Apocalyptic Homesteading (Day 118-124)
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 118-124!
A Magic Corn Stick, Scarecrow Antics, Homestead Building While Camping & The New Solar Shack
The wind is gusting this morning and there is a chill to the air that has been lacking of late which has me hesitant to get to working outdoors. The sun is rather bright so perhaps on the first day of spring it will eventually get warm and be a pleasant day but with all the weird weather stuff that has been going on it is hard to say what will happen. When that big storm blew by a few days ago it narrowly missed the area I am in and I am thankful for that because it was a sketchy damn storm that had spawned several tornadoes on its way across the southern states.
Although I was as prepared as I could be for such a storm I assuredly regretted lacking an underground shelter to flee to in the event of a tornado and moved that particular item way up on my overall 'to do' list. In the days leading up to the storm's arrival I considered all my options for sheltering underground and lacking any large culvert pipes under roads or anything like that I determined that my best option would be to dig a big hole and stick one of my plastic barrels in it sideways so that I could crawl into it if need be. There are a lot of things about that idea that are pretty sketchy to start with but I figure that in a pinch it would be a much better strategy than being out in the open or just sheltering in an outbuilding and hoping for the best. I considered burying a barrel just for the peace of mind but realized that at the very most I could only squeeze me and three dogs inside of one at best which would leave one dog outside. All of that lead me to thinking about burying two barrels so that there would be enough room for all the dogs but just burying one barrel would be a heck of a lot of work and with the way the clay is here I would probably still be digging the holes and it is now two days after the storm has blown by!
Anyway, with all the wacky weather stuff going on I have had a difficult time getting a whole lot done but I did manage to plant two new patches of corn. I retrieved that other flower pot of dried corn cobs that I had in storage to find that the rodents had been quite hard on it after all. Thankfully among all the mess I found about a hundred more potentially viable kernels and the little stick that I used last year for making the holes with. It was kind of funny because when I saw the stick in among all the old corn husks I was like 'oh the magic corn planting stick' and got rather excited about using it to plant whatever corn kernels might be left in the flower pot. It was not really my intent upon retrieving the flower pot of corn to start planting immediately but that is exactly what I did.
I was riding the bike at the time so I rode it through the pine forest to the very southern edge of the property where there is plenty of sun every day and chose a suitable location far enough back from the property line that it could never be disputed on which side of it the corn is planted on. Not that the property line is much of an issue here but it is always best to be safe and not make folks feel like they are being infringed upon. I once again did not do much other than poke a bunch of holes in the ground about three inches apart, drop in a corn kernel (or two if they looked dodgy) and then cover the holes back up with dirt. Although I only planted three rows of it there by the property line I kept thinking about the old saying "If I am to grow good corn, I must help my neighbors grow good corn" which is very true because of how corn will cross pollinate due to the wind and either improve or degrade the quality of the corn growing in an area.
Well, it is now the following day and it is quite the rainy morning. I first woke up at four o'clock to the sounds of it pouring outside the tent and went back to sleep after letting the sounds lull me. When I woke up again at eight it was still raining and nearly an hour later now it is still coming down but much more gently than it was. All the rain is assuredly a good thing especially since I have been planting so much stuff over the previous few weeks. So far all that I have seen growing (aside from the four black locust seedlings) is a bunch of the grass seed that I spread quite some time back and a little of the newer grass seeds that I spread a few weeks ago. Hopefully with all the rain I will see the first shoots of corn popping up over the next week or so. I am pretty sure that I have used up all the silage corn seed that I had so at this point I am 'all in' as far as the corn goes but still have a bunch of potatoes to plant as well as some tomatoes and a few other things.
With the arrival of spring I have noticed a large increase in the number of birds that I have seen (and heard) around the place so I made a scarecrow to help keep them away from the stuff I am planting. I was at first just going to make a humanoid shaped sculpture just as an art installation but while I was working on it I happened to see several birds flying around one of the newly planted corn patches and made the decision to make the sculpture more than just a piece of art. At first I began to make the torso, arms and head portion of the sculpture very complicated (with lots of pieces of wood) but then decided to simplify things and just used two small logs in a cross shape to accomplish the goal and then hang a shirt over it.
The scarecrow came out pretty good but I still want to find an old hat to put on its 'head' as a finishing touch. One kind of cool thing that I did was to make it look like the scarecrow is holding a forked stick and because of how I installed the stick it moves in the wind which is pretty neat and adds some 'life' to the otherwise motionless sculpture. The log for the torso is a piece of hollow black locust and I have been considering adding some lights to its head once I find a good hat for it. What I am thinking to do is adding a broken pair of safety glasses to it and put LED bulbs behind the glasses and perhaps a small solar panel in the crown of the hat to charge the batteries with. We will see how it comes out in the end and what kind of additions that I make to it along the way. For now the scarecrow does its 'semblance of life' rather well and even one of the dogs here had to do a double take on it to make sure that it was not a real person.
Alright, I never finished writing this the other day so here I am at seven in the morning sipping my first cup of espresso... diving back into it. It is a good bit warmer than it has been the last few mornings and hopefully there will not be a bunch of chilly wind throughout the remainder of the day either. The birds are already making quite the racket outside so I am going to take that as a sign that the weather has improved because they have been rather quiet of late during this time of the day. I could undoubtedly sleep in some more but I had this intense dream and woke from it feeling wide awake so here I am.
Last night while laying in bed with the dogs before falling asleep I realized that I have been camping for over a quarter of a year now and how saying it like that makes it sound like a lot longer than the four months that it actually is. As I thought that particular time frame over I realized that this is the longest stint of camping in a tent that I have done in almost ten years and the first such extended tent camping that I have done with the dogs. Although we have all done well at it... I am still not all that fond of camping as a lifestyle. Sure it has worked well enough to get me to where I am at now with things but it all amounts to a standard of living just below what is acceptable to me to really feel good about my life choices.
I am in no way bashing it for the helpful short-term solution that camping has been but it is important to convey that it is in no way shape or form how I want to be living. The difficulty with doing something for extended periods of time like camping for four months straight is that it establishes a new set of day to day habits and the longer that I cope the more that I accept it all as just fine and dandy. In other words I wind up lowering the bar for what is acceptable living conditions. Personally I have an awesome setup and all that jazz and have done well to continue my daily chores as if I had both a shelter and functional homestead around me. I am of course in the process of setting up a homestead so I remind myself of that often. I also look at the things that I have already gotten into place like the compost system, the dog yard, to some degree a few gardens, electricity and water hookups, a shop area and so forth and so on which are mostly all feats in and of themselves... and combined they make up a big portion of what is necessary to have a solid modern homestead or at least the foundation for one.
What I am getting at with all of that jazz is that I am still very much in infrastructure building mode and that my own personal setup is far enough along that I do not have a bunch of anxiety or any horseshit like that but not far enough along that I can heave a massive sigh of relief. The sticking point in getting the cabin built has been the sky high lumber prices as I have said numerous times before. There is no way around it either aside from buying second hand wood, rough cut lumber or getting a sawmill and milling everything myself. For those of you that are aware of what is going on in the lumber market I am sure that you understand that the quadrupled increase in price is quite insane and makes a lot of things cost prohibitive when they should not be. When it comes down to it I would rather live in a tent than to scrap some shelter together with junk and then deal forever with the inevitable, mold, bugs, quirks or whatever that results from scraping things together.
On the flip-side to all of that is that if we bite the bullet and get the overly expensive materials then I am going to feel incredibly stressed not to make any errors along the way so as not to waste a bunch of money. Granted I have the carpentry thing down pretty good and have done a few of these little buildings now so I do not have too much anxiety... but still when a sheet of plywood is forty bucks instead of ten bucks it makes me look at it differently. The trick (in my mind) is to not only reduce the amount of waste during the building process but also to make use of any waste that is created. Hopefully once the construction phase of things gets going I will get some good weather and be able to take my time with it all and not feel pressured to hurry.
Alright. It has been a few more days and I never added to this or got it posted so I guess that I should get on task here and try to summarize the last few days the best that I can. First, I should say that the weather has been super nice and I have been waking up before sunrise each day and making the most of my time. I have a nice mild sunburn for all my efforts and whoa has it been wonderful since things have warmed up and stayed that way outside. It makes such a difference when I wake up in the wee hours of the morning and it is not so chilly outside that I just want to remain indoors. The last few mornings I have even been able to sit on the front stoop of the deck, sip my espresso while watching the sunrise and soak in that 'stillness' that I enjoy so much.
Two days ago I finally caved into my desire to build something with that bundle of material that got erroneously delivered here when we ordered the material for the deck that the tent is now setup on. I had drawn several plans for what to construct with it and finally decided to build a small eight foot by eight foot building inside the dog yard in a spot where it will get a fair amount of sun throughout the year during the early portion of the day. Where to place the building was problematic because I did not account for it during my initial site development but I think that I have the runoff from its future roof going in a direction that will not prove to be problematic. Basically with some good gutters everything should be fine and if it is not then I will deal with it then even if that means building a small water feature to help manage the water.
Once again I went with a cube shaped super-structure and this time it was with four inch by six inch thick pressure treated material that I used six and ten inch landscape screws to fasten together. Since I did not want to get too complicated with the roof system I went for a very minor pitch (like one and half inches over eight feet) and merely notched the rafters at different depths. There is no risk of snow let alone snow accumulation here so the below average pitch should not pose any serious problems as long as I seal the roof good when I install roofing metal on it. It is sort of silly because my only real goal with the building is to have a place to mount solar panels and whatever else I use the building for is just a bonus. I am thinking of using it for either storage or as an outdoor kitchen but am as of yet really undecided. Currently it will be nice to have some more dry area to work with and the little building will undoubtedly be handy for when I build the actual cabin because I will not have to lug the tools up and down the hill to the shop each day and can just put them inside it.
The last few days I have been checking all the stuff that I planted hoping to see more signs of growth and today I finally saw the first of the corn popping up. There are also two more black locust seedlings but no sign as of yet with the potatoes that I planted a week ago. If stuff is going to grow then it is always going to do it in its own time but I keep hoping for that 'big moment' where everything is growing and I can sigh a big sigh of relief that my efforts were worthwhile. Like I have often said though in regards to farming and gardening... if you want stuff to grow you have to at least take the risk of planting it to start with! On that note, I keep thinking that I want to start a massive potato mound that just makes potatoes all year. It would probably involve the mound having its own little greenhouse but for now I can at least pick a sunny spot and start the mound.
I have been making a few changes to how I have things setup in the dog yard so that I can make both day to day life and the cabin building project easier. The way that I had the portable PVC dog yard setup before for the chickens was taking up way too much space and it was blocking me from having easy access to the north gate that leads to the compost mound. Anytime that I wanted to use that gate I had to first go through the chicken gate first and that was a real hassle when carrying buckets of compost and the shovel. So I made a circle out of the PVC dog yard once again and have the chickens inside of it until I get their coop built which is the other reason that I wanted to move their fence around a bit. I think that I have finally decided on where to put the coop and the way the fence was before I would have to build the coop while inside with the chickens who of course crap all over everything.
Well, if I do not start editing this and getting it all posted then I think that I will not do it tonight and fall asleep. Suffice it to say that things are going well and springtime is absolutely here. 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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Even if you could put two barrels on their side underground, I worry they will fill with water. I do not know what they charge but our Home Depot rents small equipment like backhoes, if you could rent one for one day, you could dig a hole and place your little building over it or find an old truck topper to place over the hole and cover it with a bigger tarp then dirt. These are just my thoughts. Tornados are scary and I know there is no way in hell you should or would leave one of your babies out. Stay safe.