I really enjoyed the recent interview with Frank Aragona on the Diet Soap podcast.

Frank goes into some detail about a new project he's working on with a group in New Mexico that wants to expand a program that teaches gardening skills to school children.

It's a concept that is long overdue and I can't help but to feel like a couple of hours working in the dirt might actually help to calm down some of the more energetic students that can never seem to stay in their seats.

I would take it a step further and teach the kids some basic janitorial skills and put them to work cleaning the school like students do in Japan.

This short video provides an accurate yet boring picture of how the rental chipper cuts a rug.

Our share ended up being 1/3 of the weekend time which worked out to be 65 dollars.

It was a great opportunity that would not have been possible without our neighbors' suggestion of sharing the time and the aid of their tractor to pull the thing all the way back here. Well worth waking up early tomorrow morning to drive it back to it's home in the big city.

I imagine this might be the closest thing we have to participating in an old fashioned barn raising which is too bad because this neighborly cooperation thing is a pretty darn good feeling at the end of the day.

 

The occasional water line damage is to be expected when your wife is just starting to learn the finer points of 40 caliber marksmanship.

Joe Dominguez, one of the authors of Your Money or Your Life, retired at age 31 using the formula he outlines in the book.  After figuring out the true value of his time and minimizing his spending, he invested his savings in long term U.S. treasury bonds and lived off the proceeds.  Unfortunately, I don't know that his success is replicable any longer --- treasury bonds are currently only paying half of what they paid at that time, and I haven't stumbled across any other types of investments that are as safe and stable while paying such a high rate of return.  I feel like it would take a very determined person to save up a quarter to a half a million dollars of investment capital and then manage to disentangle their souls from the rat race.

While discussing the book's anticlimactic ending with Mark, he pointed out that we've really reached the same point using our chicken waterer microbusiness.  With just a few hours of work per week, we make enough money to pay all of our bills and get to spend the rest of our time pursuing our dreams.  Basically, we're retired.

If you're still working a full time job and dreaming that some day you can retire and live your dream, now's the time to rethink your priorities.  You only live once, so you might as well enjoy your hours here on earth!  Here are a few more resources to speed you on your way:

• Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin --- a bit out of date now, twenty years after being published, but most of the book is still right on track.  (There's also a new edition that might be a bit more up-to-date.)
  
• Financial Integrity website --- the up-to-date and free version of the above.
• The Ultimate Cheapskate's Roadmap to True Riches by Jeff Yeager --- if you need some more help learning to save money, this book should be on your reading list.
• The Four-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss --- this is the book that jump-started us on our own quest to leaving the rat race.
• Microbusiness Independence by Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton --- This is our own personal story of how we created a small business that pays all of our bills in just a few hours a week, along with lots of tips to replicate our success.

Many people chase the almighty dollar because they think having more money will make them happy.  But scads of scientific studies have shown that people with more money are no happier than those with less (once you pass over the lowest income hurdle of having food and shelter, that is.)

In fact, affluence is a relative thing --- if you hang out with folks who barely have two pennies to rub together and you've got two nickels, you're going to feel rich.  On the other hand, if you hang out with someone who owns his own island, you're going to feel poor despite having a huge house and a fancy car and your own yacht.

The American dream tells us that we'll really be happy once we've got all of the modern conveniences that our neighbors have, but most of the time when you try to have it all, you just end up with lots of little bits of nothing.  You work so many hours that you barely enjoy your McMansion, then you're putting in overtime to save for your kids' college education and end up feeling like you're living with strangers.  How can you break out of the cycle of measuring yourself against your neighbors and always wanting more?

The trick is to learn the value of "enough" by recalibrating your financial sensors.  Throw away your television and stop listening to commercial radio --- those ads that you think you can ignore are really seeping into your dreams.  Even movies are nefarious --- have  you noticed that most movie characters have a fancy new car and all of the modern conveniences?  By watching, you're telling your psyche that these movie stars are who you want to measure yourself by.

If you can disentangle yourself from the mainstream media, chances are you'll stop wanting so much stuff.  Mark and I are barely middle class by most people's standards, but when people ask me what I want that I don't have, I honestly can't think of anything.  (Except more mulch, of course...)  By learning that "enough" for us costs very little money, we were able to quit our jobs and devote most of our time to the things we really enjoy.

I think that people who achieve financial independence and true happiness are marked by only one thing --- they can figure out when they have enough.  Are you always in search of the next raise, a new car, or a fancy gadget to make you happy?  Or do you realize that the things you really value in life are time with friends and family, time to explore your hobbies, and time to change the world?  If the latter, then you have learned the value of enough and can skip most of the Financial Integrity process --- you're there!

Hey you two...what's your secret to a smooth working team?
George W-Texas
 

Thanks for the question George. It's really hard to pin down just one thing that makes two people work well together. We try to figure out which task is best suited for our skill set. For example. Anna is really good with math, so she is in charge of measuring for this project. I've got a little more upper body strength so I usually do most of the heavy lifting.

Last but not least you should both agree on a time to stop working. A sure way to create extra friction is to have one person thinking it's 10 minutes till the end of the day and the other wanting to push through till sunset. Anna and I usually wind down around 4pm and shift into an evening chore routine.

The next step in the Financial Integrity process is to keep track of all of your expenditures for a month.  Now sum up the expenditures in categories and divide each one by your real hourly wage.

This can be a bit of an eye-opening experience for many people because money is an abstract for most of us.  We often don't realize that the $500 plasma screen TV we bought on a whim last month actually represented 45 hours of work --- that's a solid week of full time employment!  This exercise alone is probably enough to tempt many people to cut back drasticly on their spending.

On the other hand, dyed in the wool skinflints like me sometimes come to another realization.  I simply don't believe in spending money on non-essentials (something Mark has worked hard to train me out of), and this step helped me realize that a few luxuries really are worth it.  I defnitely don't mind working for an hour to get to enjoy a meal with my family at a restaurant now and then, or to get a whole month of entertainment through netflix.  After reading Your Money or Your Life, I finally made peace with spending a bit of money on luxuries.

Whichever end of the spendthrift/skinflint spectrum you stand on, this step is definitely worth your while.  Try it out and watch your spending habits change.

Did you know that your job may be costing you money?  Step 2 of Your Money or Your Life involves calculating your real hourly wage, which is a very powerful exercise for folks who thought the $50 per hour they're supposedly making really ends up in their pockets.

To follow along at home, first make some notes on how long you really spend working.  Start with those 40 hours in your cubicle, of course, but then add in the hour you spend grooming, your daily commute, and the extra hour you vegetate in front of the tube to wind down after work.  Do you have to study or take classes to stay up to date in your field?  Do you end up spending a week in bed because you're so run down from work that you catch the flu?  Add it all up!

Next, add up all of your work-related expenses.  These include the gas and upkeep on your car, those fancy duds you wear to the office, every meal or $5 cup of coffee you consume away from home because you're too busy to pack a lunch, the six pack of beer you drink while winding down in front of the tube, the massages you pay for to wipe out the work stress, and the money you give other people to do your household chores since you don't have time (daycare, house cleaning, lawn upkeep, etc.)  Don't forget to include your taxes. 

Finally, use the formula below to figure our your real hourly wage.

The example at the top of the post from the Financial Integrity website shows how someone who thought she was making $48 per hour was really making $25.57.  The book includes someone who thought he was making $11 per hour who was actually making $4.  Without too much of a stretch of the imagination, I can see how working could send some job slaves into debt!

Luckily, I've very rarely had a real job, but when I did I could clearly see that the extra job-related time and money was a trap.  If you're working a real job, I encourage you to add it all up and figure out your true hourly wage.  Would you have accepted that job if you'd realized you were only making $7 per hour?

Did you know that before the Industrial Revolution, the average person worked for about two or three hours a day?  Studies from a wide range of pre-industrial civilizations show similar data --- it takes only about fifteen hours a week to provide for all of our basic human needs.  And that's using hand tools.

So why is the average American working a dreary forty hours a week?  I've heard from at least half a dozen readers who say that they'd love to live like Mark and I do, but only once they save up some large sum of money or bring their microbusiness up to a level where it can pay them some other large sum of money per year.  So, even though it's a bit off topic, I want to spend this week's lunchtime series talking about money --- how much do we really need and how can we make it without selling our souls?

Most of the information I'll present is drawn from Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin's Your Money or Your Life and the loosely affiliated Financial Integrity website.  You can find the same nine step program, complete with worksheets and examples, in both the book and the website.  (Download the worksheets and examples from the website for free here.)  Both are highly recommended!  I'm going to gloss over some aspects of the program that seem old hat to me, so if you like what you read here and want to learn more, I highly recommend you go straight to the source.

 

Another winter day at Wetknee where the snow is taking its sweet time saying goodbye.

 

Cosmic Cookout is a project that's been in the back of my head for years now, and thanks to Anna's help as webmaster it's finally ready to see the light of day.

It's a place to help me distill down some of the more interesting and fantastic information that has been gushing out of the physics of consciousness field the past few years with some attention paid to the disclosure movement.

The intention is to stimulate debate and conversation through a process of observation and questions and hopefully increase awareness and understanding and perhaps move to a higher level of consciousness.

Credit goes to Neuronarrative for the fine images above.

 

Note to any future homesteading men out there. If you find a woman that will do your roofing without too much complaining then you've found a mate. Treat her well and don't work her too hard.

As we pull together our first semi-serious structure on the farm, we've received a lot of feedback from really helpful folks who want us to build something more sturdy.  Some of the feedback is right on track --- we are new to this after all and we just miss some steps.  For example, we'll be adding a header to both load-bearing walls to fix the window/door problem and will add rim joists on the ends of the floor joists.

On the other hand, we've intentionally underbuilt some areas rather than following the conventional wisdom to build a house that'll last two hundred years.  Americans seem to be obsessed with building things to last centuries --- odd since Europeans have only been on this continent for a few hundred years.  As a nation, we build out of steel and concrete, then opt to tear it all down twenty years later to build something bigger and better.  The rubble is unusable --- pure waste.  It's almost as if we're struggling to overcome our own mortality, or to prove ourselves immune to the natural cycle of decay.

When we visited Mexico, our tour guide told us that traditional Mayan families tore down their houses and rebuilt them every few years.  The structures were made of plant matter that could end up back in the garden, so this wasn't really waste.  They also built modularly, making several small structures instead of one huge house so that when one hut had to be taken down it didn't turn their lives inside out.  Similarly, the folks who lived on our farm before us believed that a dozen rocks sitting on the ground were a fine foundation for their house --- and the structure stood for three quarters of a century.  I think all of these people had a good point --- why not build something simpler and cheaper that won't last forever and instead plan to repair or replace in a decade or two?

Granted, if you live in the city or are paying off a mortgage, you probably have to build for the long haul and abide by nitpicky building codes, spending ten times as much money on your house as is actually necessary.  The freedom to do our own thing is one of the many reasons we love our farm.  Sure, some of our experiments will probably fail, and our building piers may start to rot out in ten or twenty years.  But we've barely put any cash into it, so we can just rebuild.

Or maybe we're just young and stupid. :-)  Time will tell....

What do I foresee in the twenty-teens?  Honestly, if you'd asked me what my life would be like a decade later in 2000, the only part I could have imagined would have been the farm, so I don't think my predictions should hold much weight.  But I can tell you what I'd like to see.

In ten years, I hope that Mark and I will still be living on this same farm, but hopefully a slightly more advanced farm with a pasture or two, a growing forest garden, and maybe even an indoors bathtub and outdoors greenhouse.  By then, I want to have streamlined the garden process to cut back a bit on the time we spend on repetitive chores like weeding and increase the time we spend on the more fun part.  Maybe by then we'll truly be food independent, having figured out grains, oil, and a few more meats.

I hope to have built my social network a little more by then.  My college years were blissful in that regard, and ever since I've been looking for a similar community where I can feel accepted and at ease.  We're slowly making friends in the area now that we're settled, so hopefully this community will grow organically with time.

Last decade, I found Mark --- he and the farm were really the highlights of the 2000s.  This decade, I hope that we'll find someone to back us up on the farm when we go on our explorations.  Whether that will be a live-in apprentice, a nearby farmer who we can trade caretaking with, or something else entirely, I'll leave up to the toss of the dice.

Lately, I've started to find a good balance of computer work, physical work, and relaxation --- hopefully by the end of the decade I'll have it as well figured out as Mark does.  Maybe this decade will be all about balance.

The last three years of the decade, we got the farm running and I learned to garden.  I've always been torn in several directions --- between art and writing on one hand and biology on the other.  The farm --- and this blog --- turned out to be the junction of the two fields, letting me create beauty and play with plants all at once.

After moving to the farm, I first worked as a part-time professor at a local college, then as an employee at a non-profit organization.  Both of these jobs were fun in parts but also stressful.  Only last year did we reach what had been Mark's dream all decade --- such a simplicity of needs and diversification of income sources that we could both quit our jobs and work for ourselves.

Meanwhile, Mark and I grew together in delightful ways.  Every day seemed (and still seems) to be better than the last, and his kisses still make me weak at the knees.  In December 2008, we finally decided to get legal, so we went to the courthouse and got hitched.  Last year, we celebrated with our family and friends with a picnic at the park.

When I had to put my farm dream on hold, I ended up moving back in with one of my inventory families, to help with those same kids.  The family matriarch had plans for me, though I didn't know it.  She (Sue Ella) and her sister (Rose Nell) were playing matchmaker and believed that Rose Nell's son and I were perfect for each other.  Sue Ella tried every trick in the book to get us to meet, but I scurried the other way just as quickly as possible.  He'd be coming down for Thanksgiving?  Sorry --- I have to go visit my father!  You want me to help him drive your son's possessions across country?  Are you nuts?!  Even though I'd traveled the world, I'd never kissed a boy --- women in my mother's family tend to be late bloomers --- and I didn't particularly see why I should start now.

When Sue Ella finally pinned me down in 2005, she and Rose Nell didn't trust us to go on this first, blind date on our own.  Intead, Sue Ella put me in her car, Rose Nell put Mark in her car, and all four of us met at a restaurant in the middle.  After our date, we browsed for a while in the Dollar Store, and went our separate ways.  In fact, Mark fled all the way to New Mexico, but he emailed me and slowly wiggled his way through my defenses and into my heart.  Four months later, we kissed for the first time while listening to a chorus of spring peepers.  When we kissed again in a cave, my knees went weak, and 17 months later we moved onto the land.  Mark had been the missing link in my farm dream, even though I hadn't known it at the time.

 

I had my 2nd flat tire of the week just as I got yesterday's fixed. The first one was due to a sharp tree root jutting out of the frozen ground and jabbing itself into the side wall, but today's deflation could have been avoided if I'd had an inner tube in the tire, which it now has.

At least we got all the 2x4s shuttled back to our storage building project before this next storm sets in.

Although backpacking gave me a glimpse of simplicity, I didn't have any money to buy a farm, so I instead spent the next few years wandering around in other peoples' woods.  Every year, I moved to a new property where I identified the plants and animals and told the owners what they were doing right or wrong.  Some of my hosts turned out to be my best friends, and I got all of my maternal urges out of my system by helping with one set of kids who I still adore (even though they're all grown up now!)

In 2003, I finally achieved the goal I'd been saving for and dreaming of for so long --- I bought 58 acres of swamp and hillside about an hour from the farm I grew up on.  With no experience under my belt, I took my father's advice and decided to build a little house by hand, first tearing down the old house on the property to get some supplies.  Crowbarring on winter days, I came down with carpal tunnel and ended up dropping that dream for the time being.

My brother posted about the last decade of his life so vibrantly (and succinctly) that I decided to give it a go.  The last decade fills up pretty much a full third of my life to date and my entire post-college adulthood --- yikes!

2000 started with the last few months of my senior year at college.  Although my freshman, sophomore, and junior years had been life-changing and fun, my senior year was stressful and angsty.  By the beginning of July, I was glad to see campus disappear and to instead be hopping on a plane to England (then Australia, then Costa Rica) for a solid year of camping and drawing plants.

Although I'd dreamed of living on a homestead in the woods ever since I was ripped from our family farm in elementary school, I think my world travel year cemented the deal.  I backpacked the whole time, and was shocked to return home to the U.S. and discover the size of stores and supermarkets, and to see the many boxes of possessions I had waiting for me in my mom's basement.  Why would I need all of this stuff when I'd happily lived with just fifty pounds of camping and drawing equipment for the last year?

Last week, I was paging through old blog entries from this summer and literally couldn't remember the earth looking so green.  On the south side of the trailer, the ground is still covered by snow where it's shaded by the hill, and the rest of the world is mostly brown.  I watch deer pulling honeysuckle out of trees and dream of a big, black bull calf doing the same in search of green leaves.

How do I relieve winter gardener's blues?  Luckily, I've got some house plants in need of attention.  My citrus trees (dwarf Meyer lemon and dwarf tangerine) have sunken down in their pots over the long growing season and need a new infusion of stump dirt.  I also have a rosemary in need of potting --- one of the six sprigs I got from my father finally sprouted roots.

So I climb the hill halfway to the cars, heading straight to my favorite, hollow beech.  This old beauty churns out around seven or eight gallons of stump dirt every year, which I scoop out with our yellow-handled shovel, savoring every teaspoonful.  I chose a warm day so that the stump dirt would be shovelable, but that means the driveway is too wet to drive on.  So I lug the dirt home in five gallon buckets.  It's all worthwhile, though, when I get to sink my fingers into rich soil, the combined scent of actinomycetes and rosemary smelling as good as baking bread.

 

We got our 5th visit yesterday from the electric company. I tried appealing to this guy's sense of duty by casually mentioning that we've had four other visits, each ending with a bit of looking around and head scratching at how deep our creek is.

"I didn't come all the way from North Carolina to just look around," he calmly stated. His confidence filled us with with a newfound hope and sure to his word the lines were back up before he headed back home last night.

We spent the morning waiting, trying not to think of all the obstacles that could be keeping the flow of cheap electricity from coming back to our trailer when all of a sudden the hallway light came on and the power outage of 2009 was officially over.

It's good to know we can get by without the grid, but this has been a wake up call for us by pointing out a few areas we can improve upon for a more streamlined approach to off the grid living.

 

I spotted this small crew off in the distance while I was working outside on the do it yourself storage building project. It gave me a glimmer of hope that something was going to get started today, but that was not meant to be.

Maybe they're getting everything ready for an early start tomorrow?

 

We had a visitor from the sky come out this afternoon just before dinner. It seems like this iron bird was inspecting our downed power lines, which gave us hope that we might get our power turned back on before next year.

Our driveway snow was close to melting, and this hoe method really worked in helping to break up the icy spots where the Festiva was slipping in the ruts.

Lately when I've been using a hoe I can't help but to think of the original Hobo from where the term came from. Hoe boys were a large group of soldiers from the Civil war who came home to a devastated farm. Most of them started traveling around with their hoes trying to find a place to belong and perhaps a garden to tend to.

This is the image I've had since I heard the short explanation on a radio show, but it seems like nobody is exactly sure where the word came from if you can believe what Wikipedia says about the term.

Monday night as we read by solar flashlight, the telephone rang!  I'm a confirmed phone-o-phobe, but that sound was the nicest one I'd heard in days.  I leapt up and pounced on the receiver, then enthused in my father's ear, called my Mom and sister, and even talked to my equally phone-phobic brother.

Earlier that day, I'd resorted to putting a letter to my mother in the mailbox to assure her that I was alive.  When I got her on the phone, it was clear that Mom had been worried, but she also told me how she'd often been snowed in at my childhood farm and unable to contact her own mother for a solid month.  "No news is good news," Mom said...then admitted that she'd emailed two of my neighbors to check on me.

Daddy gave me equally good words of wisdom.  "Isn't it nice to go without so that you'll really appreciate power when you have it?"  I have to admit that in the past I've wished my ancestors hadn't opened up Pandora's box of industrialization.  But living without for just three days, I can completely understand how we ended up in our current era of modern conveniences.

Tuesday morning, the phone was once again dead.  Farewell, civilization!

One of these days I'm going to get up to date, really....  For now, though, enjoy reading our backstory, then check out our microbusiness ebook.

Mark Twain: “Buy land. They’ve stopped making it.”
Seasteaders: “Production Resuming.”

Do you want to go back to the land without being under the sway of the federal government?  If so, the Seasteading Institute suggests you should instead go back to the water.  They envision intentional homesteading colonies constructed on floating platforms in international waters.  Out there on the sea frontier, you can do whatever you want since no nations' laws apply.

The nonprofit is founded by libertarians, and they bill seasteading as a method of testing out new political systems.  I can also see the appeal of building your own nation from an entirely nonpolitical point of view --- homesteaders everywhere wrestle with restrictive building codes that don't allow them to build strawbale houses or composting toilets.  Wouldn't it be nice to be able to choose environmentally sustainable options without jumping through months of hoops?

Mark's response was, "One word: pirates."  (Though the Seasteading Institute thinks that pirates wouldn't be a big deal.)  And, granted, I'm far too attached to my hills to leave the land for the sea.  Still, I thought you all might be interested.  After all, the first colony is planned to go live in 2015.

 

           I'll take warm and muddy over cold and frozen any day.

 

These past few days have been a real test for the new mud traction golf cart tires. I thought the frozen ruts might create too much of a challenge, but the ice isn't quite frozen through all the way and seems to break easily with a dramatic crashing sound that sends my imagination racing to an Arctic exploration story I once read.

Our top choice for a pasture is the powerline cut area down in the floodplain.  The electric company chopped a big swathe through the woods, and we can't let trees grow there, so we might as well put it to use.

This weekend, I did some measuring and discovered that the open area along the powerline is approximately one sixth of an acre.  It used to be farmed, long before we bought the land, so two ditches bisect its width (and so does our driveway.)  At the moment, I'm thinking of using osage-orange hedges to split the powerline cut into four paddocks along these obvious dividing lines.

If we ever feel ready to have dairy animals, I've recently been thinking our best bet would be miniature goats.  They're short, so fences don't have to be quite so intense, and they use less pasture per animal so we might be able to fit in two does and a buck.  With four tiny paddocks, we'd be able to keep the buck separate and still have room to rotate all the animals frequently to prevent overgrazing and parasites.  Of course, this is still very much in the dreaming stages --- I expect our hedges to take anywhere from a year to five years to be beefy enough to deter critters, and we still need to find someone willing to milk when we're away from home!

Indian Summer ended this weekend with temperatures in the low 20s.  Although the calendar doesn't agree, winter is finally here.

We're not ready --- it seems like we're never ready for winter.  Our water lines are frozen, our wood stove not really ready to be fired up.

But the refrigerator root cellar is working like a charm --- no temperatures below 38 F!  The shed is nearly ready for its roof, and I foresee warm bathing in our future.

When living on a farm, it's easy to think of winter as an adversary to be overcome.  But when the frost is so beautiful, I remember that winter can be my favorite season.

 

Finding a quicker and safer route to take to my Grandmother's house feels like discovering the Northwest Passage of Eastern Kentucky.

Thank you Google maps.

In the 1950s, Dr. Wolfe stumbled upon a medical anomaly.  The small town of Roseto, Pennsylvania, was unbelievably healthy, with a death rate about 35% lower than it should have been.

Seventy years earlier, the town had transplanted nearly whole-cloth from a town of the same name in Italy.  The Roseto in America was peopled by immigrants who knew each other, so unsurprisingly the town continued to grow as a close-knit community.  After ruling out diet, genetics, and several other factors, Dr. Wolfe came to the conclusion that the Rosetians' longevity was due to that sense of community --- happiness really seemed to make them live longer.  (You can read the whole story in the Washington Post article.)

We struggle with building community as much as any other Americans, but I couldn't help wondering if our homesteading lifestyle might not have a similar effect on our health.  Over the last three years, as we've worked the kinks out of our relationship and figuring out how to work from home, I've got happier and happier and happier.  If you need an incentive to pursue a life of simplicity, that might just be it.

Jacke used the numbers shown here as one of his arguments for forest gardening.  He noted that forests are much more productive environments than annual agricultural land in terms of the amount of solar energy converted to biomass after the needs of the plants in the ecosystem are met.

His point is well taken, but I was more intrigued by another part of the graph.  Notice how wetlands are just as productive as tropical forests --- nearly double the productivity of temperate forests?  Can we create swamp gardens that mimic wetlands just like forest gardens mimic forests?

Some folks already make use of wetlands, but they seem to focus on the potential of wetlands to break down contaminants in graywater or sewage.  Since we have lots of floodplain land on our property, I can't help wonder if we could do something more interesting with it.  Maybe find a way to harvest biomass for mulch and compost to feed my hungry vegetable garden?  Rotate animals through it at a low enough rate that they take advantage of the fertility without causing erosion?  I'd be curious to hear if anyone has better ideas!

 

This will be our 4th Halloween here on the farm and still no trick or treaters.......it's hard to complain when that equals extra chocolate for us.

Our new leaf containment area is starting to fill up fast making me ask the question....will there ever be too much mulch?

Our tour of Uxmal in the Yucatan of Mexico was one of the highlights of the cruise. We had an awesome tour guide by the name of Armando Chan who was part Mayan. His words really added a nice element to our understanding of this amazing culture.

The atmosphere of history is fascinating and we decided 3 hours was just not enough time to explore such a mystical place. Maybe we can plan for an extended adventure at Uxmal for our next Yucatan excursion?

 

I was walking by the bee hives today and noticed this crowding by the entrance. No doubt it's due to it being cold this morning, but a steady flow of bees were going and coming which makes me wonder how they decide who gets to stay home on a cold day like this one?

I've always said a cat would be worth its weight in gold if it could pull weeds out of the garden.

I guess the next best thing is to have your cat keep you company while you get the job done yourself.

During the last frantic day before our wedding celebration, I noticed a monarch licking the handles of our iced tea jugs.  One of the butterfly's wings was slightly crumpled, and I guessed that the insect was having trouble making the long journey to its wintering grounds in central Mexico.  Even though I believe that nature picks off wounded animals for a reason, I had to carry the monarch over to the sunflowers, where it began feeding greedily.

Since we're currently cruising toward Mexico at this moment while my brother watches the farm, I thought this monarch was an apt symbol of this week's mini-adventure.  Despite being a homebody, I've always dreamed of traveling.  Nine years ago, I did --- setting off with a backpack full of camping supplies and sketchbooks for a year-long expedition through Great Britain, Australia, and Costa Rica.

In the end, what I remember most from that journey was the homecoming.  How American grocery stores seemed huge and slighly obscene.  How the dozens of boxes of books and clothes I'd stored in my mother's basement seemed even more obscene --- what did I need with so many possessions?

In a way, that trip was the beginning of my path toward simplicity.  Slipping outside my own world, I saw myself in a completely new way.  What insight will this adventure bring?

I was struck by a throwaway sentence in Good Farmers, a book about traditional farming practices in Central America and Mexico.  The author noted that traditional farmers usually lack heavy equipment and funds to pay for lots of hired help, so they have to take a process-oriented approach to big tasks rather than being project-oriented.  For example, if they have a steep hillside that they'd like to terrace and create farmable ground, traditional farmers are more likely to put in a spare afternoon here and there building the terrace bit by bit rather than renting a bulldozer to get 'r done.

Homesteading is slowly teaching me to slip out of my project-oriented mindset and enjoy the journey.  For example, the wood we bought was delivered to our parking area, half a mile from our house.  At first, I was considering just taking a day and making golf cart trip after golf cart trip to bring the wood back to its shed.  But instead I've been taking in a load of wood whenever I need to drive the golf cart out to the cars anyway.  A week later, our shed is already a third of the way full!

September gave us 6.2 inches of rain over 10 days.  The days that didn't rain were generally cloudy, so I put off doing laundry until we both ran out of the essentials.

Tuesday, I gave in and washed anyway.  Three big loads of laundry later, I had filled up the clothesline and moved on to draping clothes on the grape trellises.  I didn't even get to our bedding before running out of both laundry detergent and space on the line.

Four hours of clouds later, it started to rain.  I scurried around and gathered up damp clothes, then draped them all over the house while a quarter inch of water fell on our garden.  Wednesday turned out to be the prettiest sunny day in a long time, so I carried all of the clothes back outside, flipping clothes over halfway through the day so that every one finally dried all the way through.  Just this once, I think if I had a clothes drier I would have used it.  (Good thing I don't have one!)

Despite the astonishing amount of effort required to get there, we have enough clean clothes to last us for our entire week long honeymoon.  Most of the posts for the next eight days will be auto-posted --- saved up topics we never got a chance to serenade you with during the height of the growing season.  The farm will be in the able hands of my brother, and we plan to not even check email for most of the time.  So if anything looks funny on the site, I promise I'll fix it when I get home!

Our deer deterrents are still working like a charm, but one got hung up this weekend and a deer came through the gap in the sound barrier.  After looking at my munched strawberries, I resolved to kill a deer before the fall season is over.

I spent a while Monday afternoon poring over the Virginia hunting laws.  Turns out that if we were good enough, Mark and I would be allowed to kill 5 deer apiece on our own property without a license.  The rules are complex and confusing --- no hunting on Sunday (even on your own land?!  What happened to separation of church and state?), no more than two bucks per person (great --- I want to kill does!), and no more than one deer per day per person.

We were thinking about hunting last year, but never found the time to practice amid the rush of winter preparations.  But this year we freed up some time by buying firewood, and are even prepared with a 40 caliber rifle.  I'm hoping that in the next six weeks before hunting season begins, we'll have time to become proficient marksmen.

The Walden Effect for me is a path from noise to nature and what happens when you manage to surrender to the everyday beauty of life. My understanding of its exact nature is a work in progress, although I think it's safe to say that it has an emotional element that relates to dealing with unresolved conflict of whatever one feels strong about.

Youtube user Holofractalist has made a clever edit of a Greg Braden interview that goes a long way in explaining what I'm trying to say here. I liked it so much I watched it twice in a row and I'll most likely review it again and again. A fantastic 10 minute chunk of enlightenment that I give 2 thumbs up.

We bought a large truck load of firewood recently due to the fact that we were too busy to cut any this summer, and we've decided the extra time we get will be well worth the price.

I believe it takes a certain amount of experimentation when contracting out essential chores in order to find the most comfortable balance point of having enough time and money left over to relax. I already have a good feeling about the value of this wood pile and how much time it will free up for a few projects we have on the drawing board this winter.

 

If you listen closely you can hear the very distinct sound of Lucy's tail hitting the seat of her golf cart, which is one of my personal top 10 favorite sounds of all time.

It's really nice of her to let us use it whenever we need to haul anything or anybody back to the trailer.

 

When we first moved to the farm we had fantasies of owning our own mini-tractor. Once we did the math and figured out just how many times we would really need such a piece of equipment we scaled down the dream to a golf cart.

I've discovered it's far more efficient to hire out what little tractor work we need. Today we got 6 tons of crushed cinder blocks for 40 bucks delivered. The same guy is half way through scooping it up and spreading it around to troubled spots on our driveway for an equally reasonable fee.

It sure beats filling up 5 gallon buckets and spreading it around the old fashioned way.

Like Anna said this morning, we had a few visitors drop by yesterday, and I still can't get over what they were thinking as they made the hike back here.

What they heard was a lot of banging from the home made deer deterrents, what they assumed was that we were "working like mules back here!"

The nice picture of the handsome mule is from the Blue Ridge Blog, which has some really nice photos of farm life on a similar frequency as our own here.

I wonder if our other neighbor within ear shot has the same misconception of our work day, and if I should make a point to let them in on the secret to working like a mule without breaking a sweat?

I've had a few of those small ratchet straps for a couple of years now and they really come in handy...but they also have a problem getting hung up and stuck in some pretty nasty tangles if the load shifts.

We got a set of the medium sized ones a few weeks ago and I'm still kicking myself for wasting so much time on the small version. No more pinched fingers and frayed straps with the bigger more substantial mechanism.

I used up our last extension cord last week when I installed the first Black and Decker deer drill deterrent which meant I had to unplug units 1 and 5 to get my share of electricity for a drill press project I was doing this afternoon.

Well....I got busy doing something else and forgot to plug deer deterrents 1 and 5 back up....so that makes about 45 minutes of down time. I looked out our living room window in shock to see the ugliest deer I've ever seen munching down on a few sweet potato leaves like it's nobody's business!.....I quickly ran out the door and chased after the four legged monster to show it who's boss around here.

Now I know the local deer population is so bad I can't take a brief pause even during a sunny day from the new mechanical deer drill deterrents without being munched on.

September 14 is our big anniversary --- three years after the day we moved to our farm!  Every fall, I take a bit of time to think back over the year before, and every year I'm stunned by how far we've come in a short twelve months.  This navel-gazing lunchtime series explores the top lessons we've learned this year on the farm.  I'll start where I left off last fall: "our trials and tribulations --- fencing out deer, not enough hours in the day."

We've discovered that it is quite possible to keep deer out of the garden without a fence!  Last week, I tentatively pulled the last protective row covers off our sweet potatoes and strawberries, and still nary a nibble.  Deer damage was one of my hardest trials last year, and I can barely believe it's a thing of the past.  Pretty soon, we'll be rolling out a website entirely devoted to helping other farmers and gardeners beat the deer problem, so stay tuned.

As for not enough hours in the day --- well, some days I still feel that way.  But due to the wonders of taking weekends off, I suddenly feel like I have more time.  We've managed to pretty much stay on top of the weeding and mowing and harvesting, and still zip through some long term projects.  Maybe by this time next year, I will have forgotten feeling pressed for more daylight hours.

A day spent fabricating, packing, and driving to the post office is a good day indeed.

I keep expecting the excitement of going to the post office on shipping days to wear off, but it just seems to get stronger as I settle in on the fact that a micro business lifestyle is a perfect fit for me and our way of life here on the farm.

I stumbled across a grasshopper slipping out of its nymph skin this past weekend.  The old skin was clinging to a corn leaf so that the living insect dangled below.  Backlit by the falling sun, the empty skin glowed and the grasshopper seemed to be descending out of summer.

Earlier this year, I obsessively listened to NPR as I weeded the garden.  Lately, though, I've been backing off from the radio and listening to my own thoughts.  Sometimes I find it hard to be in the present without distractions, but the occasional glimpses into the profound make it worthwhile.

Shame-faced plug: Check out the homemade chicken waterer that funds this blog.

One of the hardest parts of running a homestead is killing.  It took us quite a while to wrap our heads around killing our chickens...but it seems to be taking me even longer to wrap my head around pulling out perennials which just aren't functioning properly.

Monday, I realized that we had ripe grapes on one of the Golden Muscat vines we put in this spring in the well-drained soil of the mule garden.  The grape vines there, despite being less than a year old, have grown rapidly until their tendrils nearly touch the next plant over along the trellis.

The mule garden grapes' exuberance makes it hard to continue ignoring the sad state of the grapes along the driveway.  These grapes are anywhere from one to three years old, but none have ever fruited. Most of the vines there are French hybrids, so the Japanese beetles have eaten the leaves down to lace despite my thrice-weekly picking.  Their decline is exacerbated by soil that is pure clay where water puddles during wet weeks.

And yet, even though my mule garden grapes have done more in one year than these grapes have done in three, I have a hard time pulling the driveway grapes out.  Why is it easier for me to kill a spare rooster or bottom of the pecking order hen than to kill a grape vine?

Shame-faced plug: Check out the chicken waterer that funds this blog.

 

I was talking with one of my uncles on the phone today about this year's blight and he still has some hopes for his tomato crop. His remedy is to clip off the offending leaves stricken with blight, get them far away from the garden, cross your fingers and wait.

Anna and I considered this option...but decided the stress from multiple leaf trimming would set back the fruit production even more.

This episode of vegetable loss has further reinforced my new way of thinking which involves rolling with mother nature instead of fighting her. Not unlike the theme of my favorite Rolling Stones song "You can't always get what you want".

Over the last year, we've made mountains and mountains of trash, which we tossed in the barn to be dealt with later.  This photo shows about half of the trash, and I'd estimate three quarters or more of it is plastic packaging.

We cut down on our trash by buying in bulk and by using food scraps, paper, and cardboard on the farm.  But plastic seems inevitable.  Milk jugs, styrofoam meat trays, thin sheets of plastic wrapping everything from toilet paper to boxes of tea bags.  In many cases the plastic is entirely redundant, seemingly tacked on for the sole purpose of filling my barn with trash.

The worst part is that plastic isn't really recyclable.  So how can we cut down on our mountain of trash?  The best options I can come up with are:

• finding a way to buy even more things in bulk
• growing more of our own food
• buying less

If you have any better ideas, I'm all ears!  I'm especially interested in ways you might reuse plastic on the farm.

1491's summary of American Indian agricultural practices reveals societies full of people a lot like current farmers.  Neither Indians nor farmers aren Noble Savages who live in totally harmony with the land, but we are constantly striving to achieve a more sustainable system.  I hope that recent forays into permaculture show that we are on the cusp of reaching a new relationship with the natural world.

Although I'm a bit sad to see my childhood image of Indians dashed, in a way the reality is much cooler.  I wonder what other ancient, permaculture-like techniques scientists will turn up in the years to come?

Amazonians also developed a method called terra preta to increase the fertility of their low-nutrient soils.  Scientists estimate that up to 10% of the Amazon's soil consists of this man-made, high fertility, "dark earth."  Terra preta is high in phosphorous, calcium, sulfur, and nitrogen, is rich in organic matter and microorganisms, and has been shown to have elevated moisture and nutrient retention capabilities.  The soil grows good crops too, even hundreds of years after being created.

Although popular articles about terra preta suggest that all you have to do is create charcoal and work it into the ground, terra preta production is actually more complicated.  The Indians mixed charcoal with excrement and animal bones in long trenches when creating terra preta.  The charcoal consisted of charred wood, weeds, cooking waste, and crop debris.  Copious pottery shards in the terra preta suggest to me that the technique may have begun as simply a modified midden heap.

I'm curious about whether terra preta could be the answer to some of our waste disposal problems.  I try to keep our homestead as self-sufficient as possible, and the influx of cardboard from our automatic chicken waterer microbusiness doesn't seem to fit that model.  I've tossed some of it on the worm bin, but am starting to suspect that I'm overwhelming my poor worms with the mass of sodden cardboard.  (Recycling isn't really an option since we live an hour away from the nearest facility.)  Could I use the excess cardboard along with those troublesome chicken bones and maybe even our excrement to create terra preta?  Only time and experimentation will tell.

The Amazonian forest is considered by many environmentalists to be the Holy Grail of untouched biodiversity.  Or it was, until recently when scientists started uncovering evidence that anywhere from 8% to 100% of the Amazon forest is anthropogenic.

Slash and burn agriculture is currently the norm in the Amazon basin, and for a long time scientists assumed that slash and burn was the ancient method of managing the forest.  In this technique, farmers hack a small opening out of the forest, burn the fallen trees, then plant crops in the resultant rich bed of ash.  After a few years, trees begin to grow up in the gap, and farmers move on to cultivate a new area.  Although slash and burn is harmful to the air, the method is vastly superior to trying to till the poor soil, which would ruin the land in less than a decade.  Instead, slash and burn seems to be marginally sustainable.

The slash and burn technique, though, is clearly dependent on the European introduction of metal axes.  Using the Amazonians' indigenous stone axes, scientists estimate it would have taken about three weeks to chop down a single tree.  Creating a forest gap in this scenario must have been a long term undertaking with long term rewards.

Scientists are now beginning to understand that slash and burn was merely a method that Indians resorted to after disease devastated their populations.  Previously, the Amazonians did hack gaps out of the forest canopy, but into each gap they planted small food crops like manioc between carefully selected tree species.  The trees were the real crop, with the manioc being a secondary addition to their diet.  Over one hundred carefully bred tree species now dot the Amazonian forest with their edible fruit.  In essence, the Amazonians were creating a forest garden.

Cahokia was an ill-fated, American Indian settlement near present-day St. Louis.  When the city was settled around 1,000 A.D., Indian populations had grown to such a level in the eastern United States that game was becoming scarce.  Luckily, maize (corn) was making its way north from Central and South America, allowing the Indians to replace their hunting lifestyle with a more agricultural one.

One visionary leader realized that changing to a lifestyle centered around maize would require building granaries to store the kernels over the winter.  He figured the best way to go about it would be to create a huge communal granary so that the combined might of the community could protect the maize from depradations by neighboring groups.  Some 15,000 people joined this unnamed leader in his quest to construct a giant city --- the largest north of the Rio Grande --- and to plant vast fields of maize.

Unfortunately, the population of Cahokia grew so large that the water from the stream  flowing by the city couldn't support the city's people.  So the Cahokians channeled a nearby stream from its normal path, rerouting the water to join their existing stream and turning their water supply into a river.  More water!  More maize!  More people!

The Cahokians continued to clear the surrounding land, cutting down trees as building material, for fires, and to open up land to grow more maize.  Eventually, disaster struck.  Heavy storms which would have been soaked up by forest quickly ran off the agricultural fields, bloating the river, and causing floods and mudslides in the city of Cahokia.  A subsequent earthquake was the last straw which broke Cahokia's back.  Within a few hundred years of its inception, the city had dissolved back into the earth.

The story sounds astoundingly familiar.  Clearcutting, stream channelization, monoculture, and overpopulation leading to flooding and ecological collapse --- it could be set next door to my house.  The end of the story, though, is something I only see dimly in modern agriculture's future.  The Indians fled the city and developed a more sustainable agricultural system based on small fields of maize surrounded by managed forests of fruit and nuts.  Maybe those Noble Savages were pretty smart after all.

I have to admit, I was raised on the "Noble Savage" belief that American Indians had a pure connection with the nearly untouched wilderness they lived in.  I spent my childhood running wild and pretending that I was an Indian, not a plain old American of mixed European descent.  My preservation ethic was built in large part on these beliefs...which have now been debunked by the scientific community.

In actuality, evidence suggests that the pre-Columbian American Indians lived in a highly constructed landscape.  Over two thirds of the United States was devoted to farmland, game was scarce (having been hunted close to extinction near settled areas), and forests were young and impacted by frequent, human-lit fires.

Then Europeans arrived and brought with them diseases that nearly wiped out the Native American population.  The suddenly human-free, formerly cultivated landscape gave rise to huge populations of bison, elk, deer, and passenger pigeons, which feasted on corn left uneaten by dead Indians.  Then the forests began to grow up and take over the cultivated land, so that explorers in the eighteenth century reported vast expanses of "virgin" forests.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the deeply human-impacted nature of the American landscape, we have a lot to learn from the American Indians.  This week's lunchtime series summarizes the permaculture implications of Charles C. Mann's fascinating book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.  I highly recommend you check the book out of your local library and peruse it on a suddenly sunny Saturday between visits to the wringer washer, the way I did.

Lucy has found a rotting opossum and dragged it halfway home, dripping entrails and one-still discernable leg.  I pull my t-shirt up to cover my nose and hurry past, dodging piles of offal.

Past the unlimited green trees of our driveway, we reach the neighbor's hay field.  Lucy and I stop and gaze at new round bales forming a barricade along the property line.  Last hunting season, bright yellow "No Trespassing" signs sprang up here overnight, fraught with border tension.  But this wet summer's plentiful bales feel like a protective bulwark.

Back at home, I nearly delete an email from another neighbor.  "Meet Mr. Lucky!" it proclaims, and my fingers think the words are spam before I decipher the sender's name.  Do we want his spare rooster for our girls?  No, our white cochin has dropped her broodiness and reentered the world of scratching and pecking.  But thanks for asking!

Neighbors and the food chain --- each is colored by our own perception.  Life on the farm is what we make of it.

Joey posted about social capital yesterday, and the idea really caught my imagination.  Last year, we sold our excess eggs and produce, but this year we've taken to giving them away.  They seem to bring us more value in the latter situation since folks who are gifted with eggs think more highly of us and end up doing us favors in return.

Social capital isn't the same as bartering --- we don't give folks eggs and expect to get anything back right away (or even ever.)  Instead, we just give the eggs to people who can use them, mostly to empty out the fridge.  The social capital we garner is just an added benefit.

This boingboing article and the ensuing discussion raise the intriguing point that social capital is probably the most widespread economic system in the world.  I think the near-absence of a social capital system in modern America is part of what we're missing when we complain about the lack of community in our lives.  So, build up your social capital and reap the rewards!

Our last bit of homesteading wisdom is perhaps the best of the lot.  Jeremy from Adirondack Stone Works kept it short and sweet:

I would say that the most important tip I have for home business and homesteading is this: the joy and love I bring to a project sets the tone of the project.  The feeling I get from a project is the fuel I use to move forward. 

This is why I think it is important to find the positive story about a project.  It's unreasonable to expect ourselves to move though all of the obstacles that a homestead or small business will bring without a sustaining, positive story.

I've often found myself dealing with a myriad of stressful thoughts about all of the things I have to do.  This stress is poor fuel for getting things done. If I think of a project like "the garden" and stressful thoughts come up, I have less energy for the garden just when I likely need more energy.  I really do believe that a positive or negative story is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Jeremy's advice is something I've been working hard to incorporate into my own life in the last six months.  Perfect timing to hear it voiced so succinctly and well.  Thanks, Jeremy!

I was looking for some farm trivia recently and found a very interesting website by a guy named A.O. Kime.

Looks like 1954 was the first year more tractors were used on farms than horses or mules. I'm not sure if this was a good direction in light of how out of touch the big factory farms have got from the natural cycle of things.

He's got a real head scratcher of an article on speaking to a transcendental cantaloupe that still has me thinking. It's listed in his Bio-oddities section, which speaks volumes about his out of the box way of looking at farming and gardening.

There's an article by Patrick Malcolm that's worth checking out on the history of fruit in America and several more directions to go on his well put together site.

The June/July issue of Backyard Poultry hit the streets on Saturday and I couldn't be happier with how Anna's full page article on page 36 came out.

We've been getting some good feedback on how much happier chicken chores can be with this new concept in backyard poultry watering.

It's exciting to see an idea go from the drawing board to reality in the span of a few months. I was thinking today that our operation is a level below most small business set-ups, which inspired me to call it a micro-business. The name has been around for a while, and Lloyd Lemons is one of the top sources for all things related to these smallest of businesses.

I was talking to the local hardware store owner today about grape fungus and tomato blight.

Phil: "You know what the old timers used to do about blight back in the day when all they had to get by on was their imagination and sweat?"

Me: "Uhhh...no. I don't have a clue?"

Phil: "Copper wire...you take a short piece of electrical wire and poke a hole in the stem of a mature tomato plant...leave it in there. That was supposed to help with the blight somehow."

Me: "Have you ever tried it?"

Phil: : "Heck no....I'm not an old timer!"

  

If you get a lawn mower blade installed backwards it'll still cut some grass, just not as smooth and crisp as having it cut the right way.

You might want to confirm this as soon as you start up the new blade as opposed to mowing all day and then asking yourself why it's not slicing through the lawn like its usual ninja self.

  

The robot's day in the sun is fast approaching. From the level of research being done one can predict that an affordable garden robot might be here within 5 to 10 years.

What would happen if we grew to rely on such robots for the bulk of our agricultural work? Is there a danger in becoming dependent on this type of technology?

I'm not sure I would feel the same if I let a machine do all the work and never got my hands dirty.

I've been chatting over email with a reader who shares many of my same dreams and tribulations about the journey toward simplicity.  She asked me if I could give her any advice, and the first thing I said was to throw out the television.

I know that advocating ditching the TV sounds a bit Amish.  The Amish have been on my mind lately, partly because I'm fascinated with them and partly because Joey recently pointed me to two fascinating articles, one about Amish technology and one about Amish cell phone use.  The articles note that Amish don't reject new tchnology out of hand.  They give it a spin, let a few folks try it out to see how it impacts their family and community life, then ditch new technology which adversely impacts them.

Mark and I weren't really able to take that approach with television since we'd both had the tube since childhood.  Instead, we tried the reverse --- ditching the TV when we moved to the farm and monitoring the results....

     

Flickr user Kevin Borland captured the amazing image above that still has the gears in my head turning. This Amish family seems to have evolved to a sort of steam powered solution to farm machinery, which seems brilliant on multiple levels.

The homesteading community could learn a lot from observing how the Amish solve problems in such simple and innovative ways. These casual snap shots provide us one of the few looks into this interesting culture due to their clever rejection of big chunks of the world.

The C-realm podcast is an evolving expression of a dynamic guy by the name of KMO. The C stands for consciousness, and he has a way of choosing words and guests that really take you down roads mainstream media could never even dream of.

I'm still going through his archive of shows and have really been drawn in to the story that's unfolding. He seems to be open to new ways of thinking when it comes to such subjects as the re-location of community and agriculture. I think people who read the waldeneffect might enjoy his show and I encourage everyone to give him a listen. His new shows, which come out every week on Wednesdays are something I now look forward to.

If you want something to last a million years, then carve it into stone.

Words have a mysterious power once they make the transfer from thought to reality, and if you want to harness the full potential of this power you might want to consider having it written in stone.

We've had our new garden stone for about a week now and I've noticed a slight change in the way I feel about the Waldeneffect as a concept. The handsome rock represents another level of commitment to this life style and provides a non physical anchor to the idea of a path that continues to increase in sustainability as we solve each puzzle that pops up. I was pleasantly surprised by the positive effect this little rock ritual has had and feel like I've created a literal milestone for our permaculture life back here in the woods.

Jeremy and Tavia at engravedstone.net can make you a customized stone like the one pictured next to our dwarf apple tree. They have fair prices, and a quick turn around time of only about a week.

The last attribute I want to talk about is pacing.  In the last five years, I've noticed that all city slickers (myself included) have a tendency to dive into physical labor with two feet and wear themselves out after ten minutes or an hour.  It's easy to pick out folks used to physical labor because they start slowly, take frequent breaks, and can keep going all day long.  In the process, those well-paced farmers get about ten times the amount of work done as the eager beaver city-slicker did.

Pacing is also important on the larger scale....

While not essential, ties in a community will really help you out as you head back to the land.  I grew up an hour and a half down the road from where I eventually settled, but my parents are from out of state and my initial forays into the local community were met by a steady stream of "You're not from around here, are you?"

My parents moved to this area during a spate of back-to-the-land migration in the '70s, so I did end up making inroads into the ranks of back-to-the-landers of my parents' generation.  Mark --- even though he grew up in Ohio --- seems to do a much better job of gaining acceptance by normal locals though.  In part, I blame his acceptance on his parents' roots in the area --- they and their ancestors lived an hour away from our farm for generations before fleeing the mountains just as my parents were moving in.

Roots in an area are great, but I really chalk Mark's acceptance up to his ability to make small talk.  He's able to head down to the little hardware store in town and talk about the weather at great length --- the sign of a true local.  If you have to settle outside your home county, it's worth taking a little extra time to shoot the bull with everyone you meet for the first year or two.  "Sure was a cold winter, wasn't it?"

Now that we've gotten the obvious out of the way, let's move on to the more ephemeral traits which most successful homesteaders share.  Frugality is right there at the top of my list.  If you're independently wealthy, you can probably live your homesteading dream while also living up to the American ideal of consumption, but most of us will have to scrimp a bit.

I saved for years before coming up with the cash necessary to buy our farm, and since we've moved here we've realized that the farm is still a huge drain on our finances.  Every season, we have new infrastructure we want to install --- first the trailer, then a rototiller, an irrigation system, a mulching lawnmower, and so forth.  Rather than blowing our income on luxury items (eating out, installing tile floors, etc.), we opt to keep our expenses down and save up for the things that really matter.

Many folks believe they need a nest egg to move back to the land, and while that wouldn't hurt, I don't think it's really necessary.  What you need is an ability to distinguish between your wants and needs, to make a budget, to live debt-free, and to save, save, save!

One of the most basic qualities you need to be a successful homesteader is moderate strength.  You should be able to:

• Lift a 50 pound bag of feed to your shoulder.
• Carry a full five gallon bucket of water in each hand.  (That's about 35 pounds in each hand, but you don't need to be able to lift it beyond your waist.)
• Walk a mile on level ground without getting out of breath.
• Move around without keeling over in moderate heat (about 85 F) and cold (about 30 F.)
  

Don't be tempted to assume your partner can do all of the heavy lifting for you.  I'd be sunk if I had to ask Mark to help me every time I needed to lift a bag of chicken feed from the golf cart into the trashcan by the tractors.  He wouldn't mind, but it'd drive me crazy!

If you live in the city and dream of being a homesteader but have no other way of moving toward your goal, it can't hurt to try to achieve those four abilities.  Step outside your climate-controlled office and gym this summer and build up a bit of tolerance to heat.  Take a walk around the block every evening.  You'd be surprised how easy it is to achieve this level of physical fitness, putting you one step closer to your goal!

What does it take to become a homesteader, to move back to the land?  If you ask ten back-to-the-landers, you'll get a dozen different answers, so I thought I'd share my personal top four. 

But, before I start, I'd like to make a quick list of qualities you don't need in your quest for homesteading simplicity.

• Extensive knowledge of agriculture.  I took a class and became a Master Gardener before I moved to the land, but it was far from necessary.  In our current information age, you can learn everything you need to know from the internet and your local library.
• A partner in crime.  Again, it wouldn't hurt, but it's quite possible to move back to the land by yourself.
• A nest egg.  Sure would be nice, but we've done fine without it.
  

When my head is buzzing and I can't find the present moment with two hands, I slip off my shoes and take a few steps.  The hamster wheel in my head slows to a halt and I hear a Lousiana Waterthrush's clear notes from the trees above my head.  I feel the remnant of winter coldness in the ground, realize that tree roots are slipping through the mud under my feet.

All of my life, people have told me to put my shoes back on.  I think that Thich Nhat Hanh would have understood, though.  After all, he wrote:

So take off your shoes and take a step.  I promise you, it's cheaper than therapy.

Over the next few months, Mark filled the gaping holes in the trailer's walls with double-glazed windows which we'd gotten free or cheap over the last couple of years.  We ripped up ancient carpet to reveal not-too-bad linoleum, hauled out a broken washer and dryer, and mended a few leaks in the roof.  Overall, I'd say we put maybe $2,500 into our 500 square foot home --- $5 per square foot --- and the vast majority of that went to the trailer-hauling company.

There are two major downsides to living in a trailer.  First of all, your snooty friends will sneer a bit (but who cares?)  More important, the insulation is minimal.  However, the positives vastly outweight the negatives.  After our initial startup cost, we can now live on next to nothing.  After all, while most folks around us are paying rent or a mortgage, our housing bill comes down to a measly $200 per year that we throw at the county in property taxes.

I consider the trailer one of Mark's biggest strokes of geniuses because it has let us work very part time jobs and pour our hearts and souls into becoming more self-sufficient.  If you subscribe to voluntary simplicity, you could do much worse than scouring the countryside for a free trailer to live in.

We were lucky that our free trailer was small --- 10 feet wide by 50 feet long.  Because when we got the trailer-hauling guys to come look at our property, they said a larger trailer would have been impossible to move in.  Even for our tiny trailer, we had to cut big openings in the forest at each curve in the driveway to give the trailer room to maneuver around.  And we had to wait and wait and wait until the driest day of the year when a bulldozer wouldn't get stuck in our floodplain.

My father was never keen on the idea of me living in a trailer, and though I have happily ignored that piece of advice, I wish I'd taken his advice to absent myself from the farm on moving day.  At a rate of hundreds of dollars per hour, I could see my small stash of backup cash slipping away with every hangup.  I watched our crew jack the trailer up so that it could roll across the creek, my heart in my throat, and I gulped as a low-hanging branch ripped a hole in the tin wall.  But, finally, the bulldozer yanked our new/old trailer into the spot we'd mowed for it between the blackberry brambles.  Home!

Our initial search for a trailer took us far afield.  We hunted through classified ads, looking at trailers in the $1,000 to $2,000 range.  The world was astonishingly full of trailers for sale --- big ones, small ones, trailers reeking of cat pee, and fresh new trailers which seemed as fancy as any home I'd lived in.

Then reality struck.  The price of the trailer wasn't the big consideration; location was.  We were going to have to hire a trailer-hauling company to transport our new trailer and those companies didn't come cheap, so the closer our find was to the farm, the better.  We stopped reading classified ads and started rolling down back roads near our farm.  Within hours, we stumbled across a trailer park fifteen minutes away and asked its proprietor if he had a trailer he was willing to sell for $2,000 or less.

"You can have that one there for free," he said, pointing at a 1960s model, windowless and empty at the edge of the park.  "If you haul it off."  And that's how we found our new home.

You won't see trailers discussed much in the homesteading world.  Everyone wants to build their dream home, and I have to admit that I began my homesteading voyage with a similar inclination.  I researched strawbale houses, earthships, and cob.  I drew floorplans and crunched the numbers on passive solar heating.

And then I crunched some less enticing numbers.  Using a very lowball figure of $20 per square foot, a twenty by twenty foot house would cost $8,000 to put together, plus months of labor.  Neither Mark nor I was interested in getting a full time job just to pay for building a house, and we knew that if we jumped into the rat-race we'd have to hire folks to help us build the house since we'd no longer have time to do the building ourselves.  When I sat down and thought about it, I realized that what I wanted was to be on the land right away, to be putting energy into creating a wonderful garden.

"What about a trailer?" Mark asked tentatively.  "We could move in almost right away, and then if we want to build a house later, we can."  As usual, his suggestion was brilliant.  A trailer it was!

Befuddled bees hover as I clip lettuce, read in the sun.

Our new winged livestock seem unready to sip nectar, fill their hive with honey.  Instead, they push the grass aside and slip in and out of the tiny hole in their wooden box.

They test the air around my body, smelling the sugar syrup I sprayed on their travel crate to calm them.  Maybe they catch the scent of the queen whom I momentarily slipped into my front pocket to protect and keep warm.

I can see the bees sniffing, tasting.  Is it captivity if you choose to live in a painted blue box?  If you choose to accept the ministrations and thieveries of a warm-blooded mammal?  Or is it friendship?

Mark and I spent lunch on Saturday brainstorming our biggest mistakes made on the farm, hoping to come up with five "don't repeat our mistakes" for a lunchtime series.  Between my lack of memory and his optimistic bent, we were unable to list more than three big mistakes  though --- buying mules when neither of us has dealt with equines, planting fruit trees before we had the infrastructure to care for them, and...was there something else?

Then we wandered off into a discussion of the top five things we'd done right as early homesteaders.  Our trailer quickly leapt into the number one position.  I know that many folks consider living in a trailer a miserable failure, but for us it's been a stunning success.  And so this week's lunchtime lecture series is all about the trailer --- how we got it, why we got it, and why we love it.

In November when I quit my salaried job with health insurance and retirement benefits, I was terrified.  Everyone was already saying that the economy was going to hell in a handbasket, and folks were clinging to their jobs like life rafts.  Four months later, our income is nearly as high as it was last year (granted, never very high working for a nonprofit) and my stress level has gone down by about 80%.

Mark and I now firmly believe that the way to sail through uncertain financial times is to work for yourself, diversify your income base, and become more self sufficient so that your expenses go down over time.  As a result, we have a finger in a bunch of pies --- web design, graphic design, videography, photography, grant-writing, ecological consulting, and our beloved Avian Aqua Miser.  (The photo here is Mark mailing a premade unit and a bunch of do it yourself kits.)

Read what we've learned about advertising and freelancing....

Monday was so warm that if I lay down in front of the Egytian onion bed and looked through the green toward the sky, I could almost believe it was summer.  The chickens --- who have been craving every iota of sun for the last few months --- begged me to turn their tractors around so that they'd have shade.  Lucy and her doggie buddy (who's visiting for the week) slipped up into the cool at the edge of the hillside.

Meanwhile, I chained myself to the computer for four hours, then could bear it no more.  Many people are greedy for more money, but I'm greedy for more time in the outdoors --- once I've paid the bills, I'm far more likely to be found in the garden than hammering down someone's door in search of more clients.  After all, don't I get more enjoyment out of an hour in the sun than I would out of working an hour and then taking us out to dinner or some other frivolity?  I prepared more garden beds to be planted today and pondered the careful balance we walk between enough time and enough money.

If you can multiply the day by the month and it equals the last two digits of the year, then you are in the middle of Square Root Day.

This fantastic gift from the multiverse of numbers is a puzzle that's only offered nine times a century, and so far has only been realized by .09 percent of the population.

Is it a coincidence that it falls on the ninth year of this century...with .09 percent believing...and only nine times every 100 years? Will you be the next to solve this mathematical brain teaser and join the ranks of this shrinking population, or are you like me and have yet to discover the full problem much less even part of the solution?

Make your plans now for the next Square Root Day which will be April 4th 2016.

Today required a trip into a nearby town for some tire repair, a spark plug purchase, and a library visit. I discovered a park down by the river which was jumping up and down while yelling "come and take some pictures of me".

I'm always intrigued by the waste material that can be found alongside the railroad tracks in this country. These heavy steel plates are what seem to hold the actual track in place and I guess they need to be replaced from time to time?  I wonder if they can be used for anything non railroad related?

In what ways has the "Walden Effect" life differed from what you originally had envisioned?

--Everett

My original vision of living off the land was always based on an experimental foundation. I was already moving towards a more minimal way of living in the big city environment when I met Anna. She helped me to see how smooth minimalism can be when mixed with nature.

I'm still surprised at how delicious and fulfilling it is to be so closely involved in the personal food production we do here and can't imagine going back to my old ways of fast food and frozen dinners.

In what ways has the "Walden Effect" life differed from what you originally had envisioned? What was romanticized that turned out to be totally different or more difficult? What unexpected pleasures did you find?

--Everett
The concept of "Time Ownership" is one of the unexpected pleasures that first pops to mind when I think of that question.

It has taken some considerable distance from my previous corporate life to fully realize just how little of my time I was able to save for myself and how much of it was traded away for a paycheck and a parking spot. I fixed copier machines full time...the words "full time" being the operative point I'm trying to illustrate here. My time was full of an endless list of chores that always served the greater good of the company. My time off always seemed to have an edge to it because deep in my mind I knew Monday morning was only a day or two away. Before long you adapt to the less than healthy pace and forget what it was like to own 100 percent of your day. You eventually convince yourself that 48 hours on the weekend and a couple of weeks a year is all you need to survive.

I think I'm in the last stages of my corporate de-programming and sometimes it's a struggle to decide which hours go where for which goal, but it's a beautiful struggle that fully belongs to me and at the end of the day a by-product of that struggle can be felt in the form of a warm fuzzy feeling in the pit of my stomach as I reflect back on a noise-free day of getting things done on the farm.

The future looks brighter when you fully own your present, and I believe you fully own the present by seizing all 24 hours of each day. Maybe that's what those Latin folks were talking about a thousand years ago when they were yammering about Carpe Diem?

Cory over at Boing Boing has a nice book review which pointed me to Rick Lieder's amazing nature photographs.

I've been really enjoying his collection online and feel a bit inspired by the fact that he doesn't use high speed film or any fancy tricks to capture moments like in the picture here.

I spent a busy weekend as a new board member of Appalachian Community Fund sifting through applications and deciding as a group which ones best fit the vision of social change by encouraging grassroots networking in the Appalachia area. I'll speak more about this in the future as I become more experienced with the organization and the grant making process.

In the meantime, if you're looking for a good cause that's serious about working to overcome the underlying causes of poverty and injustice in Central Appalachia then I suggest you consider ACF for your next charitable donation. I can personally vouch for this group and assure you that it's on the complete up and up. It's a no frills way of getting much needed money to groups in this area that have always struggled with unusually high levels of poverty.

The golf cart stopped working and I have not been able to diagnose the exact problem. I found a guy in town that is willing to work on it, but we have to get it there first.

We made some good progress today with me pulling and Anna pushing and steering. Hopefully we can get it up the hill and loaded onto the trailer tomorrow.

Yes...it is quite a workout pulling a full size golf cart through the snow and mud and there's no way I could have made it as far as we did without Anna pushing, which I guess is a pretty good metaphor for a happy relationship where lots of exciting things get accomplished with the combined effort of two people who work well together.

I have a hard time wrapping my head around winter on the farm.  I feel like it should be a time of hibernation, of catching up on tasks that fell by the wayside during the growing season, of contemplation.

But I find myself instead turning winter into a long anticipation of spring.  Two weeks until I can prune the apple trees!  Four weeks until I can plant the peas!  Two months until the first spring flowers will peek out of the leaf mould!

I often think that Mark would make a good Zen monk --- he has an enviable ability to live in the moment.  I catch only glimpses of such a mindset when I empty my head through a half hour of yoga, a long walk, or a sketch in the outdoors.  Strangely enough, I've also been finding that intensity of focus while browsing the web in search of images to include in the Lisbeth Longfrock posts.  For hours at a time, I feel like I'm transported to Norway, milking pesky goats into wooden buckets.  I'm sure there are much better uses of my time, but as we all know, books are my mind-altering drug of choice.

Here's the view looking from above the wood stove just before sunset.

It was a good day for getting things done outside...a very good day.

I would like to send out a big thank you for everyone who sent me warm and happy birthday greetings.

It was an excellent year being 39, and I'm confident my 40th year will be filled with plenty of exciting and happy events.

The groovy picture is from a hand drawn card sent from Anna's mom which depicts Lucy, Huckleberry, and Strider.

Today was a day that begs one to surrender to the forces of nature.

The creek was transformed overnight into a mighty river that seemed to be making up for lost time in its haste to get where it's going.

Lucy likes to monitor the shoreline during heavy activity like this. She knows it will eventually yield something interesting enough to chew on and maybe bring back to us for closer inspection.

Inspired by Mike's 2008 summary photos, and by Mark's notion that we should take New Year's Day as a holiday, I set out Thursday afternoon with our camera in hand.  It's harder to find color in the winter, but the stark shapes and lines can make up for the lack of color.  First I got caught up in the shadows cast by the bed springs we'd dug out of the garden.  Spiralling circles --- I almost got lost right there.

But I really wanted to visit my favorite sycamore grove.  Down in the floodplain, several large sycamores grow in a ten foot in diameter ring.  They clearly mark the borders of an ancient sycamore's root mass, and I can almost see the parent sycamore in my mind's eye.  I lay down between them and looked up, just in time to catch a photo of a sycamore turned human.

Holidays evade me sometimes.  Thanksgiving and the winter solstice I can wrap my mind around.  I'm so used to the family elements of Christmas that I follow through without giving it much thought.  But the other holidays that Mark named off when I dubiously asked him which ones he's used to celebrating --- New Year's Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day --- are blurs in my mind.  What do they mean?  How do you celebrate a holiday you don't understand?

I'm afraid I bickered with Mark before agreeing to take the day off.  Now I'm glad he perservered --- so I cooked him up a pound of bacon and a double recipe of the fluffiest white pancakes in my cookbook as an apology.  You're right, Mark!  No matter what the holiday means, it's worth it to spend time in the moment.

Yesterday I received my last paycheck from my nonprofit.  From here on out, it's freelance or bust!

While musing over the above, and cooking our Christmas turkey bones into stock, I dug up this carrot in the garden.  Its split bottom, with the small side twining around and seeming to strangle the big side, reminded me of my life in the nonprofit world over the past year.  I'll leave the obvious symbolism to the reader to tease apart.

My resolution for 2009 is not to be that carrot.  Saving the world, keeping us fiscally afloat, visiting with friends and family, nurturing my own household with tasty treats, feeding my soul through art and long hot baths, feeding my body with wood chopping and digging in the garden --- I hope to keep all of the sides of my life in closer balance.  Meanwhile, that carrot went into our bellies.

It was mostly cloudy today as can be seen in this picture of today's sunset out by the mailbox.

There's only a couple of days left in 2008 and 2009 is already starting to look like a fine year for the Wetknee farm. I guess these cloudy days bring out my introspective side a little more than usual.

I'm always interested in low budget building methods that break away from the traditional square lodge approach.

If these concrete culverts were buried into a south facing hillside you might get a perfect year round temperature at zero cost?

This could also work as a root cellar and maybe even a small green house if enough sky lights could be added. The circular design would make it easy to roll into position when you get ready to bury it.