John B. Marek

If you are one of the estimated 50 million people who received some sort of wearable technology this Christmas, you are most likely thinking about how that gear will help you improve your fitness, lose weight or become a better athlete. While all of these are great, there's a lot for the backyard homesteader to love about this technology, as well. No, your Fitbit won't tell you when to plant your garden or water your lawn... yet, but it will provide valuable feedback on the energy you are expending doing those things. If you watch shows like  Mountain Men , you will occasionally hear the narrator refer to the extraordinary number of calories the men burn each day as they go through their rigorous outdoor activities. For those of us who merely putter for a couple of hours each day in our backyards, though, it was difficult to get a feel for the level of exertion and how it related to other activities, like running or a gym workout. Sure, there was a general sense that mowing t...

Maybe you got it as a "hostess" gift, or maybe you bought it yourself to brighten up the house for the holidays; a Norfolk Island pine, rosemary topiary, Christmas cactus or poinsettia. And if you are like 90% of people who buy these plants, the minute the holiday decorations come down they will be headed to that great compost bin in the sky. That's really a shame because most of them make great year-round houseplants, and with a little care can provide many years of enjoyment. First, a couple of caveats: ​The businesses who grow and market Christmas plants fully understand that the vast majority of people are buying them as a sort of extended cut flower arrangement. Their efforts go into getting them to bloom at the correct time and stay relatively fresh and attractive looking for the 4 or 5 weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day. This impacts the way the plants are potted, fertilized, transported and even the specific varieties grown. In other words, very l...

A few years ago I received a well-intentioned Christmas gift from a family member who was not a fisherman; a bait-casting rod paired with a spinning reel. How exactly that particular combo came about is a story I would have loved to hear, but not wanting to hurt his feelings I simply said "thanks" and later bought an appropriate reel to go with the rod and appropriate rod to go with the reel. On the bright side, I guess you could say it was two for the price of one. While the "innovative" bait cast/spinning combo is maybe an extreme example of a non-fishermen buying questionable gifts for their fishing friends and family, it's not as uncommon as one might think, so I want to offer some simple advice for the non-fisherman who wants to purchase fishing-related gifts: 1. The number one best piece of advice I can offer is get professional help. No, not that kind of professional help, but the assistance of a sales associate that at the very least has been fishing...

The biggest change in most people’s holiday traditions typically results from marriage. Two completely different, often conflicting, sets of traditions have to be consolidated, mashed-up and ironed out. This process is even more difficult if the parents of the person you are marrying are divorced, which means you essentially have to merge THREE different sets of traditions. For the first several years Janet and I were married, we lived in The Little House on the Highway, which was not quite half-way between my parents’ house in Port Clinton and hers in Ft. Wayne. The first year, Janet’s mother actually came and had Thanksgiving dinner with us at my parents’ house. Back then, I was working as manager of a retail store, and while I had Thanksgiving day off for the first time in years, I would be putting in 14 hour days the rest of the holiday weekend, so it was impractical for me to travel anywhere. Once I got out of retail and into a more sane holiday work schedule, we began alternati...

For the homeowner who doesn't spend hours each week immersed in gardening journals, tweets and blogs, the term "lasagna garden" probably conjures up visions of tidy plots of Italian herbs and Roma tomatoes. But lasagna in this case refers to the process, not the product, of the garden. Also known as "kill mulch" or "sheet mulch" gardening, lasagna gardening is a no-till method which uses layers of mulch and compost to create a stratified growing medium while simultaneously enhancing the underlying soil. I stumbled across the idea a few years ago while, ironically, expanding my Square Foot Garden. I wanted to reclaim space for several new raised beds from my lawn and didn't want to use any sort of herbicide to kill the grass. I got the bright idea of cutting the grass as short as my mower would allow, then covering it with a layer of newspaper and several inches of shredded leaves. It was a fall project and effectively allowed me to kill two bir...

For my last two years of college, I drove an hour every Friday afternoon from my dorm at Bowling Green State University to my hometown of Port Clinton to work a weekend job and then back again every Sunday evening. The route I took was SR 105, a two-lane country road that roughly traced the path of the Portage River. At about the halfway point, just outside the tiny hamlet of Woodville, I would pass a small enterprise tucked between the road and a 20 foot cliff overlooking the river. While I forget the name, I recall that it was a hunting and fishing outfitter that advertised custom-made fishing rods. I never stopped, because I was always in a hurry to get to my job on Fridays and the shop was closed by the time I would pass late on Sundays, but I was always curious how successful that business could possibly have been, located as it was on a sparsely traveled back road far away from any population center. That was the mid-1980's and rural businesses faced a variety of marketin...

When I was a senior in high school, I took an aptitude test that indicated the occupation for which I was best suited was... forest ranger. I laughed and laughed. Forest ranger! What a ridiculous idea! Well, as you have probably gathered, time has proven that idea to be far less ridiculous than I thought. For better or worse, our educational infrastructure is designed to target very specific skills and promote very mainstream career options, often to the detriment of creativity and unorthodox choices. I see this in my day job as an economic developer for a rural community; manufacturing careers have been devalued to the point where we need special programs to explain to middle school students that there are good career opportunities in advanced manufacturing. I'm not saying that had my high school's curriculum been a but different, I would have embraced rather than scoffed at a job with the forest service. I'm not sure that, ultimately, I would have lived happily ever aft...