The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

How to keep your feet dry in wet boots

Slide a grocery bag in your boot to keep your foot dry.Today's homesteading tip originated with my mother, I swear, not with a homeless person.  On a farm, it's awfully easy to get your boots wet even if they're waterproof.  Maybe the world is full of deep, damp snow (like last week) and clods drop down the back of your heel.  Maybe you slip off the creek bank while sawing through a grapevine (like this week) and your foot submerges in frigid water.  Either way, the worst thing you can do is keep working with wet feet.  But if you don't have a good pair of spare boots, what do you do?

Take a plastic grocery store bag and wrap it around your dryly socked foot.  Then slide the whole shebang into your boot --- this has the added bonus of making boots slide on even easier!  The grocery store bag separates your foot from the damp boot wall until the evening, when you can set your footware by the stove to dry.  Dry feet!

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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I learned that at a very early age around my stomping grounds here. I was about 10 tromping through muddy woods every spare moment I could get away. In the alluvial plains of Louisiana, standing mud and water are a fact of life more than not here... and during winter, one either wears rubber boots and gets dry cold feet, or regular boots and without the bags, wet cold feet. The only problem with grocery bags is they often have holes in them. If your feet must absolutely stay dry, kitchen size garbage bags work well and are usually more durable. Also, the bag sandwiched between two pairs of socks works to protect the bag, but you lose the added bonus of the boots sliding on easier.
Comment by Shannon Wed Jan 6 08:27:52 2010
I learned it young too --- glad to hear I'm not the only one! We liked to play in the snow, and our snow boots inevitably got damp after day 1. We just changed our grocery bags often, but I can see how kitchen garbage bags would give me a bit more longevity!
Comment by anna Wed Jan 6 09:18:35 2010





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