Eric is still getting over the stomach flu, aka an acute gastrointestinal event, and we talk about how its probably not the last thing you at that made you sick.
Rick tells about a simple water filtration system called the BioSand Filter. you can help fund this to bring clean water to people in need here: http://friendlywater.net/ also check out Water.Org
Garden Fails and Success comes next. Be careful of free compost! Wise words we should have heeded.
GardenFork’s Facebook Discussion group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1692616594342396/
GF Contributor & Garden Expert Erin Schanen was interviewed on the Root Simple Podcast and talked at length about soil samples. Its got us thinking about why we don’t do that.
Here’s a video on how to make iced coffee. And our video on how to grow mushrooms.
We roll through a few videos on GF about growing mushrooms, dryer vent cleaning, pressure washing, and iced coffee.
Johan De Klein
Talking about ticks on your podcast it reminded me of an article I read about a trial to fight the population of ticks in the Netherlands. The Wageningen University will use sheep as a new weapon against the tick. The WUR has launched an experiment to test whether sheep can make an area free of ticks The animals are smeared with a certain substance, which immediately causes the tick to die when they suck on the sheep. The tick is becoming an ever-increasing problem in the Netherlands.it doesn’t harm sheep’s. Thought this was interesting.
Eric
@Johan Thanks for the info. I didn’t think about ticks being a problem in Europe, I thought it was a North American problem. We have several medicines we can apply to the coat of our dogs that causes the tick to die if it bites the dog. One reason I have Yellow Labradors and not Black Labs is so we can see the ticks crawling across their fur when the come inside. thx!
Brad Wilson
For ticks, at least here in Georgia, I’ve found free ranging my chickens have worked quite well on them. My property is fenced and I do have a LGD (livestock guardian dog), though the dog does not watch the chickens, but he will bark at anything he doesn’t recognize at night. The chickens are put up at night in a chicken tractor and let out in the morning to free range. At the beginning of the warm weather/spring we were pulling several ticks off of my wife and I daily, but once the chickens went to work we no longer see any.