Wood ash can be used on your lawn, but with a few cautions. Turfgrass does best in soil that is slightly acidic (pH 6.3-6.8). Wood ash is alkaline, so if your soil is basic (pH above 7) then you don't want to raise the soil pH by using wood ash. Another issue is spreading wood ash. Due to it's fine consistency is can be very difficult to spread it evenly on the lawn. If you find a good way to spread wood ash evenly and your soil is acidic then wood ash would help with the pH and it contains potassium and other micronutrients. It's pH effect is not as dramatic as lime, roughly half as effective by weight, so overapplication is probably not an issue, but avoid having piles of it on the ground as that can lead to areas of high pH.

When one of our camping friends died, his widow didn't want to quit camping, and since our son and her kids were such good friends, I suggested I would teach her how to tow her travel trailer. so, she got pretty adept at towing, so we'd go on short trips--us in our pickup & trailer, and she in her Station wagon & Trailer. Her youngest daughter sort of adopted me as her substitute father, so i treated her as good as her daddy did, or so i tried to do. (She still calls me Dad) We were up in northern Ohio on one trip, and upon seeing a sign for a campground, we pulled in, and as my wife stepped out of the truck, a beer can rolled out of the door opening! This wouldn't have been so bad, but the camp was a religious camp! And then, my semi-adopted daughter got out of the car behind us, driven by her mother (Not accompanied by a male!) and hollered:"Hey, Dad, is this where we are going to stay tonight?" Well, by this time, my wife had been talking to the man in charge, and when he heard Debbie say that, we got the "Bum's Rush!" I suppose he saw the beer can, too! A funny thing about that situation was--there was never any hanky-panky going on, but we'd kid about me and my 2 wives and all our kids, wherever we went! We all had gone to Westmoreland Mall one day to shop! I didn't want to do all that walking, so i went to an ice cream store, bought a big cone and went outside to eat it! i sat on a park bench, and began talking to an old guy there. And then, the 2 ladies and 4 kids came up, saying:"Dad, why didn't you buy ice cream for all of your kids?" The old guy gave me a funny look, got up, and walked away, fast! by: Rustyj

In Korea, almost 50 years ago, nearly everyone lived in single-family homes, usually each in a walled compound. Every home, including city ones, had a latrine in a small shed out back, a hole in the ground, over which one squatted to do one's business. Without contacting the facility: orientals think our habit of having multiple persons' rear ends (serially) touching the facility quite distasteful - as well as unhygienic in the extreme. Only a very few newspapers came into the average village, were passed from hand to hand for reading (reused), and then again for final use after the news had staled (recycled). No problem with surplus used newspapers. Entrepreneurs trundled ox-carts into town and charged householders a fee to empty their latrines, dipping the product with dried half-gourds on a stick, then pouring it into wooden tanks (which were much more durable than steel), which all the foreign community called "honey buckets". They hauled the loads out to the nearby farms, sold the product to the farmers to enrich their fields and scattered it immediately on the land - without composting. We were cautioned not to eat raw vegetables without thorough cleansing, with green ones to be used uncooked washed in water to which we'd added a chemical, as roundworm infestation was almost universal. Something like a third of the population were farmers in those days - with each farmer's holding being something like 3 acres. Many local farmers had been displaced to build military barracks for both Korean and a number of international brigades, airfields, etc. (including Prisoner of War camps which held many thousands of detainees). Refugees mostly had to scrounge a location wherever they could find it - a shack built of scraps over an open drain, high on mountainsides on unclaimed land, etc. So refugees who'd been farmers found it impossible to obtain land to work. In wartime, many businesses, industry and commerce were closed down, so it was very difficult also for non-farmers to find employment. Huge changes have taken place in Korea since those days. By the way - it's important for us to help the Afghans get back on their feet: they've known nothing but destructive war for a couple of generations - and (unlike the Iraqis) have few resources to pay for the rebuilding. By the way, we Canadians have a major lesson to learn from the Koreans - how to live next door to big neighbour(s) for centuries, without getting eaten. I hope that you're all enjoying a summer which adds some new polished facets to the diamond of your being. joyful guy

I lived in a big old white brick farmhouse as a child, with a brick summer kitchen, where the wringer washer, with its bench and two rinse tubs sat, through a door ahead to go into the woodshed, where they used to store a buggy, I guess, as there was a double door in it. Turn left to take the door outside, or right through a door into a lean-to porch, then left along a few steps to another door leading to a two-holer ... that I don't recall ever seeing used by more than one person at a time ... so I guess the second was provided in case of extreme emergency. There was a fairly large sized pail under each hole. That was the facility that we used in fair weather. Actually, there was a door going outside from that lean-to porch, then go down a few wooden steps and a few steps ahead was a small brick building, with no door on it when I was young, which had a large pile of wood, sometimes coal, ashes: it had been a smokehouse, in earlier years, I was told, where the people smoked their meat to preserve it for winter use. For use when the weather got near teeth-chattering cold, in one of the six upstairs rooms, most of them bedrooms, we had a small metal rounded box with a wooden seat and lid on top and a door in the front, which held a large metal pail, which Dad would carry out to add to the pile of manure by the horse stable, when it got filled. There was a small pipe leading from the box into the wall, into one of the four inactive chimneys in the lower part of the roof near the corners. There was another chimney, built in the centre of the house on top of one of the interior brick cross-walls, with a pipe from the furnace in the basement leading up through the front hall to the hall in the second storey, then through that floor into the attic, where it led into that chimney. We had a big old kitchen range, with a much larger pipe called a "fuel-saver" in the regular pipe just above the range, with its pipe going through the floor into the second storey, on the other side of the hall, so it had a bend over our heads to go to the other side, then travel a few feet to join the smoke pipe from the furnace on its way to the attic. We had a cistern in the basement to catch water from the roof for washing, and a hand pump in the yard to fill a pail to bring in for drinking and cooking. Dad said that it needed cleaning, but that the rocks, stones and bricks in its wall were so loose that he was afraid that they'd fall in on him. So he had a well drilled right beside the house in 1936, in the Dirty Thirties depression, so we got a tap in the house and trenches dug to carry water to three barns to serve the animals. Mom had gone to psych. hosp. a couple of years before, was there about 6 more years prior to her death. If she'd been home, it's possible that we'd have both a bathroom ... but as it was, the first real modern bathroom that I experienced was when I went away to University. Dad's mother and a hired housekeeper were the women in the house ... keeping Dad and three boys more or less out of mischief: usually the "housekeeper" was the wife of a fairly recently married couple, who came to work on our farm as a couple, and needed to leave when they were about to have a family. One woman who'd been with us earlier came back, with a small child, after her husband went to war, more or less offering to help our family for room and board ... I don't know what financial arrangements there were between her and Dad. I had some connection with them, years later, after my return to this area: her husband was a taxi driver ... and they'd had trouble with a daughter related to drugs. ole joyfuelled