Hello Everyone!

A brief introduction: 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.

A little over three 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 the Fantastica Chronicles came about is that I was living at another place when I started chronicling and sharing my days but eventually I wound up moving to a new place. The new place is a homestead named 'Fantastica' so I started with 'Day 1' upon my arrival here and just kept documenting my days much like I had done for the previous nine hundred and fifty-seven days at the last place that I lived.

I have mostly done that 'documenting' at Fantastica exclusively with words (and pictures) opting not to do the videos because as I learned at the last place, sharing videos over an intermittent and slow internet connection is horribly time consuming and what I often think of as an 'ulcer inducing' experience. All that said, I opted for simplicity with the documentation and have no real regrets for doing so.

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.

TL;DR: There is no tl;dr because you should have more patience and attention span than a gnat on a high wind.
[End Introduction]

The Fantastica Chronicles Day 213-219!

Day 213. (TFC A Relaxing Day Of Listening To Music, Hanging Out With My Dogs & Enjoying My Birthday)

When I woke it was both rainy and a tad chilly outside but thankfully the weather cleared up rapidly and gave way to a very sunny and nice day which was pretty awesome because I was able to spend much of my birthday hanging out at my newly constructed coffee bar and listening to some music on my sound system.
Having been unable to listen to much music on my birthday the last few years (because I was off-grid and the sun had not cooperated with generating enough electricity) having some 'unlimited' music for my birthday was quite the treat to say the least.

Throughout the day I did not get much done besides 'having a good time' and doing a lot of thinking about what exactly I would like to accomplish over the coming year and primarily over the coming warmer months before I begin my winter downtime again. It was nice to just spend the day outdoors looking around at how far things have come along here at my own shelter site and the homestead in general. Something that kept occurring to me was that between all the various projects that I have going on I do not feel much in the way of 'dread' about working on any of them and just how enjoyable I find working on things here actually is for me.

The only real work that I accomplished during my birthday was getting this week's Fantasica Chronicles compiled and posted as well as making another post that is a pre-release for my fictional book titled 'A Story' which I thought was a nice gift for me to share with folks on my birthday as a sort of reverse gift-giving. If you missed seeing the post about the ebook then you can find it here: https://peakd.com/hive/@jacobpeacock/ebook-versions-of-a-story-now-available-limited-one-week-birthday-gift-sneak-peak I had been thinking about making such a post for several weeks now (maybe even months) and a few days ago I decided to just go ahead and do it on my birthday just for shits and giggles.

Anyway, I do not have much else to really report other than it was an incredibly serene and peaceful birthday and I felt like I have relaxed more over the last few days than I have cumulatively relaxed in many years so I have zero complaints. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night.

Day 214. (TFC Building A Straight-Edge With An Old Bed Frame, Digging Footers & Setting Sonotubes For Concrete Piers)

There was a bit of a chill to the morning air so I wound up burning off the small pile of stuff that was in my outdoor fire pit which was mostly just a little cardboard and a bunch of sticks that I had previously picked up from along the trail and around the shelter site area. Having only one propane tank with fuel in it at the moment and having it hooked up to my on-demand water heater I chose having a fire instead of fiddling with swapping the tank around from the water heater to the small propane heater that I use in the shelter. My thinking on it was that later in the day I would undoubtedly want to take a shower and would not want to be swapping the tank back around to do so. Changing the tanks around is not all that big of a deal or anything but for some reason I always sort of dread doing it. Also I really need to keep having fires every chance that I get so that I can build up my supply of ashes for my compost pile.

Having the fire made for a nice start to the day but since I did it part way through my morning writing time I never finished writing until much later in the day. So at the end of the day (after my shower) I went ahead and swapped the propane tanks around just in case it was once again chilly in the morning which it of course is not so go figure! The weather is supposed to turn colder tonight and tomorrow and although it is going to get down into the thirties (Fahrenheit) it is not going to get quite cold enough to freeze so at least I do not have to worry about all my plants getting frosted. Considering that so far it has been a rather mild spring (besides a heck of a lot of rain) it will be kind of nice to have some cooler temperatures during the day while I am working on stuff.

I started on another one of those 'odd jobs' at the homestead proper and although this particular project is much bigger than the others that I have done there I have been looking forward to starting on it ever since last fall when we first started collecting the materials for it. Since it involves a lot of concrete work I opted to wait until the springtime instead of trying to work around the weather and risk having the concrete get frozen. Having done concrete work in the winter before I have found that it is just all around better to do it during the warmer months if at all possible.

As I mentioned many months ago one of the buildings at the homestead proper has a 'roof over' (a second roof built over the original roof) and although the construction of the roof itself is pretty solid the posts that support it are all in pretty bad shape. A big part of that 'bad shape' is that whoever built it used pine four by four posts and although they were painted they just did not hold up the way that treated lumber (or even black locust posts) would have. The post were also buried in the ground, so as you can imagine they wicked up a bunch of water over the years and the bottoms of them began to rot and on some of the posts the bottoms rotted away altogether and some other folks had shored them up with cinder blocks.

Anyway, my job is to replace the old posts with concrete piers and six by six pressure treated posts which of course is complicated a bit by the pre-existing framing (for the roof and walls) being out of square, level and plumb as well as having to dig new holes below the frost line beside the building in the rocky ground. Since later at a later date the same concrete piers will be used to build additions to the building I also have to make sure that everything (the piers, the walls and the roof) all line up to accommodate building the new additions.

Suffice it to say that it is some tricky stuff and although I can undoubtedly do the construction aspects of it the daunting part of the project is the digging and on the very first hole that myself and a fellow homesteader (that helped me) dug we hit a big rock that required us to dig out the hole for the sonotube to nearly five times as large as it needed to be because the big rock was square in our way of digging below the frost line. It is really not that good to 'over dig' a hole like that for a concrete pier but it was the only way to get the rock out of the way. Once the rock was extracted and we got the sonotube in place we thoroughly tamped the back-filled hole around the sonotube and added in lots of smaller rocks to make up for the clay/soil we did not have due to having removed the big rock.

All in all it took roughly five and a half hours to get two holes dug and two of the sonotubes (with rebar in them) installed which considering the amount of rocks we encountered is not that bad at all as far as time goes. After the day's efforts there are now only ten more such holes to dig, rebar cages to build and sonotubes to install. We have yet to get the concrete or mounting hardware (for the six by six posts) but hopefully we can get it all delivered before the end of the week and can start pouring concrete and setting the posts in place. Needless to say it is a pretty big project especially since it is a structural one but hopefully I will be able to finish it over the next few weeks.

Well, I guess that is about it for now. The sun is starting to come up and I am wanting to get an early start on my day so I better wrap this up, do the editing, take a few pictures (that I failed to take) and get the heck on with my day. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.

Day 215. (TFC Getting A Belated German Chocolate Birthday Cake, Lots Of Rain & Napping The Day Away)

It was a rainy and chilly morning and although it eventually got a little warmer throughout the day it never stopped raining until sometime late in the evening. I did not even try to do anything outside and wound up spending the day indoors with the dogs. I probably spent more time taking naps than I did actually being awake which turned out pretty well because my body now feels like most of the aches and pains from the last several weeks of activity have subsided. I am sure that there will be new aches and pains to come but at least those acquired during my initial transition from winter downtime to warm weather work time have passed.

The best part of the day (besides all the naps) was that one of my fellow homesteaders made me a belated German chocolate birthday cake and whoa was it frigging delicious. Although I could have undoubtedly eaten the entire cake myself I wound up sharing it and I was assuredly not the only one who thought that it was yummy! It is hard to say if the cake was more satisfying than the thought and time someone put into making it for me but either way it left me feeling both warm and fuzzy inside and absolutely full of cake!

During one of my walks outside in the rain I did take a quick look at that wet weather spring site that I have been slowly developing and noticed that several of the vertical holes are now holding water. The original angled hole did not appear to be holding all that much water but I think that is because of that lower angled hole that I recently created near it is now holding the water instead. I did not verify this by moving the flat rock covering that newest hole (because it was pouring rain and I did not want to get all muddy) but with all the rain and the lack of water in the initial angled hole I am assuming that is what is going on. When I get some pictures this morning I am going to investigate it further and see if my deduction is correct.

I am unsure just how many inches of rain that we got but it will undoubtedly be enough to raise the level of the creek so I will have to spend some time checking on that irrigation line that I have running across the creek and make sure that the water has not risen to a point where it can wash the line downstream. I have yet to figure out a better way of running the irrigation line across the creek but what I have been thinking about doing is sleeving the tubing inside a larger diameter tubing and wedging it under some boulders along the creek bottom.

The possibility of running the irrigation tubing on a cable across the creek is one that I have considered and rejected numerous times because the cabling introduces its own problems and to do it at a point high enough that it is well above the creek during a flood would be so high that I would lose every bit of water pressure that is being created by that particular gravity-fed system. If I run the irrigation tubing along the creek's bottom I will gain some water pressure along the way which would help mitigate losing water pressure as the line climbs back uphill and up the creek bank.

Anyway, I do not really have much to write about at the moment, the sun is starting to come up and I better wrap this up and see what I can accomplish before more rain moves back into the area. Everything being soggy, wet and cold outside is not all that conducive to getting stuff done so we will see how productive the day turns out to be. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night.

Day 216. (TFC Another Day Of Foul Weather, Dreaming Of Water Solutions & Staying Cozy In The Shelter)

It was a chilly morning and although it was not as rainy as the day before it remained damp and chilly outside the entire day which lead me to just staying indoors again snuggling with the dogs and taking a bunch of naps. The napping has been good for me not so much because I have been feeling tired or anything but because my brain has been in overdrive for many weeks now and just turning it off and getting a break from it has been nice.

I have been dreaming a lot during my naps and although my 'mind' is still thinking of things during those times it is not the same (as wakeful thinking) and I have been waking feeling rather peaceful afterwards instead of feeling 'troubled' by my over-thinking whilst awake. Thankfully the dreams that I have been having have not been stressful or anything and although they are bizarre and a bit surreal I would not go so far as to say that they are anything 'out of the ordinary' for me.

Some of what I have been dreaming has centered around finding solutions to some of the things that I am trying to accomplish around the homestead here in regards to the water scenario especially in regards to the spring water and irrigation water systems that I have been working on. It is assuredly tricky trying to translate the lofty (often peculiar) experiences (and ideas) that occur in the dreams to something tangible and simple but for the most part I have grown rather adept at it over the years and the recent dreams have me thinking more about rain-water harvesting for irrigation purposes as a possible solution.

I often get really focused on the springs and creek as water sources but given how much rain there has been here perhaps I am really missing out on harnessing its potential. Even though I am often suspicious of rain water (because of what might be inside of it) I think that for irrigation purposes I should set my concerns aside and see what I can come up with around here (as far as materials go) to set at least one rain water collection system up.

I keep thinking that I should harness the water that sheds off the roof covering my little shelter but given that the roofing metal on it is quite rusty I am unsure that it is all that great of an idea. In the past I have setup rain water collection on a few rusty roofs and although I was treating and drinking some of the water (out of necessity) I told myself that I would rather not have to do that again because of how much rust winds up in the water. I guess that what I am saying is that I have been sort of shying away from the idea of rain water harvesting as a whole but perhaps it is time to look at it as a viable solution here until I can get the spring and/or creek water systems setup to the point where they are truly functional.

The water systems that I currently have setup all face the same problem of overcoming the elevation changes of the terrain from their sources and up to the higher ground of the homestead itself. Of course this is nothing new as far as challenges go and although utilizing the velocity/siphon effect gets the gravity-fed water 'close' to a usable elevation it just does not quite make it far enough. The remaining distance (height) needed is so novel that it is a bit maddening because each place close to the homestead 'yard' that I get the water to flow to is always roughly within ten to twenty feet.

I think that the real solutions with the gravity-fed systems given the terrain here is to either build a small hydraulic ram pump to drive the water uphill or do what I was first considering which is to utilize a solar panel, a twelve volt battery and a pump to drive the water the remaining distance and into a holding tank. Given that the last time that I attempted that with the twelve volt water pumps that I already have failed... I should figure out a way to afford a stronger pump (or pumps) and just be done with it.

Anyway, I am going to keep this short and sweet so that I can make an early start on my day and see what all I can accomplish now that the foul weather has passed and the day is going to be much warmer than the previous two days. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night.

Day 217. (TFC Patching My Dog Yard Fence, Installing My Tree Stop Glass Table, Digging More Footers, Stacking Firewood & Spreading Grass Seed)

Although it got quite sunny outside it never quite got truly warm which was mostly because there was a slight breeze that carried a chill with it that was uncomfortably noticeable every time that I got in the shade. I kept hoping that it would eventually just be warm outside and although that never really happened it was at least warmer than it had been the last few days and it did not rain at all. Springtime in the mountains here is always hit or miss as far as the weather goes and fortunately we have not gotten any late frosts (yet) even though the last few nights have gotten down close to freezing temperatures. I will be a bit surprised if we make it through April without another freeze but the weather being as odd as it has been the last few years there is no real way of telling one way or another what it will do.

All that weather stuff aside, I made a pretty early start on my day by bundling up in my winter clothes and getting busy outdoors before I could convince myself that I would be better off spending my day cooped up inside staying cozy and warm. It sure was tempting at first but having a few days previously to think about the stuff that I wanted to accomplish I got into 'go mode' and did not stop until it was nearly dark outside.

As I have said before there is a section of fencing on my dog yard where my boy dog kept going over the fence when he saw those neighbor's 'free range' dogs and although I do not horribly mind him jumping the fence to chase them away I also wanted to keep the fence from being totally destroyed in that area. I wound up adding a roughly fifteen foot section of two foot tall fencing to the top of the other fence and installed it in such a way that it overlapped the mangled part of the old fencing and effectively 'patched' the bad spot. Doing that also raised the height of the fence in that area almost two more feet and after I finished and showed it to him he let out a bit of a disappointed sigh and seemed to realize that he can no longer scale the fence in that particular spot.

I had to get a little creative on attaching the new fencing but for the most part I just used some screws and small pieces of plywood to sandwich it over the old fencing and then used some twine to tie the two pieces of fencing together as well as repair some of the malformed parts of the original fence. Since the two foot tall fencing that I used did not line up with the preexisting fence posts unless I cut it shorter in length I opted to add another post where the fencing ended. Although it is not pretty by any means it will work which is all that really matters.

A few weeks back I got that black locust tree stump (that I used as the base for a glass table at the last place I lived) moved back to my shelter area with the aid of a few of my fellow homesteaders and ever since then I kept wracking my brain on exactly where to install it. Like I have said numerous times before 'flat space' around here is in short supply but I wound up installing the table near one of the outdoor fire pits (the one outside the dog yard) in a relatively flat spot that was out of the way and did not eat up any of the larger flat areas.

I did the same thing that I did before when setting that table up and just dug a hole, stood the stump in it, back-filled the dirt around it and tamped the ground around it with my mini sledgehammer. The only things that I did differently was that I hammered in rocks around the base instead of black locust stakes and I did not bury the stump quite as deeply so that the table top would be a little higher than it was previously. I also added a bunch of flat rocks around the base of it to act as pavers to help keep the vegetation from growing around it.

Early in the afternoon I went back to work on digging more footers and installing more sonotubes around that building at the homestead proper. The first hole that I dug went pretty smoothly and although I encountered plenty of small rocks I did not hit any big ones which was quite a relief. The second hole happened to land almost exactly where a post already was so I used an old disused post to brace the roof and remove the existing post that was in the way. I got lucky on that hole as well and did not hit any big rocks until I reached the bottom of the hole (at twenty inches) which fortunately is the frost line here.

Before doing any of the digging I used some pink mason string to do a proper layout so that all the new post (and concrete pillars) would line up. It was a bit tricky to accomplish that last bit because there was a bunch of wire and the old posts in the way but I eventually got the string line pulled tight and got everything lined up. The old posts were not installed with any kind of proper layout (that I can tell) which is actually making my task of installing new ones on a layout a little easier. Like I said the other day the new pillars/posts need to be on a layout so that they can be utilized for adding additions onto the building so I am mainly just keeping the distance between each post at eight, ten or twelve feet which is all standard sizes for lumber.

Once I finished with the odd job stuff at the homestead proper I switched back to working around my own area and got all the beech wood (that I have for firewood) stacked inside the corner of my greenhouse where the metal wall is. Although the wood now takes up a good portion of where I was previously putting my garden tools there is still room for the tools and now the firewood is not just covered by a tarp in the 'yard' like it was before and will hopefully cure up well in its new location. I still have not decided what to do with all the pine firewood that I have covered by the same tarp but given how tired I am of looking at it (and that I want to plant some stuff in the area where it is located) I will probably move it somewhere else over the coming days.

Anyway, late in the day I used a garden rake to 'rough up' the ground in the dog yard, remove a bunch of small rocks, twigs and leaves and generally prep the ground for some grass seed. I do not think that I quite realized just how many small rocks there are in the dog yard until I started the raking and although many of them have been revealed by all the foot traffic I think the majority of them have been revealed by the water that is shed off the shelter itself and all the rain in general. Once I had the ground prepped I spread almost an entire large coffee can of grass seed over it and was extra careful to spread the seed out rather well so as to avoid it growing in tight 'bunches' that would be prone to becoming root-bound and not spreading as well as it could. Since all the grass seed was spread in 'high traffic' areas I am unsure just how much of it will actually grow but hopefully it will start filling in some of the larger areas that are bare of any vegetation.

Well, I have rambled on here a good bit and better get this all wrapped up and edited so that I can get on with my day. It is a bit chilly outside once again but thankfully yesterday I remembered to take some pictures so I at least will not have to bundle up in warm clothes and have to go take any this morning. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night.

Day 218. (TFC Building A Border Around My Compost, Splitting Firewood, Creating Another Raised Garden Bed & Planting Corn)

It was once again a bit of a chilly morning but it warmed up rapidly and turned out to be a really nice day. There was a bit of a chill to the wind (again) and just like the day before if I stayed in the shade too long I got a bit cold which was at least mostly avoidable by staying busy in the sunny areas. It is often a bit tricky to avoid the shade in the woods because of the shadows cast by the trees so I just kept a warm hat and a jacket nearby for the times that I could not avoid the shaded areas. During the middle of the day it was not all that bad but early in the morning and late in the day I got chilled several times just walking in the shade from one area to another.

Recently I have been wracking my brain on what to do with all those pine logs that I had stacked under that tarp that I mentioned the other day and I have been equally thinking about how to create a border around my compost mound so that I can expand it a bit and help keep the stuff that I pile onto it from sliding off of it and into the dog yard. Lately I have been digging small holes in the mound when I am adding dog poop to it just so it will not roll off the mound as I am adding it but that defeats the purpose of encasing everything in ash to keep the flies out. All of which is what lead me to thinking about adding a border to it.

I wound up digging an approximately one foot wide by six inch deep trench around the entire mound and then hauling over all the pine logs from that woodpile, standing them up vertically in the trench as close together as possible, adding rocks around the bottoms of the logs and then back-filling the trench with clay and dirt that I then tamped in to firm the ground up around the logs. The logs were not all that long with the longest being maybe twenty inches but for the most part they were all sixteen inches or longer. I used the longest logs on the downhill side of the mound and the shorter ones on the uphill side and although in some places I dug the trench directly beside the base of the mound for the most part I tried to stay about six inches to a foot away from the base just so that I can enlarge the mound a bit as I keep adding stuff to it. All in all the project came out rather well and it even makes for a nice 'feature' in the dog yard.

After doing that project I took the remaining pine logs and split them with a maul and stacked them all by the fire pit in my dog yard just so that I would have a little bit of split wood to burn when I have fires in it. For the most part I have been burning whatever sticks that I find along the trails and around the shelter area in that fire along with whatever burnables that I have on hand like cardboard and paper but I have noticed that each time that I have a fire in there I always want something with some actual 'substance' to it to burn so I think that the split pine will work well for that especially since all I really want from having those fires is ashes for my compost and the pine will help the fires burn a bit hotter and faster.

Anyway, once I got all the pine logs moved from where I had them stacked under the tarp I re-arranged the long pine logs that they were all stacked on top of to make a new raised garden bed in that area because it gets really good sun for almost the entire day. Although I did rake up the area and remove all the rocks on the surface of the ground I did not til it or anything like that. I did notice while raking the area that the dirt there is rather nice and although it is just the first inch or so of topsoil that looks dark and rich it should work for my purposes without needing to add more soil to it.

Later in the day I got some of the corn that I saved from the last time that I grew it and after scratching out several rows with a hoe I went along with a small stick and poked holes into the ground about every six inches and planted a kernel or two of corn in each one. I was a bit surprised to realize that it only took two small corn cobs of kernels to plant the entire new garden bed and considering that I have about another dozen or so corn cobs I will now need to find more sunny spots to plant more corn in. One way or another I am rather determined to plant all the corn that I have and although I did plant a little of it in my compost mound for seed purposes I think that I want to plant the majority of it in places where I can do more with it than just creating next year's seed stock. Just to be clear the dog poop compost should not be used for growing food stuff for three years but for growing seeds (like with the corn) it works really well.

Planting the corn this early in the year is a bit of a gamble but hopefully the weather forecasters are correct and we will not be getting anymore below freezing temperatures for the remainder of the springtime. It is hard to put much faith in them at this point because they are so often just 'off' or all out wrong about the weather but currently I think that the best thing that I can do is plant as much food stuff as possible and just see how things go especially since it is early enough in the year that I can just plant stuff again if the frost comes along and wipes everything out.

Well, the sun is making its way up into the sky so I better wrap this up and get it all edited so that I can get on with my day. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night.

Day 219. (TFC Organizing My Storage, Leveling A Chicken Coop, Sharpening A Few Bladed Tools & Planting Red Clover Along With Some Other Flowering Plants)

The weather was much nicer even though it sprinkled rain a little in the early morning hours. All things considered the rain was probably helpful because I had just planted all that corn the other day and the ground getting a little more damp will undoubtedly help the seeds germinate. I dd notice when I was planting the corn that the ground was still very moist from all the recent rain so hopefully even with all the leaves raked away from that area it will remain that way. I keep picturing how dry it was last summer (when I moved here) and kind of cringe a little inside at how much I will have to keep things watered if another drought like that one occurs.

During the time that it was raining in the morning I hiked down to my storage in the camper at the homestead proper and finally started getting things inside of it more organized which was more of a by-product of me wanting to find a few things rather than a real desire to get things more organized. Do not get me wrong because it is not like the storage is a real mess or anything but it has definitely needed some attention ever since I first got here and unloaded the majority of my stuff into the camper especially in regards to the usage of space. When I first got here me and the other folks just unloaded everything from the moving truck as quickly as we could which assuredly accomplished the mission at hand (moving) but ever since then it has been nagging at me to go through everything, figure out exactly where everything is and get things organized better. After all my efforts I got about a third of it organized/consolidated more to my liking and found the stuff I was looking for which was mainly a bunch of seeds from wild plants that I harvested at the last place.

The seeds that I have all seemed like they were in pretty good shape besides the sycamore tree seeds that look a little 'powdery' but might still be fine. The other seeds were chicory, red and white clover, black locust and datura which I like growing in my dog poop compost to help keep the flies away. I also found a small jar of individually wrapped seeds of fruits and vegetables that I have had for many years and am unsure if they are any good but I am going to plant them anyway because at this point I feel an intense compulsion to just plant anything and everything that I can and just hope that it grows.

I wound up planting some of the red and white clover in that raised garden bed that I made for the corn. What I did was use a hard rake (what some folks call a garden rake) to rough up the soil around the edges of the bed (where I did not plant any corn) then gently pulled apart the clover heads and thoroughly spread the tiny seeds over the roughed up area before covering them by hand with the loose soil created by the raking. I did not bury the seeds very deeply and at their deepest depth they are maybe a quarter inch below the surface which should work pretty good to get the clover growing rapidly. I also planted some of the clover in my other big raised garden bed in front of the greenhouse in the areas where I have already added soil and planted stuff. I considered planting it all over that raised garden bed but decided against doing that until I add more soil to it.

I had two small boxes of 'wild flower' seeds that I have lugged around for several years and again although I have no idea if they are good I wound up spreading both boxes around the raised bed with the corn and clover as well as in the raised bed in front of the greenhouse and along the base of the greenhouse where I added a bunch of dirt and rocks. Each box contained at least tens of thousands of seeds so hopefully at least some of them grow and will help to attract some pollinators to the areas. I also planted a bunch of datura seeds into the top and sides of my dog poop compost and as long as I remember not to bury those areas in new soil, ashes or clay I will once again have some big beautiful datura sanatorium plants to help keep the flies away from the compost like I did at the last place that I lived.

All that jazz aside, I finally put a good edge back onto several of my favorite bladed tools like my axe, cane knife, machetes, kukri and that small hatchet that I am so fond of wearing and whoa the blades of some of those tools were in pretty bad shape given the heavy use I put them to during my adventure at the last place that I lived. The two that had taken the most abuse were my axe (that I mostly use for cutting roots) and my cane knife and I spent a good bit of time reshaping the edge on both of them.

At the last place I did not have the luxury of using my angle grinder with a flapper wheel to keep the blades in good shape and had to continually file them by hand which assuredly did the job but getting some of the larger dings and nicks out of the blades with a metal file was never quite sufficient enough to keep the blades the way that I like them. I did use a bit of a heavier grit flapper wheel than I usually use and am thinking that I might go back over the blades with a finer grit flapper wheel just to hone the edges a bit more.

Anyway, early in the day I helped some of my fellow homesteaders level out and rock beneath their chicken coop and although I only did some heavy lifting of both the coop itself and by gathering a bunch of rocks for them to place beneath it... it burned through a shitload of my calories and left me feeling pretty damn hungry much earlier in the day than I usually do which of course lead to me eating a big lunch late in the afternoon and inadvertently into taking a nap. I slept so soundly that I had a hard time falling asleep last night and it skewed my schedule this morning and I wound up waking much later than usual.

Now I need to wrap this all up, get it edited and then get all my posts for the week compiled into the weekly Fantastica Chronicles which will probably be another hour or two to finish before I am free this morning to get to working on other stuff. So with that ta ta for now, I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night and I will more than likely do the same.