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.
The Fantastica Chronicles Day 206-212!
Day 206. (TFC Doing Some Early Morning Hiking, Clearing Out My Greenhouse, Moving A Bunch Of Stuff Around, Planting Potatoes & Doing So Many Things It Is Hard To Fit Them All Here In The Title)
It is early in the morning here and once again it is raining but perhaps by the time that I get this written and the sun comes up the rain will let up and I can get to working on stuff early. Thankfully the temperature has warmed up again and will more than likely remain that way for the rest of the week even if it is supposed to rain a good bit over the coming days.
I am pretty whooped after yesterday's activities but all in all I also feel pretty good about the progress that I made on stuff as well as the progress made by some of my fellow homesteaders that were working on their own projects at the homestead proper. Given the things going on in the world and how it has affected my fellow homesteaders with their daily routines it is good to see them adapting to the changes so well and working together on common goals. Their story is not really my story to tell so suffice it to say that the pandemic (and the general response to it) has affected their lives much more than it has mine.
My day began with taking a short hike up the creek looking for potential sites to capture water for a (or multiple) gravity-fed irrigation system(s) and although I found a few spots that might work to develop more of those natural reservoirs at (like the one I made last week) none of them would really be any better than the one I am currently using because although the places are a foot or two higher in elevation the surrounding terrain (rocks, trees and hilly areas) would eliminate any 'gains' that the higher elevation would provide. It was nice to just look though and eliminate them as possibilities because now I can focus on exploring places further up the creek on that good neighbor's property.
The other day I spent some time looking at some of the county property maps and using the measurement tool on their to get a rough idea on the distances between the furthest point upstream on that neighbor's property and the homestead where I want to run the water to and was a bit surprised to find that it was only about a seven hundred and fifty feet. Although that number is probably not precise (especially given the terrain and any obstacles along the way) it does however give me a good idea on just how much irrigation tubing that it will take to get water from there to the homestead itself. With the irrigation tubing that I currently have I do not think that I can quite make it that distance but over the coming week (or weeks) I think that I am going to hike up there and see if I can at least either find or develop a place (reservoir) to capture water from just to start the process.
On a different note, I have been wanting to finish getting my greenhouse constructed and since I have been using it as dry storage all winter for some building materials I went ahead and started clearing it out and with the help of one of my fellow homesteaders I got some of the larger material stored in one of the outbuildings at the homestead proper. I still have a few things stored in my greenhouse that I will need to find a place for but now I am pretty much ready to begin finishing off the walls and getting it to the point of being operational. I still do not have any idea what I am actually going to grow in it but I am thinking that perhaps I should just try a variety of things and see what does well in it given that it is in the woods and does not get a whole lot of sunlight.
Since I am pretty low on actual building supplies I hiked around the homestead looking for something large enough that I could plant some more potatoes in and I would up finding a metal sleeve from an old stove among the boulders where the previous owners of the place had thrown a bunch of scrap metal. It is the only place on the property where there is any junk so it was good not just to find something to plant the potatoes in but also to help start cleaning that area up which it sorely needs but overall is not all that bad considering that most of the metal objects will probably be useful for one thing or another. The metal box (sleeve) from the oven worked pretty well for planting the potatoes in after I used the claw of one of my framing hammers to punch some holes in it to accommodate drainage and although I just set it inside my large raised bed for now I am thinking to bury it and ring it with stones just so that it is not such an eye sore.
Anyway, ever since I moved here I have had a lot of stuff stored around a portion of the yard at the homestead proper and although it was not truly in the way of anything it does make things a bit cluttered so I spent some time shuffling some of it around and consolidating it somewhat behind the camper and a bit more out of the way. I really need to get some better storage built in my own little area in the woods so that I can begin hauling it all back there but for now it would just make things a bit of a cluster fuck if I did.
Well, I did a bunch of other things throughout the day but to detail them all would nearly double the length of this entry and honestly they were nothing all that fabulous other than perhaps the part where me and a fellow homesteader repaired a fifteen foot section of fencing late in the day because the old fencing was rather useless and a bunch of pallets had been used to block it off to keep their dogs inside their dog yard.
I guess that is about it for now and once again the sun is almost up so I better wrap this up, do the editing and get ready to truly start my day. I forgot to take any pictures so I will probably take another early morning picture before getting this posted. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night.
Day 207. (TFC Another Rainy Day, Building Some Greenhouse Tables, Moving One Of My Big Solar Panels & Investigating The Status Of That Wet Weather Spring)
The rain only let up a few times throughout the course of the day but I was able to at least get a few things done even though I did not get in nearly as a productive day as I was wanting to. The weather will hopefully be clearing up soon and although there will be more rain this week it is also looking like there will at least be a few sunny days. Things are getting quite mucky outside once again and I am regretting not getting another bale of straw to spread around the shelter entrance and help mitigate the muck. I am thinking that when I do my monthly shopping next week that I will try to get some straw if my budget permits it.
On the bright side of getting all the rain... that wet weather spring that I dug those holes around a few weeks back is starting to look a bit promising. It is still too early in the development process to tell if it will prove to be a viable spring but for now that one particular hole (the first one I dug where I saw water emerging from the ground) is holding water rather nicely and I was pleasantly surprised when I put my hand in it and felt that the water was very cold which is a good indicator that it is actually spring water and not necessarily just rain water that has collected in it.
Each day I think about doing some more excavation in that spring area to continue trying to find an actual springhead but since it is wholly in the experimental/developmental stage I have yet to prioritize working on it more. Part of me just wants to 'dig into it' and see what I find because if I can establish a good water source there it could potentially solve all my gravity-fed water problems due to where it is located on the 'uphill' portion of the property. The spring area itself is currently looking pretty good because with the addition of the holes the soil/clay is staying very wet/moist and with each rain that we get it seems like the 'main' hole is holding more water which indicates that the ground below it is remaining thoroughly saturated which is exactly what I want to see!
I spent some time helping a fellow homesteader build two more tables for the greenhouse at the homestead proper. Overall it was a rather simple task because a few days ago we re-purposed two wood framed tables to act as planting boxes (with the legs in the air) and all we did was stretch chain-link fencing across the legs and used fencing nails to attach the chain-link to the legs. We then inserted two long pieces of bamboo beneath the chain-link and lashed them to the legs to support the chain-link. I totally failed to take any pictures so suffice it to say that the tables came out pretty well and will hold a good amount of potted plants on them.
Late in the afternoon me and two of my fellow homesteaders finally moved my second big solar panel back to my little area in the woods and placed it near the greenhouse. It is not really the best place for getting sun but it is the only place where it will get some sun and not be under trees where branches (and or seed pods or seed cones) can fall on it and potentially damage it. I have yet to actually set it up or truly get it properly positioned and moving it was primarily done just to get it out of the way and continue my recent project of hauling more of my gear back into the woods.
Mostly I just stayed indoors out of the weather and sort of brooded over the various things that I want to accomplish over the coming weeks and how to best prioritize the order in which I do things to yield maximum results. Getting stuff done outdoors has largely hinged on the weather of late and all too often I find myself at the end of the day not quite accomplishing as much as I really want to accomplish. Staying indoors is nice and all during the winter months and I can do it rather well without going all that 'stir crazy' but whoa when the springtime arrives I just want to stay in motion outdoors getting as much done as possible each day!
Well, the sun is starting to come up and I am going to try to at least go get a picture of the wet weather spring to include in this post. I do not know if I ever mentioned it but the phone that I use to take pictures does not do well in the humidity (or when/after raining) and every picture comes out super blurry. I had to use a different phone to take yesterday morning's picture and I am never quite happy with the way its pictures come out but I guess that it is better than no pictures.
Anyway, that is about it for now. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night.
Day 208. (TFC Working In The Rain, Getting More Of My Greenhouse Walled In & Doing Some Planting)
The rain just never really let up yesterday and although it more or less drizzled all day it also poured rain a heck of a lot. Needless to say, all the rain has made the area outside of my shelter quite the mucky mess but there is not much that I can do about that until I get some more straw to spread over it. Considering that the seasons have now changed I am considering adding more grass seed to the muck in the hopes that some of it might grow but honestly I think that the area gets too much foot traffic for the grass to really grow there so I have been considering lining it with flat stones. The only thing that makes me hesitant to lay stones down in the area is how many times I have fallen/slipped and that I would really like to avoid taking a tumble onto a bunch of stones especially if I slip on my entrance ramp.
The best solution for the entire area directly outside the shelter entrance is to get my pre-built decks carried back into the woods from where they are stored at the homestead proper and do what I was originally planning to do and use them to build a porch that I can later close in to make a kitchen which would be incredibly nice especially since I am still using my 'coffee cart' as my outdoor kitchen. Mainly the problem with moving the pre-built decks is that they are heavy to start with and at this point they are heavy and waterlogged and we just do not have enough people here to carry them. I have considered taking the decks themselves apart and while that would be a rather straightforward task, I think that doing so would destroy much of the material.
On a different not, even though it was raining I decided to dive into finishing off as much of my greenhouse as I could so that I could start planting stuff inside of it and also have some area outdoors where I can work on stuff during the rainy days. I wound up having enough greenhouse plastic to wall in the largest unfinished wall and most of the short 'front' wall of the greenhouse and although I have yet to decide on how I am going to enclose the wall on the north end (where the metal roof is) I am sure that I will eventually come up with a solution for it. I am still debating on whether or not I should turn that end of the greenhouse into a shed because the roofing metal leaks a good bit and the area below it does not stay quite dry enough to store stuff in. It might make for a good 'garden shed' but for now I am going to keep my options open.
Once I got the rest of the greenhouse plastic installed I retrieved that metal tub with the bottom rusted out that I previously had been using as part of one of the outdoor fire pits and after putting it in the corner of the greenhouse I added some soil to it and planted some potatoes in it. They are the very first things that I 'planted' inside the greenhouse and hopefully they do well in there. I also planted some of those black cherry seeds that I have in a flower pot and put them in the same corner as the potatoes.
After getting those two things planted one of my fellow homesteaders showed up and offered to help so we went to work digging up a few rectangle shaped beds inside the greenhouse and planting everything that I had on hand into the beds as well as into the remaining flower pots that I previously had stuff growing in. All total we planted more black cherry seeds, two dandelion plants, a possibly living mullein plant as well as a bunch of mullein seeds, a living chicory plant as well as a lot of chicory seeds and more potatoes. We also brought in a tray of half gallon flower pots that have a bunch of miscellaneous vegetation growing in them as well as six baby black locust trees. We also moved that metal box that I planted potatoes in a few days ago and got it situated inside the greenhouse. All in all it was pretty awesome being able to work inside the greenhouse during the pouring rain and getting stuff (besides grass) growing in there!
We also added more dirt (that we dug up from the garden beds that we made) to the outside of the greenhouse where the plastic meets the ground. What I am thinking of doing on the outside of the greenhouse is to create flower beds on at least the two long sides of it where the water from the rain will collect which would not only work really well to help control the water runoff but also provide some plants for the local pollinators. The outdoor flower beds would also look pretty damn nice especially if I make them with rocks and/or stones. As much as I like the idea of growing stuff in and around the greenhouse I am equally looking forward to making it a pleasant and perhaps even beautiful place to hang out in during the winter and/or rainy times. We will see how it all turns out in the end and just how well it works out given that it is in the woods and does not get a whole lot of sunlight.
Well, I better wrap this up and get it all edited. It is raining here again this morning but hopefully it will clear up so that I can get back to working on stuff outdoors and even if it does not clear up I can at least do more work in the greenhouse where it is nice and dry, out of the wind and pleasantly warm! I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night.
Day 209. (TFC Finishing Enclosing My Greenhouse, Moving A Bunch Of Building Materials, Expanding My Large Raised Garden Bed, Listening To Music & Doing A Bunch Of Other Stuff)
The weather finally cleared up by early afternoon and the sun not only came out but it was a truly sunny day with very little in the way of cloud cover which was really nice after all the recent dreary foul weather days. It was a bit chilly outside in the early morning hours and since I got an early start on doing things it was not long before I found myself first removing my jacket and warm hat in favor of no hat and a short-sleeved shirt while working on the greenhouse but once I got to working outside of the greenhouse I noticed the wind was a bit chilly so I wound up putting on a long-sleeved shirt as well which was just enough to knock the chill off.
Before I launch into describing some of my activities I want to say that it was one of those days that I found myself just doing one thing after another and tackling a bunch of tasks that (for whatever reasons) I had previously been either avoiding, dreading or a mixture of both. Tackling those kinds of tasks (that I dread) always leaves me feeling like I really accomplished something as well as a certain satisfaction that I overcame whatever 'dread' I was feeling to do it which makes for a pretty potent boost to my morale and an overall feeling of achievement. All of which, often leaves me feeling like I can do anything! So in other words doing a lot of those kinds of things in one day left me feeling rather damn good by the day's end.
Anyway, one of the walls of my little outdoor room attached to the shelter is made of greenhouse plastic and when I first installed the plastic I did not really take that much time to either attach it well or cut off the excess plastic which was no big deal because throughout the fall and winter it kept the water out of the room but... it had been nagging at me to attach it better (because the wind had blown it lose multiple times over the last many months) and to also trim up the excess plastic... so the wind would not catch it and tear it loose!
The bottom part of the plastic had a lot of grass growing under it and although I could have trimmed it up months ago I left it so that the grass would continue to grow throughout the colder months and also so that the dogs would not trample it. As a side note, it is also one of the places where the dogs can eat the grass because it is tall enough to do so unlike the rest of the grass in the dog yard. There is also a second grassy spot like that one (that the dogs can eat from) under the plastic that shields the bottom of the outdoor room's longest wall on the downhill side where the rainwater (and snow melt) from both the shelter and the outdoor roofs drains to. The whole time that I have been watching that grass growing I have been thinking that once the weather warmed up that it would probably start spreading and grow into the dog yard more where there is not much in the way of grass or anything else growing.
Once I got the plastic on the outdoor room securely attached and trimmed I took the plastic scraps over to the greenhouse and used them to cover the remaining section of the short wall on the front of the greenhouse. I had to get a bit creative to make the plastic work but with the aid of a few pieces of poplar I was able to secure both the bottom of the previously installed plastic and the top of the new plastic. The newly installed plastic did not quite reach the ground in several places so I wound up adding some logs, rocks and dirt to 'raise' the ground to meet the plastic. Doing that was something that I actually needed to do anyway to help prevent the water shedding from the roof keeping the ground soaked around the downhill post that holds up the low corner of the building.
Over the outside of the post itself I installed a few pieces of old roofing metal to keep the water shedding from the roof directly above it from onto the post and also used the metal to create a 'wall' that goes to the actual corner of the building where I added another short poplar post to more or less act as a 'nailer' for the roofing metal and to create a corner so that I could continue another wall to cover the side of the greenhouse. I decided to just add a big log at the base of the hitherto unenclosed wall of the greenhouse and used it to attach three pieces of roofing metal (cut with the appropriate angle on top) to. The angle cut tops of roofing metal themselves I secured to the edge of the roof rafter just below where the roof's metal makes an overhang. All along the upper edge where the wall and roof meet I bent the overhang portion of the roof's metal down to create a 'cap' and act as a drip edge which worked out so well you might think that I had planned it that way.
I added in another piece of poplar between the log on the ground and the tall edge of the wall so that I would have more than just the sharp edge of the vertical roof metal at the entryway which is about four feet wide. On the left side of the doorway I installed a tall poplar post that goes from the ground to the roof header and attached the greenhouse plastic to it to finish out that large plastic wall and once again create a corner to act as a 'nailer' for the plastic which I wrapped around the poplar pole and stapled to it.
Needless to say that with all these simple construction solutions I am not so much trying to build something overly strong (because the super structure of the greenhouse is incredibly strong) and am just trying to enclose the greenhouse the best that I can with the materials and fasteners that I have on hand. It is definitely all built well enough for my purposes and it is worth mentioning that I am staking every thing that I can into the ground (and/or piling rocks and dirt around it) and making sure that nothing can be pulled loose in high winds. In other words I am 'cutting corners' so to speak and doing preemptive hazard mitigation along the way.
This post is already getting long and the clock is ticking now that the sun is coming up and I feel like I have not even begun to explain all the stuff that I did! It is times like this when I wish that I was also making videos and uploading them just so that I could write about other things and let the videos speak for themselves. Hopefully there will eventually be fiber optic internet here and all my uploading and overall internet problems will evaporate and I can make videos again! Maybe I should at least start making them so that later I can upload them when the internet situation changes. It is something I will consider but the idea of having more media to archive is a bit daunting to say the least.
After doing all the greenhouse stuff I decided to finally move all the building material, plumbing material, wrought iron and roofing metal from where I had it stored in front of the greenhouse and got it all re-stacked on the sawhorses beside where I have my black locust material stored which oddly enough both of the piles of material turned out to be more or less the same length, height and width. I like how that came out because the majority of my building materials are now stored in one place where they are convenient to access.
With the last round of rain that we got that wet weather spring has a lot of water in it and that first angled hole that I dug (where I initially saw the water bubbling up) is nearly full of water. It was such a pleasant thing to see that I decided to dig more on that one hole downhill that was the shallowest hole where I had previously encountered rocks and roots. Digging it deeper required widening the hole some to get around the rocks but eventually I got it dug about a foot deeper and although the clay and dirt was very wet and there was a lot of small shale pieces that were saturated... I did not encounter any water. All I can do is keep digging and excavate around the big rock that stopped my progress and see what I find.
The folks at the homestead proper had a big brush burning fire most of the day and I wound up on and off throughout the day (and into the early evening) helping haul stuff to the fire and even do some brush clearing with them on the terraces around the fire area. At one point in the afternoon with the music playing in the background I even carried my chair to beside the fire where I sat, had the bright warm sun at my back, the big fire before me and a big warm rock under my feet. I even took my shoes off and warmed up my feet and basked in the heat and was like "Yes. This is what life is for!" which made for a nice late in the day break before diving back into doing more stuff.
Well, there was other stuff that was accomplished and overall it was a wonderfully productive spring day and I am looking forward to having many more like it... music and all! For now I better just wrap this up and get it edited. I also need to go around and get a few pictures because yesterday I missed taking a bunch of them because the phone that I usually take pictures with was attached to the mixer for playing the music. As a total side note, something funny that I keep getting told lately is 'Jacob your life has not changed at all since the apocalypse.'which always leaves me thinking something like: Did you actually think it would!
I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night.
Day 210. (TFC Doing More Spring Site Development, Working On The Greenhouse & Doing Too Much Stuff To Write About)
It is once again early in the morning here and I am slowly waking up enough that I can start typing things out. It is admittedly an interesting way to start the day because after waking up, turning on the light in the shelter, letting the dog's outside and getting my coffee brewed I promptly open a text editor and start pecking out some words which is not all that interesting in and of itself but what is interesting is casting my mind back to what I all I did the day before which is no small feat (even without being barely awake) especially when I have done a lot of various things that amount to a long day of productivity. It is difficult to sum up what re-playing the previous day's events in my mind's eye does for me but it sure does get my brain kick-started for the morning as well as lend me a pretty good sense of 'continuity' from day to day.
So far this writing about the previous day in the wee hours of the morning has been working out well and I do not miss battling exhaustion at the end of each day to get my writing time in. On the flip-side to all of that, some mornings it is a bit of a struggle to bring the previous day's activities into focus because I have the long-established habit of spending my mornings ruminating about what I am going to be doing that day and only mildly reflecting upon the previous day. I guess that if I keep doing things this way (writing in the morning) I will eventually settle into the habit of both reflecting upon the past and ruminating about the present and/or the immediate future. Thus far the big advantage to this change in habit has been that I begin my day's pretty damn clear-headed after typing out a thousand odd words into something that is coherent! I also start the day feeling like I have already accomplished something meaningful long before (or just after) the sun has risen!
All that jazz aside, I took the initiative yesterday to cut up some aluminum siding with a pair of metal snips (metal shears) to the sizes of some missing windows on the library bus at the homestead proper and got them installed so that the interior of the bus would be better protected from the elements. It was one of those tasks that has been nagging at me for my entire stay here and one that I should have taken the thirty minutes to do instead of letting the 'dread' build up over it for all these months. I do not know if 'dread' is the most accurate way to describe it but I had basically been avoiding doing it just because I did not want to cut the aluminum siding by hand and thus avoid creating burrs along the edges by cutting it with the circular saw and then having to grind/file the burrs off with either an angle grinder or a metal file.
Anyway, once I got all the pieces of siding fitted into their respective openings I found some caulk and a caulk-gun and delegated the task of caulking it all to one of my fellow homesteaders who did all of the caulking later in the day. The project turned out pretty well overall but I think that I am going to find some sheet metal screws and secure the siding to the window frames just in case someone leans on them from inside the bus or in case of incredibly strong winds which I have found are pretty common here during the winter months.
After all of that I wound up digging a new hole at that wet weather spring site beside (and kind of below) that very first angled hole that I dug which follows the contour of the big boulder in the ground there. The digging was rather straightforward and I did not encounter much in the way of roots or rocks (besides that big boulder) and I was very happy to see water seeping into the new hole within the first foot of digging. I am unsure if the water was coming from that first initial hole situated above/beside the new hole, if it was coming up from below the edge of the boulder or some combination of the two but either way it was nice to see and seeing it at least makes me feel like I am making some progress on developing that spring area. It is definitely a slow process developing a wet weather spring (and a total gamble) but this particular spring area is looking quite promising given that the ground has been staying very moist and there is water in that main hole more often than not. Time will tell but for now I am going to just keep plugging away at it when the inspiration to do so comes over me!
On a different note, the greenhouse project is coming along nicely and I got both the entryways framed in with some pieces of poplar and the smaller entryway is more or less finished now unless I decide to add a little more plastic so that the plastic 'flap' I am using as a door seals the building a little better. I am unsure about sealing it better because I am unsure how hot it will get inside if I do that even though I have several places in the building's roof and walls that create air vents.
As far as what to do with the other entryway goes I am still undecided on what to do to enclose it, especially above the entryway where I am thinking to vent the highest part of the roof/ceiling so that I can maintain good circulation. I am hesitant to install roofing metal as siding there because the framing is not all that stout which makes me keep considering just adding plastic but given that I have used up all my greenhouse plastic... whatever other plastic that I use would be prone to breaking down in the UV from the sun and make a mess that I would have to cleanup later.
I also went around the base of the greenhouse and added more dirt, clay and rocks where the plastic meets the ground and really like how all that came out because it makes the greenhouse look like it is sprouting from the ground instead of being built on top of it. The rocks will assuredly help with collecting heat throughout the day and also (on the garden bed sides) help keep the soil (that I have yet to add) warm. I also went around the edges of the big logs that make up the garden beds and added smaller stones/rocks in the cracks where the logs meet the ground. I am mostly doing that to stabilize the logs and also to not leave a bunch of room under them where snakes or other vermin would be prone to use it as habitat. I will eventually cover the rocks beneath/beside the logs with clay and/or dirt and then tamp/pack it in to further stabilize and seal beneath the logs. All total it took three small wagon loads of rocks to get the exterior of the logs sealed and most of them I was able to collect from along the trail where I had been kicking them off to the sides over the last many months as they were worked lose from the trail itself from all the foot traffic.
This post is getting quite long already and I have once again not really described much of what I did throughout the day! The sun is also up now so I better get to wrapping things up so that I can get an early start to my day. Something worth mentioning is that the canopy tent protecting the 'solar shack' has miraculously survived all these months since last summer and somehow it even survived all the rain and snow that we got during the winter but it has also been quite the 'eyesore' especially because the frame and canopy fabric sags in several places. So I went ahead and removed it completely from above the solar shack and used a tarp to help seal the roof and a small portion of the sides as well which should work well enough until I figure out what to do next with it.
Part of me just wants to delete the shack altogether but since it houses one of my crucial WiFi extenders I cannot quite do that because of the weak signal the extender already gets. I also cannot (should not) enclose the shack with roofing metal (like I initially planned to do) because I think the metal will make the weak WiFi signal either worse than it is or completely disappear altogether. The real solution would be to run CAT-5 (networking cable) from the homestead proper out to the woods but that just is not feasible at the moment largely due to finances. For now at least the shack is not quite so ugly and once I reinforce the frame of the canopy tent I can set it up somewhere else and create a bit more dry area.
Well, I better really wrap this up and get it edited. I have to once again go out early in the morning and get some pictures of yesterday's projects because I used that phone with the good camera to play music all day and neglected to take any pictures but hey having the music was definitely worth it! I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night and for those of you that sent me birthday gifts via PayPal yesterday THANK YOU SO MUCH! Much Love and all that jazz!
Day 211. (TFC Briefly Venturing Into Civilization, Setting Up My Outdoor Shower, Hauling Rocks & Tidying Up The Shelter Area)
I woke up several hours later than usual today and am getting off to a slow start which is not all that surprising now that it is the ass end of a rather productive week. I did wake up before the dawn for a few brief moments but after hearing what I thought to be rain (and it feeling a bit chilly) I dozed back off. Now that I am actually up I do not see any evidence that it had rained so I have no idea what I was hearing that made my sleepy brain think that it was raining outside. I guess that I needed a little more rest than usual and am thankful that my lifestyle accommodates me the flexibility to do so.
Early in the day I decided it was time to get my outdoor shower setup operational again even if there is still a chance that we might get more freezing temperatures over the next several weeks. I will just going to have to keep an eye on the weather and be sure to drain the on-demand water heater if/when the colder temperatures return. The setup itself was not all that difficult because all that I had to do was swap out the empty propane tank (for the on-demand water heater) for one with fuel in it, remove the plastic bag that I had protecting the water heater housing from rain, remove the piece of plastic that I had covering the water input (to keep critters out), run an extension cord and water house to the water heater and turn everything on.
At first when I hooked everything up to the water heater nothing happened except for a small amount of water coming out of the shower head. Thinking that perhaps the shower head was clogged I removed it from its tube but still the water heater was not igniting and the water was barely trickling out. So after a lot of head scratching and turning on and off the electricity, the gas, the power switch for the water heater and adjusting the 'water flow' and 'gas flow' dials on the water heater it was still not working. I wound up deciding to turn the water off altogether and drain the water heater and was a little surprised to see that where I had connected the water hose to my main water supply line a piece of the piping had come apart. Apparently the glue on the PVC pipe that connects the male water hose fitting to the PVC valve had let go and no water was going to the shower except for what was gravity-feeding it to if via the water hose.
After shutting the water off at the valve and reconnecting the lose PVC pipe (I just jammed it back in its hole and twisted it snug) and then turning the water back on the water heater kicked on and worked just fine. Of all the times for that PVC pipe to come lose that was an odd time and left me a bit confused as to what the heck was going on with the on-demand shower and since I could not see the main water valve from where I was tinkering with the shower setup there is no telling how long I would have been 'head scratching' over it trying to figure out what was wrong!
Once the shower was operational I used some hot water and a little bleach to scrub out and rinse clean my outdoor bathtub so that I could climb into it and take my first outdoor shower of the year. Since the wind was a bit cool (and minorly gusting) I mostly just sat in the warm tub water with the shower head pouring water down on top of me which felt pretty damn awesome especially since it was so sunny outside and the black plastic tub walls were also radiating heat. I always look forward to being able to start using my outdoor bathtub each year but for the last several years I could only heat it via the sun so being able to just fire up my on-demand propane water heater and having actual hot water this year was/is a pretty damn fantastic feeling to say the least.
On a different note, I went to town with a few of my fellow homesteaders and got some stuff for my birthday weekend (which is this weekend) and since I had not left the homestead since the first of the month I was very aware of how far apart folks stayed from each other (in the stores and parking lots) and just how empty many of the shelves in the stores were. One store in particular did not have any bread of any sort (whether loaves, buns, tortillas, pitas) and they had removed their usual 'bread' display (where it is stocked) altogether. I was not specifically going to get bread unless I saw some that was cheap or on sale but my fellow homesteaders were and after combing the entire store they/we left without any sort of bread. I was however able to get two months worth of coffee which was one of the main things that I wanted to get not so much because I wanted to hoard it but because I wanted to banish all thoughts of running out of the stuff over the coming weeks and can binge out on drinking it if need be without worrying about cutting into my monthly rations of it.
Anyway, I pretty much spent the rest of the day tidying up around the shelter area and hauling stones/rocks from the edges of the trail to my greenhouse and adding them around the bottom of the greenhouse's exterior as well as some to the interior along what I think of as the front wall. Some of the stones that I placed on the interior are really large and they will undoubtedly work well to provide thermal mass inside the greenhouse. Those particular stones are a bit fatter than I would like them to be (and thus I lose some space in the greenhouse) so I might eventually swap them out for some thinner (flatter) stones if I wind up needing some extra room inside but for now I have plenty of free space to work with so it is not all that big of a deal one way or another if I lose a few inches of room.
I really like how the whole greenhouse project has been turning out and although the ability to grow some stuff is nice and all... just having that much dry and mostly weather-proof space outdoors to work with is frigging awesome especially since a solid half of the greenhouse's interior has become my shop, storage and chill out area when I want to take a break during the day. As far as taking breaks goes I just have a chair, small table, shelf and an ashtray setup inside the place where I can relax out of the sun but whoa when it got up to eighty degrees outside yesterday I had to relocate to the shade outside the greenhouse because it was just too damn hot inside of it for it to be truly relaxing!
Once I finish covering the remaining wall (above the large entryway) and creating a door for the large entryway I may have to adjust some of the openings in the greenhouse plastic that I have for air vents and really 'dial in' the air circulation so that it does not get 'too hot' inside for the plants. For now it is assuredly fine but given how hot it gets even without being fully sealed I will probably have to make some adjustments to compensate for over-heating.
Well, I better wrap this up and get it edited. I once again failed to get any pictures yesterday so I will have to go around and snap a few of them this morning so that I can complete this post. I have been really liking getting the pictures early in the day because the morning sunlight seems to work pretty well whereas the sunlight (especially the angle of it) later in the day makes taking decent pictures a real challenge more often than not. It is also nice just having a reason to walk around in the dewy woods accompanied by the bird song and taking a close look at the things that were accomplished the day before. In other words I am liking it and looking forward to doing it this morning. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night.
Day 212. (TFC Building A Coffee Bar & Enjoying The Day)
The weather turned out really nice and although I intended to just take a few pictures before completing the post that I was working on... I wound up diving into building a small coffee bar and working exclusively on it for the remainder of the day. It was one of those projects that I felt inspired to do so much that I did not stop working on it until it was finished late in the day after fashioning a roof for the bar and making a 'bar stool' to sit on at it. I really should have constructed a bar like that months ago so that I would have somewhere to relax at outdoors while taking breaks from working and to have a place where I can collect some rain water at the highest elevation point on the property. Although the roof above the bar is currently only two feet wide and twelve feet long I am thinking that I will eventually make it larger just for catching rain water.
The entire bar building project was not one that I had a plan for or anything and it is kind of funny how one thing lead to another and I just kept building on it throughout the day with whatever scrap material I could find on hand. I at first just wanted to see if I could fit a big live edge slab of wood up onto those tree stumps where I had a wood sculpture and had piled up lots of small cutoff pieces of poplar and black locust left over from when I was building my shelter. Needless to say that the slab of wood fit rather nicely on the tree stumps and after sliding it around a little on top of them I got it to fit upon them rather snugly without having to cut or chisel either the stumps or the bottom (rounded) side of the slab itself.
Once I got the big slab anchored to the tree stumps I could of just left it at that because it alone made quite the nice 'countertop' but of course I wanted to make it a bit more elaborate (and functional) than just a single uncovered countertop so I added a second smaller slab onto the top of the first one to create a a shelf and to add to the overall length of the bar which worked out pretty well. Adding the second slab also created a nice little storage area between the upper and lower slab where I can put things to keep them out of the rain or stop them from being blown away by the wind.
I wound up using both of those long pieces of wrought iron (the rectangle ones with the hearts) to form one 'wall' and a sort of 'header' for the rear of the roof. It was a bit tricky getting the wrought iron piece for the roof in place but I just did it incrementally as I added to the height of the bar. Having one 'wall' made from that piece of wrought iron helped make anchoring the the two pieces of wrought iron together pretty simple and I wound up using some twisted wire to do so. I am planning on anchoring things together a bit better once I get some more fasteners but for now I think that everything is secure enough that it is not a hazard or anything. The roof was able to support me crawling around on it (to fasten the roofing metal to the poplar rafters) so there is no doubt in my mind that it is stout enough. Mostly I just wanted to use the wrought iron for something and having a row of hearts above the bar was assuredly more for decorative purposes rather than structural purposes but overall it lends a lot of structural support so that was pretty convenient.
All in all it was probably the most mellow and enjoyable building project that I have done in quite some time and although many of my construction projects tend to drag on over many days this one in particular went from a simple idea to a finished project all in one day which is a bit surprising considering that I started with zero plan and did it totally on a whim after remarking the evening before to one of my fellow homesteaders that I needed to build myself a coffee bar.
There are some more practical applications for the bar itself than just hanging out at because from it I can see the majority of the property (because it is built on a small knoll which is the highest elevation point of the property) and if I climb on top of the bar (or on its roof) I can see even more of the property as well as several adjoining properties. In other words it makes for one heck of a vantage point!
There is also the water factor that I previously mentioned and although I do plan on setting up a small rain water system at the bar my other plan is to setup either a large IBC (intermediate bulk container) water holding tank at it or several fifty gallon barrels so that I can gravity-feed water to the rest of the property and especially to the plants inside of my greenhouse which is located about thirty feet downhill from the bar. It will be a bit of a tight squeeze setting up a large holding tank at the bar because it is constructed adjacent to the main trail but I think that several smaller containers (like fifty gallon barrels) would fit rather well.
As a side note about the water scenario, the bar is not all that far away from that wet weather spring that I have been doing spring development on and hopefully the water shedding from the roof of the bar will help keep the ground uphill of the spring a little more damp which will undoubtedly help as I continue to develop the spring site. Honestly anything that will help to keep the area around the spring site damp/saturated is good especially since there is a very large pine tree near it that is undoubtedly soaking up a lot of the water that the spring produces.
Anyway, I have just sort of rambled on here and am going to wrap this up because I still have to edit yesterday's post also and try to get all my posting done for the day so that I can just relax at my new bar, listen to some music and enjoy my day. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night.
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