Apocalyptic Homesteading (Day 513)

about 2 years ago

Hello Everyone!

A busy morning, Laundry by hand eats calories, Transplanting saplings, Planting seeds & Prepping to game!

It is not all that long before sunset so I better get busy writing before the day catches up to me and I start to fade for the evening. I am unsure when I first awoke today but it was somewhere around dawn and I spent the early hours hiking and doing my routine chores instead of clacking away at the keyboard. Which is fine and all since it really is a better use of my time in the mornings ever since the days started getting hotter.

Like I have said before I want to avoid working during the more sweltering portions of the day and although the temperatures are not quite blistering hot yet... they sure are getting closer and I often find myself pouring sweat by the time the sun is fully overhead.

Early in the day I dove back into doing laundry (mainly socks) and whoa did I get a workout while first rinsing and then wringing all those suckers out! I have no idea how many calories that endeavor burned off but it once again left me longing for a washing machine to do the laundry for me. It is also a rather time-consuming process but at least now I have a bunch of clean socks once they finish drying.

After doing all that I wound up shuffling some of those flower pots around (that I previously planted black locust seeds in) so that they were not in direct sunlight like they were before. I did not move all of them to the shade but I at least got all the ones with little green things (hopefully trees) sprouting in them.

The little green shoots in the pots could be a lot of things so I do not not want to get my hopes up quite yet... but several of them are popping up exactly where I planted seeds so who knows! I thought it best to play it safe and get them into the shade just in case and will continue to watch the other pots over the coming days and move them as I notice things starting to grow.

There is actually a good amount of shade in that area now that those mystery fruit trees have their leaves and I can fit about four pots in the shade of the medium sized trees and around six in the shade of the larger ones. There are also numerous places where the shade from several of the non-fruit trees combine to make some larger shaded spots but I have yet to use any of them.

Anyway, once all that was done I finally went ahead and transplanted some of last years black locust saplings from pots and into the ground. The area that I did it in is not ideal for sunlight (inside the PVC dog yard fence south of the real dog yard) but I am hoping that shade tolerant strain will do okay there.

Although I did not do much besides digging holes and gently placing the contents of the individual flower pots in them... I did use the excavated dirt to make a berm uphill of them so that surface water will not flood the holes when it rains. I do not think it will be all that big of a problem given the terrain there, and the fence itself but thought it best to take any precaution that I could that might help insure their survival.

Once I got the three saplings transplanted I went a little uphill of them and dug a shallow curved trench about three meters long, a hands width wide and maybe two hands width deep. I used all the material from the trench (especially the loamy portion) to create a berm directly above the entire trench to help shed water away from it.

When I had the trench and berm to my liking I hiked to the topsoil trap, churned a bunch of the soil over for the chickens and harvested two big flower pots of it to fill my new trench with. I gotta say that the more that I work with that soil the more that I like it and after several days of the chickens turning it over and scratching in it... the stuff is looking amazing!

At first I thought that I would need more soil than that to fill the trench but I am glad that I did not because lugging that soil around (sans wagon) was awkward at best given that the pots are kind of flimsy and I had to both walk uphill and traverse a gate carrying them. Not that it matters or anything but I think that in the future I am going to use the wagon even for small loads of soil just to make things easier.

Anyway, with the trench filled with soil I retrieved my black locust seeds and set to planting not just the entirety of the trench but also in the berm above the transplanted saplings as well as in the ground near them. All total I planted twenty seeds in that area and if I get four good trees out of it all I will be very happy.

While seeding the trench I spaced the seeds about six inches (fifteen point two four centimeters) apart and figured that if they all pop up then it will be easy to scoop them out of the trench for transplanting elsewhere. Honestly though, if all those seeds produce seedlings and they grow in thick I might just leave them alone and see what happens.

I have really never had a whole lot of luck with either transplanting seedlings or saplings so the risk of leaving them alone to possibly get root bound with each other is not as big of a deal as losing trees during the transplanting process. The main thing that I have figured out (aside from not touching the seedling or sapling) is to leave as much of the root mass alone and do my best not to compact any of its soil during the process.

Doing things that way has yielded the best results but the last few times that I did it only like one out of two or three of them lived afterwards. I have no idea how many of the seed grown ones I have accidentally killed over the years... not to mention saplings that I dug up from the ground and tried transplanting!

But... I have learned a great deal along the way and that survival rate is way better than my old one and especially so in regards to ones that I dig up directly from the ground growing from root suckers. I am kind of proud of myself for figuring that one out and as long as I take my time with it and there are no big root chunks that need trimmed away... it is not all that hard to gently scoop one up and get it adjusted to living in a pot.

On a different note. I found out that the ladder patch for that game gets released in a few days which is about two weeks before the ladder goes live near the end of the month. My buddy wants me to play with them before the ladder begins (because there are a ton of new features and changes) which has put me in overdrive trying to get prepared for it.

Today I mainly focused on getting the faster internet setup but I also have all these other 'conditions' that need to be met before I will let myself play the game. As far as the internet connectivity goes I am going to try a blanket approach and just look at setting up all my various routers and extenders so that the network will be as robust as possible even if it will introduce more hops.

The other process that I began was getting the game itself installed and whoa that thirty plus gig download is a monster over the cellular network and I think here in a few days when that patch comes out it will be another download of similar size! I still have no idea how they managed to bloat the game so much from its original two point five gigabyte size... but ugh I do not want to get started on that trip again!

We will see how all that jazz works out because I still have to do a bunch of cleaning (one of those conditions that I mentioned) finish all my laundry (another condition) and build some kind of cooling shroud for my computer so that I do not cook it while playing that resource hog of a game.

As far as the shroud goes I think that I have a pretty simple idea to remove the top panel of the computer, arch a piece of flexible cardboard over it from side to side, create some end caps for the arched cardboard and then install that high CFM (cubic feet per minute) fan that I have in one of the end caps to exhaust the air. It really does not have to be anything all that 'fancy' but it does need to keep the dust out and of course not allow for hot air to get trapped inside.

That project should come together rather easy once I get started on it and although it is not absolutely necessary I do want to extend the life on my hardware as long as I can. I like how compact those small form factor computers are but whoa can they get hot inside especially after stuffing the most powerful graphics card that I could inside there also!

Anyway, aside from doing a bunch of computer related stuff this afternoon I also vacuumed out the wall unit air-conditioner again and got it to the point where it is operating better and more efficiently. I cannot recall exactly when the last time that I did it was but it must have been well over a month ago because that thing sure needed cleaning out.

Going forward I think that each time that I clean the filter (like once every week or two) that I am going to just plan on dismantling the rest of it and cleaning it out with the vacuum. Hopefully doing so will keep it purring along and continue to be operational for a few more years. So far it has been working pretty awesome but alas that has come with me doing lots of routine cleanings!

Okay, the hour is growing late so I best call this entry good enough and get on with the editing. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.