The animals that feed a household, the rules that keep foragers alive, and a sky you can tell time by — no feed, no battery, pure arithmetic. — the sundial prints ready to mount.
🐔 The small menagerie — animals a household can actually keep
Chickens (start here): 3–6 hens feed a family eggs. Dry draft-free coop, 30 cm of roost each, a nest box per 3 hens, water always. They eat scraps + forage + grain; lock them up at DUSK every night — everything eats chicken. A hen lays ~5 eggs a week for 2–3 good years.
Rabbits (the quiet meat): a buck and two does out-breed anything; 30 days to kindle, 8 weeks to grown. Shade is life — heat kills rabbits before cold ever will. Solid-floor rest board in wire hutches, feed greens/hay/garden waste, never lawn-mower clippings (they ferment).
Goats (milk on rough land): escape artists — the fence must be better than you think (if it holds water, it holds a goat, goes the joke). NEVER just one (they sicken alone); browse beats grass; milk twice daily once freshened, same hours. A doe gives 2–4 L/day.
Bees (the pollination engine): one hive pollinates a whole garden and pays honey rent. Face the entrance to morning sun, water nearby, leave them 15–20 kg of their own honey for winter — take only the surplus. Move slow, work them on warm still afternoons, and get stung a little; it's part of the rent you pay.
Compost (the herd that eats everything): greens (scraps, manure) + browns (straw, leaves, paper) in rough halves, damp as a wrung sponge, turned when it cools. Hot pile in weeks, lazy pile in a year — both end as the soil the Well plants into. Meat/oils invite rats; keep them out (or bury deep in the middle of a HOT pile).
🍄 Foraging — the rules that keep you alive
The iron rule: no ID, no eat. 100% certain, from THREE features, or it does not go in the basket. "Probably" is a funeral word.
Mushrooms get a harder rule: learn them from a living person in your own region, one species at a time, spore print and all. The deadly ones (the destroying angels) look gentle, taste fine by report, and give you a good first day — the poison works while you feel recovered. No book, no app, and not this page is enough for mushrooms.
Learn the region's few DEADLY plants first (hemlocks — the parsley family's killers — nightshades, yew), so everything is judged against them. A carrot-like plant near water is treated as hemlock until proven otherwise, three times.
The universally-safe starts: dandelion (all of it), stinging nettle (cooked), cattail (roots/shoots/pollen), acorns (leached), wild berries that match a known picture EXACTLY — aggregate berries (raspberry-shaped) are the safest family.
New food, even a certain one: a small portion first, wait a day. Forage away from roadsides and sprayed fields; take a third, leave two-thirds — next year eats too.
Children are taught ONE rule: nothing goes in the mouth until a grown-up who knows says its name out loud.
☀️ The sundial-maker — print a clock
(roughly: your map knows; 5°–80° works — at the equator use a different dial design)
Print this page; the dial face is drawn for YOUR latitude.
Mount it flat and level. The gnomon (the shadow-caster) is a triangle glued upright along the noon line: its angle above the plate = your latitude (a protractor, or fold paper to the printed angle).
Point the gnomon's high edge at true north (southern hemisphere: true south, and mirror the dial): true north = where the sun stands at local noon, or a compass corrected for your area's declination.
It reads LOCAL SUN TIME — honest time. Clock time differs by your longitude within the timezone and the season's ±15 min wobble; for a world without timetables, sun time is the truer one anyway.
🌙 The moon tonight — and the sky's other clocks
🌑…
Moonlight is a work-light: full moon rises at sunset and burns all night — the traveling and harvest nights. New moon nights belong to the stars (and the star pages: Starforge ships the real sky).
Tides follow the moon: roughly two highs and two lows a day, each about 50 minutes later than yesterday. Biggest swings (springs) at full and new moon; laziest (neaps) at the quarters. Never turn your back on a rising sea.
The year's four corners: solstices ~Jun 21 & Dec 21, equinoxes ~Mar 20 & Sep 22. The Well's frost dates hang off these; so do the feasts on the turning-year strip.
North without a compass: the two end stars of the Big Dipper's bowl point to Polaris — and Polaris's height above the horizon IS your latitude, which is the number the sundial wanted.
Part of the Ark. Husbandry and skylore as commonly taught; the dial and moon are pure arithmetic (formulas in source). Corrections: 🔔 ring the bell.