Apocalyptic Homesteading (Day 108)
Hello Everyone!
A brief introduction: Hi I am Jacob.
TL;DR: There is no tl;dr because you should have more patience and attention span than a gnat on a high wind.
Apocalyptic Homesteading Day 108!
A Cold Snap, Broken Bottles Lacking Any Treasure, Site Development & Cordless Chainsaw Milling China Berry For A Bench
There was a solid sheet of ice in my outdoor tub when I checked on it in the morning and honestly it was quite frigid outside which is why I spent much of the early portion of my day writing. Like I said yesterday it really was not all that bad weather wise outdoors because the sun was shining and the wind had died down. It actually got so warm by the afternoon that I had to turn the fans on in the tent to help keep it cool. Once the sun went behind the trees in the west though... the temperature dropped rapidly again but it is not forecast to do that again for the rest of the month so mayhaps spring is here or close enough to being here that there are nothing but warm temperatures ahead!
Anyway, early in the day I spent some time clearing out some deadfall in an area of the woods where I am thinking that it might be good to grow some black locust in the future. Although the area is shaded during the latter portion of the day it gets excellent sunlight during the early portion of the day. One thing that I noticed about the area is that there were all these small buried mounds and although I did not check all of them... in two of them I found full and broken glass bottles. So I may have found someone's old dump site and will have to eventually do some excavating if I want to fully clean it up. For now I just have to be careful not to kneel on the ground if I start planting stuff in the area. It is probably best to just leave the area undisturbed and simply clean up any of the glass that I can find on top of the ground.
It is worth noting that the bottles are not the variety that are valuable nor useful and are just trash at this point. I have over the years come across lots of good bottles in the ground (in similar buried trash heaps) so I have a good idea of what to look for. The place to look for those kinds of bottles on this property would probably be near where the old railroad was at the foot of the slope. There is absolutely some good amateur archaeology to do around here and I am sure that I will eventually find all the spots worth doing it in! At this phase of things I have to stay focused on my objectives and cannot get off on a bunch of side quests digging around in the dirt looking for treasure. Besides I have to still clear all the paths and roads that will making digging for treasure much easier because I can then easily haul my findings away... and preferably so in a wheeled fashion.
There are of course all the things that will come up along the way that will need doing also which in and of themselves tend to be side quests... which are fine and dandy as long as they somehow contribute to the primary quest. In this case the primary quest is getting the property in shape and setup for folks wanting to do some camping. The place can already accommodate a good bit of folks doing primitive camping with water, electric and even internet but it will be nice to get some more advanced infrastructure in place like a shower house, a kitchen, an eating area and so forth and so on. Thankfully all the initial groundwork is done as far as the site being a viable camping area goes and there is no concern over loud music so that is pretty nice and will make the rest of the process much easier.
That initial groundwork has surely made me getting my own setup to where it is much simpler and in many ways (like the stout dog yard) I am light years ahead of some of my previous homesteading setups. I mean what the heck I even have hot water on tap in my shelter site and good cellular service! The progress here has been pretty awesome and although it has been a tremendous amount of work it has not been overwhelming or all that taxing. I am sure that if I took less care of myself along the way it would have been extremely physically taxing but my good habit of pacing myself has ruled many a day and I have more or less come through unscathed.
Late in the day I used one of the landowner's vehicles to retrieve those curvy sections of China Berry tree that I cut up last week and piled next to one of the roads. I kept thinking that I should attempt to mill some of them with the sixty volt cordless chainsaw and perhaps even make some benches with some of them. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy the saw milled the wood and I used that technique that I mentioned a few weeks ago to do it and wow I am impressed! It cut the log very straight except for where I let the log itself move and lost my plumb cut line for a six inch section at the end. It still worked out okay and I used a short oak and cherry stump log (that flares at the bottom) to make some legs for the milled log to form a bench. I fastened the legs of the bench with six inch landscape screws and also some deck screws that I pre-drilled for and fastened at an angle where the legs meet the bottom of the bench's seat.
All in all I like how the bench came out and as far as a prototype goes I knocked the entire build out in well under an hour. My goal with it was 'fast and rugged' and I did not spend any time debarking it, matching the parts well, or anything like that and just threw it together as an experiment. I did later remove some of the bark from the bench's seat just to clean it up and when I did I noticed that it is really easy to de-bark so that is convenient. The milled grain is quite pretty also and I am looking forward to testing different wood sealers on it and seeing how it looks afterwards. Maybe that invasive tree growth is a good thing if it can produce large mill-able logs in a short period of years but seriously it is nice to find a use for it even if it is just for furniture.
Well, the sun is up so I should get on with my day and see what becomes of it. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.
More about me: I have been doing property caretaking (land stewardship) for many years (decades) and live a rather simple life with my dogs doing what most folks would consider to be an 'alternative minimalist lifestyle' but what I often just think of as a low-impact lifestyle where I get to homestead and spend the majority of my time alone with my dogs in the woods doing projects in the warmer months and taking some downtime during the colder months.
Nearly four years ago I began sharing the adventures (misadventures) of my life via writing, videos, pictures and the occasional podcasts and although my intention was to simply share my life with some friends it undoubtedly grew into much more than that over the years and now I find myself doing what equates to a full-time job just 'sharing my life' which is not even all that glamorous or anything but hey folks seem to enjoy it so I just keep doing it!
The way that I look at it is that I give it all my best each day and while some stuff I write is better than others I think that for the most part I do a pretty good job at doing what I am doing which is simply 'sharing my life' as candidly as I possibly can and whatever folks get (or do not get) from it there is always the satisfaction of me doing what I set out to do... which is to simply share my life.
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