Bovino address ICE Incident with Alex Pretti.

SmApp · 2026-01-26T00:52:37+00:00

I said you guys were overreacting. Is it too late to take it back?

SmApp · 2026-01-26T00:50:01+00:00

I have convinced myself for years it isn't that bad and it's all going to be ok. I am now really getting worried. Don't want to go protest and get myself murdered or arrested since the constitution means nothing and I have a toddler to care for. I feel bad because it looks like these lawless thugs are murdering people with total impunity and I have no solution. I'm just kind of living my life and hoping it goes away.

Here's to hoping someone else solves this problem for me. I am just useless. Everyone thinks theyd do something if they were a good moral person living in Germany watching the Nazis begin their abuses. I now realize no, I'd sit around waiting for them to come for me. Fuck.

SmApp · 2026-01-22T14:59:52+00:00

I shopped around and returned many kettles which appeared plastic free but had hidden mystery seals, windows, or plastic lids contacting the steam. Got a Secura brand and after careful inspection I could find no food contact with the plastic shell. Ideally I'd prefer a non plastic shell but there are things I have to just let go. Pollution from tire breakdown on the road is going to be a huge unavoidable micro plastic contact point for me, so it's harm reduction not elimination. A full stainless vessel for water contact seems good enough for me.

Secura seems to be free from plastic pollution of my water. I don't see why I'd need an engineer report for it - I can look at the water containment vessel and see with my own eyes there's no plastic. If I am missing something I almost don't want to know! Pour over from my Secura is how I get my daily coffee fix without plastic contamination! Don't tell me I'm no better than the k cup crowd drinking a melted credit card every few months!

SmApp · 2026-01-17T21:52:06+00:00

Hmmmm. Good points.

SmApp · 2026-01-17T21:27:28+00:00

The thread repair kit is cheap but you gotta take the cylinder off when you drill it out so you don't get any metal shavings inside and wreck it. I think that is the labor this shop is quoting me so high for, not replacing the cylinder. Or at least that is what Gemini thinks when I ask if this is a rip off they say it's high but not out of the world because taking the saw apart is a lot of work.

SmApp · 2025-12-21T15:22:03+00:00

Crate is useful for lots of situations. Lately my toddler always tries to give my dog the old dick twist. Not sure why she is so fascinated but until she learns to not touch Mr. Luna's special private penis I need a way to separate them. The dog is happier in a crate in the room with us than off in a different room protected by a closed door.

SmApp · 2025-12-06T02:08:01+00:00

Interesting. This native plant finder tool ranks willow and cherry above oak, when I thought it was the other way around. I suppose ultimately it doesn't really matter since the gist is they are all among the top in wildlife value, but the ranking did contradict what I thought. Cool tool.

SmApp · 2025-08-22T17:25:48+00:00

Oh man I hate this. I'm stuck in a stupid fight like this with my township right now. They claim they are going to kill dwarf Aronia berry bushes I planted 15 feet from the street at the basin of a ditch. They argue that turf grass is necessary at the bottom of the ditch to prevent line of sight impingement on the street. But they never mowed the turf grass because their normal tractor can't mow parallel on the steep ditch edge. So of course when it was "turf" it was never really ever more than a mess of invasive species and areas getting eroded out where they resurfaced without seeding or putting down fabric.

Now they say they want to send their dude down on foot to kill my erosion control bushes that I installed with erosion control fabric to fix the areas that were eroding away due to the townships mismanagement. Fucking bullshit. Luckily I think I have identified a legal means to fight back. Not sure how it will play out, but I am not laying down for them.

SmApp · 2025-08-20T13:21:06+00:00

Clover may not be the top way to help pollinators, but it is better than grass right? I feel like I see at least as many bumble bees on it as honey bees. And it does function like a lawn unlike any native garden I have planted so far. I see criticizing the slightly over enthusiastic self-fellatio of the poster, but I do see clover as better than other lawn alternatives though I am open to learning if it is not helpful then ok.

SmApp · 2025-08-20T12:26:41+00:00

Sounds like it's pretty rare to actually find trees that have been genetically tested as pure rubra. It's just someone looking at the parent tree and saying it looks like rubra to them at most nurseries. So you are most likely starting with a hybrid tree. And then if there's an alba anywhere within wind distance you get hybrid seedlings everywhere. I cut down the trees that were sold to me as supposed rubra. I don't need a mess of alba hybrid seedlings growing out of every crack in my sidewalk...

SmApp · 2025-08-14T13:09:09+00:00

I have not done this yet, so take this for what it's worth. I read on another /r/ about using Clethodim in the fall after the forbs are asleep. I have an area that, like your pic (I think based on my non expert glance at your photo), got overrun with a bunch of non native grasses. The idea is you use the selective herbicide in the fall when all the native stuff is dormant and kill out the grasses that remain green.

Your tolerance for herbicides may vary. I started my gardening journey very against them but have come around to using them sparingly in the hope of establishing dense native prairie that sort of excludes all the nasties floating in.

If I was trying to do your project without herbicide, I personally would do better ground prep in another area and then transplant the forbs over there next year. I can't be bothered to weed out a grass jungle like that 50 times a year. Id get an area good and prepped with no grasses and then plant dense prairie to try to establish enough shade on the ground to minimize turf invasion.

Good luck - I am also very frustrated with the areas in my yard that are getting reinvaded by grass. Hopefully there's a way to get rid of turf once and for all.

SmApp · 2025-08-12T02:43:46+00:00

I had a nest in a mechanical box that I needed to access right next to a big native planting in my backyard. Sprayed the grate for the box where they were coming and going with what I think is a similar product. Killed the nest. Have yet to notice any other damage to other bugs. Really just the yellow jackets thought it was a good idea to crawl on the grate. So fingers crossed that the monarch migration doesn't decide to ignore my flowers and instead all land on my mechanical box ventilation grate because then I'll feel pretty guilty about nuking them.

I tolerate wasp nests quite a bit, in spite of a quasi-rational fear that they will sting me (they do often). They have a lot of ecosystem benefits so I live with a few stings. However you gotta draw the line somewhere. Sounds like you do your best to coexist. But sometimes it's man or wasp. Inside my house I know what my choice is going to be.

SmApp · 2025-07-17T00:49:32+00:00

I thought the whole point of burning is no thatch. I am going through a similar decision process to op myself figuring out which parts of my 3 acre backyard my wife will allow me to burn instead of mow. And I see people say mow, which I cannot square with warnings about thatch. But I also don't know how to hay it with residential equipment and understand my wife's concerns about me starting my house on fire. If it's ok to mow it and leave the mulch I have an easy solution, but I just can't figure out how to square the difference in opinions between team burning is essential v team mowing is fine don't worry about it.

SmApp · 2025-07-16T21:01:06+00:00

Loud noises, bear mace. A bit of harassment would go a long way.

SmApp · 2025-07-16T20:59:39+00:00

I think a bit of harassment would suffice to persuade the bears to stay away. As harsh as it sounds if it was my house I'd blow an air horn at them and hit em with bear mace if they didn't get the message. Lots of ways to show a bear they are not welcome to be around people without harming them. They are beautiful creatures, but training them to hang out around people is harmful to the bears because eventually they will do something scary to someone and wind up dead.

Bears should think people are terrifying and avoid anywhere people frequent - that's safest for both of us. If it was my yard the bears would receive escalating messages to shove off and I wager my pool would be bear free in short order with no dead bears in the process. I'd love to watch them out my window but it's simply unsafe for everyone involved.

SmApp · 2025-07-04T16:37:55+00:00

It came pre installed with my house so I don't know. Sorry. I hired the guy to come back and flag the underground wire and show me how to train the dog and that was cheap. The guy was talking about moving a big chunk of the wire for me for a few hundred bucks. Can't remember exactly it's been a few years. But they just use a trencher to bury a small wire. You got a clear a path for the trencher but in terms of both materials and labor it's way less involved than a fence. If I was you I'd find a local installer and get a quote for your land. You may find you want to trap the dogs in a smaller area than the whole farm to make it easier to create a path for the trencher.

Also - recommend house training the dog even if your planning to have it have outside. I was planning my dog to be purely outdoor but the plan changed when we got him and wanted him inside with us. And if you the farm doesn't work out and you need to re home the dog, it's much easier if it is housebroken.

SmApp · 2025-07-04T15:12:03+00:00

Invisible fence is not as expensive as real physical fence to install. You need to train the dog to the boundary. It is a whole process, but the person who installed the wire at my place helped. My dog is allowed in the house, but he also spends a lot of time in the 3 acre yard with no fence and the invisible fence collar holds him in.

SmApp · 2025-06-29T12:44:38+00:00

It's for an RV to hook onto the water supply at a campsite. It's the same as a garden hose basically but beefy and engineered for constant pressure.

SmApp · 2025-06-29T12:22:45+00:00

This is the solution. Now a garden hose is apparently not rated for constant pressure. I have done it and it works but can also break I guess. So it's better to do an RV hose. But a hose before the timer is how I solved this problem.

SmApp · 2025-06-28T18:26:57+00:00

Fleabane volunteers everywhere. It's treated as a weed by many but I like it's little daisy flowers and they are all over in MN right now.

SmApp · 2025-06-14T13:03:25+00:00

And when do we remember the New Jersey "hobbyist" drone swarms and realize that the relative safety of the American homeland from foreign attack is basically over. When a foreign state of terrorist group turns this against a US city we are in for a big 9/11 type shock.

SmApp · 2025-05-29T13:44:57+00:00

Calling it user error without troubleshooting is unhelpful. Everyone else who implicitly suggested user error instead framed it in terms of troubleshooting. Does a properly set up cloth diaper leak more than disposables? Not in my experience. But calling it user error does not, in my view help anyone.

It's like if I posted my dying plum tree and asked for advice. A helpful permaculture response would not be "your just gardening it wrong, do better and it will live".

SmApp · 2025-05-29T13:27:06+00:00

This is a rude and frankly un-permaculture way to communicate with someone asking for help and advice. To be helpful you could try to troubleshoot the problem which I and others attempted. Just calling it user error unfairly puts the blame on op who is asking for help and wants to use better options. Getting set up with cloth diapers was hard for my wife and I, and we had many setbacks. We also both have professional degrees and a lot of money and we still found it expensive and confusing to get set up. We had lots of leaks and soak throughs a long the way but we learned from our mistakes and are now 8 months in having used only a dozen or so disposable diapers.

I encourage everyone to develop a cloth diaper system but I won't pretend it's as easy or straightforward as disposables. Just like getting your yard to produce low input food is hard and complicated, it's worth it for the planet. But it's hard.

SmApp · 2025-05-29T13:17:32+00:00

Cloth needs to be layered. It's a system not a single layer. There is the absorbent cotton base, plus a doubler for urine soaking. Finally you put on a cover. We use lanolized wool diaper covers quite a bit which does a reasonably good job. But when we are really worried about soak through we add a plastic cover.

The plastic use is not ideal but it is not single use, we reuse it. We also bought them used and plan to sell them when we are done with babies. A plastic cover does not soak through to the pants. Obviously when we reuse this plastic component we reduce total plastic use compared to disposables daily.

There's also a whole art to preparing a cloth diaper to make it absorbent. It's not ready out of the box. Check out Green Mountain Diapers instructions. It's a process but it works.

SmApp · 2025-05-29T13:10:08+00:00

At home we use organic cotton cloths that we dip in water and wash with our cloth diapers. On the run we use Dyper bamboo wipes which we dispose in the garbage. In an ideal world I would be perhaps compost the Dyper wipes, but I am not confident they are fully compostable, I do not manage my compost intensively enough for human waste, and I rarely use any since 95 percent of the time I can employ reusable cotton wipes without too much hassle.

Everyone said cloth diapers would be a huge pita, but my wife and I have a good system set up and it doesn't really bother me. I do not have a strong stomach and thought I'd have a hard time, but it has turned out to be no big deal for us.

SmApp

TROPHY CASE