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.
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
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.
This post is part of our Your Money or Your Life lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
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!
This post is part of our Your Money or Your Life lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
Weekly income - Work-related
expenses = Real hourly wage
Total hours you really work in a week
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.
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.
This post is part of our Building a Storage Building from Scratch
series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
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?
This post is part of our Two Weeks Without Electricity series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
This post is part of our Two Weeks Without Electricity series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
This post is part of our Two Weeks Without Electricity series.
Read all of the entries:
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?
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.
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!
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?
This post is part of our Moundville and Cruise to Mexico honeymoon
series.
Read all of the entries:
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?
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!
Unfortunately you can't float across the
blue waters of the Caribbean with us, but you can give your chickens
clean water with a homemade chicken
waterer.
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.
We finally solved the deer in
the garden problem, and the solution was so elegant we gave it a new
website. Check out our deer
deterrent website for free plans!
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.
This post is part of our Third Year of Homesteading lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
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?
This post is part of our American Indian Permaculture lunchtime
series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
This post is part of our American Indian Permaculture lunchtime
series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
This post is part of our American Indian Permaculture lunchtime
series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
This post is part of our American Indian Permaculture lunchtime
series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
This post is part of our American Indian Permaculture lunchtime
series.
Read all of the entries:
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."
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.
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?"
This post is part of our Homesteading Qualities lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
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!
This post is part of our Homesteading Qualities lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
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!
This post is part of our Homesteading Qualities lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
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'tneed 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.
This post is part of our Homesteading Qualities lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
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:
"If you are trained in walking meditation, with each step you can
experience peace, happiness, and fulfillment. You are capable of
truly touching the earth with each step. You see that being
alive, being established fully in the present moment and taking one
step, can be a wonder, and you live that wonder in every moment of
walking."
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.
This post is part of our Low Cost Housing lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
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!
This post is part of our Low Cost Housing lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
This post is part of our Low Cost Housing lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
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!
This post is part of our Low Cost Housing lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
This post is part of our Low Cost Housing lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
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.)
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.
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.
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It's a way of life here. I don't get the part about lifting 50 pounds over your shoulder hell here you better be able to lift 100 pounds over your shoulder or you might be considered a sissy. We chop wood by hand...not a cord or two try 10 a year. Who rents anything we do "all" of our work by hand. Where do you live? Florida? Ca? Boston? You don't know "hard work" until you have been lobstering for a couple of seasons, this includes WINTER. I am a female at age 50 that puts the younger ladies to shame. And a few men too. I think your article is all wrong. I really don't think you would do so well here in Maine. We are getting on in age and granted I cannot lift more than 100 pounds anymore but be damned if 50 pounds is anything. It's nothing.
Comment by
pw
— at teatime on Saturday, October 24th, 2009