Apocalyptic Homesteading (Day 173-176)
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 173-176!
A Storm Passes, More Cabin Framing, Coppiced Stumps, A Gable Vent, Planting Trees & A Few Meandering Thoughts
The rain finally let up at some point in the evening so aside from doing my daily chores and napping yesterday I did not get anything done. I did however climb up into the second floor of the cabin to see if the roof was leaking and while I was up there I took the time to get all the sawdust swept up. There were a few minor drips of water coming through the roof so once things dry up later today I will have to climb up there and try to get them sealed with more flashing tape. I am not a hundred percent sure if the water was coming in where I accidentally abraded the tape at the peak with my safety rope... but that is where it looked like it might have been coming from before traveling down the top of a few rafters and dripping from the blocking between the rafters. One way or another I will get the roof sealed and really the leaks were not all that bad considering how much it rained and how little of it wound up pooling on the floor in the attic space.
Anyway, I napped like crazy throughout the day and did not even bother trying to avoid skewing my early morning wake up time by getting too much rest. With all the rain I had thought that it might get hot and muggy but instead it got so chilly (I guess because of the high winds) that I wound up turning on the electric recirculating oil heater to keep it from being uncomfortable in the tent. At first I thought that it might get too warm inside but the way it worked out was that the tent stayed at a very comfortable temperature even with two of the window flaps partially open and one of the fans blowing the hot air back down from the ceiling. It all made for a rather comfortable little micro-environment to be in while the wind howled and the storm raged on outside.
I am making a slow start this morning and hoping that by the time that the sun gets up that I will have shed the lingering urge to go back to sleep. Hopefully things outdoors will start drying up sooner rather than later today so that I can get to working on stuff and of course get that roof properly sealed. It will probably be late afternoon by the time the roof gets dry enough to apply more flashing tape so I am thinking to occupy my time getting the rear wall and the window's rough opening framed in and perhaps getting the doorway framed in as well.
I wound up utilizing some scrap material to finish out the second floor's exterior walls the other day and because of that I have more full sheets of zip-board left than I thought that I would have. Which is good and what I was hoping for because I am heavily leaning towards using it to enclose the soffit on at least the peak of the roof and perhaps also on the fly rafters. The main difficulty with installing it on the peak's soffit is that I cannot reach the soffit there without either adding/fabricating more scaffolding or somehow getting the ladder to reach by resting it atop something or extending it. After much consideration I think that the simplest way is to build a two meter long ladder with some lumber and ratchet strap it to the bottom of the aluminum ladder to extend it. As hacky as that might sound I think that it will work quite well and if it does not then I can always build more scaffolding. Who knows, I might just wind up ratchet strapping my A-frame ladder to the top of the extension ladder and do things that way instead just to conserve on the lumber.
It is now getting on in the morning and it is looking like it will be quite the sunny day so that is good. Things are nowhere near being dry outside but that will not stop me from knocking out a few of my daily chores before it gets blistering hot. I am kind of nursing the last remnants of espresso in my cup and getting the day's sequence of tasks firmly pictured in my head before getting on my work clothes and venturing out into the muck. As far as muck goes it really is not all that 'mucky' thanks to the loamy soil on the hill here. It is what I guess I could call 'gritty' because of the sand, broken down leaves, small sticks and thankfully few clumps of clay that between me and the dogs tend to get spread around wherever we go. I have assuredly had much worse 'yards' to deal with and by far this one is not all that bad when it comes to the muck and once the grass grows in I think that everything will be marvelous.
Alright, it is now the next morning and I am once again making a slow start to the day as I sip my espresso and listen to the morning bird songs. Although I am tempted to go back to sleep and get a wee bit more rest I doubt that I will be doing that and instead will gradually get myself motivated to get out the door and dive into the day's chores and the ongoing cabin building project. I am feeling a bit grungy this morning because last night I was so wiped out at the end of the day that I did not have the energy to fill the outdoor tub and get a bath which usually is not a big deal to me but last night I was covered in sawdust and just brushing it off me was not the most effective way of dealing with it that is for sure.
I spent most of the day finishing the framing for the window at the rear of the cabin and the framing for the doorway. Since both of those features will get some amount of weather exposure (over time) I decided to frame them in with some pressure treated material instead of the yellow pine that I have been doing the rest of the framing with. The last time we had gone to the building supply store we had gotten some pressure treated lumber for that purpose but it was so soaking wet (green) that I decided to use the lumber I had set aside for the solar shack's floor joists instead because it was nice and dry. Putting off doing the solar shack's floor until the new lumber dries up is not that big of a deal and I was glad that I did not have to frame everything in wet just to have it shrink later and potentially skew the rough openings for the window and door. All the framing went rather smoothly and I even beefed up both the corner by the window and the corner where the door's hinge-side will be so that they are extra stout.
Once all the framing was done I went ahead and dismantled the scaffolding on the right side of the building (whose braces ran across the doorway and window) so that it would not be in the way and I could finish sheathing the exterior of the building. I may wind up re-installing the scaffolding later (in one shape, form or another) so that I can work on the soffit on that side of the building but in order to make progress I had to get it out of the way for the time being. Getting the last of the sheathing installed was rather straightforward and I even cut the window opening out after the sheathing was installed without much hassle. Doing almost anything on that downhill side of the building is tricky because of how steep the terrain change is there so I was frigging stoked that everything went smoothly. I have yet to add all the flashing tape to the new sheathing but I plan on doing that today or as much of it as I can get done working off the ladders that I currently have available. As a side note I am going to be borrowing a super long ladder soon to make my life a little easier and I will not have to rig something up to be able to reach those hard to reach places.
I should backtrack here a bit to early in the morning yesterday when I was doing my routine chores. As those of you who have been keeping up with my progress here know, when I first cleared the site (before installing the dog yard) I had to cut down a bunch of small trees in the area. Well, as always there were stumps left over from all that brush clearing and over the last few months they have coppiced and been shooting up a bunch of new growth. It was not until a few days ago that I realized that I should either cut all the new growth back or remove all but the most straight and healthy sprigs. There were so many of these little clumps of new growth around the dog yard that it was restricting where I could walk and where the dogs could use the potty. The chickens on the other hand loved the little clumps of vegetation and they would often pick through them for bugs. Anyway, I went around the shelter site and trimmed back all but the ones that I want growing (some oak and cherry trees) and am excited to see how fast they grow given that they now have a single sprig atop their comparatively massive root systems. Given that I want plenty of sunlight in the dog yard for both the grass growing there and the solar panels I will more than likely top the new growth once it reaches a few meters tall so that they bush out instead of growing upwards where they could potentially cast shade on the solar panels.
The other thing that I did early in the morning was hike over to one of those mounds of dirt left over from the last trenching project where I had previously planted some potatoes. Since the potatoes seem to be doing rather well there (they are actually some of the largest ones that I have growing around here) and the area seems to get good sunlight... I decided to plant a bunch of sweet corn there and am quite excited to see how well it does. Although I did not count the individual corn kernels that I was planting, I guessed there to be about forty of them which should be plenty for that particular area and perhaps too many if they all wind up growing and the critters do not dig up too many of the freshly planted kernels. It is worth noting that I have one or two more packs of corn seed to still plant and I lucked up and found half a cob of that silage corn that I thought that I was out of. I am pretty stoked about that last bit because those late cold snaps were rather hard on the silage corn that I planted way back at the beginning of spring.
There is never enough time in the day to spell everything out and even now I should wrap this up and get outdoors because the sun is shining brightly and I want to get a bunch of stuff done before it gets super hot outside. Thankfully I got a little writing time in this morning and feel 'all caught up' (or close enough) and can now get on with my day without all that jazz jumbling around in my mind.
It is yet again another morning and today the roosters are making quite the ruckus with all their morning crowing which gets incessant all too often lately. I still think that the solution to that is to get more hens but I have yet to come across any. Some mornings it sure seems like they make more noise than others and being in a tent that is located not all that far from their coop makes it seem much louder than it really is. The thing is that I just want the birds to be happy and what grates on my nerves is that they might not be (and probably will not be) until I expand the flock.
Yesterday was pretty tedious because I spent the majority of the day getting as much of the cabin's exterior sheathing taped off with flashing tape as I could, including both the doorway and the window that I framed in the day before. The taping in general is a slow and tedious task because I have to hammer all the nail heads flat, remove the bits of plastic left by the nail-gun, sweep away any dust, dirt or sawdust and then apply the tape without wrinkling it. As far as that last part goes I have been doing okay but some pieces of the tape seem to get wrinkled no matter what the hell I do or how much time I take to patiently install the tape. The other tedious part is cutting the small pieces of tape to cover the nail heads that were over-driven by the nail-gun that seems to overdrive the nails more often than not.
Anyway, I probably could have gotten all of the joints taped but I ran out of tape late in the afternoon and even if I had more tape there are places on that downhill wall that I cannot safely reach until I get that taller ladder. So, I did what I could do with what I had before switching gears, crawling up into the second floor and framing in one of the gable vents that we got for the cabin. Since I will have to tape off that opening as well I just screwed the gable vent into place temporarily so that if it does rain there is not a big hole in the wall. I have a second gable vent to install on the downhill wall as well but again I could not safely reach it to cut the hole so I did not even bother framing it in or anything. It is worth noting that when I first climbed up in the second floor to install the vent it was in the heat of the day with the sun almost directly overhead and the second floor was nowhere near as hot as I thought that it would be. Given that I have yet to close in the soffit on the peak of the roof it is venting itself rather nicely and hopefully will continue to do so once I do close that soffit in and am relying on the gable vents for the majority of the ventilation.
On a different note, I keep feeling anxious over getting more food planted before spring is over and I still quite often forget just how much that I have already planted when I get caught up in the anxiousness. It is really hit or miss with what I am doing with the gardening because without clearing out some areas for it there just is not a lot of options for sunlight in this area. Like I have said numerous times before the best sunny spots are all inside the dog yard where the chickens would play hell on any plants without a fence around them... which keeps leading me to looking at the spots around the dog yard instead as well as spots further away from the shelter area. All of which of course leads me to having other concerns like the need for more irrigation lines and keeping the deer (and other game) out of the gardens. The place where I have those raised beds is barely close enough to the shelter site to keep the deer away when the dogs are awake but I am sure that at night they would make quite the meal out of everything if they happened upon it. Each morning that I go and water the stuff in the raised beds and flower pots I mentally brace myself to see everything neatly mowed down by the deer but thankfully that has not happened as of yet.
The thing with all the gardening and farming stuff is that I really do not have much time to devote to it because of everything else that I am currently working on and yet I keep making time for it anyway just to ease that nagging part of my mind that will not let me stop thinking about it all. I know that it is not reasonable to put such a large project on my shoulders atop all the other projects but damn does it eat away at me if I do not do exactly that! My instincts, intuition or whatever the heck it is will just not let it all go and again and again this part of my mind screams at me to grow as much food as possible no matter what it takes to do it. In other words when my rationally pragmatic thinking and limited available time does not sway me from planting food and I keep doing it anyway... I have to wonder if it is more than a desire for more food security that is going on there. I would be more understanding towards this urge if I was not as 'food secure' as I already am and it would all fall under my second or third year goals instead of trying to cram it into my first year goals at a new site but nonetheless... that is where I am at with it!
I know that I have a lot of damned 'irons in the fire' at the moment and am actually doing well at not loading myself down with unreasonable expectations... yet I cannot (and probably will not) shake this underlying sense of not-so-much 'urgency' but what I can only describe as a need to be doing whatever I can now while there is time to be doing it. With stuff like the gardening I am making the time to do it and while I am doing it I give it all of my focus so that I do it as well as I can without the burden of hecticness or impatience mucking up the process. That sort of goes for pretty much everything that I have been doing and yeah I am rather 'ho hum' about it all because it is not like I am struggling to figure stuff out or working with junk so pretty much everything that I do I find to be rather enjoyable or at the very least satisfying when something that happens to be tedious gets finished.
By and large I am simply doing the same stuff that I have been doing for many years now and although my writing has suffered during this adventure I think that my overall life has gotten better. I am still working on getting my quality of life up to par and yeah it has been a true grind the last one hundred and seventy-five days to get it to where it is... but alas it has also been very empowering and uplifting to accomplish one thing after another without the goals (or goal posts) wavering.
Well, it is getting on in the morning here and the sun is up over the horizon and casting long shadows from the trees to the east of the shelter site which is generally when I get to working on the cabin so that I can maximize those cool hours. I never mention it but I work around the building each day depending on where the sun is so that I do not get turned into a 'crispy critter' before noon. This has worked really well during this particular build (aside from the roof work) and for the most part I am no longer pouring buckets of sweat and having to dive into the outdoor tub multiple times throughout the day to cool off. Getting a building to the point where the outside is sealed (or sealed enough) for the inside construction to begin is always a bear when working alone and everything after that phase is sort of anti-climatic and downright relaxing in comparison.
There is of course the saw dust, the aches and pains, the perpetual usage of math, the dust in the ears and eyes even with safety glasses, the bits of wood in the boots, the socks that keep slipping because of the gymnastics being done with my feet as I hang precariously in some weird position to fasten something in place or take a measurement, the weight of wanting to always do the best job that I can do, the ladder that never quite rests properly on the uneven terrain, the task of hoisting some large object high into the air and doing something with it only to have it fall on the first several attempts, the chickens flocking after every nail or screw that gets dropped and making them hard for me to find later, while in some precarious position taking a measurement and finding in my tool belt that yup there is one pencil (of my four pencils) and yay there is even a point on it just to have it break as I try to make my mark on the lumber... and on and on ad infinitum the little daily things of living life unfold as a series of 'things happening' and all the while I laugh about them, chuckle about them, occasionally grit my teeth over them and at the end of the day when I step back from it all and see what was accomplished I am invariably always satisfied that I find the things I do to be quite fulfilling and often anticipate the coming of another day so that I can do it all again.
After writing all of that I wound up taking the day off from working on the cabin and instead doing some gardening, tidying up around the shelter site and pretty much taking it easy. I was feeling like I needed to take a step back from stuff and let my body heal some so that is exactly what I did even though it was a beautiful day outside and never got all that hot. It is now the following day and although I woke up several times this morning I kept going back to sleep and did not rouse myself from bed until the sun was fully up over the horizon. Since my plan is to take today off from working on the cabin I did not see the point in getting up at four in the morning and beginning my day like I often do with some espresso and some writing.
I finally bit the proverbial bullet early in the day by scratching out an area in the pine forest (on the western side of where I have all my plants/trees growing) so that I could make two more raised beds, fill them with my remaining potting soil and transplant some of my larger black locust saplings into them. Once I got the saplings transplanted and the soil smoothed out I also planted the raised beds with a bunch of spinach and hot pepper seeds that were a part of that seed supply that I purchased last month. I am still unsure of how safe the saplings will be from the deer and am hoping that the presence of the hot peppers will deter them from grazing on my fledgling trees before they can develop their juvenile thorns. Since I have yet to check on them this morning (having missed my morning garden watering ritual because I slept in) I do not yet know if they even made it through the night but the thought of them getting eaten has nagged at me so much I am considering making some sort of fence around the new raised beds just to put the matter to rest once and for all.
When I was making those new raised beds I used some pine logs to form the borders which is probably not ideal for growing most things in but I think that the black locust will do fine given their overall hardiness and ability to thrive in acidic/poor soils. Since I was transplanting the saplings from pots I dug down into the ground below the level of the potting soil that I had added (making a hole for each sapling) and carefully flipped the flower pot over into my opposite hand where I would then balance the mass of dirt and plants (there was other stuff than just black locust growing in the pots) before gently flipping it upright and plopping it down in the hole. When I dug the holes I did my best to not dig them too deep and tried to breakup the clay in the walls and bottom of the hole so that water would be less likely to pool inside them.
Since my idea with planting those saplings in the ground is to get them to spread throughout the surrounding pine forest I basically created a cluster of them in a roughly two meter by one meter space. I am unsure of exactly how many saplings that I transplanted but I spaced them out in such a way that they hopefully will not begin crowding each other until they are at least a meter or so tall and even then will probably be fine because whichever trees make it will start pushing up new trees from root suckers and the entire area will hopefully have black locust trees growing in it by the following year. For those of you who have followed my adventures the last four-odd years you know that I have routinely planted black locust trees in flower pots and avoided planting them in the ground or even transplanting them because I always felt like I was not at the place to begin such a long-term farming endeavor. A while back I did plant some seeds in the garden with the PVC fence and although there are two wee saplings growing there it is like I said before a partially/mostly (depending on the time of year) shaded area where I am hoping that this shade tolerant strain of tree that I have will do well even if they grow incredibly slow and albeit produce a very dense wood. The trees that I planted in the pine forest though will amount to being 'field grown' (which does not produce as dense of a wood) but grow rapidly instead of slowly. The pine trees there are all around ten or more meters tall so there actually is a lot of sunlight that gets below them to the forest floor throughout the day just not so much when the sun is directly over the area.
I am no fan of these timber stand pine forests that cover the south eastern portion of the country because of how frigging destructive they are to the native habitat but a hundred odd years into folks growing them... it just is what it is at this point. The way I see it is if I can get a truly useful tree like black locust established beneath the pines then once the pines all die off (or get logged) then there will be a healthy vibrant 'under forest' that will take over in their place and over time the pine needle laden ground/soil will once again become fertile. It is a pretty lofty goal as far as forestry management goes but one that I think is well worth it especially considering that there are a heck of a lot more uses for black locust (as wildlife food, fodder, building material, fixing nitrogen in the soil and flowers for pollinators) than the genetically manipulated pines that choke out everything else and are a massive fire hazard to boot! I better avoid getting off on a tangent here and suffice it to say that if all goes well then one day I will look around and see a forest of beautiful trees which give back way more to the immediate environment than they take away which is the inverse of things the way they currently are.
Anyway, I guess all my writing the other morning really got my gears turning and throughout the day I kept finding myself wondering what the fuck I am doing with my life and if I am going to dick around with this tree farming thing forever or actually do it on a larger scale. Again and again I come around to having the same passion about it each year, I plant the seeds, I grow the seedlings, get them to saplings and then either give them away or keep them in pots to do nothing with them. It is pretty wacky but I have gotten pretty dang good at starting them from seed and keeping them alive to the sapling stage where they invariably get stunted because I do not plant them in the ground. While I am thankful for what I have learned along the way, I think at this point I should really focus my attention on growing them in the ground and heed all the things that I have learned the last several years related to growing them. The phrase 'not fucking around' keeps coming to mind when I think about farming those trees and considering that I am finally at a place where there is the sun, water and soil that they need as well as the space for them to grow in... I may as well go for it!
Alright, with all of that in mind I just spent part of the morning getting a piece of fencing material stretched around the new raised beds and staked in place so that the deer can no longer get to the tiny black locust trees. Hopefully they do not push all that hard on it or anything because of how I have it setup but I think that even if they pushed on it a little that it would hold up to the task of keeping them out. The mesh on the fencing is pretty big so I still have to worry about rabbits and other critters like that but I am hoping that the logs that form the raised beds are tall enough to discourage them. I guess that if it does seem like something is eating on them that I can always wrap the bottom of the current fencing with some smaller mesh chicken wire fencing and that would solve it. For now it is good enough and I think that my next tasks should be to get more seedlings started and continue making more raised beds and fencing them off.
Aside from hiking around the property looking for more gardening sites I began the tedious process of hauling some stuff from storage and making sure there were no critters living in it before stuffing it in a corner of the new cabin's attic. I mainly focused on the fabric stuff that I have but I also got my exhaust fan and some other odds and ends stored up there. The building is not even done yet and I am utilizing it for light storage until I get the downstairs ceiling insulated and sheathed and at that point I can really start packing stuff away up there. Since applying more flashing tape to the roof after the last rain we had, I am unsure if the roof will leak which is part of why storing fabric up there is not a big deal because I can always wash and dry it later and heck even use it to mop up the mess if it does leak.
Well, as you can surmise it is 'the heat of the day' (a little after noon) so I am taking a little siesta and thinking of getting in a nap before too much more time passes but this post was nagging at me so I thought to give it a little more time and see if I could perhaps get it all edited and posted. We will see how that last part goes but for now it is nice to just chill in the shade without much to do on... (wait for it) my second day off in a row.
I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night or something like that!
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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https://peakd.com/hive/@jacobpeacock/hive-survival-guide-sixth-edition