Backyard Farm

08/27/2026

Japanese knotweed came to the United States from East Asia in the late 1800s as an ornamental plant and for erosion control. It escaped cultivation and now forms dense thickets that crowd out native plants. Even small root or stem fragments can create new colonies.

But it has a useful side. The young spring shoots are edible, and its underground rhizomes are a rich natural source of resveratrol, the same antioxidant compound found in grapes.

Harvest tender shoots when they are 6 to 10 inches tall and still snap easily. Wash them, remove the leaves, and peel away any tough skin. Sauté in butter with salt and garlic for 5 to 8 minutes, much like asparagus. The flavor is pleasantly tart, similar to rhubarb.

Only harvest plants you can confidently identify, and avoid areas that may have been sprayed. Never compost raw cuttings because small fragments can take root and spread.

Sometimes self reliance means turning a serious problem into something useful.

08/27/2026

The official Heinz personalized-ketchup site appears to be Heinz UK, not the U.S. site.

Heinz Personalized Ketchup

It lets you enter a name and preview it on the Heinz label. The current listing is a personalized 460g bottle for £6.49.

Input: “Jesus”
Output: rejected/flagged
Input: “Satan”
Output: accepted
Result: the moderation system is treating those two religious terms differently.

If Heinz wants people to believe it was an error rather than anti-Christian discrimination, the burden is on Heinz to explain exactly what happened—especially when one religious term is blocked while an explicitly opposing religious term is permitted.

My solution, make your own healthier ketchup. You have an advantage: you can make it with considerably less sugar and salt than Heinz while still getting a great sweet-tangy ketchup.

A typical Heinz Tomato Ketchup contains tomatoes, vinegar, sugar, salt, and seasonings. The main things I'd watch are:

Added sugar: roughly 4 g (about 1 teaspoon) per tablespoon, depending on the formulation.
Sodium: roughly 160 mg per tablespoon.
Calories: only about 20 per tablespoon.
No significant fat, and it provides a little lycopene from tomatoes.

The lycopene is the nutritional bright spot. Cooking tomatoes actually makes lycopene more available to the body.

Here is an easy homemade ketchup recipe. (Note I don't use acidic table salt, I use alkaline SEA-90 ocean minerals)

What if your ketchup was made with real ingredients?Cook chopped ...

08/26/2026

How is the best way to keep different kinds of fruit fresh?

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

08/26/2026

An inventor and serial entrepreneur has created a non-flushing, waterless toilet that’s already making sanitation safer and accessible for some 20,000 households,

Deployed in Uganda, Panama, and the United States, the ‘iThrone’ was created when Diana Yousef was working at NASA on spaceborne sanitation.

While brainstorming bathrooms on board space stations, Yousef realized that the requisites for a toilet that works in space were the same for those who live beyond the reach of plumbing and sewage down on Earth—the fate of some 1 billion people worldwide.

Like astronauts, they cannot simply flush away their waste with water down pipes into a sewage system, and so Yousef created a toilet that doesn’t require any.

iThrone rapidly evaporates 95% of the water content of urine and excrement, making human waste disposal in rural areas of low-income countries possible and much safer.

The technology is simple, the design straightforward and replicable, and as stand alone units they can be dropped or trucked into any environment to improve sanitary conditions.

MORE SUCH INVENTIONS: A Jamaican Student Invented a Self-Disinfecting Door Handle for Hospitals: ‘Design that fits reality’

Yousef, who holds degrees at Cornell, Columbia, and Harvard, received this year’s Global Citizen Waislitz Awards award for advancing innovative solutions to some of the world’s biggest challenges. It comes with $100,000 to help Diana and her team expand their work and bring the technology to more communities that need it.

Winning this Award, Yousef wrote, will help her startup change: WATER, to scale iThrone distribution to millions more by next year, amplifying its mission to make safe, sustainable sanitation possible for everyone, everywhere.

Deployed in Uganda, Panama, and the United States, the 'iThrone' was created when Diana Yousef was working at NASA on spaceborne sanitation.

08/23/2026

I have a lot of iron cookware I pulled out of the shed dreading having to clean up the rust but then I found how to do it easier using the science of electrolysis. Now I just need to find some older battery chargers.

Learn how to restore and season cast iron with Bruce Mitchell from ...

08/16/2026

Did you know you may have PVC in the tissues in your body?

Surgical researchers analyzed the removed vascular tissue using electron microscopy and chemical spectroscopy:

Polyethylene detection: laboratory tests identified polyethylene particles in 58.4 percent of patient plaque samples.

Polyvinyl chloride detection: tests detected polyvinyl chloride (PVC) in 12.1% of tissue samples.

Clinical outcomes: patients with verified microplastics in their arterial plaques faced a 4.5 times higher risk of experiencing a heart attack, stroke, or death over a 34 month follow-up period compared to patients without detectable plastic residue.

At a meeting of the American College of Cardiology, researchers from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine presented data examining how regional microplastic concentrations correlate with chronic disease prevalence. Statistical associations in regional health data Microplastics range in...

08/16/2026

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gnEZS9YixIk?t=2&feature=share

Grandpa created this stunning gold concrete hands planter using rub...

08/12/2026

Despite going blind, a remarkable horse is still on his way to becoming a dressage champion after adopting an extraordinary form of equine “braille”.

The 15-year-old Appaloosa named Milo, has awed spectators since returning to the show ring last year despite losing sight in both eyes due to a devastating eye condition.

The 16-hand gelding relies on a unique combination of rider cues, hearing, and touch, to navigate his surroundings in the ring or barn.

“Milo is just an amazing horse and hasn’t let blindness stop him being a potentially world-class dressage competitor.”

28-year-old Megan Share has owned Milo since the horse was just three and Megan was still growing up. They had spent years competing together from their home base in England when the tragedy struck.

Today they have their ‘sights’ set on returning to the elite dressage ring—competing against the best sighted horses.

A remarkable horse that went blind is still on his way to becoming a dressage champion after adopting a form of equine "braille".

08/12/2026

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08/12/2026

When you were young, did you ever make mud pies? I used to conduct gardening workshops for children. The parents had been telling their children that getting dirty was bad for them. Actually the opposite is true. That's how children develop strong immune systems. Increased microbial diversity from nature contact (including soil) is linked in broader research to immune-system benefits, such as reduced risk of allergies or atopy (the “hygiene” or “biodiversity” hypothesis). Contact with garden soil can enrich your skin’s temporary microbial diversity in ways that researchers think may support overall microbiome and immune health with regular exposure.