Hello Everyone!

Apocalyptic Homesteading Day 430!

Better weather, Let there be music, Danged vermin, Making stakes & Finding white clay in the watering hole!

That supply run yesterday took more out of me than I thought it did and whoa did I sleep like a rock last night! Some of it assuredly had to do with the big meal that I got while we were on the road but mainly I think that I was mentally exhausted by the whole endeavor. Then after the supply run I found myself pushing through the fatigue and writing late into the night to stay on my posting routine. Whatever the reasons might have been I slept in until well after sunrise and was loathe to leave the warmth of the bed until I absolutely had to.

I do not know if I ever mentioned it before but for the last year or so I have been buying myself one pound of relatively good coffee each time that I go on a supply run as a kind of reward. This morning it was quite nice to drink it as my morning espresso instead of the low end (okay total trash) kind that I have been drinking for months now and it more or less 'set my mood' for the day. Sometimes it is the little things like that which make all the frigging difference because while I can drink some pretty foul coffee and be happy... that good stuff really gets me jazzed up.

Eventually the weather warmed up and I got outside in short order and got busy doing my routine chores. Since I got back so late last night I had opted not to dump more feed in the chicken coop because they were already roosting for the night and would not eat it anyway. Thus today they were right outside the cabin door and kept sort of harassing me until I got them some feed! They do not quite 'harass' me as much as 'annoy' me because they try to get inside the cabin every chance they get because they know the dog food bowls are in there!

Anyway, once all the routine stuff was done I decided to finally listen to some loud music and after shuffling some stuff in the solar shack around and getting all the equipment turned on I realized that a rat had eaten through the composite cable that I use to plug the phone (or laptop) into the mixer. The little bastard had not just chewed through it entirely in one place but in two places and totally destroyed the cable. All I can figure is that at some point I must have had some kind of food stuff (or maybe some residue from a beverage) on my hands when handling it and it had tried to eat it. Like I have said before I have known that there is a rat going in there and have failed to do anything about it. Before the seasons change I am going to have to use the dogs to solve my vermin problem not just in there but in the storage tent and the shop tent as well.

Once I found a new cord and got the music playing I went ahead and made those stakes for the new compost. My little battery operated circular saw did the trick nicely and once again I am glad that I got those eighteen volt to twenty-four volt battery adapters for it because all my older eighteen volt batteries are total garbage at this point. The stakes were nothing all that special and I basically cut up more of those poles (left over from the original site clearing) into roughly one meter sections with a crude point on one end. Later in the day I even took them over to the new compost and hammered them in place to help 'lock in' those corners a bit better. I also added a few in the center on the uphill side so that I can later add more horizontal poles to section the triangle up into several smaller triangles like I mentioned doing last week.

At some point in the afternoon I grabbed the trenching shovel and hiked over to the meadow to explore that big hole and that spot that was holding water when the rest of the meadow was dry. I did not want to get over-involved digging in the big hole so I just climbed down in it and dug out a few scoops at the very bottom of it... and yup it was pretty dang mucky down there which could be from the recent rain or it could be from ground water seeping up. Further exploration there will be required to find out one way or another but for today I just wanted to satisfy my curiosity a bit and I surely did just that!

After all that jazz, I climbed back out of the hole and hiked to that spot below it where the standing water was and began digging there. I could only get the shovel down about six inches into the muck before hitting some sort of hard-pack layer so I decided that would be deep enough for now and just focused on digging out what I could without it becoming a backbreaking endeavor. I wound up making an oblong hole that was roughly a meter wide and two meters long. I was careful to not pile the removed material either above or below where I was digging (where there is water basically) and piled it out of the way off to the side.

One thing that was super cool about it all was that I found a good bit of white clay while digging. Which, if you do not know is usually indicative of a spring! I am not going to get my hopes up that it is a spring because the white clay could also be what makes the water not get absorbed into the ground there and like I said before the water may not be evaporating there (like it does elsewhere in the meadow) because it is a very shaded area. Either way there is water there at the moment and it does make for quite the nice little watering hole for the wildlife just the way it is. We will see how all that turns out in the long run but I think that I will be keeping an eye on it and perhaps doing some more exploratory digging. Just the white clay itself is an awesome resource so no matter what I am pretty stoked about it all.

Well, I should get to wrapping this up because between all the hiking around, working on stuff and having a fire late in the day I am pretty wiped out. I did take a nap just as the sun was setting and woke up in a mild panic thinking that I had slept all night and missed my posting window but alas I did not. It did require making some coffee to get me to focus enough to spell all this out... or at least that is how I justified yet again breaking my no coffee at night rule!

I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.

The watering hole that I dug out in the meadow!

I know its dirty on the outside but this is a chunk of white clay!

Thanks for reading!

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