Think about predators - everything: rats, cats, dogs, hawks, mink, snakes, raccoons, foxes, bears, alligators, human thieves etc - depending on where you are. They taste like chicken. Can you predatorize the coop or will you accept a certain rate of loss (be aware that once they know the chickens are there, they’ll be back). And what are you going to do with injured, not dead chickens?

Our run has hardware netting on all sides including the top and under the dirt, and we let them out in the garden to live their best lives when we’re at home. So far this has kept predation down although we have had some curious cats.

Also if you have kids think about whether your chickens are livestock or pets. Ours are pets that lay eggs.

You can definitely take the train from Italy to Sweden. This summer we took the train back and forth from Denmark to Italy, with children.

Where is the existing building mass in those pictures? It’s all weird glass pods. I don’t want to live in a glass pod. Did we just blow up all the old brick warehouses, Victorians, old farmhouses that got engulfed by the city, etc etc?

I want to see my little old house from the 1930s that’s been energy retrofitted, with solar panels and a solar water heater and barrels under the gutters, with apple trees and chickens in the backyard and some bicycles in front.

It’s still important to acknowledge that the usage in the medical/health sectors is also dehumanizing. It’s so disempowering and alienating.

I work in the health sector not in the US and I would never refer to a patient that way no matter what language I’m speaking.

So, what you’re saying here is that your life would improve if you got a divorce…

Fascinating read, thanks for sharing. It reminds me a little of the natural historians of the 1800s but with less colonialism.

He was 34 when he started in 2013.

And reducing food waste! I was surprised to see that individual/household food waste is so significant in terms of agricultural impact.

This is super common though. I mix up my kids’ names on a daily basis, it’s not because I don’t know who they are or can’t tell them apart. They do think it’s hilarious when I mix them up with the chickens.

The common factor is that I am usually saying the same mindless stuff to my kids (and chickens), like “get down from there” or “move out of the way please” or “stop making so much noise”.

Oh God, I swear our local supermarket moves the fresh fish every three weeks. It’s always the fish and it just fills me with rage. I don’t want to do a meter by meter search for a chunk of salmon while my picky children are whining and chewing on my kneecaps.

Not defending this particular wool shop but often those sorts of specialty shops also have an online side. Weird that they would throw customers out though

Also if you spend time with chickens, you realize without a doubt that birds = dinosaurs. Especially if you raise them from chicks, their awkward teenage stage is like half bird, half lizard anyway.

We are from Scandinavia and right now we are in the Alps, later we are going to Italy.

There’s been work on the railways that has changed our itinerary and caused some delays but otherwise it has been ok.

We are not huge travelers but previously we’ve driven in our little car or flown and rented a car (ie Iceland, visiting family in the US). My main concern was changing so many trains with children and luggage but they’ve done really well (they are tweens). They are used to trains though.

Pros:

• I don’t have to drive for hours and hours (I am the only driver in the family)
• not having to go through security, also we have been inside the Schengen area so no passport controls
• you can get up and move around in the trains and it is more comfortable than in a plane
• not as much queueing as at airports
• night trains can save an overnight at a hotel
• you get to see the landscape you are crossing, and even if it is just fields or industry it is better than freeway or clouds
• other travelers seem more chill and less stressed than when flying

Cons:

• you can’t bring as much with you as in your car and you have to handle your own luggage when changing
• there’s still waiting around and risk of missed connections
• it takes more travel time out of the total itinerary than flying
• still risk of motion sickness especially with seats where your back is to the direction you’re traveling
• still not cheap

I would do it again but there are still some destinations where I would prefer to drive, such as far out in the countryside or where the public transportation is not great.

We’re on vacation and it’s 100% public transportation from beginning to end, the kids are doing pretty good with schlepping their bags on and off trains.

I have a cuddle chicken, too. They are the best.

The second one here is great and really stands out from the other submissions, especially with the non-pastel colour scheme.

The second one is really good!

Paving stones/cobbles seem to work much better than concrete and asphalt. They are very durable (stone), can be put down in different patterns, and if you need to do maintenance on underground stuff you can just rip them up and then replace the same stones when you’re done. They also appear to be more frost stable.

How important is it to focus on native vs non-invasive plants in a European context? I live in Scandinavia but come originally from North America and in NA there can be a pretty intense ideal of native plant gardening that I don’t experience the same way here. Ex, lavender is not native to Scandinavia and nobody seems to care.

If you have anything to say on the subject of drought tolerant plants and grasses suitable for Northern Europe I’d love to hear it.

I think it’s also important to have a diversity of aesthetics and cultural representations to gain a more universal appeal - and also that diversity needs to be understood very broadly. Movements like this seem to typecast themselves relatively quickly, as there are few role models available and people adopt an aesthetic, or mannerisms, or jargon as a sort of identifier that they belong to the group, which ends up being just as exclusionary as it is a marker of inclusion.

There will always be people who see the extreme version as wildly inspiring, and those who see it as ugly or frightening or wildly unrealistic. Ex: earthships - personally I think it’s awesome to have a self-sufficient space with indoor gardens, but they are huge and ugly af. But people renovating and retrofitting their century old houses with natural materials and respect for the original architecture? Yes please.

I guess I’m trying to say that the fantastic needs to have a place under the umbrella alongside the pragmatic, and the vegans alongside the people with turkeys in their backyard, and the DIY permies alongside people who would never ever use an old bathtub as a planter but are willing to xeriscape their front lawn with native perennials, and the people who make their own sandals out of bicycle tubes alongside the people who buy really expensive shoes for life etc etc.