they sell it so cheaply if it takes so much time and care to get started?

>>1701

Thanks chap. My local garden centre is apparently completely out of stock of them for some reason, but I'm sure I'll find another.

>>1702

Relatively speaking, that's not all that cheap - a plant of a similar size that didn't require as much attention could only be a fiver or so. Also, from my limited research, it depends how old they are. A 3 year old one is £20, but a 6 year old one is £50. They have older ones upwards of a hundred quid.

>>1705

I wasn't talking about relative prices, I was talking about how they can sell something so cheaply that apparently takes so long and so much effort to produce.

>>1706

I mean that some other kind of plant might also be two years old, and it will also require maintenance, just not as much. If you're talking about man hours, I can only imagine they do a whole load of them en masse, and don't spend nearly as much time and attention on them as the eventual owner will.

I can't speculate any further, I don't even own one yet.

There are some older threads which might help you, e.g.:
>>285 (soil improvement)
>>93 (generic growing)
>>778 (garden planning)
>>938 (more garden planning)
>>899 (salad and potatoes)

>>1694

What they said, but also plant potatoes, more than one variety, and plant some fruit trees.

Buy a water tank with a tap to collect rain water for watering.

Also consider getting a bee hive.

>>1696

Seems a bit much for a novice to leap into being an apiarist. There's a lot to learn there.

>>1693

Might be useful for those on a budget and lacking space:

http://www.freally.com/contents/view_content/563/what-can-i-reuse-or-recycle-to-make-a-vertical-gardenliving-wall

Hey OP, can we have a picture of your land please?

>>1678
Well then what about a fanned or espalier fruit tree? I can tell you that cherries are crap because the birds invariably get all of the fruit, but apples, plums or pears could be nice, or perhaps even gages, medlars or figs.
Not vegetables as such, but it's always nice to have food from the garden.

>>1679 I'm all for food from the garden but I really wanted something to climb up the wall. A fruit tree is not really what I'm after.

Passion fruit would be your best bet, you get some nice flowers and lovely fruit. Though you do need to check out which variety your buy since some of the fruiting varieties are fucking rancid. Being on a sunny wall they should ripen fine.

>>1681
They do require some care, though. In good conditions they can ramble out of control quite quickly if not tended to.

>>1682
I suppose I forget about these things living in a fiarly moderate climate, they are suceptible to frost and will need to be properly trained along wires. otherwise they start anchoring into the mortar and fucking up the pointing on the wall/ taking off any rendering. Just chek about to see which variety works best in your soil type and what type of fruit they give. Many of the larger varieties are watery and insipid and some of the varieties are not going to last very long once ripe.