I used to roll my eyes at those store chickens, figured they were just lazy food for people who can't cook. Had a buddy show me the 4 meals trick last winter and I felt like an idiot for all the years I passed them up. That Harold guy is a legend for passing it on.

Oh man, the classic "my soil is broken" spiral when it was really just a $6 pack of paper sitting in a hot garage all summer. I did the same thing with my tomatoes two years ago, dumping in sulfur and lime like a mad scientist because my strips said the dirt was pure acid, then a new pack said it was fine the whole time. The worst part is the strips don't even look bad, they just quietly lie to you for months while you wreck your garden. Mine lived in a shed that hit 100 degrees so I'm guessing that did it. Now I keep them inside a ziplock in the house and check the box date like it's milk.

I read a long thread on a trucking forum once where a bunch of old drivers said the same thing, that the stuff you really need to know gets passed down in diners and truck stops, not classrooms. "A guy at a diner fixed my swing" is a great way to put it, because most of those old timers never wrote anything down, they just showed the next guy. Half the tricks I use came from somebody I met for ten minutes who had no reason to help me.