It’s been a little frustrating for sure… I adore our carpenter and he’s welcome back any time he’s in the area. The electrician was acceptable but I’ll probably go to my neighbor (commercial electrician) for future work. There’s just been a lot of overpromising and underdelivering on timelines, which is especially irksome to me as someone who does landscape contracting.

Thanks! My laundry drain just overflowed into the laundry room for the first time ever in the decade we’ve lived here 🫠

Our house is still being worked on, but hopefully it will be wrapped by the end of the month (press X, or some such). One of the new bedroom floors was finished so we were finally able to change the scenery if not the fact that all of us are still sleeping in one room. But moving everyone out of the room we had been sleeping in allowed me to rip out the old carpet, fix the subfloor, and put down the flooring I had saved during demo so at least my wife now has an honest-to-goodness home office for her wfh days. Code enforcement is coming tomorrow for our “final inspection” but I don’t know how that will go since the plumber didn’t bother to show up today to finish his work.

We’re so behind schedule on the renovation that I’ve been doing the things we’re ostensibly paying people to do just to get things finished, but I’m unsure how claiming hourly trade wages against what we still owe for work is supposed to go. Seriously, I’ve done so much trade work that I haven’t been to my markets (where I make my income) in over a month.

At least my wife’s new office looks nice

Yes, we have to cover things pretty consistently when they’re first sprouting. Cardinals, tanagers, and sparrows seem to love pulling young plants out. There’s usually less interest after a week or so, depending on how quickly the sprouts grow.

I also would’ve accepted Bennifer

I’ve never grown in those zones, but this page has a few tables of information that should help you out. Outside of the suggestions from A&M, figure out how many days you have til your average frost date and anything that takes fewer days to maturity is fair game

So it’s working as intended. I often think an actual way to address this would be to double the tax burden for each additional house held by any company and its subsidiaries - double taxes for the second, quadrupled for the third, and so on. Sure, there’s going to be a stark correction when all those homes hit the market but it’s better than bleeding families dry on renting them, and I’m not going to shed tears for people who paid 50k on their house and expected to sell for a million

I’ve been playing the coop online with a buddy and having a blast; from what I can tell the procgen is pretty much for raw material placement and the layout of some of the ‘naturally’ occurring tunnels and caverns.

Everything else feels stylized and I happen to like the art style, so it all feels handcrafted to me. If you’re referring to the pool of craftable items, there’s a slew of things to make but they’re all very similarly themed which makes sense given that they’re all 3d printed planetary exploration tools.

I don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier, but what about Astroneer? It’s closer to an adventure sim with rpg elements to it, but it’s entirely about exploration and crafting all of your adventuring gear and your home base(s).

+1 for the monster hunter games, everything is crafted from monsters you hunt and there are tons of ways to customize your gameplay based on your play style and what you craft.

The Etrian Odyssey series also bases what you can craft on what you can find, but crafting is less in-depth than MH. That said, you also make all the maps which is a huge bonus in my book

By doing it at the beginning of the dormant season, the collateral damage is very low. Permethrin is toxic to bees, fish, amphibians, and others, so we don’t use this method during their active seasons. This way, we can minimize the chances of any unintended species interacting with the tubes during the 45 day period when the permethrin is active

I am more of a forest person than a beach person, but rarely turn down a chance to stock up on seaweed for the compost and gardens. If they’re the european ones then I’ll feel less bad about the one that found itself near trees unexpectedly =D

We put cardboard tubes from toilet paper rolls, stuffed with shredded natural fibers (I’m clumsy and ruin shirts), that have been doused with permethrin out in the areas where voles and mice are each autumn. The rodents use the bits of cloth for their winter nests and the permethrin kills the ticks they’re carrying without harming any of the other arthropods we want around. It’s an easy, inexpensive, and reuse-minded way to help mitigate tick levels. Before doing it, I’d pull off several dozen ticks before June but the past few years I’ve pulled maybe five or so. An ounce of prevention, and all that jazz

A general rule of thumb is aged 1 year, especially if you don’t know what they use or if they board/breed horses since there’s a lot of variability there. If the part of the pile you’re digging into had a good worm population that’s a good sign for that section, but if you get into another area and the worms vanish then don’t include that in what you take

That sounds wonderful! I really enjoy letting our lettuce cross and seeing the patterns of the next generation.

Got a horse farm nearby

Always ask what their deworming schedule is like, or how long they’ve aged their manure. It’s good stuff, but even a few ppm of common deworming treatments can persist and cause problems for gardens and especially worm bins

Have you tried telling your sage how proud of the fig you are? That and some additional nitrogen inputs might get them to bounce back too

Huzzah! That sounds like such a neat tree!

I land more on the “ten iterations on every iteration that works” model of evolutionary pressures and the arms/gills race that ensues but I think this is appropriate regardless

People who know these kinds of things are particularly neat to me (like you!) I know they have a long life cycle if they make good decisions but didn’t realize they were considered different creatures based on their developmental stage

We’re lucky in that we have two ponds and many seasonal vernal pools in our wooded property, so we get to see a lot of really cool amphibians